Tear Up Your Books
I have a tendency to save everything: cards and books and jackets that fit sort of strangely but that I might one day discover are perfect, useful, irreplaceable. As if I’m afraid I might alter some killer memory just by getting rid of its evidence.
I also believe there’s nothing quite like throwing things away—and it’s best if you can shred or break those things before you finally sweep them into the recycle bin. It was easy when I lived in Philly and had an overgrown backyard, an alleyway, and an unending supply of empty wine bottles. But destroying things can take less formulaic paths, as I’ve discovered lately.
This past December when I went back to my parents’ house to visit, I was feeling weighed down by extraneous things: people, doctors, school, words, and the years accumulating behind me in general. So when I went downstairs to the closet full of childhood books, I decided I no longer felt so precious about them—particularly the long series of shiny yellow Nancy Drew mysteries, each with an amazing title, the same tried plot, and vacant heroines. Some of the mysteries in my collection, however, were nice old ones from the 1960s—they had red-edged pages, matte covers, weird illustrations—one had the previous owner’s name scrawled all over the inside cover. In other words, just the type of old, awesome, useless things I love. I decided I needed to do something about these.
I’d been playing around with the idea of making books for a while, but lack of time and the fear of fucking it up, as usual, were getting in my way. Here I had three weeks free and no reason not to do something worthwhile. I went to the art store (which does something to me that even bookstores and record stores don’t) and touched every little, exciting thing on the shelves. I bought linen thread and cloth for the spine and an exacto knife and spray paint. The store manager, Seth, a true Berkeley character in the best possible way, was excited about my project. He started running around finding me things. Then he got excited about my Rudimentary Peni patch and started giving his employee a lesson about early punk. In short, it was a good time in the art store and, thanks in part to Seth, I no longer felt like I would fail at all projects because I never went to art school.
Here’s what I’m getting to: I measured. I cut. I folded. I punched holes. I made a plan. I began stitching blank pages together in a way that seemed impossibly complicated and precarious. The thread kept getting tangled up with itself. The cat kept batting at it. My holes weren’t lined up. But in the end I ended up with a “book block” that had detailed, beautiful, braided stitching. That was enough in itself.
Then I ripped out the pages. I was not careful about it. Sometimes I read things like “With a dimpled giggle she said, ‘What are you going to wear?’” Then I laughed and kept ripping. Some pages I left in and later went over with a Sharpie, creating a found poetry of sorts, full of “gasped” and “stopped short” and “incredulous” “treasure.” This whole process felt like breaking bottles, only much more…bad. It made me wish some children’s librarian would come upon the wastebasket in my parents’ house and gasp at all those crumpled, vintage (maybe priceless!) Nancy Drew pages in the trash, just so I could say:
I don’t know what I’d say. I’d like to think that destroyed books speak for themselves.
To finish the thing off, I spray painted it with a stencil and glued on bits of old maps that I found in a dumpster in Exarchia, Athens. What I had was a handmade, children’s mystery-themed journal with some Greek city-planning designs covering the publishers on the back. So it was a little fragile, a little ragged in places, a little, I guess I’ll say it: amateur.
But my point is this: it’s good to ruin things, and it’s good to make things, and it’s good to accomplish both of those with the same purpose in mind. This, in part, is why writing stories is such a painful and gracious process. You get to smash things apart (as a certain professor likes to tell me) all the time, and then you get to sew things together entirely according to your aesthetic. No one loses.
As for the book, I gave it to my brother. I like to think by now he’s made his own alterations.
Tags: bark, book making, books, destroying things
This is an awesome post, Melina. You ought to wax bookmaking with Anne, Tim Greenup’s girl; I’m about 98% sure she’s really into it.
