American Ghosts and Old World Wonders 精彩片段：
In Pantoland-1
"I"m bored with television," announced Widow Twankey from her easy chair in the Empyrean, switching off The Late Show and adjusting his/her falsies inside her outrageous red bustier. "I will descend again to Pantoland!"
In Pantoland,
Everything is grand.
Well, lets not exaggerate -- grandish. Not like what it used to be but, then, what is. Even so, all still brightly coloured -- garish, in fact, all your primaries, red, yellow, blue. And all excessive, so that your castle has more turrets than a regular castle, your forest is considerably more impenetrable than the average forest and, not infrequently, your cow has more than its natural share of teats and udders. Were talking multiple projections, here, spikes, sprouts, boobs, bums. Its a bristling world, in Pantoland, either phallic or else demonically, aggressively female and theres something archaic behind it all, archaic in the worst sense. Something positively filthy.
But all also two-dimensional, so that Maid Marians house, in Pantolands fictive Nottingham, is flat as a pancake. The front door may well open when she goes in, but it makes a hollow sound behind her when she slams it shut and the entire fa?ade gets the shivers. Robin serenades her from below; she opens her window to riposte and what you see behind her of her bedroom is only a painted bedhead on a painted wall.
Of course, the real problem here is that it is Baron Hardup of Hardup Hall, father of Cinderella, stepfather of the Ugly Sisters, who, these barren days, all too often occupies the post of Minister of Finance in Pantoland. Occasionally, even now, the free-spenders such as Princess Badroulbador take things into their own hands and then you get some wonderful effects, such as a three-masted galleon in full sail breasting through tumultuous storms with thunder booming and lightning breaking about the spars as the gallant ship takes Dick Whittington and his cat either away from or else back to London amidst a nostalgic series of tableaux vivants of British naval heroes such as Raleigh, Drake, Captain Cook and Nelson, discovering things or keeping the Channel safe for English shipping, while Dick gives out a full-throated contralto rendition of "If I had a hammer" with a chorus of rats in masks and tights, courtesy of the Italia Conti school.
Illusion and transformation, kitchen into palace with the aid of gauze etc. etc. etc. You know the kind of thing. It all costs money. And, sometimes, as if it were the greatest illusion of all, there might be an incursion of the real. Real horses, perhaps, trotting, neighing and whinnying, large as life. Yet "large as life" isnt the right phrase, at all, at all. "Large as life" they might be, in the context of the auditorium, but when the proscenium arch gapes as wide as the mouth of the ogre in Jack and the Beanstalk, those forty white horses pulling the glass coach of the princess look as little and inconsequential as white mice. They are real, all right, but insignificant, and only raise a laugh or round of applause if one of them inadvertently drops dung.
And sometimes therell be a dog, often one of those sandy-coloured, short-haired terriers. On the programmes, it will say: "Chuckles, played by himself," just above where it says: "Cigarettes by Abdullah." (Whatever happened to Abdullah?) Chuckles does everything they taught him at dog-school -- fetches, carries, jumps through a flaming hoop -- but now and then he forgets his script, forgets he lives in Pantoland, remembers he is a real dog precipitated into a wondrous world of draughts and pungency and rustlings. He will run down to the footlights, he will look out over the daisy field of upturned, expectant faces and, after a moments puzzlement, give a little questioning bark.
It was not like this when Toto dropped down into Oz; it is more like it was when Toto landed back, alas, in Kansas. Chuckles does not like it. Chuckles feels let down.
Then Robin Hood or Prince Charming or whoever it is has the titular -- and "tits" is the operative word with this one -- ownership of Chuckles in Pantoland, scoops him up against her bosom and he has been saved. He has returned to Pantoland. In Pantoland, he can live for ever.
In Pantoland, which is the carnival of the unacknowledged and the fiesta of the repressed, everything is excessive and gender is variable.
A Brief Look at the Citizens of Pantoland
THE DAME
Double-sexed and self-sufficient, the Dame, the sacred transvestite of Pantoland, manifests him/herself in a number of guises. For example he/she might introduce him/herself thus: