Thursday, 19 January 2012

START - WILL SELF - MY IDEA OF FUN

From last module I have taken away that my designs work when I have a solid concept; how can I best start my research and come up with further interesting concepts? It seems that literature I particularly like makes me more enthusiastic because then I can play around with typography and vocabulary...

My initial thoughts and themes that I listed in my statement of intent relative to the idea of literature were;

Literature
* Wuthering Heights
* Will Self
* Sylthia Plath

This isn't really a very thorough list at all, and I'm sort of not interested in representing wuthering heights as a concept within design just yet, it was only because I was reading it at the time that I added it to my list of interests. I think that if Sylthia Plath becomes one of my themes I may end up doing something twee and completely wrong for me, although I haven't read everything by her and so if I am selective enough then perhaps I can look at more interesting subject matter. Will Self is a writer that I have been told to look up before, and after being read a chapter of from 'My idea of fun' I really want to look at representing him in a series of zines or publications which would allow me to represent a very particular subject matter by experimenting with format and layout and type etc.

So here we go... Will Self!

I think in a panic of doing some design context I hurriedly posted some tidbits about Will Self but I am officially starting my research here.  It is his literary style that I am most interested in;


"I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people."

Already, from looking into his influences I have found other avenues of research;

* William Burroughs
* Hunter S. Thompson
* Jonathon Swift
* Alasdair Gray
* Franz Kafka
* Lewis Carrol
* Joesph Heller
* Louis-Ferdinand Celine
* Martin Amis

Works

Fiction

  • Cock and Bull (1992) — the stories of a man and a woman who develop sexual organs of the opposite sex.
  • My Idea of Fun (1993) — a lonely boy grows up just outside Brighton in a caravan park with his over-sexual mother and Mr Broadhurst who takes the boy on a disturbing and often violent journey.
  • Great Apes (1997) — a man wakes up in a world where chimpanzees evolved to be the species with self-awareness, while humans are the equivalent of chimps in our world.
  • How the Dead Live (2000) — an old lady dies, only to be moved to a London suburb where the dead have taken residence.
  • Dorian, an Imitation (2002) — a modern take on Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
  • The Book of Dave (2006) — Set between 1987 and 2003, against a backdrop of Fathers for Justice protests, it is the story of a London cab driver who suffers a mental breakdown due to failed relationships, estrangement from his son and an obsession with The Knowledge. He writes a book of rantings which he buries, that is discovered 500 years later and used as the sacred text for a religion that has taken hold in the flooded remnants of London.
  • The Butt (2008) — a man flicks a cigarette butt from the balcony of his apartment while on vacation in a foreign land and soon finds himself enmeshed in the bureaucratic nightmare of native law.
  • Walking to Hollywood (2010)
Short fiction

Non-Fiction

Self has also compiled several books of work from his newspaper and magazine columns which mix interviews with counter-culture figures, restaurant reviews and literary criticism.
  • Junk Mail (1996)
  • Perfidious Man (2000) photography by David M. Gamble
  • Sore Sites (2000)
  • Feeding Frenzy (2001)
  • Psychogeography (2007)
  • Psycho Too (2009)

Scheduled

Introductions and forewords

Narration


The initial piece of work that I am interested in is 'My idea of fun' 

My idea of fun is a 1993 novel by Will Self about a lonely boy who grows up just outside Brighton in a caravan park with his over sexual mother and the tenant Mr Broadhurst who takes the boy on a disturbing and often violent journey. 

The novel works as a bildungsroman;


..in which the main character - Ian Wharton learns the art of black magic from his benefactor Mr Broadhurts who is also known as the fat controller. Ian engages in a series of strange acts including time travel and trips to an alternate reality - the land of childrens jokes; a grotesque alternate universe inhabited by the menacing and deformed characters from jokes. The protagonists education culminates in bizarre rites of bestiality and necrophilia. However he finds that in the exchange for knowledge of the black arts Mr Broadhurt begins to take over more and more aspects of the protagonists life. 

The novel could also be seen as an example of an unreliable narrator as it is unclear whether the strange events in the novel are meant to be real of hallucinatory. I just ordered the book so I can read it! 




Open publication - Free publishing - More bloomsbury

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/august/will-self-book-covers-bloomsbury?utm_source=StrikeSearch&utm_medium=twitter


Greg Heinimann at Bloomsbury has designed a series of new covers for author Will Self's backlist, to coincide with the release of the paperback edition of his latest book, Walking to Hollywood...
To create the ‘Will Self' device that appears on each cover in a different colour, Heinimann worked with vintage wood type and hand drew the ‘pool' shape surrounding Self's name. The finishing on the covers will apparently make the words appear recessed into the liquid. "The idea of this organic pool was to try and get across the fluidity of Will's writing, almost like a petri dish," says Heinimann.
"The titling is in Pitu Pro, making the most of its unusual glyphs," he adds. "I wanted to use something that would convey the punkiness of his writing, and the descenders and points seem to have that edginess."

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