Thos. Little
Conversations with a Wizard
Dear Reader, today an interview. But first this service announcement.
I wanted to tell you about a real wizard. I mean he eats octopus toast, makes his own gruel to feed the bright yellow slime mold that waves its fingers across a map made of liquified Russian Bayonet ink on handmade mulberry paper pulped in tune with the herbalist hillfolk he’s channelled through the airwaves of his anarcho-queer-pinko network. A few years ago he developed and documented a ritual peacock burial that feels like Flannery O’Connor time-travelled to ancient Egypt. I wanted you to be as excited as me by his discoveries: the gum of wasp-stung peaches, his studies of eclipses, divination, Rumi, Pyrex, Blake, tree and tin-can furnaces, magnetic tape, and origami’d inkblots. And I wrote an introduction yesterday to try to convey all that to you. But today I’m underslept and the world has softened to meet the slow flakes of snow filling the window ledges and covering the buds in the trees and my mood has changed. Thomas Little for all of his weird science, speculative herbalism and wild magnetic ink-making is not magic. It’s the world that is magic. And while I am drawn in by the cape of wizardry he has drawn around himself what I love is how attuned he is to the radical possibilities of the world right all around him.
If you do nothing else today I urge you to look into the extraordinary self-portrait wormhole fever dream that is his Rural Pen instagram feed. And maybe join his Patreon to help transmute firearms into ink. You can also see just the tip of the iceberg of Thomas’s practice in the the NFB documentary The Colour of Ink, directed by Brian D. Johnson, hopefully widely available this spring. But I could not leave it at that, so I began a conversation back in December. It was, of course, not a straight interview, more like an unfurling. Below I quote our email exchange, mostly in full, with an occasional edit for clarity or because I got too wordy.
On Sat, Dec 10, 2022, 9:02 PM Jason Logan <xxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Thomas
Would you be open to submitting to an email interview for my newsletter? No deadline just would love to ask some questions.
Jason
On Sat, Dec 10, 2022 at 11:29 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Of course. Any specific topics?
On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 10:23 AM Jason S Logan <xxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Well really I only have one question but it’s a bit dense. Take your time and just answer whatever parts feel interesting to answer.
What’s the deal with your name and handle?
Even though I know Thos is kind an oldtimey way of shortening Thomas, I always read Thos Little as Thoth Little. Is that just me or do you sometimes align yourself with Thoth the god of the moon, sacred texts, mathematics, the sciences, magic, messenger and recorder of the deities, master of knowledge, and patron of scribes with a head of an ibis that looks a bit like a pen? And then there is the handle, “A Rural Pen,” which seems to be a metonym for your writing and as a holder and channeller of ink and also the rural part a kind of getting out of New York [Actually he lived in New Orleans not New York] and founding a new Utopia in a kind of Flannery O'Connor South but with some scary rednecks with guns. I might be reading too much into all of this but just to say I am a fan of your name and I’m curious if any of this resonates. Because this risks being one of those irritating run-on questions that you sometimes hear after public talks where some guy in the audience is mostly doing a monologue rather than asking a question I will try to separate out some of the pieces of my curiosity:
How important is naming for you?
Do humour and obfuscation have roles in your way of naming ?
Does Egyptian mythology fit into your practice?
How does your family tree fit into your practice?
How do science theatricality and magic battle it out or work together in your practice?
How does old-tymey entrepreneurism and history fit into your practice?
Do you mind me using the word practice? I just can think of anything else that encompasses your multi-hyphenate interests.
What drew you to pens and ink?
How important are words and the other marks that inks make to you?
Where do you see you and I overlapping? Competing? Collaborating?
How does the city country divide in America fit into your practice, especially as it relates to guns?
Can you talk a little bit about the town you live and work in?
Can you talk a little bit about Peacocks?
Jason
On Sun, Dec 11, 2022 at 9:37 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I will answer in chunks, cryptically, and out of order.
Peacocks are coppery Venusian creatures, that I love because they left Darwin restless until he knew what role Love played in the dialogue of form.
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me:
‘Pipe a song about a Lamb!’
So I piped with merry cheer.
‘Piper, pipe that song again.’
So I piped: he wept to hear.
‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;
Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.
‘Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book, that all may read.’
So he vanished from my sight;
And I plucked a hollow reed,
And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hear.
For now, Thomas
On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 11:18 AM Jason S Logan <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I love this.
Jason
On Tue, Dec 13, 2022 at 9:15 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I was being glib, but I am overwhelmed by your questions. Ask me something one at a time.
On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 12:11 PM Jason S Logan <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I didn’t read it as glib. More like you were dissolving my structure while poeticizing the situation. Also Blake was a good hint towards not history or magic or science, but something more dream-like and personal. Okay I’ll try again.
What is your earliest ink memory?