Speaking of destroying/creating, John Riggs and Amaris proposed a question to our group as we walked downtown last night: If you could break one thing in the world, what would it be? Nobody came up with an answer at first because we were far too busy answering the question with more questions – literal, or figurative? Would we get to choose what we broke our “one thing” with? How many swings were we allowed? Amaris finally came up with a great answer – a chandelier. Not only are chandeliers ostentatious and unnecessary, there are so many tiny breakables in the whole. Furthermore, chandeliers are not meant to be broken. Breaking an ice sculpture, for example, may sound really cool and horrify lots of ridiculous spectators, but it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying, because it’s going to melt, anyway. But what would one break a chandelier with? I proposed a Louisville Slugger. John proposed that one drop a piano on it. I love this answer – doing so would elicit the most delightfully discordant, cacophonous sound this side of Stravinsky, but I argued that you wouldn’t have a connection with the destruction of it, in terms of force and energy. If one used a baseball bat, one would feel a direct connection with the shattering crystals because the energy would travel down the shaft of the bat, through the arms and into the body, amplifying the sensation. As we continued to digress, kind of like I’m doing in this reply, John asked another question: If you could fix one thing in the world, what would it be? It was a sobering question. Nobody talked for awhile; all we heard was loose asphalt crumbling beneath our shoes. We immediately returned to the original discussion, weighing the destructive merits of baseball bat versus sledgehammer. It was kind of a depressing thought, that it’s so much easier, fun, and satisfying to think about what we could destroy and how we would do so, than what could be done to fix it. But, of course, for all the people who celebrate Mardi Gras, very few go on to take part in Lent.
So yeah – I’m glad to see that you are fixing and creating what you are destroying. To handle and re-imagine what’s been destroyed may elicit more guilt and is far more difficult than sweeping it into the recycling bin, as you put it, but far more rewarding in the end. Sometimes I have to take a Louisville slugger to my first, second, even fifth drafts, and it sucks, but what I rebuild always reads far more coherently.
Keep up the kick-ass posts!
Thanks, Sam!
Now I’m daydreaming about the sound dropping a piano would make on a chandelier (your description is amazing)…though the other problem I see with this is that you’d first have to take the chandelier down carefully from the ceiling, which would be a bit disappointing. There’s actually a particular chandelier I always wanted to break (partly because I secretly loved it)–and that’s the one that hung in the jewelry store/tattoo shop in New York where I worked. A customer once pointed to it and asked,”Are those real diamonds?”
But I’m getting off track: We all need to find the junkyard and get to trying this with whatever happens to be there.
While I also am intrigued by Amaris’s idea of breaking a chandelier, I also like the idea of Melina making a chandelier. The appeal of chandeliers to me is that they look (or can) like they are put together by broken parts. Those broken parts don’t have to be crystal…I often fantasize about making chandeliers, anyway.
About breaking things, my partner, Tracy, had an axe-the-baby-blue-piano-party once. It was before my time, but I like to think about the broken wires and decontexualized keys. He showed me the side of the freeway where they tossed the pieces. Maybe it is still there, 12-13 years later, baby-blue shreds in the soggy Seattle grass.
Awesome Melina! I always think that breaking things is a form of rebirth and much more satisfying than just throwing things away. The most satisfying part of doing remodeling is when you get to go at it with a sledgehammer on walls and floors. A friend of mine is an awesome bead worker and I give her all my mismatched and unwanted jewelry. It’s amazing what she comes up with from my old broken pieces. I also love smashing pottery and other ceramics apart and then making mosaics out of it.
Melina, I really love the book you made!
It brings me back to my mysterious brittish childhood writer Enid Blyton and the famous fives…with the tuff tom girl, shipwreckes and stepping right into this adventure that is life.
And that is the whole idea i think, to remember.
Ourselves and the paths we take.
To create something little out of our lifes, little treasures and then we can throw away the rest.
It is somewhat cleansing.
My friends recently burned an old piano, i wasnt there for the occasion but i have to guess it was old and useless. I wonder if it made disorted tunes when it was burning?!
I like to think it did play a lonely song in the backyard of the fire breathing kangaroo house.
I love the found poem — Chapter XX: Natory. The transformation of the “broken” object is what’s so cool here. The breaking of the thing seems less significant than the creating of the new thing. Though I realize the destruction has to occur for the new object to arise. Very cool.
This seems like a physical representation of what a reader or viewer does with art — takes it in, appropriates it, breaks it apart and remakes it in their own image. or maybe that’s not it exactly. but this is stupendous. I’d love to see one.
A piano key chandelier?!…I’m getting so many ideas from this.
In the meantime, Shawn, and everyone, this blog might be of interest, as New Lights Press does a lot of this type of stuff:
http://newlightspress.blogspot.com/
The guy who runs it, Aaron Cohick, led a free bookbinding workshop at the San Francisco Zine Fest last summer, and that was partly what got me into it. The books I saw of his were amazing–and very Situationist-inspired, it seemed.
Thanks for all this nice feedback…
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