Kingston Book project

Kingston have set me a summer brief. It begins as such:

“The book is an extraordinarily successful piece of technology. For centuries it has been the most widely used and powerful medium for conveying information, ideas and imaginings. In academies, schools, universities, and workplaces of all kinds, books have stimulated discussion and debate,informed new ideas, and inspired innovations and inventions of all kinds; books expressing political and social ideas have been instrumental in bringing down governments and raising new ones; and,most importantly, books have given untold pleasure to countless readers.
The modern revolution in communications technologies – in the sense of the speed and
extent of travel and the capacity for sharing ideas – threatens and, at the same time, confirms and extends the place of books and book-making in our lives. It makes possible new types of books, new methods of production and distribution, and new types of authorship that could barely be imagined just a decade ago.”

From this overview I was tasked to “Write your own succinct definition of what a book is.” I am a big reader of fiction. I love stories and get completely immersed in the escapes they provide. I agree that books have a sort of metaphysical power in this regard in the way in which they spark such vivid pictures that you create in your head. The ideas of myths, legends and mystical stories also comes to mind when thinking about books. I grew up reading stories about the Norse and Greek Gods. The fact that these stories are alive today is magic in itself and they have been preserved through oral retellings and books. Whilst books can be used for all sorts of things such as documenting information etc, to me stories and fiction and worlds created by others shared through the page is where the interpersonal meaning of books lies.

I began thinking about books that have been influential to me to see if there was something I could draw from this collection. One of my favourite novels is “Blood Meridian” by Cormac McCarthy. It’s such a bleak violent book that really is critical of the human condition and what it’s worth. However, it’s so poetic and almost beautiful. I think this complex contradiction is what really makes this book. It is aided by McCarthy’s atypical, “primitive” writing style and sentence structure. Another book that has had an effect on me is “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I think I appreciated the purist nature of it, it’s just thoughts and stories in what has been described to me as a “stream of consciousness” which I think is exactly it. It celebrates the mundane and the journey and is the essence of this book down to the very structure of the novel. I found out that “Legend has it that Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, typing it almost nonstop on a 120-foot roll of paper.” this really makes sense when thinking about the pacing and I think this mythos about the writing of it is a testament to the message of the book itself.

I was also drawn into “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess due to the use of the made up slang that the book is written in making it a unique reading experience. “Nadsat is a fictional register or argot used by the teenagers in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange. In addition to being a novelist, Burgess was a linguist and he used this background to depict his characters as speaking a form of Russian-influenced English”. It creates a really immersive experience and it’s funny just how quickly you pick up and accept this language. I witnessed this form of world building and immersion when I visited the Tolkien exhibition at the Weston Library in Oxford. The thought that went into the language, history and geography of Middle Earth is immense. This is what a book can be. I also don’t want to exclude other mediums such as graphic novels because this level of thoughtfulness is very much present in the works of Alan Moore is books such as “Watchmen” and the illustrations of Jean Giraud, otherwise known as Moebious in his comic series “Edena” and “Arzach”. I am actually dyslexic so perhaps this explains why I am so fond of these forms of books which are slightly differently written and are read in different ways.

With these examples It’s almost like the books exceed or transgress what a book is. There is something embedded in the writing style and technique that is a necessary to be able to truly depict this natural stream of consciousness that these books hold.

This led me to come up with my definition – “A book is a stream of consciousness translated to a page.”

“Once you have a definition, produce a publication or a series of publications that respond to it. Your publication could use the physical properties of a print and stock (paper, card etc.) or examine the possibilities of digital communication or work across both these mediums. Be exploratory and experimental in your approach.”

I will go on to create some responses to my definition. I think increasingly so books are becoming less rigidly defined. I will experiment with how I can portray the idea of a “stream of consciousness” graphically. I think it might be good to use extracts of these books and play around with typography to try and construct these different channels of communication. How can I portray it through different mediums, will this lead me to rethink my definition. I want to challenge this defintion and push it to its limits to see if holds up. I will continue to research by looking at designers, artists and more books. I’ve ordered “The Book” by Amaranth Borsuk as recommended by the graphics course and will visit some libraries, museums, book shops and anything else that I find relevant in the future.