The Axeman's Carnival

The Axeman’s Carnival (2024) by Catherine Chidgey

There’s something deeply unsettling about stepping outside of social media and then looking at it from the outside in. I say that it’s unsettling, but in reality, it’s almost impossible to do. It seems like what you’re doing is looking at a farce.

When you’re in it, you are consuming, engaging, posting, etc. with the fluency of the exact weird moment and thing going on in this strange, constantly shifting network. It makes sense. To be removed and to just see it for what it is would be like walking into your favorite bar at 10:00 am and seeing it for how small and dingy it really is.

I was thinking about that while reading Catherine Chidgey’s The Axeman’s Carnival. The book is clever, if a bit too long for its particular cleverness to sustain. It’s about a bird - a magpie - that is taken in by a woman as a baby and comes to love her. Because she can mimic human words and wants to impress her human surrogate mother, she develops an enormous vocabulary and becomes a viral sensation.

This Twitter virality leads to a financial boon for the couple that has taken in this magpie, which, unsurprisingly, does not resolve the issues at the heart of their marriage. The idea of Tama, the bird, actually trying to study these two humans and use its mimicry to influence their life is a fun part of the story.

The part that took me out, at least initially, was the portrayal of social media. The reactions to Tama’s Twitter followers were, for a lack of a better word, cringe. I even had the thought “This is why old people shouldn’t try to write about social media,” which would be a fine enough thing for me to think about someone else if I weren’t 36 years old.

The posts that Chidgey wrote for Tama’s followers - the posts that she had to come up with to push forward the plot that Tama does indeed have followers who love this bird’s antics - were indeed cringe. Ultimately, I was conflating cringe with unrealistic, and for some reason, I was pretending that these cringe posts were more unrealistic than a talking bird.

At this point, I’ve purged myself of all social media except for Bluesky, which is just a Twitter knockoff without ads, bots and Nazis. In many ways, Bluesky is for true posters. You aren’t going to get celebrities or influencers on Bluesky. You are going to get people who are so fluent in posting that your brain has to be truly broken to know what’s going on at any given moment. I just opened it and literally the first post just says, “what’s a good thing to say to someone for beginners". That post has 116 likes.

I think there are ways that it feels like the dynamic is so deeply contextual that you do need a mind that has developed the ability to work quickly and understand the sporadic rhythms and patterns for taking in humor and information (and antagonism and misinformation). That same dynamic plays a part in the addicting nature of it all. Any one post feels incomplete, and everything is in conversation. Something is coming and you can be next in the conversation, whether that’s a good point or a funny joke or the right argument or the best photo or the update that you just want a coupe people to see.

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Most things do better with context, but ideally, what we do in leisure can at least survive without it. A piece of visual art, for example, like a painting, has additional light brought to it by reading an essay about the artist’s life, process and/or intention. I’d go as far as to say I might recommend it, but I certainly wouldn’t call it necessary. You can look at a painting in a vacuum and have an experience.

The same can be said of a song. Or a film. I pretty much always recommend additional context, but the things in this world that are most enriched by additional context are the ones that can also survive without it.

When you see a post outside of the context of its timeline and it flops around like a fish on the pier, that, I assume, says something about its worthiness. Where that leaves me, I’m not sure. I likely still have a couple great posts left in me. Then maybe I’ll retire.

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‘Til next time buckaroos…