The List
I want to be really prepared for this brief and feel like I need to have a good connection to the author I choose, so I don't struggle later on down the line for any reason. It is because of this that I decided to look into all of the authors and their backgrounds/works first to see what jumped out at me as a possibility and I have narrowed the list down and down until finally reaching the following 4 authors to look into more thoroughly:
-Italo Calvino
Possible works to read: Invisible Cities
Cosmicomics
/ The Complete Cosmicomics
If on a
Winters Night a Traveller
Notes:- Invisible Cities:
The book explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of
cities by an explorer, Marco
Polo. Over the nine chapters,
Marco describes a total of fifty-five cities. The cities are divided into
eleven thematic groups of five each:
1.
Cities & Memory
2.
Cities & Desire
3.
Cities & Signs
4.
Thin Cities
5.
Trading Cities
6.
Cities & Eyes
7.
Cities & Names
8.
Cities & the Dead
9.
Cities & the Sky
10.
Continuous Cities
11.
Hidden Cities
-Leonora Carrington
Possible works to read: The Hearing Trumpet-Leonora Carrington
The House of Fear
The Oval lady
Notes:- The Hearing Trumpet: A fantasy story, some say a twin to that of Alice in Wonderland. Marian is a 92 year old woman living with her family. She is given a hearing trumpet as a gift and consequently overhears her family plotting to send her to an institution. She soon finds herself in a sinister elderly home where everything is not as it seems. Highly imaginative and visual story of adventure.
-Douglass Adams
Possible works to read: The Meaning of Liff
The hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Notes:- The Meaning of Liff: The book is a "dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet" All the words listed are toponyms and describe common feelings and objects for which there is no current English word. Examples are Shoeburyness ("The vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat that is still warm from somebody else's bottom") and Plymouth ("To relate an amusing story to someone without remembering that it was they who told it to you in the first place").
-Aldous Huxley
Possible works to read: The Doors of Perception
Brave New World
The Island
Notes:- The Doors of Perception: a short book detailing his experiences when taking mescaline. The book takes the form of Huxley's recollection of a mescaline trip that took place over the course of an afternoon. Huxley recalls the insights he experienced, which range from the "purely aesthetic" to "sacramental vision". He also incorporates later reflections on the experience and its meaning for art and religion.
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Authors from the list and their works that also really interest me which may be helpful as possible back up choices:
- Edgar Alan Poe
Themes: Horror stories, gothic poetry
Possible works to read: The City in the Sea
The Raven
Berenice
Ligeia
- William Burroughs
Possible works to read: Junkie
Naked Lunch
- Angela Carter
Possible works to read: The Bloody Chamber
- Cormack McCarthy
Possible works to read: The Road
No Country for Old men
Child of God
- George Orwell
Possible works to read: Animal Farm
1984
- Oliver Sacks
Possible works to read: Awakenings
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Research
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba in 1923.
Left Cuba early in his life, with the family returning to Italy, settling amongst the rolling hills of Sanremo on the Ligurian coast. This spot was the inspiration for a lot of Calvino's early writing including The Baron in the Trees. "San Remo continues to pop out in my books, in the most diverse pieces of writing." He and would climb the tree-rich estate and perch for hours on the branches reading their favourite adventure stories.
Calvino's parents refused to give him and his younger brother Mario a religious upbringing or force them to have any religious education. Calvino described the experience as a salutary one as it made him "tolerant of others' opinions, particularly in the field of religion, remembering how irksome it was to hear myself mocked because I did not follow the majority's beliefs".
Both of Calvino's parents were well off and highly educated in the areas of botany and agriculture. Calvino followed in these footsteps for some time whilst studying agriculture at the university of Turin (as his father had done), however kept his love of political literature, anti-Fascist works and physics a secret. Calvino felt that his early interest in stories made him the "black sheep" of a family that held literature in less esteem than the sciences. Fascinated by American movies and cartoons, he was equally attracted to drawing, poetry, and theatre. Calvino often referred to himself as a an enclosed "provincial shell" during this time. ""We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women."
