Further Ferris

Back in January, I went to a reading by Joshua Ferris, after which I awkwardly gave him (further description here) a scan of the Post-it Book that I had done in response to his novel Then we Came to the End (further description here). 

Remember that?  My expectation of getting any response had long ago dropped to nothing...
But I actually just heard back from him.  I had included my email address with the scan I gave him, and I just received a very nice note from him, politely thanking me for coming to his reading and giving him the scan, and saying a few nice things about the piece.  Oddly enough, the fact that his response came eight months after I met him, makes me all the more impressed that he actually took the time to look the project over and write me a note!

Abandoned Coast, Abandoned Project?

I have quit the east coast in favor of the west, and in doing so, have left my serial post-it story, which I'd been placing on post-its in books from the Brooklyn Public Library, hanging in the middle of its grandmother/granddaughter cross-country road trip.  I decided to move so quickly, that I did not even get a chance to do the installment in Specimen Days, the next book that I had planned to use as a base, leaving this note a lie:

So now my "To be continued" is left hanging, presumably forever.  I could pick up the story in a new library book, here on the west coast, and keep adding the installments to my blog until its finished, which would give the piece a sort of completion.  After all, the likelihood that anyone ever actually found a segment of the story and followed it from one book to another, much less that anyone found the first segment of the story and succeeded in following each "chapter" from one book to the next, through four books, seems incredibly unlikely.  But somehow, even though any real audience for the piece was always likeliest to be found online, now that I know that no one with be able to follow the story through the actual physical books, the impetus to finish it is gone.  I'm not sure why my interest is so bound up with whether someone will experience the piece as it was "meant" to be experienced, rather than viewing the the documentation of that piece.  And isn't it rather strange to be caught up in the loss of an audience of one?

Or maybe I'm just making excuses for writers block?

Serial in a Sequel: Chip Kidd Post-its

I'm about to return the fourth installment of my serial post-it note story to the library, nestled inside of Chip Kidd's The Learners.

 

I chose The Learners based simply on wanting to read it, but the fact that it features a recent college graduate dovetails nicely with the situation of my Maddie.  The novel is a sequel to Kidd's first book The Cheese Monkeys, which means that both his story and mine start off in the midst of the tale.

You can read a pdf of my post-it note additions to Chip Kidd's The Learners here.

More Parasitic Story: Carson McCullers

I've just finished the third segment of my book-jumping serial post-it project.  I've added a little slice of Phyllis narrative to Carson McCullers' slim but lovely The Member of the Wedding:

Since McCullers' story is one of youth grappling with being young, I thought an addition of the elderly grappling with being old created a nice symmetry.

 I'm still having difficulty with the task I assigned myself of creating a story that jumps from book to book, and so functions both in discrete clusters and also as an ongoing tale.  I've become convinced that no one who finds one segment of the work will put in the effort, and have the luck required, to find the next segment.  But part of me still likes that this is a theoretical possibility - that the piece could lead to a sort of cross-book scavenger hunt, however unlikely it is to actually unfold that way.

And meanwhile I'm becoming a Times-New-Roman-drawing machine.

Scans of my additions to Carson McCullers' book are available here, in three parts: one, two, three. It's been split up because I used a new scanning method, which resulted in a larger than usual file size.

It's Only Part Two? An Almost Perfect Moment

I feel like I've been working on my serial post-it note story about road-tripping grandma/granddaughter for ages, and yet I've only just returned to the library the second installment, secreted inside of Binnie Kirshenbaum's An Almost Perfect Moment.

I'm not sure why I'm having such a difficult time with this story. Perhaps the serial nature of it makes me feel locked in, like I can't do any other post-it books until I'm finished with this tale?  Or perhaps it is just that I don't have as much appropriate experience to draw from?  At any rate, you can read the Kirshenbaum borne part here, if you want to.

Being One of Those People to Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris gave a reading from his new novel this week, and it occurred to me that this might be a chance to give him a copy of this Post-it Book that I did based on Then we Came to the End.  This is very much against my nature, which is very uncomfortable with self-promotion or even anything that could be considered self-promotion, and tends to view people who approach more successful strangers about their own work with an unfair level of scorn. (This blog doesn't count, because it is so easy to ignore if you are not interested in what I'm doing.) The thought having occurred to me though, I knew that if I wussed out and did not actually approach Joshua Ferris, I would go home feeling disappointed with myself and vaguely depressed.

The reading itself was really good. The new novel, The Unnamed, seems compelling and well-written, and Ferris was refreshingly opinionated during the Q&A afterward. (He was quite strident on the point that the disease in the novel is a disease, not a metaphor for anything else, and mentioned how high school English teaches people to read all wrong). Once that wound down, he signed books, while I stationed myself in a nearby chair, catching fragments of the fragments of conversations he had with book-buyers and trying not to clutch insanely at the envelope enclosing the print out of my project, with a brief explanatory post-it on the front.

After the line was exhausted, I made my approach. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi
Ferris: Hi
Me: I'm really nervous.
Ferris: Why are you nervous?
Me: I want to give you a copy of an art project that I did based on your last book, and it's weird.
Ferris: That's not weird.
Me: It is weird. (I put the envelope with the copied project on the table in front of him)
Ferris: Is that it?
Me: Yes, it's a copy. I liked your last book a lot, by the way.
Ferris: Oh, thanks.
Me: I was nicer to it in my project than I was to other books.

And then I basically bolted for the door. I was very nervous and self-conscious throughout, and
by the time I was sitting watching the last few people get books signed, my nervousness had reached the pitch of discomfort that I feel when waiting in lines to return clothing that I've altered for Shell Game. The sensations were so similar (the sweating, the feeling that I'm creeping toward panic), that it made me think that the Shell Game nerves might be not so much fear of being caught, but rather a strange reaction to the act of giving my work to someone else. But I still don't want to get caught.

