LITERATURE | Words are swallows

Sunday 27 March 2011

I've been somewhat interested in stream of consciousness literature since reading James Joyce's 'Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man' for my A-level literature class - I absolutely loved it, and although sometimes a technique that is hard work to read, and difficult to get into, eventually the mindset required becomes second nature and suddenly it all makes sense... I'm also a big fan of anything that combines text and image, especially if the text is arranged in particular ways (so much so that this is the subject of my Final Major Project for my Art Foundation). My favourite books tend to go along these lines, such as 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z Danielewski, and 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close' by Jonathan Safran Foer (both deserve individual posts, and will feature here at some point.)

This publication written by Brett Gallagher, published by Radioactive Moat and illustrated by Elizabeth Arnold looks just my thing, for the illustration alone. It's very, very different from anything I've ever read before, apart from e. e. cummings, which has a slight similarity but is easier to read. It could be stream of consciousness (though extreme), sort of poetry, sort of prose, and some might even consider it nonsensical - but the way the illustrator describes it here (there's also other cool stuff there too) seems to fit it best: a wordscape. Whatever it's called, I liked it.



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