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!
