Five cover options for Andrew Levy's Cracking Up, all based on Judith Ornstein's "Listening," all in PDF format. They are roughly as follows:
CrackingUp-cover1-Listening.pdf
For this cover, I used P'shop to extend the texture of the paper out to the edges of the cover, so that Jude's image floats on the page. This one was the most work but it's also my least favorite, as I find it a little too "digital" -- esp. heavy-handed on the blur effect, most noticeably on the back cover.
CrackingUp-cover2-Listening.pdf
For this cover and those that follow, I boxed the image up in the standard way, deciding to let the layout and typography act as a counterpoint to Jude's image instead of relying on the image alone for interest. I particularly like the way that the image is slightly askew against the box, which makes the elements seem to drift slightly -- cracking up. This one uses a white background and black type, nicely understated; however, white covers tend not to wear all that well imho.
CrackingUp-cover3-Listening.pdf
Same strategy, this time using a black background and white type. I also reversed the frame on the image box to white, a simple innovation but one that, I think, gives the cover a flat, modern look that fits with the typesetting inside.
CrackingUp-cover4-Listening.pdf
Same strategy as #3, this time with a midnight blue background.
CrackingUp-cover5-Listening.pdf
Same strategy as #3, this time with an orange background.
CrackingUp-cover6-Listening.pdf
Same strategy as #3, this time with a green background.
Finally, here is the book layout for comparison: CrackingUp-layout-HelveticaNeueLTStd.pdf.
4.07.2009
Back after a long (OMG *LONG*) illness with a few mock-ups for Tom Fink's Yinglish Strophes. As I mentioned before, these are based on a Yiddish primer of Russian origin. The first one is a simple arrangement of the pages from the primer:
A bit sloppy around the edges, but it's just a draft. What I like about this design is that, by aggregating the images, it emphasizes their seriality (appropriate to the manuscript) and gives them a flash-card quality. Fixes/Changes: the back cover would continue the motif using different images drawn from the same source; probably I would take out the Russian text and rearrange each image to fill the resulting white space.
The second possibility draws on the same pool of images, but to more "worked" and much more dynamic effect:
I really like the prominence of the song-bird and the way the Yiddish text has been sketched up in this version. Taken together, in my view, the watercolor style of the bird and the facsimile of handicraft in the lettering create an impression of age that stands in powerful contrast with the more contemporary flat, giddy play of the halftone dots -- a theme in the manuscript, with its language of reminiscence and the "old-fashionable." On a simpler note, I also like the open, breezy feel of this one. Notice that a few of the dots are more intensely colored toward the left-hand side of the image: most likely I would continue this drift into bright color across the back cover, adding a dimension of movement to the whole. I might also include the cherries and/or another illustration from the primer on the back cover.
A bit sloppy around the edges, but it's just a draft. What I like about this design is that, by aggregating the images, it emphasizes their seriality (appropriate to the manuscript) and gives them a flash-card quality. Fixes/Changes: the back cover would continue the motif using different images drawn from the same source; probably I would take out the Russian text and rearrange each image to fill the resulting white space.
The second possibility draws on the same pool of images, but to more "worked" and much more dynamic effect:
I really like the prominence of the song-bird and the way the Yiddish text has been sketched up in this version. Taken together, in my view, the watercolor style of the bird and the facsimile of handicraft in the lettering create an impression of age that stands in powerful contrast with the more contemporary flat, giddy play of the halftone dots -- a theme in the manuscript, with its language of reminiscence and the "old-fashionable." On a simpler note, I also like the open, breezy feel of this one. Notice that a few of the dots are more intensely colored toward the left-hand side of the image: most likely I would continue this drift into bright color across the back cover, adding a dimension of movement to the whole. I might also include the cherries and/or another illustration from the primer on the back cover.
