Designers' nightmares

Comments like this make me deeply unhappy:

"Today, thanks to computers and design packages, design awareness is very high. Even the novice computer user becomes proficient in designing documents within a few days, if not weeks. Usually, templates are available for brochures, reports, books, etc. All you need to do is fill in the contents in the readymade template." source

'Design awareness' and 'design proficiency' are wildly different beasts. Owning design software doesn't make you a designer anymore than wearing a police uniform makes you a policeman. Actually, instead of making this argument, I'm going to make a cup of tea...

Timo's blog

As if to rub in how self-absorbed I've become in my own research, I only realised TODAY that Timo, my fellow PhD candidate and partner in Postgrad Room high-jinx (which mostly involves laughing at ourselves, each other and stuff on You Tube) has a blog he's been running for 18 months or so. Well worth a nose around.

Notes to self: 3

Spelling it out isn't going so well (I never was a good speller) but the saying no thing is surprisingly liberating.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! (gimmicks)

I recently met Jon Walker – a research fellow in history at Sydney University – whose unconventional biography Pistols! Treason! Murder! The rise and fall of a master spy was published in Feb 2007 by Melbourne University Press. The book is described as a biography of both person and place: Gerolamo Vano, one of the original spy masters, and 17th Century Venice as a city of espionage. Of particular interest to me is the inclusion of "playful comic strips, transcripts of imaginary conversations and a bar-crawl around contemporary Venice." (from the book's blurb, as listed on Jon's website) Several papers given about the book have referred it as "a multimedia assassination". [what's the difference between multimedia and multi-modal?] Jon worked in collaboration with illustrator Dan Hallet to produce these graphic elements. The original manuscript included just four illustrations (which didn't end up in the final version – Jon decided they were not up to scratch) and his editor at MUP requested more of these. Jon scripted what was to go in the illustrations, and Dan produced them, sometimes closely following the brief and sometimes pushing it. In conversation, Jon discussed that the text editing process was rigorous, but although the illustrations and graphic elements were endorsed by the editor, they weren't actually edited - allowing the author (and illustrator) greater freedom of expression with these elements. Were the visual devices not edited because the editor didn't know how, or because they were seen as less meaningful?

By email, Jon also explained that although MUP were supportive of the non-written elements and never questioned the value of using four different typefaces, other editors/agents were not so supportive: "By contrast, conversations I've had with other editors and agents about the possibility of overseas editions are almost always prefaced with remarks like, 'I wish you'd done it as a 'proper' history book. We'd have to get rid of all the pictures and the weird typefaces ...'."

Jon's book was nominated for the NSW Premier's History Award in 2007 and was described as 'our first true work of punk-history'. However, it has also at times received the same criticism as the fictional works I'm looking at - that the typo/graphic elements are 'gimmicks':

"The book is not helped by a motley collection of gimmicks such as comic strips and imagined conversations between invented 'historians. It's all rather confusing, but perhaps that's what Walker intended?" Paul Collins in the Herald.

Referring to the non-written material, most online sources seem to do as I have done above - regurgitate the blurb text that the book includes "playful comics strips ...", word for word. My defense is that I haven't actually read the book yet, as soon as I do I'll update the post. Perhaps it could be overlooked as time saving (lazy writing), or perhaps – again – reviewers are unsure how to tackle a description of the function of these elements?

In an interview with UK magazine Computer Arts Dan Hallett [click on Dan's name to see portfolio of illustrations from Pistols!] describes the intended function of his illustrations: "I want my work to tell a story or stimulate a thought. It is all about communication, even if the message is not always specific."

Jon questions the conventions of historical research and writing through his work. The abstract to a 2003 article published in Rethinking History:

This article attempts to do a number of things: Firstly, it describes the assassination of a priest called Giulio Cazzari in Venice in 1622, using the reports of a spy named Gerolamo Vano as a principal source. It confronts the distance between the experience of death and the representation of death, and explores possible connections between our understanding of death and our understanding of time. It uses formal experimentation and deliberate anachronism (inspired by Futurist literature and photography and the graphic novels of Alan Moore) to dramatise these themes. It does not, however, contain any detailed discussion of seventeenth-century espionage or diplomatic culture, or much in the way of context. This omission is itself part of an implicit argument about the nature of historical knowledge: i.e. that a meditation upon time and death is a natural and appropriate subject for a historian and that archival documents can be used as raw material for such a discussion. Historians should have the courage to ask questions that have no answers (in other words, metaphysical questions). Rethinking History, Volume 7, Number 2, June 2003 , pp. 139-167(29)

Jon's next book project is an illustrated novel. Watch this space.

