Addressing the Grotesque

How do you define the grotesque?

Perhaps you associate the grotesque with the ugly, and possibly even with the frightening and horrifying.

Have you ever worn or made a grotesque mask?

You are likely to have worn a lifesaving mask in various situations over the past eighteen months or so, at least if you have been adequately respectful of other people's right to avoid being contaminated by an airborne disease you may have been exhaling.

Perhaps you are only interesting in saving a life if the life is your own.

Perhaps you do not regard selfishness as grotesque.

Perhaps you have been dancing grotesquely and/or singing grotesquely or playing chess grotesquely and/or behaving with theatrical grotesqueness and/or reading macabre stories and/or watching horror films and/or behaving like a zombie. 

How do you define the grotesque?

What do you know about caves, grottoes and underground chambers?

You may associate the grotesque mainly with architectural features, such as grotesques/chimeras, gargoyles, images of the green man, mascarons and sheela na gigs.

What do you know about the chimera in mythology?

What do you know about teratology?

What do you know about Baubos?

How do you define the vulgar?

How do you define the ugly?

How do you define the abnormal?

How do you respond to the vulgar, the ugly and the abnormal?

Perhaps you regard ribaldry as grotesque.

Perhaps you regard insults as grotesques.

What do you know about the Venus Kallipygos?

What do you know about various examples of anasyrma, exhibitionism, lewdness and mooning?

What is your acquaintance with the grotesque body?

What do you know about grotesqueness in relation to international law and international illegality?

What do you know about the grotesqueness of governments, individually and collectively?

How have you assessed prejudices in terms of the attractive and unattractive, and in terms of other aesthetic concepts

What do you know about lookism, particularly politically?

What do you regard as visual pollution?

What do you regard as an eyesore, and why?

What do you know about urban decay, marketing clutter, light pollution, noise pollution and air pollution?

Perhaps you regard The Ugly Duchess as a representation of the Anthropocene.

What do you know about deluded attempts to dress up government policies in the fashions of the past?

What do you know about the conference of the parties?

Perhaps you regard the Earth's atmosphere as a soup, with or without the addition of the oceans.

Perhaps you regard carbon in the atmosphere in much the same way as pepper.

Perhaps you regard the fossil fuel lobby as the cook.

Perhaps you regard the Cheshire cat as the financial system.

Perhaps you regard the Wonderland Duchess as the world's governments.

Perhaps you regard the baby of the Duchess as representing the children of the world.

Perhaps you regard the croquet flamingos as being most of the world's media, with the caterpillar representing most journalists.

Perhaps you regard yourself as Alice.

What do you know about underground living, ice houses, the London underground, the development of underground cities, and the process of placing (other) ugly things underground?

What do you know about burial grounds and catacombs?

You may be familiar with the Catacombs of Rome. 

You may be familiar with the Domus Aurea in Rome.

You may be familiar with the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

You may be familiar with the Blue Grotto in Capri.

You may be familiar with the Tantanoola Caves in South Australia.

You may be familiar with the Catacombs in Paris.

You may know something about the history of ossuaries, charnel houses, tombs, crypts, sarcophagi, burial vaults, reliquaries, mausoleums, graves, and the Giza Necropolis.

You may be interested in fantastic art.

You may be interested in funerary art.

You may be interested in necropoleis, possibly including the one in Glasgow.

You may be interested in COP26. 

Perhaps you will be attending that event in the guise of a vegetation deity or dying god or deity of death or as a dying-and-rising deity, or as a purported representative of one.

Perhaps you associate international conferences with katabasis.

Perhaps you are seeking to attend COP26 with three witches, three rabbits and/or three monkeys.

Perhaps you intend to play pall-mall with Mary, Queen of Scots at Seton Park.

What do you know about alterity?

What do you know about the Lernaean Hydra?

What have you been learning about the Basilikon Doron and the Eikon Basilike?

What do you know about The Australian Ugliness?

How do you respond to the picaresque in relation to the grotesque.

How do you usually respond to the grotesqueness of corruption?

Perhaps you respond with Menippean satire rather than a direct critique in terms of ethics and/or aesthetics.

Perhaps you respond with nonsense literature, in much the same way as most journalists.  They often treat strangers as though they are hedgehogs in a crazy croquet match.

Who is the White Rabbit? 

Who is Heracles/Hercules?

Who is Hera/Juno?

Who is heroic?

Who is down the rabbit hole?

Perhaps you are not particularly familiar with Liddells and riddles and golden afternoons and rowing boats on rivers and real and imagined worlds of wonderment.

Perhaps you are not particularly familiar with the grotesque historical reality of bullies in positions of power and the millions of violent deaths associated with them.

A real hero protects and defends for the greater good.

What have you been protecting and defending, and why?

How do you know your attitude towards protection and defence is not grotesque?

What is your acquaintance with tragicomedy? 

What is your acquaintance with the work of John Tenniel?

How do you help to protect and defend downtrodden hedgehogs?

How do you interpret the Alice stories?

How do you interpret political responses to anthropogenic climate change?

What do you know about fool's literature?

How do you compare the grotesque with the burlesque?

How do you compare the grotesque with the pueri mingentes?

How do you compare the grotesque with putti and amorini?

How do you compare the grotesque with tropaion and trophies of arms and war trophies more generally?

How do you compare the grotesque with the reporting of news?

What are the emotions you personally experience in relation to the grotesque, and why?

What do you regard as grotty?

Perhaps you associate the grotty with inadequate hygiene and inadequate maintenance and inadequate care.

Perhaps you associate the grotesque with inadequate, and outrageous, public policies.