1.21.2009
A few cover designs I've been toying with for Andrew Levy's Cracking Up + some process/notes. I was thinking -- I guess my immediate thought for this project was to go literal, which for me meant laughter, mebbe hysterical laughter. At the same time, I don't want to collapse the semantic possibilities of the title: Andrew's work opens up a complex space of feeling, sensation -- it's a sensitive field I guess you could say -- and so at the very least "cracking up" has to be allowed to be as much humor, joy as it is -- what? Some falling apart kind of emotion. After all, cracking up is not breaking down. And mebbe even it's very precisely *not* breaking down, i.e. laughter as hiccup -- a physiological response that attempts to stabilize emotion thro expression, but can't, or that tries to have it both ways, both at once to express and not express. On the other hand, laughter that takes over the body, that throws us into a pure physiological state, thinking mind locked inside a shaken body it can't yet regain. "Instability at / the onset of degeneracy?" -- "You're like everyone else around here, go ahead and laugh." Giddy like a nation at war that still enjoys a healthy discount on a trip to Disneyland -- which isn't to point fingers, I'm in it too and that's the problem right, none of us hasn't yet been able to take the helm all of us ought to stand at. (Oh humanity! O democracy!) And that disjunction gets rite down to the heart of us going about our every day. "Meanwhile we have no names for the psychoses in question but the names hark, look, and wait" sez Wm. James in the Greater Psychology, and I mostly consider Andrew's work in this kind of Jamesian register: not disjunction as a formal strategy, but writing as a live sense of the gaps, transpositions, breaks that consciousness really is made up of; as particularly in Curve and then the work following Paper Head Last Lyrics, where he gives up the tension of the line in favor of a more expansive permission. (It's funny, KG and I were at Bob Perelman's excellent reading last nite at the Poetry Project, and the typescript he was reading -- a poem called "Minsk and Pinsk" -- seemed to be moving in that same general direction, tho with vastly different consequences.) But not as a general state of affairs only: *this* consciousness, it's always *this now* consciousness in Andrew's work -- the mind of the contemporary -- or as Duncan sez, the poet's job is to know what is happening.
Anyway so literalism, meaning some kind of image that focused on a laughing mouth, a disembodied mouth prob'ly to get some torque on the phrase -- that's my beginning point. But I hate literalism! dumb, decorative literalism anyway i.e. the supposed one-to-one correspondence of cover and text, which doesn't give us much space for thought. So torque is important: the image should comment on, enact, dislodge the text. Looking around with that in mind -- what's come up so far in terms of concrete proposals you can see down the page, but I want to walk up to it thro my own process just for the sake of getting a few things set down -- one of the first things I tumbled to was the cover for the 7" release of Nick Lowe's "Cracking Up" (Radar Records, 1979).
Despite its late date -- as everything else in the visual culture circa 1980 seems it sometimes all juxtaposition, isolation, individuation -- boxes, angles, brite colors contrasting -- I see in this image a minor but rock-crystal expression of a certain late 60s/early 70s aesthetics in which the medium, the experience of mediation (not just the concept) is brought into play. Look (hark, wait) how the image of the hand sits on a separate plane, rendered in a distinct style; how the photorealistic teeth are fitted into a mouth thats all fine line cartoon, floating against this pink glove hand in silhouette. Is the hand over the mouth? The hand is over the mouth -- exaggeratedly covers it --but we see the expression overflows, so the laugh can't be concealed. There's an image of hysteria. But the hand also defines the field in which the mouth sits, standing in for the head and face: a pink rubber glove head, convoluted, smooth in all the wrong places, elaborately empty.
It's an aesthetic that's worth considering because it's so distant from that of our own moment, which seems constantly to be expanding the codes of realism or founding new worlds on them but doesn't much want to lay them bare.
This image in mind immediately called up the corresponding one from my bookshelf: I mean the original Sun and Moon Press cover of Bruce Andrews' Give Em Enough Rope (1987).
-- Robert Longo's "Arena Brains II," which has subsequently been picked up by Norton for the cover of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; not a particularly good fit imho, and certainly not as good as the Andrews tho that's hardly a surprise given their proximity. I probably don't need to say much here: the resemblance is obvious, are the differences in tone and aesthetics, between these two images.