Exploiting Borrowed Emotion

...was an idea I picked up from one reviewer's description of the still from Casablanca at the end of The Raw Shark Texts. I've come across it again in a review of Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Too much in the middle of what I'm doing to store it anywhere else but here:

In a blurb to this book, Salman Rushdie writes: ‘Perhaps the highest praise I can give is to say it completely earns the right to take on the World Trade Centre atrocity. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed.’ Most of the time, I felt the opposite. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close offers, along with many local pleasures – Safran Foer is a writer of considerable brilliance – a narcissistic realism, in love with it own gimmickry. By the time you get to the end, and flip backwards through the pictures of the falling figure to restore the victim to the top of the skyscraper, as Oskar wishes, you may feel a good deal of the emotion has been borrowed and not quite deserved. Adams, T. 2005, ‘A nine-year-old and 9/11’, Guardian (Books), May 29

*note use of 'gimmickry' again

Idea of 'borrowing' emotion relates back to the postmodern idea of all texts being fragments of other texts - existing within the continuum of all literature (including film and other media) - we can't help making comparisons and drawing on our past experience to interpret the work at hand. Why not exploit that?

A review of Mysterious Flame (Umberto Eco) states:

In the Eco-ian universe, books aren’t merely stand-alone islands to be traversed in linear fashion; they are nodes in an exponentially expanding extranet. To read one book, you sometimes have to pass through several others, accumulating countless references and subtexts along the way. Ng, D. 2005, ‘Eco and the funnymen’, Village Voice, vol. 50, no. 27, pp. 32

Notes to self:

Vonnegut's doodles...

An essay by Peter Reed on Kurt Vonnegut's website (http://www.vonnegut.com/artist.asp ... reprinted from Volume 10, Issue No. 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 1999 Florida Altantic University) says of the felt-tip pen drawings that appear scattered throughout several of Vonnegut's novels:

“the drawings earn their place in the novel, and must be seen as integral to it. Some make graphic the ludicrous disparities that often exist between words as signifiers and what it is they signify. Others simply function as embellishments or even punch lines of jokes. In their almost child-like simplicity of line they have a certain ironic propriety in a novel where the central event is an arts fair. Above all, they are part of-and draw attention to-the seemingly naive, even adolescent, perspective by which Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies American culture and society in this novel."

The word integral is important - again, these drawings aren't visual 'gimmicks', but part of the text. They serve a function within the text that goes beyond reflecting/reinterpreting the writing. Vonnegut called them "felt tip calligraphs".

Thanks, Wikipedia

About a year ago I made a bet with another researcher that I could reference Wikipedia a couple of times (legitimately) in my thesis. It was a joke at the time, based on the look of horror when I told someone that I understood Phenomenology because I'd read the Wiki entry on it (also meant to be a joke, although not entirely false).

Anyway, turns out I can win the bet. Online searching has become a valuable tool for my research – primarily, using the "similar to this" function. For instance, the function on Amazon which suggests if I like a particular book, I may like a list of similar books based on other people's buying history – I have located a number of examples I wasn't aware of using this. Also, on Wikipedia, looking at the suggested links has lead me to some interesting classifications of other similar types of literature, such as:

SLIPSTREAM fiction

"The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989. He wrote: "...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility. Science fiction authors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, argue that cognitive dissonance is at the heart of slipstream, and that it is not so much a genre as a literary effect, like horror or comedy."

The description of this as a literary effect, rather than a genre is interesting because it is essentially how I describe the practice of integrating of typo/graphic elements in novels: rather than a new genre or literary form (to rival the novel), it is style of writing employed when words alone will not suffice.


Metagraphics/Hypergraphics

On the visual side, the Letterists first gave the name 'metagraphics' (metagraphie) and then 'hypergraphics' (hypergraphie) to their new synthesis of writing and visual art. Some precedents may be seen in Cubist, Dada and Futurist (both Italian and Russian) painting and typographical works, such as Apollinaire's Calligrammes or Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuum. "Composition – which is simply a fragmentary purification of the former object – in (or alongside) a figurative structure, this second composition digests the first one - transformed into a decorative motif - and then the whole work becomes figurative. However if one places a letterist notation on (or beside) a realist "form," it is the first one which assimilates the second to change the whole thing into a work of hypergraphics or super-writing." Isidore Isou, "The Force Fields of Letterist Painting" , from Les Champs de Force de la Peinture Lettriste (Paris: Avant- Garde, 1964).

Ignoring the ridiculous phrase "super writing", idea, and (if I understand it correctly, and here is where I need to leave the convenience of Wikipedia and do some actual research...) they are claiming that if you incorporate a 'letterist notation' (what I would call a 'typo/graphic element') into a 'realist form' (in my case, the written text in a novel) the synesthesia of these two modes creates an entirely new kind of text. This mirrors my argument that, when integrated, rather than supplementary, word and image can communicate something that words alone cannot – the synesthesia of word and image produces a unique expressive form.

Wikipedia is useful as a kind of buffet for sampling new ideas, labels, genres, phrases that might overlap my area of research, but also useful in locating examples through a 'six degrees of separation' approach. I keep finding 'friends' of the books that I'm studying through these online networks.

