The Chaosettes treat all earnest pursuits of the ludicrous with the utmost gravity, and while we’ll be in Kilkenny for WordCamp Ireland, consider this a strongly worded message to those of you who will be in Dublin on Friday evening, tomorrow, the 5th of March, when our natural ally, the Literary Death Match comes to the Sugar Club on Leeson Street.
Don’t worry if you can’t understand it. Did you understand Chaos Thaoghaire before you went to one or two of them? Do you understand it any better now? Didn’t think so.
Just be there.
You’ll notice that on the panel of judges is the inimitable Una Mullally, whom Chaos regulars will know from Team Scary Mary McGintys, otherwise known as the team that probably stole all your money and we didn’t make them give it back. Do you know what’s more dangerous than a person with a whole lot of power? You don’t need me to answer that. And besides, it’s like a hundred o’clock.
Yes, we know it’s been two weeks. What are you, our mother? Actually, I used to have – note used to have – a friend who, every time I called her, would tell me exactly how long it had been since I’d last called, and since we’d last seen each other. She was a real laugh riot. A very quick post. Don’t expect much. Sure, it’s fine. I know you’re busy, it would just be nice to hear from you every once in a while. If you have the time. You know. Etc.
Anyway, so we’re getting all psyched up for Word Camp this Friday, March 5th in Langton’s Hotel from 8pm. And we’ll be joined on the storytelling stage by the lovely, delightful, hilarious Rosemary MacCabe, whom you may recognise also from her Irish Times blog, and such.
Are you coming? Are you? Do you want to? We’ve still got room for at least one more storyteller on Friday night, so if you’re interested, do let us know at chaosdublin at gmail dot com.
We’re also pumped for our Paddy’s Day Chaos, which will be called PADDY GRA (how do I get a fada on this thing?), and will be curated by the bearded Patrick Freyne, and take place on the DAY of our NATIONAL PATRON SAINT.
And one final word, and it is from my ‘other life’, and unrelated directly to Chaos, but now that I’ve got your attention, and I do promise a better blog post later this evening. I (Jane) have started work as a researcher on a young people’s TV series, and we’re looking for a person to come and help design an Alternate Reality Game. Do you have experience working on this stuff? Do you want a job? If so, hop on this real quick!
Job spec below. Do you want it?
Enjoy playing/creating Alternative Reality Games? Experienced in web/software design? For TV work, email Jennifer@mindthegapfilms.com
Details to be provided via email:
Individual wanted to assist in the creation of an alternative reality game for 9-13 year olds in conjunction with a young people’s television programme for RTÉ. Experience with web/software design is a requirement. Applicants must be creative and have an interest in viral media marketing. Fluent English and excellent communication skills are necessary. Television production experience and an interest in archaeology and Irish history/mythology are advantageous but not a requirement.
Please apply with CV and cover letter to Jennifer@mindthegapfilms.com.
Why, I was merely trying to determine the correct pronunciation for the South Yorkshire town of Penistone. You see, this is the tyranny of the edit suite. Any fool can accuse one of saying the word for a manpart when in fact, one was was merely thinking aloud about a brisk trek in the Pennines to keep one’s prudish thoughts pure, as so should all of you, you filthy preverts.
Ban this sick filth!
Anyone who mentions this incident tomorrow will be forced to cough up a Chaos Buck as punishment. Let us never speak of Penistone again.
Now where shall I go, since my trans-Pennine adventure has been sullied? Perhaps Cockermouth, in the Lake District. Yes, that will do.
Move along now. Have ye no homes to go to?
ALSO, however, and things. If you’re STILL confused about Sex Chaos (we can also show you on a doll), it is not *sold out*, it is simply that the booking list is full. But that’s because we only let HALF the tickets be pre-booked. We don’t recommend you get down too early, since we won’t be ready for you, but do come as close to 7:30 as possible if you want a spot on the fist-come-fist-served (Yes, I meant that) basis.
And there is still room on our booking list for the 23rd. OK? Ok. Clear? Clear.
Phew!
And I DID NOT say the word for a man’s thingy. Never have, never will. Hmph.
Poor Jane. Poor poor Jane. Maybe it was because she was raised by a priest (no really, her dad is a priest), maybe it was simply her chubby and awkward years (see previous posts by Jane), but the simple fact is Jane is a prude!