Within this field of associations, I workt up this first and still my favorite possibility for Andrew's book:
To my eye, this image, placed in the context of Andrew's title, takes the literal idea and folds it back on itself: the mouth/laugh is definitely present in the bared teeth and radiant lines, but not at all as you'd expect; and there's something disturbing about it -- the mouth disarticulated, the body in pieces -- but simultaneously whimsical, cheerful, effervescent (ha ha). I think it sits right on the line that corresponds to the internal disjunction, the seam of Andrew's manuscript. But it does so in a way that's not at all obvious. This is the kind of image a reader will go back to, the kind of image that accrues meaning as the text unfolds. At the beginning, it's funny, weird -- usefully puzzling -- but your sense of it develops as the text shifts. KG on the other hand isn't totally convinced: she likes it, but sez it makes it look like Andrew's book will get yr dentures clean! We'll see what Andrew thinks.
After this, I began to respond to the images that Andrew was sending ("respond" tho I didn't email him back promptly: sorry Andrew!) which were wonderful and mysterious. There were several that seemed to capture moments of animal emotion -- a chimpanzee leaping dramatically between branches in horizontal flight, a cartoony one the eye of a blue whale with the curve of its mouth as if smiling, a photoshoppt sea turtle with its flippers extended, mouth wide seeming to shout in surprise. Others otherwise: a picture of two women and a girl standing before a shattered building, probably Gaza but just as likely U.S. bombing somewhere in the middle east; later, cracked desert mud; then engravings of humpty dumpty! All appropriate directions to take for this ms. Much of this I have yet to digest, but here's my initial response to the first set of images:
This one I like too. Particularly what strikes me is the uncertain aspect of the animal: I look at this and think "Uh kitten? Tribble? Kitten I guess." In contrast to that, I feel an immediate recognition of the emotion: thats bored and drowsy, I know it as surely as I've felt it myself. In this way the image inspires a complex response. Plus there's the attraction of shared feeling across species, which responds to Andrew's initial suggestions. Plus putting Andrew's name under the kitten's chin -- it is a kitten, btw, according to the person who took the photo -- amusingly suggests this is a photo of Andrew!
Anyway so literalism, meaning some kind of image that focused on a laughing mouth, a disembodied mouth prob'ly to get some torque on the phrase -- that's my beginning point. But I hate literalism! dumb, decorative literalism anyway i.e. the supposed one-to-one correspondence of cover and text, which doesn't give us much space for thought. So torque is important: the image should comment on, enact, dislodge the text. Looking around with that in mind -- what's come up so far in terms of concrete proposals you can see down the page, but I want to walk up to it thro my own process just for the sake of getting a few things set down -- one of the first things I tumbled to was the cover for the 7" release of Nick Lowe's "Cracking Up" (Radar Records, 1979).
Despite its late date -- as everything else in the visual culture circa 1980 seems it sometimes all juxtaposition, isolation, individuation -- boxes, angles, brite colors contrasting -- I see in this image a minor but rock-crystal expression of a certain late 60s/early 70s aesthetics in which the medium, the experience of mediation (not just the concept) is brought into play. Look (hark, wait) how the image of the hand sits on a separate plane, rendered in a distinct style; how the photorealistic teeth are fitted into a mouth thats all fine line cartoon, floating against this pink glove hand in silhouette. Is the hand over the mouth? The hand is over the mouth -- exaggeratedly covers it --but we see the expression overflows, so the laugh can't be concealed. There's an image of hysteria. But the hand also defines the field in which the mouth sits, standing in for the head and face: a pink rubber glove head, convoluted, smooth in all the wrong places, elaborately empty.
It's an aesthetic that's worth considering because it's so distant from that of our own moment, which seems constantly to be expanding the codes of realism or founding new worlds on them but doesn't much want to lay them bare.
This image in mind immediately called up the corresponding one from my bookshelf: I mean the original Sun and Moon Press cover of Bruce Andrews' Give Em Enough Rope (1987).
-- Robert Longo's "Arena Brains II," which has subsequently been picked up by Norton for the cover of Burgess' A Clockwork Orange; not a particularly good fit imho, and certainly not as good as the Andrews tho that's hardly a surprise given their proximity. I probably don't need to say much here: the resemblance is obvious, are the differences in tone and aesthetics, between these two images.