The debate is being had in other media, too:
http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/28/wiki

Just in case I forget...

Using the typo/graphic novel as a case study, how could Visual Communications Design inform the field of visual studies, and what can it learn about itself in the process?

Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Naomi pointed me to this passage in Doris Lessing's novel (my emphasis):

"During the last weeks of craziness and timelessness I've had these moments of 'knowing' one after the other, yet there is no way of putting this sort of knowledge into words. Yet these moments have been so powerful, like the rapid illuminations of a dream that remain with one waking, that what I have learned will be part of how I experience life until I die. Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want. Perhaps better with music? But music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, its not my world. The fact is, the real experience can't be described. I think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. Or a symbol of some kind, a circle, perhaps, or a square. Anything at all, but not words. The people who have been there, in the place in themselves where words, patterns, order, dissolve, will know what I mean and the others won't." (549)

Although Lessing didn't actually employ typo/graphic elements to fill the descriptive void, it is an interesting recognition of words failing to describe 'real experience'. The potential for an image, or the combination of word and image, to convey something immediate, ephemeral and emotive is an idea I've been carrying around from the beginning on this research. There is something about what is not said that makes the experience more real (and more subjective?)

visual communication or design?

I've started writing (it's much more difficult than I anticipated, but that's probably not surprising to anyone but me) and I think I need to start blogging again to store some of the issues as they arise.

Today's quandary is whether I use the term 'designer' or 'visual communicator'. Clearly, consistency is key. Initially, I thought it wouldn't matter as long as I am explicit in the introduction-ish section that in the context of this research, I am concerned with print design, but if part of my argument is that visual communication design partly straddles the Humanities and partly straddles Design, is using 'design' weakening my argument? Visual Communications is just more wieldy than Design in a sentence (however, it will possibly significantly pump up my word count).

Cutting off a limb

After a productive meeting with Kate and Naomi at the end of last week (my supervisors - I find combined meetings are really useful at planning stages), I finally have a chapter plan and (relatively ambitious) time line. Until now, I had the research divided into two parts:

1. Theory – descriptive/analytical: history of illustrated fiction, describing the phenomenon with a typology of devices and taxonomy of their functions, which would lead to;
   
2. Practice – speculative/experimental: a series of workshops and projects exploring the potentials for this way of working to affect the reading experience.

About half way through the meeting, I put an X through Part 2. It was a big moment - I wasn't sure if I felt a bit sick or excited (relieved?). This doesn't mean I'm cutting out the practice component, but that I have to stop thinking of the practice as an entirely separate entity to the theory. Because there is so little consensus on what practice-led research is/could be, it's difficult to determine what is just practice and what is practice-led research. I had a go at defining this a while ago (talking specifically about process, not necessarily design outcome):
I'll come back to this later, it's obviously inadequate.

I have always described the research as practice-led (I identified an issue in practice - while working as a book designer I noticed novels with images in them appearing more frequently but could find little written about this). I have described some of my methods as practice-led (the current exhibition of books experimenting with different typo/graphic devices, the mapping investigations and courses with both writers and designers I'm running at UTS and through the NSW Writer's Centre). I have always intended to mount my argument as piece of visual communication design - arguing that word and image combine to communicate something unique in words alone is illogical.

But for some reason, none of these elements seemed 'enough' to constitute a practice-led research degree. Is this because what I'm doing is so ingrained, so logical to me as a designer, that I don't think of it as design? Or because, as a print designer, my work looks like the research process anyway (working on paper as opposed to, say, a furniture designer making a chair)? My favourite question when I tell people I'm undertaking a practice-led doctorate is "what percentage is going to be practice?" Well, clearly if a drawing is worth a thousand words, so if I did 80 drawings I wouldn't have to write any words at all.... How is it possible to put a percentage value on practice? Is a table worth more than a chair? If the book I'm designing is the thesis itself, how do I 'count' what I've designed?

Sundays - upcoming exhibition at UTS

click on image for larger view

Sundays is an exhibition of three books, accompanied by annotated process work, that forms part of a practice-led PhD through the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney.

Zoë Sadokierski’s research examines a developing literary phenomenon: the integration of typo/graphic elements in prose fiction (novels with pictures in them). This is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a ‘designerly’ way: writers are borrowing techniques and strategies from the designer’s toolbox.

Sundays investigates how and why typo/graphic elements could be integrated into a short story. Using three different typo/graphic devices – experimental typography, drawing/diagrams and ephemera/photographs – three separate versions of the same story (written by Katherine Danks) are presented as individual books.

Viewers are invited to sit and read each book separately, then reflect on their experience of reading the typographic, the illustrated and the photographic elements in each version.