During WWII Calvino's parents encouraged both brothers to enter the Italian Resistance in the name of "natural justice and family virtues". Using the battle name of "Santiago", Calvino joined the Garibaldi Brigades, a clandestine Communist group and, for twenty months, endured the fighting in the Maritime Alps until 1945 and the Liberation. As a result of his refusal to be a conscript, his parents were held hostage by the Nazis for an extended period at the Villa Meridiana. Calvino wrote of his mother's ordeal that "she was an example of tenacity and courage… behaving with dignity and firmness before the SS and the Fascist militia, and in her long detention as a hostage, not least when the blackshirts three times pretended to shoot my father in front of her eyes. The historical events which mothers take part in acquire the greatness and invincibility of natural phenomena"
In 1962 Calvino met Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer ("Chichita") and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and was introduced to Ernesto "Che" Guevara. On 15 October 1967, a few days after Guevara's death, Calvino wrote a tribute to him that was published in Cuba in 1968, and in Italy thirty years later:
This text of Italo Calvino was written on 15 October 1967 in Paris, the day of his 44th birthday. It was first published in Spanish in 1968 on the Cuban magazine ‘Casa de las Americas’. The original Italian version was published in Italy 30 years after, in 1998 on the number 1 issue of the magazine “Che” of the Che Guevara Italian Foundation.
Whatever I have tried to write to express my admiration for Ernesto Che Guevara for how he lived and how he died, it all seemed out of tone. I feel his smile that beams back at me, full of irony and commiseration. Here I am, sitting in my studio, amongst my books, in the feint peace and prosperity of Europe, dedicating a brief interval of my work to writing, without any risk, about a man who has willingly assumed all the risks, who hasn’t accepted the fiction of a temporary peace, a man who asked of himself and of others the maximum spirit of sacrifice, convinced as he was, that every sacrifice spared today would be paid for tomorrow with an even greater sum of sacrifices.
Guevara recalls for us the absolute gravity of everything that regarded the revolution and the future of the world, a radically critical view of every act whose purpose was to put in place our consciences. In that sense he will stay at the centre of our discussion and our thoughts, as much alive yesterday, as today when dead.
It is a presence that doesn’t ask of us any superficial consensus nor formal tribute; that would be equivalent to misunderstanding, minimising the extreme rigor of his lesson. The “line of the Che” demands much of men, it demands much whether as a method of struggle or as a perspective of the society that was to be born out of this struggle. In front of so much coherence and courage in carrying to the ultimate consequences an idea and a life, let us ourselves be modest and sincere, conscious of what the “line of the Che” means–a radical transformation not only of society but above all that of “human nature”, beginning with ourselves–and aware of what separates us from putting it into practice.
The discussion of Guevara with all those who approached him, the long discussion of his brief life (discussion-action, discussion without ever abandoning the rifle), will not be interrupted by his death, it will continue to flow. Even for an occasional and unknown interlocutor (that could have been me, in a group of invitees, an afternoon of 1964, at his Ministry of Industry office) meeting him couldn’t remain a marginal episode. The discussions that count, are those that continue albeit silently in thought.
In my mind, the discussion with Che has continued for all these years, and the more time passed, the more he has been right.
Even today, dying while putting in motion a never ending struggle, he continues, always, to be right.
Moved to Turin and returned to university, abandoning agriculture for the arts faculty. In 1947, he graduated with a Master's thesis on Joseph Conrad, wrote short stories in his spare time. Described by young writer Pavese as a "squirrel of the pen" who "climbed into the trees, more for fun than fear, to observe partisan life as a fable of the forest".From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote to her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy:
“I desire you so much that the first time I take you in my arms I think I’ll tear you to pieces, rip off your clothes, roll on top of you, do anything to give vent to this infinite desire to kiss you, hold you, possess you.”
"I want to write of our love, I want to love you writing, I want to have you while writing, nothing else,"
"We are drugged: I can't live outside the magic circle of our love."
Calvino went through what he called an "intellectual depression", which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: "...I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early."
Calvino died 19th September 1885 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Sienna, Italy.