Once at a party a friend came up to me to whisper dirty things about a boy she was having pre-marital third-base with, and I had to quickly cut her off by shouting “NO NO, Jane is here, and she’s a PRUDE!”. And now the world knows, Jane does not want to hear about your pre-marital (or marital) third-base! No Sir! Poor Jane, all this cock-talk has really got her panties in a bunch (even the thought of her own bunched panties is probably too much for her).
Colin, the composer of the Chaos Thaoghaire National Anthem, sound-guy, muse, be-spectacled gentleman and musical expert that he is, managed to capture a small clip of poor Jane trying to come to terms with her own prude-ness. The poor girl has been practicing saying some of the key words we might need to say out loud at this week’s Chaos, and ladies and gentleman, I am not the sort of friend who keeps a good sound-bite to herself when it’s this hilarious!
Don’t tell Jane, she will notice this post eventually and when she overcomes her initial humiliated shock she will take it down. Get it while it’s hot, PRUDE JANE SAYS PENIS (FOR PRACTICE)!!!!!!
P.S. Quick, thinks of ways I can win her trust back after she discovers this. She really is the Sophia Petrillo to my Blanche Devereaux. Even if she can’t say penis without practice.
Fine. Yeah, we know, you can do better. So could we. But we’re just very excited. Or excitable. Probably both.
But we figure some of you have come from the Word Camp website and are wondering what this is all about. Some of you are about to click that link to learn (again, we hope, since you are all faithful readers of and subscribers to this blog) that we will be hitting Kilkenny city to be the Friday night entertainment at WordCamp Ireland, a conference for bloggers, Wordpress developers and designers. If you’re not already going, why not? Are you lame or something? Guess so.
The conference is on Saturday and Sunday, March 6th and 7th, in Langton’s, Kilkenny, but since a lot of people will be coming down on the Friday from 8pm, your Chaosettes will be there to dispel any awkwardness by making things significantly more awkward, or at least incredibly noisy.
If you’re still confused about what we’re like, join the club. No, seriously, send us some money, and we’ll let you be in our club. We can’t tell you what the club us, or how much money to send us because then it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. Just err on the side of lots, and don’t get your hopes up about any actual secrets.
But a few people have asked us why we frequently reference the Golden Girls when we describe what we are, since it seemingly has nothing to do with our event, only it totally does. We like to eat cake and swap anecdotes, which is how a lot of the best friendships in our lives have been formed (except one of my favourite friends whom I met at a wake). And then Mental Floss went and posted this Why Betty White Is Awesome piece, and that moved things a little further along Explanation Road.
Maybe it is Golden Girls + Some Kind of End Of Level Boss=Chaosettes.
Maybe there are those awful, shrieking, Sex And The City friendships (and Amiee and I are totally united in our hatred of the entire culture that shit spawned, and our Sex Chaos, by the way, is so utterly in a different, and, we hope, far less idiotic spirit) and then there are Golden Girls friends. You eat. You talk. You tell stories, deadpan, where you know full well you’re the butt of your own joke. You take out your skeletons and make them do the All The Single Ladies dance. Then you have some more cake and you feel completely unburdened by the shared revelation of your own humanity. Then I threaten you with a straw handbag and the studio audience goes mental. We don’t do irony. We were never cool, although that’s not for (continual) lack of trying. We haven’t a fucking clue about brands of shoes.
Then some incredible website that we’ve never seen before posted one of the funniest pieces of writing we have seen so far this century. Now, we can’t promise that Chaos Thaoghaire will get you laid. We can’t promise anything we’re going to deliver on, but it would be kind of cool if, like the Golden Girls apparently joke-did, we had the power to turn an entire generation of boys gay. Imagine the rush! It would be kind of like poppers!
But we did notice that a lot of the accusations that website joke-levels at the Golden Girls also apply to us, only kind of in earnest. For example, they say that The Golden Girls fan base was made up of “boys too delicate for sports, too awkward for girls, too ‘artistic’ for labor-intensive work and too flamboyant for peer acceptance in high school”. You could be talking about us! Only, you know, with boys AND girls. Anyway, we’re pretty sure that article is a work of deliberate comedy gold (so there is no need for anyone to freak), but if we could find a way to ensure we were part of the gay agenda, we so totally would. Some of us only like the opposite sexy, and some of us like the both kinds of sexy, and some of us only like the same kind of sexy, but the point is that we are about to bring you the sexiest Chaos yet.