Essay in Heat

I have an essay (developed from the Word and Image in Contemporary Fiction lecture ... scroll down) in Issue 15 of literary magazine Heat, published by Giramondo Publishing:
http://www.giramondopublishing.com/heat/

New Readers

"Not everything in print is to be read in a traditional way; there are new modes of reading which correspond to new modes of writing." Emile Benveniste

"It is my belief that, long before the constituencies of the graphic novel have finished arguing among themselves, the stragegies that have been devised for long-range pictoral reading will contribute significantly to an emerging new literature of our times in which word, picture and typogrpahy interact meaningfully and which is in tune with the complexity of modern life with its babble of signs and symbols and stimuli." Eddie Campbell (World Literature Today, March-April 07: 13)

Deborah Adelaide put me onto Nabokov's essays on literature, in particular an introductory essay called 'Good Readers and Good Writers'. I've been putting off dealing with the issue of the 'contract' between writer and reader for a while, but I have to start dealing with it as I write up my main book reviews. One of the most interesting aspects of this topic – for designers – is the parallels between the process of writing and the process of designing: the way a writer uses literary devices to direct the reader's experience is a useful model for designers to use when thinking about the way they use their 'devices' to direct the viewer experience. Again, back to an idea raised in Kate Sweetapple's PhD thesis.

Material writing

The Material Poem, an anthology of poetic artworks curated by UTS Masters student James Stuart, is available online: www.nongeneric.net

His introduction describes these poems as the products of writers "engaged with writing as a material rather than purely literary practice." Many of the poems are accompanied by author's notes explaining their motivations. Although I'm not looking at poetry (you'd have to go into a great deal of historical grounding to understand how the poem has evolved as a visual-verbal form, and I'm more interested in experimental visual devices in prose - traditionally the domain of pure language), this is a great example of how visual rhetorical devices affect the reading experience.

Quoting Charles Bernstein: " All text is visual when read", Stuart elaborates "engaging with language necessarily entails engagement with its particular materiality." It is this consideration of form, of materiality (or modality?) that is fascinating to me, as a designer. The 'design' of literature shifts from a paratextual zone (the cover, the typesetting grid) to an intertextual zone (the visual elements affect communication/meaning).

The process of reading poetry is recognised by the likes of Michel Riffaterre as being inherently different than the process prose: you read a poem once to identify the semiotic structure, and then again to understand the structure. You necessarily re-read poetry. This is what George Alexander describes in his statement: 'meaning in poetry often seems to float just out of reach, like lost paper sail boats'.

Wayzgoose Press describes the motivation to typeset one of their poems in differing faces and weights: "to encourage a slower and more deliberate reading than the average reader is accustomed to with today's universal emphasis on speed."

Action Research and design

I've been to a couple of talks on action research lately, and Bob Dick's 2001 (find source) description of what action research is could be a description of the design process in general:

A commonly known description of the action research cycle is that of Kemmis and McTaggart (1998) – plan, act, observe, reflect; then, in the light of this, plan for the next cycle ... [action research] tends to be ... cyclic and participative and qualitative. I view all of these features as choices to be made by the researcher, usually in discussion with the participants. Good action research is research where, among other features, appropriate choices are made... If its advantages are to be obtained, it is mostly or always flexible and responsive to the research situation.

If you redefine 'researcher' as designer, and 'participants' as the client/audience, I think this is a nice working definition of what design (specifically visual communications) does. It describes an iterative creative process that involves cycles of designing, reflecting and redesigning in collaboration with the other people involved in any given project (in my practice, this would be 'planning' (brainstorming) based on a brief from an editor, 'acting' (designing a set of roughs), 'observing and reflecting' in collaboration with editorial and marketing departments (showing them the roughs and discussing), then repeating the cycle until a final solution is agreed on).

The other particularly relevant idea is that of appropriateness. Good design is evaluated on appropriateness. There is no single ‘right’ design solution to any given design problem. Unlike science, which strives for THE solution, design will only offer A solution. So whether A design solution is evaluated as being good or bad, it is in terms of how appropriate the solution is at that time – how clear is the communication and how engaging is it to the intended audience.

I can't see action research being entirely appropriate for my research, but I think it's a valuable methodology for designers who are researching through practice.

To come back to:

Are gimmicks and visual rhetoric the same thing?

if you define rhetoric as persuasion, false, showy, artificial... "Rhetoric, that powerful instrument of error and deceit" John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

I'm just starting to read around rhetoric (and its application to design research) - seems to be (appropriately) a huge range of arguments around the value of rhetoric as a field of study at all, let alone for design. The value of rhetoric for design is that studies persuasion - how do you communicate a message in the most convincing manner. This the fundamental purpose of visual communications.

The central concern of rhetoric has always been method and manner: how to discover the most effective way to express a thought in a given situation, and then how to alter its expression to suit different situations. http://lsb.scu.edu/%7Eemcquarrie/rhetjcr.htm

Abstract for Postgrad Research Conference

Following is the abstract for a 20 minute presentation at the UTS Postgrad Research Conference, August 17 2007. Program available: http://www.gradschool.uts.edu.au/ProgramwithChairs.pdf

My research examines the integration of typo/graphic devices in prose-fiction (novels with pictures in them). Although not new, this is an insufficiently articulated phenomenon. It is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a 'designerly' way: writers are borrowing rhetorical techniques from the designer's toolbox.

