The Human Fable

In April of 1975, 27 year old American-Japanese graduate student Theodore Sakamoto was conducting research in the Western Archive of the Tokyo Reference Library 14th Prefecture for his doctoral thesis on Canadian steam locomotives of the pre-continental rail system, when he came across a most incongruous slide in a roll of microfilm cataloged under North American Periodicals of the Frontier Expansion Period. Though the majority of the roll was comprised of slides from the semi-erotic quarterly: Gentleman’s Rail and Back-Carriage (pub. 1845-1866) the final slide depicted the misaligned front page of the December 3rd 1846 edition of The Spur and Trader- an unrelated news weekly circulated in the southern Alberta region during the mid 1800’s- which recounted the strange story of one Damian St. Pierre, traveling soap salesman and known gambling addict who dropped dead one night at a card game in the lobby of the Fort Redding Continental Hotel due to “acute mechanical failure.”

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Along the eastern edge of the South Pacific Ocean lie a string of 18 tropical “micro” atolls known historically as the Mustard Symposia- annexed in 1702 by the principality of Clarksburg (now Australian Tasmania) during a short lived foray into colonial expansionism that- in a 22 month period of perilous and quixotic exploration- managed to produce little more than the discovery of the largely uninhabitable atolls as well as the documenting of a new species of phosphorescent octopus: a. cobalticus by the expedition’s accountant who would latter succumb to a rare form of fish born syphilis. 

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