And then we will leave town and go to Kilkenny to think unsexy thoughts until all this blows over.
In case you were looking for it, our new booking form is here, and we’ve still got some room on the reservation list for our event on the 23rd (not a lot, though, so get clicking). And, as we will continue to emphasise just in case, neither event is sold out. You can totally just turn up on the door, and we’ll do whatever we can to squeeze you in, even if we seem hopelessly full.
From now on, we’ll be using these form things unless we aren’t, in which case we’ll let you know via blog, twitter, and/or email how we’re gonna do it. So, for example, if you come to our event and swear you’ll be back for revenge the next month, you’ll still need to put your left click button where your shriveled little mouth is and book in. This is because, you see, everyone grabs us by the shoulders at the end of each night and swears they will be back to claim what is rightfully theirs. (And not just at Chaos nights.)
And an announcement! Our March Chaos – and we’ll just go ahead and call these monthly Odessa events our Champions League – will be on Paddy’s Day itself, and, as special as our regular events are, this one will be more so. Like more regular, only bigger, faster, louder, longer. As they say in mediocre local publications and PR companies, it will probably be ‘very unique’, by which we mean the manifestation of a logical impossibility.
It will be curated by our friend Patrick Freyne (that website is old, by the way), and we’re very excited because Patrick will be our very first bearded curator, unless you count what happens to Italian-American women in their dotage (and we’d rather not be reminded). If you haven’t read Patrick’s TV reviews in the Sunday Tribune, then how are you even watching television in the first place? Upside down?
We’re also hoarding Patricks for this event. If you or someone you know is called Patrick, Patricia, Padraig, Patrice, Patriczia or has some variation of it in his or her surname (Fitzpatrick, Kirkpatrick, Patrickelli, O’McPaddy etc), even if this is not your/his/her real name, then do get in touch. Our ill-conceived plan is that we would like as many as possible of our March storytellers to be named for our nation’s patron saint. We understand that we have not thought this through. You can stop sending those registered letters now. It’s awkward with the postman.
In the spirit of grudge-bearing and bitterness we’re still – slowly, and always – working on this list of people who are getting life bans from Chaos Thaoghaire. We don’t know if we’ll be sending out official notices, but so far we’ve got:
Thomas Edison (dick)
Superman (sanctimonious cock)
Anyone to do with The Doors (obviously)
We are open to suggestion. So if there’s anyone whom you believe to be so noxious and awful on every level that he or she should be barred or perhaps shot (non-lethally) on sight, please make suggestions below. We don’t mean easy targets like politicians because those would just make us yawn, and you wouldn’t like us when we were yawny.
That said, despite our advice against trying to be the hero of your own story, we actually do have some heroes – they just aren’t us. Amiee and I were talking about our inability to be heroic last night, and she said, “I’m a bisexual Mariah Carey fan. I have no choice but to be self-deprecating.” And I said, “I’m a….where do I even start?” I’m a: fill in that blank, why don’t you. See if I care.
Anyway, heroes. One dude who has the opposite of a life-ban (whatever the opposite of a life ban is, which can’t involve kidnapping because we actually don’t even have the resources to feed another mouth), is George Saunders.
And today I discovered that his first published story is online. He’s not all that prolific with his publications, and I have read everything he has ever written except for a recent New Yorker piece, which I’m saving for an emergency, so this is very exciting news. It goes into my Emergency Saunders File, which now contains exactly two items, and I am not allowed to read either of those two items until I have accomplished some goal or I actually feel like there’s nothing around worth reading. So if you read it, don’t tell me anything about it – I’m only linking it just in case you want to, which you should. Want to, I mean.
Look out, Ireland’s biggest landlocked county, The Chaosettes are hitting the road! From March 5th-7th, we’ll be at WordCamp Ireland in Kilkenny. We’ll be holding a special night in Langton’s on Friday evening from 7:30-10pm, which will include a short storytelling workshop, aimed at helping people to realise that they already have a strong voice. We can’t tell you how to tell a story, but we can show you what you already know.