I have identified emerging interest in this phenomenon from designers, writers and critics, and recognised that the phenomenon is met with resistance from some, who dismiss the visual devices as 'gimmicky' or merely 'decorative'.

Why are these typo/graphic devices being described as 'gimmickry'?
I suggest:
A) An inadequate understanding of the function of images (what can images communicate?), and;
B) Insufficient available language to describe the function of images (how can we talk about what images communicate?).

Despite much current discussion about a 'culture of the image' and a developing 'visual literacy', there remains a widely recognised need for a way to talk about what images 'do'. At the moment, this is explored primarily through semiotics and linguistics, which analyse images as if they were language. However, although similar, the verbal and the visual are not the same. Analysing images as if they were language does not account for the difference between Language and Image. What is lost in translation? What is it that images, or the combination of words and images, can communicate that words alone cannot?

Content Analysis - methodology

I have an article from 'Marilyn Domas White and Emily E. March on Content Analysis as a flexible research method that has been used in library and information science studies, does anyone know of cases where content analysis has been used as a design research method? It seems to be an appropriate way of describing what I have called my 'contextual review' - ie the activities I've used to analyse a series of novels to try to explain the phenomenon.

Marsh and White have used it to 'develop a thesaurus of image-text relationships' (which I have been looking at in my research), but I'm not sure if it's being used elsewhere.

Marsh & White 2006, 'Content Analysis: A Flexible Methodology', Library Trends, vol. 55, no. 1, 22-45.

New review site

From this blog, I was contacted by a postgrad student in London who's researching the same general area as me. We've been emailing and decided to start a blog to specifically review books with typo/graphic devices (or interventions, to borrow a great phrase from him). We've started posting, and would love some feedback: http://graphicinterventions.blogspot.com/

film v novel

"But most readers are also moviegoers, even if the converse does not apply. The interesting thing is that the same person who goes to see the film The Brown Bunny, and groans as the insects pile up on Vince Gallo's windshield, will curl up at home with Everything Is Illuminated and chuckle approvingly at finding the phrase "we are writing" printed 191 times in a row...
In short, two aesthetics often exist in the same mind: a moviegoing aesthetic that trusts primarily in personal taste and perception, and a reading aesthetic that is more likely to defer to established opinion."
BR Myers, 'A Bag of Tired Tricks', The Atlantic Monthly Boston, May 2005

"At heart, the two forms, movie and book, are irreconcilable. A book we “hear”, listening to our own reading. A movie we “see”. The images must move, clash and climax. Translating sound into picture requires the director to cross-reference senses. When you get a film/novel such as Perfume (smell) or Chocolat (taste), the book is always going to outstrip the movie – until the film of the future gives us smell-and-taste simulation. On the other hand, when the story moves into altered states (such as Altered States), the movie has the advantage. Film can deliver a stunning visual in a tenth of a second – think The Lord of the Rings, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense and The Butterfly Effect."
Ken Russell, 'You've read the book - good luck with the movie", Times Online, August 16 2007. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article2265338.ece

The limits of images

Marie-Laure Ryan claims: "the narrative limitation of pure pictures stems from their inability to makes propositions. As Sol Worth has argued, visual media lack the code, the grammar, and the syntactic rules necessary to articulate specific meanings. A propositional act consists of picking a referent from a certain background and of attributing to it a property also selected from a horizon of possibilities. Whereas language can easily zero in on object and properties, pictures can only frame a general area that contains many shapes and features...Pictures may admittedly find ways around their lack of propositional ability to suggest specific properties (for instance, through caricature), but there are certain types of statements that seem totally beyond their reach. As Worth argues, pictures cannot say 'ain't'. Nor, as Rimmon-Kenan observes, can they convey possibility, conditionality, or counterfactuality." Narrative Across Media, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

I'm not looking at 'pure pictures' – within my area of study, the visual always exists within the context of a written text (otherwise it wouldn't be fictional prose) – and I'm also not looking at the 'narrative' potentials of image ... I'm defining the typo/graphic elements in these novels as rhetorical (evocative, persuasive) rather than narrative (driving the plot) devices but the quote above is an interesting start at defining the limitations of images.

The ability for images to narrate (to tell: narrativity) is different than their ability to evoke (to affect: rhetoric)? I'm not suggesting that typo/graphic elements are always narrating (although they do in sequential art, but the narrative drive is to do with cognitive leaps the reader makes across the gutter ... see notes from comics lecture). Not about articulating specific meaning but about creating tone or evoking, the devices are affecting rather than narrating? To use design words, the visual devices are less about communication and more about engagement.

