Great piece, and it reminds me of a book by B.S.Johnson called House Mother Normal which plays with words and often the lack of them to convey the experiences of eight residents in a home for the elderly. Each chapter is in the voice or thoughts of one of the residents, with some being more understandable and some much less, but the form of the words as well as their content conveys this in a striking and unique way. Worth looking at for sure.
Hi Carl - thanks for the positive response. Don't know the B. S. Johnson. I've only read The Unfortunates, his box-book, where the loose-leaf pages can be read in any order. A bit like Cortázar's Rayuela. I'll check it out.
And, dare I say, a bit like the Boundless Play substack? Once there are enough of them, you’ll be able to read the ‘loose-leaf collection’ of posts in any order. …..
Love the Song Dong piece. The absurdity of stamping water becomes a political statement when you consider the context, which is exactly why location and substrate matter so much for these works. I tried something similair in college with projecting text onto fog and the ephemeral quality totally changed how people interacted with the words compared to just reading them on paper. The whole materiality angle is undervalued in most writting instruction.
Song Dong at one point kept a daily diary written on stone with a brush dipped in water - also about ephemeral writing and memory. Love the idea of the fog projection. My brother-in-law was a magic lanternist who tried to recreate a 19th century Pepper's Ghost show which projected supernatural images onto fog. It was part of the Phantasmagoria. He found it difficult because the 'fog' had to remain quite still. If it swirled around too much the image was lost. Tim Burton brought him in to do the same in his film of Sleepy Hollow. There the problem was not so much the fog but the fact that even when the image could be seen by the naked eye the camera couldn't pick it up.
Absolutely agree about the materiality point. I used to teach a module on the Materiality of Writing to undergrads. In answer to those who were unconvinced about the importance of context, surface, etc. I asked if they thought a bible printed in comic sans on toilet paper would be read in the same way as one printed on vellum with gold leaf and an ornate cover.
Great piece, and it reminds me of a book by B.S.Johnson called House Mother Normal which plays with words and often the lack of them to convey the experiences of eight residents in a home for the elderly. Each chapter is in the voice or thoughts of one of the residents, with some being more understandable and some much less, but the form of the words as well as their content conveys this in a striking and unique way. Worth looking at for sure.
Thank you, Carl. Will certainly look at this book. LS
Hi Carl - thanks for the positive response. Don't know the B. S. Johnson. I've only read The Unfortunates, his box-book, where the loose-leaf pages can be read in any order. A bit like Cortázar's Rayuela. I'll check it out.
And, dare I say, a bit like the Boundless Play substack? Once there are enough of them, you’ll be able to read the ‘loose-leaf collection’ of posts in any order. …..
Love the Song Dong piece. The absurdity of stamping water becomes a political statement when you consider the context, which is exactly why location and substrate matter so much for these works. I tried something similair in college with projecting text onto fog and the ephemeral quality totally changed how people interacted with the words compared to just reading them on paper. The whole materiality angle is undervalued in most writting instruction.
Now very curious to know what the words were that you projected onto fog? LS
Song Dong at one point kept a daily diary written on stone with a brush dipped in water - also about ephemeral writing and memory. Love the idea of the fog projection. My brother-in-law was a magic lanternist who tried to recreate a 19th century Pepper's Ghost show which projected supernatural images onto fog. It was part of the Phantasmagoria. He found it difficult because the 'fog' had to remain quite still. If it swirled around too much the image was lost. Tim Burton brought him in to do the same in his film of Sleepy Hollow. There the problem was not so much the fog but the fact that even when the image could be seen by the naked eye the camera couldn't pick it up.
Absolutely agree about the materiality point. I used to teach a module on the Materiality of Writing to undergrads. In answer to those who were unconvinced about the importance of context, surface, etc. I asked if they thought a bible printed in comic sans on toilet paper would be read in the same way as one printed on vellum with gold leaf and an ornate cover.