Q: So, Bry, did you Google “elephants” to do this?
With the last dozen or so items I did, to round it up to match the 118 elements. But I’d been squirreling away elephant references for years and years. The bulk of this existed as sketches and scraps years before I saw my first search engine.
Q: I notice you start out at the top with Loxodonts and Oliphants. What’s that about?
Some researchers and elephant enthusiasts have proposed these terms to distinguish the species of African elephants (Loxodonta africana) from that of Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). Loxodont means shallow ridges between the molars. Oliphant comes from old Greek for ivory.
Fortunately there are other ways to tell loxodonts from oliphants than going up and looking at their teeth.
Q: What’s with the 11th elephant?
Try the accent on the first syllable, not the second. And make the e soft.
Q: E-le-venth. E-le… El-eventh. Ow.
Same for the 111th. I know. But try coming up with 118 anything.
Q: How did you end up with your fifteen categories?
They just seemed to line up on their own. Places speaks for itself. Namesake is comprised of things people have associated with elephants for one reason or another. Cousins are recent contemporaries related to elephants by DNA. Eccentrics are various elephant anomalies that have been documented to some extent. Captives are largely the ways we’ve tried to make money off elephants. Noble, like Transition, is a category found on the Table of the Elements. I feel like I’m explaining things here anyone would be happier to figure out on their own.
Q: The Rogue category is sad.
It is. Except for Groucho.
Q: The Desperation category I supposed speaks for itself.
It was the middle of the at night and I was getting down to the wire, sitting there at my drawing table, babbling, ele-fonts, elve-ephants, effluence…
Q: Any of these you find people get stuck on?
Well, we added a rubric, which should help. If you do get stuck or have questions, send me an email care of the site [o@smallwhisky.com] and I’ll get back to you. But let’s see. Snuffleupagus is one. It’s under Non-Existent because for years on Sesame Street only little kids could see him, not the adults, who believed he was just imaginary. Eventually the show changed that, to address issues of kids fearing adults might believe them in regard to more important matters, such as abuse kids might be experiencing. But I think all this in the rubric now.
Also—Piglet being chased by the Heffalump. Piglet appears elsewhere as well. There. I’ve said too much.
But do email me if you notice something you want to know more about.
Q: Anything else?
I used to have under Captives, an entry for Transport. It was of a late 60s VW bus, the model with the spare mounted under the windshield, seen from the front, with its front doors open. Nog* noted that if you stand out in front from about twenty feet away and look, it looks sort of like an elephant. But no one ever got that at all in the print drafts. Just before going to press, it occurred to me, to my complete astonishment, that I’d not in all these years thought to include Elephant Garlic, though I’d certainly known about elephant garlic since forever. So I substituted the garlic for VW bus.
Q: In the rubrics pages, there’s a link to a jpg. file people that could just download, print out tiles on their office color printer, and tape it all together. Are you’re sure you want to just give this away?
I know. That’s a little goofy maybe. But Nog and I agreed once that it’s important we share experiences of art more, all of us, as a culture—look at stuff together and talk about it, not just monetize it and stick the experience away behind a paywall. Artists have to eat and raise kids, but they aren’t here or shouldn’t be here primarily to make money. They’re here to contribute to what Robert Hyde calls the cultural commons. Blake called it building Jerusalem. Art, literature, music, and mathematics are the Krazy Glue that holds the culture together and moves it forward. Things we contemplate together change how we are together.
Mostly though I’m grateful I had the excuse to sit down and draw lots of little elephants.
Still, yeah, if you wanted to buy one of these, that would be great.
Can I say one more thing?
Q: Shoot.
The 5x4 print is slightly different content-wise than the 4x3 and the 3x2. When I first saw the 118els home page, and the photo with the girl reading with the 4x3 in her bedroom, I thought of entry No. 67. That’s Batyr the Talking Elephant. On the 5x4 print, one of Batyr’s word balloons says “penis,” because that’s one of the words in Kazakh that exists in Batyr’s vocabulary. Probably that’s a word the little boys standing around his cage or enclosure taught him to say. Anyway, I left it on the 5x4, but changed it on the 4x3 and the 3x3 to “eat,” another of his words, because I didn’t want to be part of a general cultural assault on childhood. I think innocence and wonder get hit on enough these days, and it’s important to maintain that quality of mental state in a child as long as you can. Because later the worldweary adult will need something to rediscover and aspire to recreate—vision, curiosity, desire, awe, delight, wonder. Thanks.
