Author: David

Sunday Funnies 7: A Human Document

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Screen capture of multiple pages of Tom Phillips' Humument

Due: 3/29

The British artist Tom Phillips is probably best known for a project that he began in 1966 and which he has continued ever since–he set himself the challenge to buy the first book he could find at a secondhand bookstore for threepence and to alter every page using drawing, painting, collage, and cut-up techniques to create an entirely new version.

First page of the 1970 edition of Humument.

First page of the 1970 edition of Humument.

He found W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document and combined the words in the title to create A Humument. Phillips not only created new art works from each of the 367 pages but has now completed five different editions of this altered book.

You can view pretty much the complete series of pages on Tom Phillips site here. You can choose pages, view the original and then view different versions of that page.

For this week’s funnies assignment, I want you to create your own visual poem-thing. You can find your own page to alter if you’d like, but I’ll bring in an old used book that you can take pages from too. Think of it as sort of a collaboration between yourself and the book’s original author or think of it as a game where you get to create new text but within the strict confines of the text available on the page.

Obviously, Tom Phillips has been doing this for almost 50 years and I’m not expecting you to produce work that is as polished or complex as his–nor that is necessarily as visually compelling. And it will probably feel very strange to you as you begin, but just let yourself be playful and experiment with your task. You do not need to be a professional artist to make these pages, but you probably do need to be able to relax your desire to be in control of what you produce and you probably need to turn off the self-critical voice that will tell you that you’re doing it wrong.

Alter your page using whatever methods or tools you prefer, then scan the page in color at a high resolution as a JPG or PNG file and load it to your site. You might include in your post the text of your altered page.

(featured image credit: Screenshot of Google image search screen for Tom Phillips Human Document.)

My Altered Book page

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A number of years ago, I started ripping up books and gluing the pages onto canvas or boards and doodling on them just as a more or less random art project. I showed a friend, who told me about Phillips’ work, and I started playing around with it. At first, I honestly felt kind of silly, but then I made this page:


"Beastly Savages by me.

“Beastly Savages by me.

 It reads:

Come and lie down in the big bed you’ll need decanting

No “No.” “No,” “No, no!” it hurt. He screamed “No, no.”
man holding him short and angry kicked the door shut he ran wouldn’t answer

dark; fastened sit in the corner help a long time crying why they were angry broke angry Beastly savages

As you can see, there’s nothing particularly complicated about this page visually, but I definitely had the feeling

“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”

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I decided to participate in this week’s Sunday Funnies assignment along with y’all, so I made the video below to illustrate this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke:

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

 

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Letter #8.

I recorded myself reading these two paragraphs using Audacity. Then loaded the audio as a base track in iMovie and layered the following photos over it:

I created short links for each of those photos using bit.ly, so that I could easily include links in the credit page inside the video itself, in addition to listing them here.

I also added a layer of background music with a 1:00 excerpt of a piece by Phillip Glass, “Molly is a Dreamer” (from Theater Music Archive, Vol.I). The music is not in the public domain or Creative Commons licensed, so it’s possible that my video will be taken down if someone objects to it, but I believe that I’ve satisfied the requirements for Fair Use of a piece by only using a tiny sliver of Glass’s music, attributing the source, and using it only in a nonprofit and creative capacity.

When it was finished, I uploaded the video to YouTube and then embedded it into this post.

Week ahead: Ides of March Edition

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Marge Simpson looking angry "Beware the Eyes of Marge"

(A version of this post was in the queue on Sunday but I didn’t manage to publish it on time, so now the joke of the feature image is sort of ruined. I’m going with it anyway.)

9 3/16 Fun Home, “The Ideal Husband”
3/18 Due: Completed revision of Tracing Persepolis.
3/20 Fun Home, “The Antihero’s Journey”
3/22 Due: Sunday Funnies 6

Note that I revised the schedule slightly. Since we didn’t really talk about “The Ideal Husband” much in class yesterday, I moved back finishing the book to Friday and moved the revision deadline to tomorrow. We’ll discuss “Ideal Husband” in class tomorrow and then on Friday finish the book. We’ll talk some on each of those days about Mapping Fun Home.

(image credit: “Beware the Eyes of Marge“)

Sunday Funnies 6: Visualize a Quote

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Detail of Zen Pencil's illustration of Bill Watterson quote

Due: 3/22

First, a little bit of inspiration: Take a look at some of the comics that Zen Pencils creates by taking an interesting quote and then creating a comic to illustrate it. (I particularly like Bill Watterson, Jim Henson, Amelia Earhart, and Ira Glass.) Notice how his comics are related to and inspired by the quotes he’s working with but are not simply literal translations of them.

And a second bit of inspiration: Find a quote that inspires you, probably a fairly long quote, at least a paragraph (though length is offered here only as a suggestion, not a rule).

Now illustrate your quote with an image or a series of images. You do not need to make a cartoon like Zen Pencils does, though you can if you’d like to. You can use a series of photographs of your own or CC-licensed ones or draw illustrations. If you’d like to make a video using iMovie, that would be cool. Your goal is to come up with something that takes someone else’s words, puts your own personal spin on them, in order to create a visual representation of the quote.