The best blogs have a strong voice, so we like to think it’ll help with that, too. But mostly we just want everyone to be entertained.
EDIT! Ok, we jumped the gun on the workshop. It’s overcomplicated. So we won’t be doing a workshop, but since we’ll be around WordCamp all weekend, and the only thing we like more than telling stories ourselves is to be told stories by others, do feel free. And since you didn’t ask, we will be looking for willing storytellers among the WordCamp attendees, so contact us (chaosdublin at gmail dot com) if you’re heading down and you’re interested.
Someone’s gonna end up shoving a ball gag/sock/something uncomfortable in Jane’s mouth because she’s bound to go off on some Did You Know This Fact About The Butlers of Ormond Who, Incidentally, Had Their HQ at Kilkenny Castle There tangent. You don’t have to humour her, and you don’t have to listen to her, but for Christ’s sake, just don’t bloody encourage her.
At which point, Jane will cease to talk about herself in the third person.
And this brings us to this little video, which is taken from Kurt Vonnegut’s Bagombo Snuff Box, in which he explains the entirely breakable rules of writing a short story.
The same applies to live storytelling, and to your personal, roughly non-fiction stories. Of course, one thing you should feel more than free to do if you do become a Chaos Thaogahire storyteller (and what better way is there to include yourself in a category that features an OSCAR NOMINEE?) is to change names, details, and any necessary identifying characteristics so that you can focus on being as honest as you want to be. One thing we’ve noticed is that some people are a little reticent to talk about themselves, less out of the fear that someone will find out that they did something naughty and more likely out of worry that they will insult someone who didn’t deserve to be insulted.
But here’s the thing. When you tell a truly honest story about your experiences, you cease to be the hero of your own life. And once relieved of the pressure to revise your past so you come out looking awesome, you stop remembering why you cared so much about your own heroism in the first place, and by default, you reduce significantly the risk of insulting anyone who has come into your orbit.
You never say anything worse about anyone else who appears in it than you do about yourself – because you’re the human at the very centre of it. You’re the buffoon, and the world is your straight man. Not because we want you to humiliate yourself but because the difference between a good story and a great story all depends on just how much of a fallible human being the teller is willing to be. Where Kurt encourages writers to make terrible things happen to even the most likable characters, we would add that while we don’t like to be too prescriptive, or tell storytellers what to do, it should sometimes feel like a struggle between comfortable narratives and difficult admissions. You should feel a little bit of trepidation. You should sometimes feel you went too far, said too much. You should feel like maybe these people shouldn’t know this about you. You should worry at least a little that you’re undermining your own image, or at least pointing to some of the factors that went into its construction.
The audience is on your side – you’re the character they already like – so make the character – that’s you! – do things he or she isn’t proud of. You’re worried that it might shape people’s opinions of you, and it should – and thank fuck for that. There’s a quote about Superman in Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality, where he talks about how Superman would never park his car in a no-parking zone. I am too lazy to look it up right now, but if I remember correctly, it’s about how morally unambiguous he is in his support for the status quo. In other words, Superman is kind of a dick. Superman is a square, but not like how Jane is a square and a prude, he’s a proper square. He’s a morally upright, sanctimonious bore whose value is entirely measured in the gap between his stupid leotard power and other people’s inability to help themselves. Yawnfest. Superman, you’re barred. Just like Edison and anyone to do with The Doors.
What makes a great story is the deft slide along the scales of comedy and tragedy, self-deprecation, self-awareness and that uneasy relationship that we (personally) have with dignity. What makes a great story is the relationship between the expressed, and sometimes totally contradictory intentions of the teller, and the rather vaguer intentions and actions of the other people in it. What makes a great story is tragedy lifted by comedy, or levity weighted down with grave confessions. What makes a great story is fallibility, and as much as we like to go on about the importance of holding two totally contradictory truths simultaneously, one thing that isn’t possible is the coexistence of honesty and infallibility.
Besides, who wants to hear a story about your most dignified moment? The person who is funny without fallibility isn’t funny at all. No, that person is just kind of a cock. Or the pope. Same thing, really.
Don’t worry if you can’t understand it. Did you understand Chaos Thaoghaire before you went to one or two of them? Do you understand it any better now? Didn’t think so.