Within this field of associations, I workt up this first and still my favorite possibility for Andrew's book:
To my eye, this image, placed in the context of Andrew's title, takes the literal idea and folds it back on itself: the mouth/laugh is definitely present in the bared teeth and radiant lines, but not at all as you'd expect; and there's something disturbing about it -- the mouth disarticulated, the body in pieces -- but simultaneously whimsical, cheerful, effervescent (ha ha). I think it sits right on the line that corresponds to the internal disjunction, the seam of Andrew's manuscript. But it does so in a way that's not at all obvious. This is the kind of image a reader will go back to, the kind of image that accrues meaning as the text unfolds. At the beginning, it's funny, weird -- usefully puzzling -- but your sense of it develops as the text shifts. KG on the other hand isn't totally convinced: she likes it, but sez it makes it look like Andrew's book will get yr dentures clean! We'll see what Andrew thinks.
After this, I began to respond to the images that Andrew was sending ("respond" tho I didn't email him back promptly: sorry Andrew!) which were wonderful and mysterious. There were several that seemed to capture moments of animal emotion -- a chimpanzee leaping dramatically between branches in horizontal flight, a cartoony one the eye of a blue whale with the curve of its mouth as if smiling, a photoshoppt sea turtle with its flippers extended, mouth wide seeming to shout in surprise. Others otherwise: a picture of two women and a girl standing before a shattered building, probably Gaza but just as likely U.S. bombing somewhere in the middle east; later, cracked desert mud; then engravings of humpty dumpty! All appropriate directions to take for this ms. Much of this I have yet to digest, but here's my initial response to the first set of images:
This one I like too. Particularly what strikes me is the uncertain aspect of the animal: I look at this and think "Uh kitten? Tribble? Kitten I guess." In contrast to that, I feel an immediate recognition of the emotion: thats bored and drowsy, I know it as surely as I've felt it myself. In this way the image inspires a complex response. Plus there's the attraction of shared feeling across species, which responds to Andrew's initial suggestions. Plus putting Andrew's name under the kitten's chin -- it is a kitten, btw, according to the person who took the photo -- amusingly suggests this is a photo of Andrew!
1.19.2009
Potential images for Tom Fink's Yinglish Strophes. These are based on Khayim Beyder's Alef Beys, a children's primer publisht in Moscow in -- improbably to western eyes -- 1990. In the original work, each page represented a letter from the Yiddish alphabet paired with the name of that letter and its transliteration into Cyrillic. I dunno anything of Yiddish or Russian, but I stumbled on Beyder's book reproduced on teh internets and found it captivating.
Here's the image KG and I foresee as primary:
Bird = Poet in Song, in Yiddish, get it. We also like this one, simply for its beauty:
I think the "primer" is a good concept for Tom's manuscript because at first glance there's something wonderfully, grossly literal about the kinds of translation that are happening in these poems -- which on further reading reveal themselves to be funny (funny ha ha) and complex, very human forms of non-equivalence between Yiddish and the American idiom. All of which infused imho with genuine vulnerability, a rare quality in contemporary experimental poetry. Anyway, what I find there is not at all unlike the equivalence Beyder's primer poses between Yiddish and Russian letters, which conceals the complex and sometimes fraught situations underlying. Plus these are beautiful, eye-catching illustrations, very much like the watercolor realism I remember from my own early schooling -- so there's an element of personal sense (sensation) in the project too. And, as KG just pointed out, you get to learn some Yiddish just by looking at the cover!
Here's the image KG and I foresee as primary:
Bird = Poet in Song, in Yiddish, get it. We also like this one, simply for its beauty:
I think the "primer" is a good concept for Tom's manuscript because at first glance there's something wonderfully, grossly literal about the kinds of translation that are happening in these poems -- which on further reading reveal themselves to be funny (funny ha ha) and complex, very human forms of non-equivalence between Yiddish and the American idiom. All of which infused imho with genuine vulnerability, a rare quality in contemporary experimental poetry. Anyway, what I find there is not at all unlike the equivalence Beyder's primer poses between Yiddish and Russian letters, which conceals the complex and sometimes fraught situations underlying. Plus these are beautiful, eye-catching illustrations, very much like the watercolor realism I remember from my own early schooling -- so there's an element of personal sense (sensation) in the project too. And, as KG just pointed out, you get to learn some Yiddish just by looking at the cover!
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