Finger Candy ⚠️
Finger Candy
If you want to know the sort of person Willy Wonka really was, then you need to know about Finger Candy. Its very preposterousness stops it from being more widely discussed. The only way you’d believe it would be to try it for yourself.
Finger Candy starts with a regime of special sweets, taken several times a day. After some weeks, sugar deposits accumulate below the fingernails. If you’re one of those disgusting people who chews their nails, you’ll detect a sweetness when you do so. Some people are so enchanted by this that they consume the entire nail down to the bed. But this is only the first stage.
Sugar continues being stored in the fingertip, taking over the whole thing down to that first knuckle. Eventually the top joint becomes saturated, filled with crystallised sucrose. That’s when the fingers lose sensation and can be nibbled on. People will chomp and chew, not thinking of the consequences. There is very little blood, and what there is only adds to the sweetness.
Wonka celebrated this invention as a great success – fingers are an extravagance, he told his executives, implying that keeping them was greed. But, in this case, Wonka listened to his advisers, and finger candy was only trialled in the Inventing Room. It proved too much even for him.
Background
I’ve been writing a lot about Willy Wonka recently. It’s hard to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an adult without seeing Wonka as a villain. Dahl’s cruelty saturates the book. I’m not sure where these pieces will end up, but it’s fun to write them.
Hype
We’re continuing to make plans for the gallery show in August. The Private View will be the evening of August 6th, and there are will be opening events on August 8th. Everything will be happening at In a Land gallery, and we’ll announce details as soon as we can. The gallery opening hours are 12-4pm, so that also leaves lots of time in the day for hanging out.
Blog Posts
One of the effects of leaving social media is that I’m blogging again. Here are the posts I’ve published in May:
The ‘social web’/blogosphere is a much smaller place than social media, with very little traffic nowadays; but I’m enjoying the solitude. It’s good to put my thoughts together in an area that I own, where there’s little possibility of virality, where there are no algorithms.
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