On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 12:19 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxx@gmail.com>wrote:
It was fifth grade, I was 12 or so. I was doing a report on Houdini and wanted to perform a water to wine trick I had found in a book. There were four wine glasses, each with a little solution in them. The first was an iron sulfate solution, the second a weak tannin solution, the third oxalic acid, the fourth ammonia, all fairly clear. The first was added to the second, essentially making a thin purplish ink. This was added to the third, were the oxalic acid bleached the solution, making it clear again. Then this was added to the ammonia, which restored the color. This was around the time of my birthday, I remember, because my father drove all around the county to different pharmacies that still had materials like iron sulfate you could buy over the counter. He put it all in a box, and this was my first chemistry set.
On Wed, Dec 14, 2022 at 6:53 PM Jason S Logan <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I once did in illustration for an opinion piece by Oliver Sacks in the New York Times where he writes about longing for time when kids all had chemistry sets. I wasn’t my best work, but I liked his premise of letting kids play with dangerous stuff. And I do love his writing. My American uncles always used to tell stories of making explosives in the garage with lye and other corrosive materials ordered in the mail, but other than setting things on fire with my brother, I came late to chemistry. Late to art too. And inkmaking. How did you find out about me? Or did I find you first?
On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 1:17 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
I found you! And ever so glad I did. You were the one who inspired me to get on Instagram. At that time, A Rural Pen was a newsletter, kind of like a broadsheet I wrote in cramped jittery cursive, that I only made one copy of, and sent to my friends, herbalists in the mountains. You came up on a search for “ink” and “alchemy” and it was heartening to see that someone thought about ink with such breadth and depth. And that there was an audience who enjoyed reading about it! So my newsletter became my handle, and I started pestering you shortly thereafter. I was working and living at Jones Lake State Park at the time, and I remember sending you bark from the Loblolly Bay trees that grow there. I still have the ink test you sent back.
Your American uncles sound like my father. He taught my brother and I how to make gunpowder when we were little kids. He still likes making rockets, though he’s close to 80 now, and has to cut the fuses longer so he can safely get out of the way. I don’t think I would be as interested in chemistry, and therefore ink, if it hadn’t been for his encouraging us to play with dangerous things.
On Thu, Dec 15, 2022 at 3:49 PM Jason S Logan <xxx@gmail.com> wrote:
That’s funny. When I was ten, our landlord Keith Shales that kicked us out of the little country place we were in just after my mother was diagnosed with cancer. He had a slightly-nicer brother named Lloyd who had a hobbyshop in the nearest town that sold an array of model rockets. My Papa took me there once and I bought a model rocket kit which came with its own little parachute inside. I very carefully painted it red. I definitely remember it disappearing into the sky in an old baseball diamond and finding it slightly disappointing.
I am glad about the Instagram. Glad that you found me. And I still have a small jar of your bark. Now I would do it differently. I bought a phone and started my ink company and got the Instagram account all without knowing what I was doing exactly but being sure of city inks and involving other people, and the name. Over the years I have sometimes felt a bit— guilty? impostery? about the book and the company and the Instagram because it attracted and gathered so many incredible spirits who had been doing such important work for so much longer and deeper and more profoundly than me. Just this year I learned that my druid tree sign is “Vine” which is the only one that is not exactly a tree but really only gets its height and complexity from climbing on top of other things. So long as I am not strangling the amazing old-growth forests around me, maybe its not such a bad sign for me. I had a better question though, maybe.
What is a question that you wish people would ask you about your work, but rarely, if ever, do?
On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 4:30 PM thomaslittlefilms <xxx@gmail.com>wrote:
I wouldn’t feel too guilty about impostery. I think there is something of the quack, the mountebank, the charlatan in our profession. It’s one of the reasons I do slant more towards the old-timey, as you say, in my aesthetic/practice. I love the images associated with the travelling salesman, the snake-oil dealer, the patent medicine hawker. It takes some chutzpah to sell ink, especially now, since almost no one writes, and a ballpoint pen is practically free. Like alchemists have always done, you have to create a mystique, do some world building, reach back to magic from the old world, back to Thoth, to Egypt, the land of K’m, the birthplace of alchemy and writing and magic. But a lot of alchemists were quacks too, weren’t they? Or they were until they weren’t, until they made their profound discovery. To quote my friend Billy Blake again, “If a fool persists in his folly, he shall become wise.” Fake it ’til you make it, in more modern parlance.
And that may be what separates us from true charlatans, from conmen. We are amateurs, in that we do, what we do out of love, not greed, and do it genuinely. We follow our path, as mad or impractical as it may seem, and lure others to follow us, not through deception, but through contagious enthusiasm. We are conning ourselves, and having a ball.
Some of this answers your question, the question that I wish people would ask. And it’s not so much I want them to ask it, but I know that they want to ask it, but don’t. And that would be “Why ink, of all things?” And I would say, because ink can be anything. It is the future, it is the past, it is time travel. It’s worth more than its weight in gold, but is free for the taking. It is all the potential paths a fool would ever want to wander down.
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