Invisible Cities:
"Invisible Cities" depicts the meeting between emperor Kublai Khan at the end of his life with the explorer Marco Polo, as told in Italo Calvino's fantastical book. The book is about 55 cities described poetically and with interlocking patterned sections, laid out as a conversation between explorer Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan. The conversations between Khan and Marco Polo take place in Khan's palace garden. Polo uses the garden to provide a point of origin for the stories he tells. He wants Khan to visualise the cities from the perspective of sitting in a beautiful garden on a nice evening.The cities are described during the narration by Polo, with interludes in between where Polo and Khan address each other, helping outline and frame the whole novel. It becomes clear towards the end of the novel that Polo isn't describing multiple cities, but is in fact only describing one - Venice, embedding all of his loves for his Venice into various cities so as to never forget.
The book was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1976
Opera
Invisible Cities (and in particular the chapters about Isidora, Armilla, and Adelma), is the basis for an opera by composer Christopher Cerrone, first produced by The Industry in October 2013 as an experimental production at Union Station in Los Angeles. In this site-specific production directed by Yuval Sharon, the performers, including eleven musicians, eight singers, and eight dancers, were located in (or moved through) different parts of the train station, while the station remained open and operating as usual. The performance could be heard by about 200 audience members, who wore wireless headphones and were allowed to move through the station at will. The opera was named a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Thoughts/Notes: Invisible cities really jumped out at me in terms of visual potential. The whole book is made up of beautiful layered descriptions which is great to work from when creating imagery. Despite really liking it, after reading the book I am worried that the artwork I would need to create for it is already too described and laid out for me. The novel centres around a mathematical pattern, and this also seems to heavily leak its way into the narrator Marco Polo's description of his cities. At this stage, in terms of imagery, I am struggling to not be obvious and cant help but think a lot about graphically structured cities and grids, lines and patterns, in order to be representative of the book. I am going to read through the book a few more times and try and become more inspired by other aspects, as well as look into other books by Calvino such as If on a Winters Night a Traveller and Cosmicomics.
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Leonora Carrington
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| Self-Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse |
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| Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst |
Born 6th April 1917 in Clayton-Le-Woods - Died 25th May 2011 in Mexico City.
A surrealist artist and writer, more well known for her haunting and autobiographical paintings.
One of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930's.
Raised as part of a wealthy Roman Catholic family, Carrington lived in on a large estate growing up called Crookhey Hall in Lancashire.
Was rebellious as a child and her parents sent her to Florence, where she attended Mrs Penrose's Academy of Art, a boarding school where she began to study painting.
Moved to London where Carrington first became exposed to Surrealism. In 1937 she met Max Ernst and quickly became romantically involved. At just 20 years old, Carrington ran away to Paris to live with the 46-year-old Ernst, consequently becoming disowned by her father. became a wild child and surrealist muse; spending all her time with writers and artists, including photographer Lee Miller, Andre Breton and Roland Penrose. She here began to write her surrealist stories. Other members of the surrealist circle she met in paris included: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Léonor Fini
There are stories of her attending fancy parties wearing only a bedsheet like a toga, covering her feet with mustard at dinners, serving tapioca dyed with squid ink as caviar and taking showers fully clothed.
Had a lifelong love of animals which continue to feature in her works throughout her life.
In 1940 at when Carrington was 23, Ernst was arrested and held as an enemy alien in France (being German) and Leonora visited him to take his paints so he could continue to work. She stopped eating and became mentally unstable and was admitted to a Spanish psychological institute and treated with horrible drugs that induced spasms similar to ECT. She referred to this time as "very much like being dead". She later moved to Mexico City to find connect with other surrealists and later married Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz in 1946.
In 1974 the artist published her best-known novel, The Hearing Trumpet—a surrealistic story of an elderly woman who learns of her family’s plan to commit her to a retirement home, which she discovers is a magical and strange place.
The Hearing Trumpet:
A likened twin to that of Alice in Wonderland, The Hearing Trumpet is about a 92 year old woman named Marian Leatherby who is given an ornate hearing trumpet as a gift. Marian, whilst listening through the trumpet, overhears her families plot to send her to an institution. Soon marian find herself in a retirement home where the elderly must inhabit buildings shaped like igloos and birthday cakes, endure twisted religious preaching and eat in a canteen overlooked by the mysterious portrait of a leering Abbess.
