Introducing Balanzone's Wunderkammer
An experiment in radical defamiliarization
This column is going to be an experiment in radical defamiliarization.
What is radical defamiliarization?
Defamiliarization is term from creative writing. It’s a technique where you approach a familiar setting or situation with a fresh perspective. You imagine the experience as if you’ve never had it before. You make it new.
To make it radically new, you push the point-of-view to the extreme. For example, how would an extraterrestrial experience, for the first time, a traffic light?
A Wunderkammer or “chamber of wonders” is a room that some European nobles would set up on their estate, during the early modern period, to showcase a collection of marvelous objects they’d acquired from near and far. They were the precursors to what we now call museums. These chambers were bound up with justifications for colonization, with ideologies of European superiority.
Beneath the aggressive cultural appropriation, though, was a sense of wonder.
I believe that sense of wonder is the foundation, or should be the foundation, of any religion or life philosophy.
This column will be a celebration of wonder. It will be a exercise in the deliberate cultivation of wonder.
Wonder at what?
At the sheer weirdness of the universe, from the grandest to the most minute scale.
Balanzone was a stock character from the Commedia dell’arte tradition, also from the early modern peroid in Europe. Balanzone, or Il Dottore, was an academic gasbag. In other words, a Know-It-All. Usually, what he claimed to know was, at best, wrong, and at worst, harmful nonsense.
So this column will strive to be the photo-negative of Balanzone. A know-nothing where all knowledge acquired comes first-hand.
I like to write parodies. I also write middle-grade fiction. One (selfish) motivation for publishing this column is to explore motifs for current and future fictive works. I’m deeply interested in characters who don’t know. Who see all-too-familiar things as new.
Caveat emptor. I’ll probably break a few rules when it comes to publishing this column. I’ll write aphoristically. Posts will often be one observation, or a series of them, and nothing more.
I won’t always explain context. I may not pretty up a post up with featured images and all those other niceties of blogging in this day and age. I’m going prioritize the observations over anything else.
So I hope you enjoy this column.