Imagining and Inventing "Shanghai". The Courtesan Illustrations, the City, and Early Modern Identity

Hey, the entire crew from continuity girl to make up man to executive producer knew we had a winner going for us. We were tapping the id wishes of millions of normal, healthy city bred Americans. People who know next to shit about Nature or her wild creatures, people whose perverse and grotesque imaginings invented a world of happy mice, ducks who wore gloves and sailor suits, baby elephants who flew by flapping their ears, insects who tap danced. In a word, anthropomorphism, or the giving of human qualities to the inhuman, animate or inanimate. Well, goddamnit, if a woodpecker can read a Sunday paper, why doesn't he ever get horny, why doesn't he go down to Chirp City and knock off a piece of fallen sparrow? Huh? The answer, of course, is that in the tiny, vodka soaked minds of Rand Corporation nitwits he does! Everybody knows animals have no shame. They do it right in the open, in the daylight. Squishy-squishy and hot flop all over the dichondra. Only trouble is, thanks to freeways and neon lights and The Jefferson Airplane, all our wonderful, uninhibited, singing, dancing, FUCKING wild creatures are getting creamed, rubbed out, decimated ...»