Thoughts/Notes: From reading different reviews and synopsis, I am really interested in this book and have bought it to read after Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' even if I wont use is as part of this brief. I love fantasy and wild stories and adventure, and have a feeling this book will have a lot of reference to Carrington's own wild ways and life, as did a lot of her paintings. There is a lot about Carrington and her life and her love of surrealism that has me interested as well as her literature works. I think she would be a great allrounder to research into further and create some interesting visual work from.
Douglas Adams
English writer, humorist and dramatist born in Cambridge - 11th March 1952. Douglas to London a few years later where his sister Susan was born. After parents divorced in 1957, Douglas, Susan and their mother moved to an RSPCA animal shelter in Brentwood, Essex, run by his maternal grandparents.
Brentwood school had alumni such as Robin Day, Jack Straw, Noel Edmonds, and David Irving. Griff Rhys Jones was a year below him, and he was in the same class as Stuckist artist Charles Thomson.
His master when at the school said of him: "Hundreds of boys have passed through the school but Douglas Adams really stood out from the crowd—literally. He was unnecessarily tall and in his short trousers he looked a trifle self-conscious. "The form-master wouldn't say 'Meet under the clock tower,' or 'Meet under the war memorial'," he joked, "but 'Meet under Adams'."Yet it was his ability to write first-class stories that really made him "shine"
Adams was six feet tall (1.83 m) by age 12 and stopped growing at 6 ft 5 in (1.96 m)
On the strength of a bravura essay on religious poetry that discussed the Beatles and William Blake, he was awarded an Exhibition in English at St John's College, Cambridge, going up in 1971.
Adams had two brief appearances in the fourth series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. At the beginning of episode 42, "The Light Entertainment War", Adams is in a surgeon's mask as Dr. Emile Koning; and at the beginning of episode 44, "Mr. Neutron", Adams is dressed in a pepper-pot outfit and loads a missile on to a cart driven by Terry Jones, who is calling for scrap metal ("Any old iron...").
Took up odd jobs whilst having a stall in his writing career, job involving a hospital porter, a barn builder, a chicken shed cleaner and a bodyguard for the Qatari family who had just made their fortune in oil.
Stories from working for the Qatari family include:
the family had once ordered one of everything from a hotel's menu, tried all the dishes, and sent out for hamburgers.
a prostitute sent to the floor Adams was guarding one evening. They acknowledged each other as she entered, and an hour later, when she left, she is said to have remarked, "At least you can read while you're on the job."
According to Adams, the idea for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy title occurred to him while he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, gazing at the stars. He was carrying a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe, and it occurred to him that "somebody ought to write a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Adams known from then on to make up the stories across the 5 books, as he wrote. The idea of the stories were so successful, they spanned all areas of entertainment, from originating as a radio mini series, to then prompting the books to be published, which then turned to comics and a computer game and then on to the resulting 2005 movie later down the line.
Adams is also famous for working on Dirk Gently, Doctor Who, working with different music producers and famous bands such as Pink floyd.
Known for being an advocate of environmentalism and conservation, also a lover of technological innovation.
He was an atheist, imagining a sentient puddle who wakes up one morning and thinks, "This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"
Adams died of a heart attack on the 11th of May 2001 aged 49. Richard Dawkins upon Douglas's death wrote: "Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender."
The Meaning of Liff: A cleaver book containing a dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet. Rather than inventing new words, a number of existing place-names are used and assigned interesting meanings to them. All the words listed are toponyms (the study of a place name, its origin, meaning, use and typology) and describe common feelings experienced in society, of which their is no actual english word for.
Thoughts/Notes: I find all things nonsense really inspiring, especially when it comes to literature. I feel there is a certain freedom and this book definitely lends itself to that. It may not be nonsense but actually quite cleaver in how the description for certain things and how they are assigned to already existing place names is thought up. After purchasing it and having a little flick through - "the dictionary of things that there aren't any words for yet" has helped generate some great and really comical imagery. The only worry i have with this book is that it has no structure, no story, no framework to help reign in the artwork or visual response. The book is literally one big list and so far all I can think of is trying to find some pattern or connection between some of the words/descriptions and maybe creating a typology for them. Or maybe integrating as many of the words/descriptions as I can into one visual scene. A comic strip detailing the scenario in which some of these actions in which there are no words for are played out could also be quite fun.