(image credit: Detail from “ZEN PENCILS » 128 BILL WATTERSON A cartoonist’s advice“)

Tracing Persepolis Revisions

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Complex lines marked in sand

Once your Tracing Persepolis revisions are completed, publish a post on your site that links to the splash page for the project.  Include one or two paragraph where you describe your revision strategy for the project. Explain what you changed and why, and how the revised version of the project is stronger than the draft that you published before spring break?

 

(image credit: “Traces in the Sand” by Flickr user fdecomite)

Using tables

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Photo of a rustic table

As you’ve been working on your Persepolis projects, many of you have asked about how to get images to line up in specific ways, especially to get a pair of images to line up side-by-side on a page (like I’ve done with the covers of our three primary texts on this site’s splash page). One really good way to control the layout of your pages is with tables. WordPress uses the HTML code to create tables just fine, but the post editor does not by default include a simple button to insert tables, the way that MS Word or Google Docs do.

One way to create tables, then, is to just switch to the Text tab in the top right of your post or page editor (instead of the Visual tab) and insert the HTML code manually. Here’s the w3schols tutorial page on coding tables.

A much easier method for most users is to add a plugin that opens up the range of options available in the text editor boxes for WordPress. In the “getting started” with Domain help pages on plugins, I recommend that you start by installing a plugin called WP Edit. Since I wrote that page, I’ve found another plugin that I like even better called Easy Bootstrap Shortcode, and that’s the one that used to create the tables on the front page for this site (and the accordion folds in the resources page).

Screenshot of the buttons added in the WordPress text editor by Easy Bootstrap Shortcode

Screenshot of Easy Bootstrap Shortcode buttons. (Table button highlighted.)

If you install Easy Bootstrap Shortcode, it will add a third row of buttons to your text editor. Hover over each to see what it does.

Insert tables dialog box

Insert tables dialog box

If you click the button to insert table, you’ll get a dialog box, where you can choose how big the table should be, how many rows and columns it should have, and some other styling features.

Once you’ve set your options, click the Insert Table button and the plugin will insert shortcode to your post or page that generates the table on publication.

Shortcode for table

Shortcode to insert a table

Here’s what that initial shortcode looks like for a table with a header row plus two more rows and 4 columns: If you just publish that post as is, you’ll get a table that looks like this:

Sample table

Sample table

If I want to have two images side-by-side, the easiest thing to do is to insert a simple table with only one row and two columns and replace the text with the two images.

So this:

Sample table with images

Looks like this when it’s published:


"Conference Time" by Flickr user Christian Senger

“Conference Time” by Flickr user Christian Senger

A cartoon diagram of the steps for jarring potatoes which looks like it's from the 1950s. There's a stereotypical pair of women in aprons, moving through the steps and a diagram of the necessary implements at the bottom.

“Housekeeping” by Flickr user Fabian Mohr.

Or here’s another table:


Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed iaculis nunc ligula, ac eleifend libero pellentesque nec. Integer at venenatis arcu. Quisque vel mattis purus. Aliquam erat volutpat.

A photo of a train schedule board.

“Train Schedule” by Flickr user Q Family

 Nulla in orci metus. Sed in ullamcorper velit. Nam ornare dapibus urna in eleifend. Quisque nec risus non leo viverra volutpat quis rhoncus est. Mauris congue risus ac nisi vestibulum viverra.

"Comments by Flickr user Judit Klein

“Comments by Flickr user Judit Klein
Aliquam sodales efficitur est ut finibus. Nulla enim urna, dapibus bibendum tempor quis, condimentum eu magna. Sed ut aliquet dui, ut finibus ipsum.

A photograph of a book with post it flags stuck in its pages.

“231 by Flickr user Jay Peg

"Long Tang Table" by Flickr user Jonas erian

“Long Tang Table” by Flickr user Jonas erian

Nullam elementum vel ipsum quis aliquet. Vestibulum quis ultrices ipsum. Suspendisse mollis ultrices felis, eu tincidunt diam tincidunt id.

"Unclickable Link" by Flickr user quinnanya

“Unclickable Link” by Flickr user quinnanya

 Pellentesque ut suscipit odio, id mattis dui. Nullam congue neque finibus facilisis sodales. Nulla ultricies, purus eget efficitur iaculis, est lectus semper lectus, ullamcorper congue dolor mi molestie neque. Ut neque est, consequat scelerisque semper rhoncus, posuere eget turpis. Sed ante leo, sollicitudin eget blandit ut, molestie sed neque. Nunc euismod faucibus mi, at ullamcorper turpis laoreet pellentesque. Mauris vel erat egestas, auctor velit eget, pulvinar est. Sed congue, metus in pulvinar posuere, neque leo efficitur nisi, sed facilisis quam enim ut purus. 

 

(image credit: “Long Tang Table” by Flickr user Jonas Merian)

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