A picture cannot say ain't ... but through tone, texture, size, colour, composition, etc, it can imply a voice or a 'dialect'. Different typefaces, for example, can 'speak' in different voices: the manner in which a graphic mark is made has a language of its own - if I render a phrase delicately in calligraphic script or scratch it across a surface with a rough charcoal, it 'sounds' different to the reader. Using the media I have in my desk draw right now:


Design writer/educator Johanna Drucker sets her students an exercise in which they transpose the headlines of the Wall Street Journal and the National Enquirer in "a kind of design transvestism–so that the banner headline 'Bond Markets See Rates Drop By Slight Margin' took on a screaming impact, while 'Two-Headed Boy Gives Birth to Alien Savior with Telepathic Knowledge of Biblical Past-Lives' was modestly set in the grayest and least exclamatory of formats." (Text 16, 2006)

These examples illustrate the communicative power of typography – where the mode of expression impacts on the communication of the content. This seems blatantly obvious to a practicing designer, and I would think many contemporary readers, but this assumption is hasty. In a recent list-serve conversation, a design academic (I believe from engineering design) commented that he didn't understand how 'page layout' could be considered design. I'm not even going to grace that with a response.

In a recent Book Show interview with Canadian Arts&Culture Journalist Jeet Heer, Ramona Koval asked him what comics can do that literary fiction cannot. He gave an example from Spielgelman's Maus, where the characters are visualised as animals: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, etc. He points out that this technique is goes back to Aesop's Fables, but here it's so effective because Spiegelman shows, rather than stating it: "gives you a sense of what it's like to be in a culture where these two groups view each other, or are viewed, as totally different races and difference species even ... so as a visual metaphor, and precisely because it wasn't articulated in words ... it's all the more powerful ... a picture is direct, it goes straight to the brain whereas a word always has to be deciphered - the word 'read' comes from riddle, you have to riddle out words." What's important to note is that the visual description evokes a visual experience.

He also discusses the recent controversy around the Danish cartoon mocking Mohammad: it created massive immediate controversy because it was so easily distributable (no need to translate from Danish) and re-printable. "A visual language transcends barriers of dialect or of history even." So an image may not be able to say "ain't", but it may be able to speak immediately beyond dialect? An international dialect? Obviously there are huge holes in this claim: there's a great Mad Magazine cartoon where a man in a kilt and a woman in jeans are standing in front of two doors with the 'universal' man and woman icons scratching their heads. But perhaps images can EVOKE a visual experience more effectively than words?

What comes out at 3.47am (post-it note to self: drink less coffee)

It started as a rash around the bottom of my monitor. Mostly references I didn't have time to check and questions for later consideration:

As it spread to the upper edges, motivational tips began to appear:

It began to creep from screen to pin-board to wall, then not just in books but all over them, and a few even sprouted in surprising places like the back of my phone and in pockets I never used. I found them stuck to the bottom of shoes I only wear 'out' and, in the kitchen, ingredients for saffron chicken were accompanied by pithy quotes from Barthes and McLuhan. The back of the door developed a reminder of my deteriorating mental state:

I really became concerned when I woke one morning to find my bedside table alive with lurid yellow notes like a swarm of paper butterflies – noisy thoughts I'd released during the night. Yesterday, I scratched an itch at my collar and my hand returned with a note attached:
In the shower last night, I looked down to see a pulpy yellow lump bleeding inky ideas down the drain. This morning, I dreamed I had a post-it note epidermis – millions of scaly yellow reminders obscuring what used to be a pink fleshy person. This is worse than the time I reached into my handbag for a pen and produced a mouse. It has to stop.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

What affect does the inclusion of the notes have? Does it contribute significantly more than if I'd typed the messages? Immediacy. Trueness to form. I went back and reduced the size of the 'keys' note, because I think it works better smaller - to discover that after reading the text before it has more impact? If I were doing this in book form, I'd put that on the following page to delay the 'reveal' - manipulation of pace and reading experience by holding out, like a dramatic pause?

Gimmickry and publishing

To argue why the typo/graphic devices are more than (mere) gimmicks, I need to define what a gimmick is. Merriam-Webster online: "a: an important feature that is not immediately apparent b: an ingenious and usually new scheme or angle c: a trick or device used to attract business or attention gimmick>" (see my post: "this is not a threat" for another definition that is more negative in tone)

So the definition is not necessarily negative, except in 'c' where it is described as a 'trick' (playful at best, deceptive at worst). The negativity associated with the term 'gimmick' in the context I'm talking about – fictional literature – comes from a value judgment about language over image: the perceived 'hegemony' of word over image. Literature is highbrow, but advertising (associated with gimmickry) is lowbrow. So these visual 'gimmicks' or 'tricks' are criticised because they are perceived of as 'hype' - included as marketing hooks (conversation starters?) rather than for their literary merit.

To show where I'm getting the issue of 'gimmickry' from:

AUTHORS:
Steven Hall: "these storytelling techniques are still considered 'experimental' or even worse, 'gimmicky' in some book circles; whereas in art you can sit in a gallery with a dead lobster on your head for a week without fear of being accused of either."

