Consisting substantially of 286 gnomic articulations of vivacious quiddity plus 13 ontological inquisitions into myth’s affinity to mind and body,
Divastigations, minus its prolusory
avant-propos (
§ 0), totals, in short, 299 distinct instantiations of what our thrilling narratrix
Ouida Willoughby Johnson calls
ludict: ‘tragiplayful stagings of [an] inability to mark with my will this blank world.’ Individually, all 286 of said gnomic articulations — topically ranging within a narrow stylistic compass from a laconic triphrasal invocation of childhood’s conclusion (
§ 1) to a lyrical plagiary of sapphic lust (
§ 195) to a trio of loquacious divagations on a fusty translation of a lost Ural-Altaic
chanson by a Poldavian ambassador to
Babur’s court in Kabul (
§ 251,
§ 267, and
§ 273) — start out with what you’ll soon affirm as our prodigal protagonist’s signal flailing away at possibility’s construction:
And should I...? By contrast,
Ouida’s 13 ontological stabs at a ‘schizomythology of ritual’ [
1] vary significantly in both aim and form. That is, if our majority of 286
liminal ludicts constrains, by way of discontiguous, loxodromic cuts through sin and symptom, a rhythmically soulful pursuit of a nautch girl's transformation from child to woman, our minority of 13
insular ludicts prosaically charts various bouts of cortical dissociation that stun
Ouida into rhapsodic fabulation during actual acts of promiscuous carnality, a prototypical triad of which follows: sociolinguistic contribution to a scholarly publication (
§ 120) [
2]; pornographic film production of a lost ‘sociophysiological’ play (
§ 191) [
3]; boarding-school instar of a ‘small tri-monthly multilingual journal of arts, writing, philosophy, natural history, and sundry cultural stuff’ (
§ 249). Such manifold ludicts, without a doubt, will focus your mind on
Ouida’s bawdy transactions; indubitably, too, a handy
bookmap is bound to assist your ocular roving of
Ouida’s wanton labyrinth. And if at last you find your way out at
Ouida’s caustic swansong to things forlorn (
§ 299), a synoptic atlas (
§ 300) should charm you back in again via an orismological unspooling of topics, authors, locations, works, and whatnot hiving panmictically within and throughout this ovular body of words known as
Divastigations.
Scholia and stuff
- M. S. Strickland, an Owlstain community chum and ambiguous Parisian pariah who is wont not only to crash various ISOCPHYS functions but also prone to salaciously prowl about and bibulously sprawl wanting it or not on Glamporium’s Playground of Taboo, put out as his own in Pank what is actually instar nº dos of Ouida’s full lunar annum of said pornosophic stabs at a lucid philography of glyphic ductility.
- Our own august organ, in fact! Full citation of Ouida’s plural, ubiquitous, and throroughly yonicistic contribution should run as follows: Willoughby Johnson, O. (2003). Grammaticalization of schizomythia and taboo in Mountain Fukari root class: Confirmation of a functional proximal–distal quantal continuum of ligativity in affixival clitics of womaninity and pronominal control. Journal of Sociophysiology 11(8). August 2003.
- First out on Glamporium’s Playground of Taboo on Sunday, July 13, 2003, and postliminarily in our fair city’s SCAT of 16 July 2003.
