Duration 2.48
Mashanter Fallack was registered as a speaker in English and Karnash, with a knowledge of Allow-ease. To identify herself entirely with victims of the VUE, she insisted in speaking Karnash in public. English to Mashanter was a language prepared to debase ornithological nomenclature to an unacceptable level, demonstrating yet again the paucity of the English concern with the phenomenon of the Violent Unknown Event.
Interviewer: "Do you think these film biographies are going to profit VUE victims themselves?"
Mashanter: "Of course. Think of who's involved, the IRR, the BFI, the COI, the European Section of the WSPB, not to miss the Directory Commission. All these public bodies have access to a viewing public that covers half the world."
Interviewer: "Do you think that public money is well spent on making films like this?"
Mashanter: "Not again. Do you ask me about the public money being paid to all these people in all these government offices? I'm surprised that you of all people can ask that question?"
Mashanter was born in the Canary Isles, though there are times when she would deny it. She now as an office in Berkeley Square. Her parents were Danish. Her father was an architect now continually employed building aviaries, and her mother, a doctor, had been drowned in a ship's swimming pool.
Interviewer: "Do you think there's any point in the IRR making a separate case for VUE victims?"
On the night of the VUE Mashanter was on holiday in Venice. Apart from some initial migraine and consequent insomnia Mashanter suffered little physically. Indeed, her metabolism was invigorated. She used her sleepness nights studying ornithological literature and she began to campaign for a better appreciation of avian terminology. Before long she was spending her teacher's income in the magistrates' courts, paying fines for disturbing the peace, harassing the public, being a public nuisance and defacing public monuments.
Mashanter's favourite Tulse Luper story was Sparrow Week:
To curb vast flocks of sparrows from yearly eating one third of a country's food production, a nation organised Sparrow Week. Both day and night, for seven days, the country's vast population rang bells, banged saucepan lids and shouted. The sparrows, too frightened to settle, eventually fell dead out of the sky. Flight exhaustion from the same cause also killed gulls on the coast, herons in the marsh, eagles in the mountains and pigeons on the town square. At the end of the seventh day Sparrow Week ended. The following year two thirds of the country's food supply was eaten by insects, and the money standard changed from gold to eggs.
Interviewer: "Where you speaking metaphorically when it was reported that you were preparing to lay your own golden egg?"
Mashanter: (Laughs)
Interviewer: "Can a take it that..."
The Falls Biographies