From Khan, Design Week: According to Safran Foer, the use of images in novels is 'still considered to be a gimmick or some expression of the failure of language'.

Arguing for the inclusion of images, from an interview with Gabe Hudson in the Village Voice:
"It's a shame that people consider the use of images in a novel to be experimental or brave. No one would say that the use of type in a painting is experimental or brave. Literature has been more protective of its borders than any other art form -- too protective. Jay-Z samples from Annie -- one of the least likely combinations imaginable-and it changes music. What if novelists were as willing to borrow?"

CRITICS: (I've only cataloged Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close so far)

Myers in an article called 'A tired bag of tricks' says: "What may hurt the book even with its intended audience arc the various diversions that both writer and publisher seem to have thought would constitute a selling point...After a while the gimmickry starts to remind one of a clown frantically yanking toys out of his sack: a fatal image."

Upchurch subtitles his review 'Gimmicks drown out power, poignancy'

Greer: "Oskar's grandfather's letters are the most gimmicky in the novel...He never really comes alive, and is perhaps the one major person in the book that is more a metaphor than a fleshed-out character."

Updike: "But, over all, the book’s hyperactive visual surface covers up a certain hollow monotony in its verbal drama. "

Robert J. Hughes: "The novel's ramblings and gimmicks are meager representations of catastrophe and often badly out of key. The end of the book features a stunt -- a short flip-book of photographs with a body falling upward to a World Trade Center tower, as if we could turn back the clock. We can't, of course, but we already knew that. It is fairly offensive to see a novelist co-opt such an indelible image of desperation and death for such a trite purpose. Whimsy and terrorist tragedy do not add up, at least in Mr. Foer's hands.

Jonathan Raymond, Artforum: Impressively, the book's bells and whistles actually feel appropriate to its larger meaning, rather than coming across as mere gimmickry.


How many of these authors have websites/blogs? Almost all of the contemporary (last 5 years) I've looked at do. Steven Hall was actively involved in the marketing strategies of his book (TBS interview?), Mark Danielewski released parts of House of Leaves on the Internet pre-publication. The contemporary novel is embedded in a marketing culture, and, more broadly, what Mitchell etc describe as an age characterised by a 'pictoral turn' – how does this context effect the content of contemporary fiction?

Postmodern fiction

Postmodern fiction in America often extends the novel beyond its conventional generic boundaries. Such writing, David Harvey explains, is "necessarily fragmented, a 'palimpsest' of past forms super-imposed upon each other, and a 'collage' of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral" (66). American postmodern writers, according to Nicholas Zurbrugg, create a literary montage that "interweaves and accepts the copresence of differing discourses and conflicting categories" (56). Horst Ruthrof describes this strategy as a "schema of 'openness,'" in which "meaning is...something on the move, a dynamic which at times is deceptively slow but never comes to rest in social discourse" (30, 32). These writers often set their formal textual innovations in the context of parody, satire, and irony, developing a form that features a carnivalesque delight in irreverence.
Nicholas Sloboda, 1997 'Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme's Snow White', Mosaic, v.30 n.4 p109(15).

This description characterising montage, collage and a 'carnivalesque delight in irreverence' as elements of 'postmodern fiction' seems to fit well with a lot of the literature I'm looking at, but I have the same unease with 'postmodern' as I do with 'semiotics'.

Sloboda provides an analysis of Donald Barthelme's Snow White that includes consideration of typo/graphic devices as a way of understanding Mitchell's notion of 'literary spatiality' (reconsidering Joseph Frank's theorising of spatial form, Sobloda describes as "in which the written text is linked to temporality in its articulation of sounds in time, while visual art is interpreted in terms of spatiality in its depiction of forms and colors in space":

Barthelme's inclusion, in many of his works, of both actual pictures and textual graphics (visualized letters and words) literally extends his narratives beyond their traditionally perceived temporal framework. In doing so his practice accords with Mitchell's contention that "traditionally 'deviant' or 'experimental' phenomena such as emblems, hieroglyphics, pictograms, and concrete poetry may well appear as the anomalies which suggest and require new paradigms for understanding verbal space in general," whereby reading emerges as a "visionary (not merely visual) experience" ("Spatial Form" 296, 297). Within his re-writing of Snow White, Barthelme prompts such "visionary" readings, shifting from traditional notions of temporality and spatiality as independent to considering them as interdependent (but not necessarily complementary). His introduction of graphic designs juxtaposed with the written text is in keeping with Mitchell's contention that both "the language of images" and pictorial representations themselves are not the "object of a...temporalizing interpretation but [are]...the interpretative framework which spatializes the temporal arts of...music and literature" ("Introduction" 7).