Charles Dickens and An Attempt at To Be Continued

I feel like I need a new graphic for my posts about my sticky-note stories. One image of text on a post-it in front of text looks much like another. I did like how this one was interloping below "Interlopers" though.

I've just returned my latest sticky-note story to the library, pressed between the pages of Bleak House, A sprawling coming-of-age-ish novel by Charles Dickens.

In the spirit of Dickens' novels, which generally appeared in newspapers in serial form, I decided that this story would be a serial one, spanning several library books. At the end of the book I made a "To be continued" sticky-note:

Which means that I'm committed to this story being at least a two-parter, even though I've had a rather difficult time even getting out part 1, which you can find here, should you be interested. Let me know - do you think it deserves much in the way of continuation?

Post-adolescence Notes: The Eagle & The Nightengales

I completed the post-it note story for Mercedes Lackey's The Eagle and the Nightingales, and returned it to the library. It took me quite a while to write the story for this book, because I wanted the story to in some way address the relationship I had with Mercedes Lackey's books when I was in High School - the heyday of my Lackey reading - and it turns out that I find it very difficult to make high schoolers interesting. At least without making them act like twenty-five year olds.


You can read the complete addition to Mercedes Lackey's novel here  and here (it is in two parts for ease of upload).

New Post-its for a New Book: The Little Stranger

I've finished my symbiotic story for the new Sarah Waters book. Unlike her previous novels The Little Stranger has no lesbian romance whatsoever. So, in a move that I hope doesn't suffer for being obvious, I've inserted a lesbian love story. Or, to be more precise, a lesbian flirtation story.

Since I've been feeling pretty uninspired when it comes to writing (still puzzling out what to add to the Mercedes Lackey book I checked out of the library over a month ago...) instead of creating a new story for the occasion I simply altered the first story that I wrote, for Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, substituting a girl protagonist for a boy - and of course changing the references to the host book that are part of the story. Changing the gender of a character in an already written story was an interesting exercise. The primary challenge was differentiating between the characters when they were suddenly both "she"s. I also changed both the characters appearances, but left their interactions pretty much the same. I'm curious if the scenario seems strained or not.

Here is the scan of my entire addition to the Sarah Waters novel.

People with Problems

I have just returned another post-it note book, The Paris Review Book of People with Problems. At the suggestion of a friend, this time around the post-it notes that I added were not drawn in Times New Roman, but instead rendered to appear as if they were actual notes to ones self, accidentally left in the library book. I scrawled them quickly and cryptically, and doodled on many of them as I do most notes that I write to myself.



Some of the notes are basically description and scene setting - most of these are the sort of notes written as reminders of professional tasks, little to-do lists, etc. - and exist as an armature for more personal notes, which are mostly things like phone numbers, addresses, shopping lists, etc.

The personal notes are intended to work as the narrative arc of the story, although I am not sure that the intended narrative comes through at all, given how much is written as I actually write notes: with the bare minimum of information required. If you give it a read, let me know what you make of it. As usual, the full PDF for the post-its that I added to The Paris Review Book of People with Problems is here.

Next Sticky Pages Book: Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To The End

I finally finished adding post-it notes to Joshua Ferris' Then We Came To the End and returned it to the library. By my estimates it takes me about twenty minutes to draw-write the text for each post-it note, which means that for a story such as this one, which had 39 post-its total, that's about 13 hours of draw-writing. That's not counting actually writing the script for the story itself, or all the false starts.


My point is, these little post-it notes add up to a more intensive project than I had realized. And I did't even redo all the ones I messed up...



If you'd like to see/read a PDF of the entire story I added to Joshua Ferris' novel, you can find it here and here. (It's split into two parts for ease of upload.)

Post-it-note-Lichen-Parasite-Sticky-Story-Books

This evening's project is working on writing the story that I will soon be drawing onto post-it notes and sticking into the library copy of Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End. I'm a little bit stuck, as it were, on what to call the piece in general. I've been going with Post-it Books so far but don't particularly like that title. Here is what I've come up with so far, in the way of other naming options:

- Sticky Note Books - It's like Post-it Books, but without all the product-placement...

- Parasite Stories - Except that they really aren't parasitic so much as symbiotic, which brings me to:

- Lichen Books - Which the dork in me is drawn to because when said aloud it sounds like "likin' books", and implies a more organic synthesis of original book and added story, but may not make sense to those who were not raised by a lichen enthusiast?

- Story Books - Simple, but perhaps overly so.

Any suggestions? Votes?

I Think I've Figured It Out

A PDF of all the inserted post it notes in Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage is attached to the site linked below.

https://sites.google.com/site/practicallyapdfcache/

I imagine (or at least hope) that my ability to both draw Times New Roman, and write stories suited to this library book piece, with improve with further iterations.

New Project: Post-it Books

I'm not sure what I'm calling this project yet. I've been provisionally going with "post-it books", the provision being that this is less a title and more the most basic unit of description I can come up with.
The project is another in the art-in-unexpected-places vein. I am taking books from the library, writing stories that are parasitic (or maybe symbiotic) to the book in question, and inserting these stories into the library book via post it notes.














The first story I've written/inserted is intertwined with Alice Munro's Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage, in that much of the "plot" of my story revolves around the circumstances surrounding two different people reading Murno's book. Munro's short stories are largely explorations of the relationships between people, so the story I wrote for the occasion is also relationship-centric .

This project, aside from the quasi-guerrilla-art appeal, has the fun bonuses of requiring that I read lots of library books, write lots of assignment-like short stories (stories that begin with a "site" rather than a plot) and practice drawing Times New Roman.  You can find a scan of my addition to Alice Munro's book here.