Here’s the thing about polar bears: We adore them, yet they want to kill us. I can’t help contemplating this strange duality during my first morning on the tundra buggy, as my buggy-mates interrogate our guide, JP McCarthy of Frontiers North Adventures, about safety. No, says JP, no tourist has ever been killed by a polar bear. No, a bear has never gotten into a buggy. No, you can’t ride on the buggy’s back deck – I don’t care what the other company allows. Yes, you can open the window, but no, don’t dangle your camera strap or scarf, or a bear might yank you out. Tourists in tundra buggies are meals on wheels.
~ UpHere (via Nick Moran)
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At the end of The Book of Dead Philosophers, under your entry, you quote a Shakespeare stage direction, writing, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” Elsewhere in your books bears come up quite often. You’ve mentioned loving Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man because of your affinity for bears and bear-related humor. So I have to ask: why bears?
I don’t know, it’s some sort of grotesque, repressed . . . I don’t know. It’s the awful truth I can’t face up to. It obviously has something to do with desire, right? I want to be raped and murdered by a bear! Maybe that’s the goal of my life, so I’m using jokes as a way of controlling that.
I could just say it’s funny, but obviously there has to be more to it than that.
~ Simon Critchley, interviewed at Full Stop