In addition to using graphics to challenge what Mitchell regards as the presupposed hegemony of the textual form, Barthelme also uses these graphics to illustrate what Bakhtin calls expressions of "extreme freedom and frankness" (Rabelais 271). At the outset of Snow White, for example, he describes her as a "dark beauty" and then goes on to spoof conventional expectations by focusing specifically on her multiple beauty spots. After listing their locations on her body, he describes a pattern: "All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down" (3). He then provides an abstract depiction of their position on Snow White's body: [image]

By featuring graphic art at the opening of the novel, Barthelme thus immediately extends his text beyond the written word and points to spatiality itself as a significant dimension of the (de)signifying process.

I need to think about this more before I can comment on it.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick

I'll start by pointing out that I haven't read this book yet but it's next on my ever growing list. However, the way the book is being talked about is fascinating, I've put together some quotes and comments from reviews and an interview with Brian Selznick on the New York Times Book podcast (does anyone know how to reference a podcast?) Have a look at the website here you can watch an animated version of the opening sequence of drawings.

In the New York Times 'Book Update' podcast, the interviewer, Julie Just, describes the book as alternating between writing and very intricate drawings that "advance the story, not just ... decorate it". A 533 page book (300 are full bleed illustrations) set in 1930s Paris about a young boy who meets film maker Georges Melies, aimed at 'middle-grade readers' (young adult?) it draws inspiration from movies with very cinematic illustrative techniques (close ups, pans, establishing shots, etc ... language from film studies could be useful for me). Selznick says he was thinking about "the way the language of cinema tells its stories and thinking about how I could adapt that language within the form of the book." So, in some ways, this is an issue of translation - how do you translate a story about cinema onto the page? Some sections - the climatic chase scene is apparently a 36 page illustrated passage - are, in Selznick's words "like having small silent movies throughout".

Just asks him if he was tempted to produce the book as a graphic novel, to "toss out the words". He responds that he "loves the way graphic novels use pictures to help tell their story but what intrigued me more what the way picture books ... tell their story ...the way the act of turning the page in a picture book ... reveals something entirely new ... With a graphic novel you read them very much like regular novels [left to right, down the page, turn the page when you get to bottom right] but with picture books ... you turn the page because you need to see what is going to happen in the next moment of the story itself ... making every picture in the book a full double page spread and making the reader have to turn the page it puts the reader in a different kind of position than they would otherwise be with a book because they are actively involved in moving the story forward." Again, the notion of a reader needing to be 'active' to read visual elements in a book. Selznick talks about making the reader experience time the same way the character experience time in certain parts of the book, so it is active, and it is about the experience of reading. This is also returning to the idea of how important the medium is to the experience of reading. He has very consciously chosen this approach because it is the best way to tell his story.

But what does that make this book? It's not a graphic novel and it's not a picture book. An article from Publishers Weekly quotes:

Selznick's editor for the book, Tracy Mack, has never seen anything else quite like it. "As editors, we're always getting excited about something different, not different just for sake of being different, but truly new," she says. "This to me felt wholly different. It's not a graphic novel. It's not a film. It's more like a picture book where the illustrations are pushing beyond what the words say." ...

This is an editor describing what makes this book a new and unique storytelling form, rather than a novel with gimmicky typo/graphic elements. The article continues:

The original vision for Hugo was pretty standard: a 150-page book with an illustration in every chapter. But Selznick was determined to make this story about the roots of French cinema work visually. In revising, he listed every passage that didn't contain dialogue or the boy's thoughts. "Anything that was just a description, I replaced with a drawing." Mack, who studied painting herself, pushed him even further. "He had a long introduction to the train station [where Hugo secretly lives) but we needed to get to Hugo quicker. I told him, 'Just draw it.' He resisted because he had really come to like that piece of writing, but it wound up being so much better because the visual introduction imparts such a strong sense of place," she says. 'Drawn to cinema', Publishers Weekly, www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6417185.html

This is, perhaps, a technique that is acceptable mostly because of the readership - young adult books are 'allowed' to be more experimental as they 'graduate' from picture books to novels (I claim this from my experience of designing book covers - almost all my freelance work is now for young adult fiction because I am privileged with far greater creative freedom). Yet this combination of word and image can be a powerful and unique.

"So I was thinking about the role narrative illustrations play in chapter books. [from what I could find on the net, a chapter book is aimed at 9-12 year olds with one line drawing per chapter] Something in the illustration is usually referred to in the text, and usually you put something in the illustrations that adds to the story, but in almost all cases the pictures could be removed and the story would not suffer. That's not the case in picture books, and I was thinking especially about those books in which the words stop and the pictures absolutely take over, like the wild rumpus [from Where The Wild Things Are]...I mean, it's a book about movies. A movie is a visual experience...I asked myself, 'What if parts of the story were told only in the pictures? Could I take out some of the text and replace it with pictures?'" Sue Corbett, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/4/2007

Selznick talks about drawing from scenes in French cinema - how better to pay homage to a visual medium than visually?