Don't Get Jittery On Me--Part 5, or "Open the Window Already"

It's claustrophobic in here, airless, despite the brisk, sail-snapping breeze from the convection current running through the open windows from the bottom of my house to the top. There's a lock-down in Boston, for heaven's sake, where the door-to-door search for the remaining alleged Marathon Bomber continues. In between non-news of that, there is coverage of the aftermath of the West, Texas fertilizer-factory devastation, where the lives of many were also horrifically impacted. But the focus here, at least on the East Coast, is more on psychology than the chemistry of ammonium nitrate. The young minds that rigged a few ordinary pressure cookers into shrapnel-filled bombs grab our primordial American heart. I find that hopeful. That we still, as a people, seem to have a primordial heart. We can still be horrified. It is a paltry hope for a nation awash in senseless violence, but it is hope nonetheless.

And that is why I share with you, today, some window work that I have done on my new altered book. Yesterday, and today, and for quite a few tomorrows to come, I suspect, we will be wanting all the fenestration we can find. If you are new to this project and are interested in the previous permutations of the book, just scroll through my blog archive and take your pick of the four previous installments. And if you don't see what you want to know there, just ask.

When last we spoke, I had filled a window space in the book with a transparency showing a house. The next thing I did was to add some text below it, for context, as indicated by the superimposed red arrow.

The cool thing with a transparency-in-a-window is that you get to choose what will show through it from behind. In this case, I wanted to continue the doll theme that I'd established previously. Repetition like this anchors me in the development of a project when butterfly-stroking through a sea of seemingly infinite choices. So this is the image I chose.

But then I had to decide about the cropping. This way, with the big head emphasized...or

this less obvious crop....



I wound up preferring the crop that emphasized the focus on the little doll. It sets up the scene for this to become, perhaps, a rite-of-passage story or some such. It's also a little more mysterious, a little less in-your-face. By looking at the little doll, I'm hoping the viewer will experience a frisson of anticipation about the rest of the story. This is a shot of the illustration as it looks behind the window.

 
And, as you'll undoubtedly notice, when the page with the transparent window is flipped, there is yet another opportunity to make a visual statement. Which I did. The elements I chose--a text snip and a picture of a snake-charming woman--were from my copy of a 1957 Look magazine. Because the paper is thin and fragile, I used double-stick archival tape to hold the elements in place; the moisture in even a glue stick would have caused wrinkling.

And here is how the transparent window page looks when it is turned. I love how the word "mystery" works here. It's adding to that frisson we were talking about and the relationship to the house in the transparency leaves lots of room for narrative imagination. Personally, I like the tension. First you see the text snip that says "I did not like the sound of the loud voice, but I liked still less the..." And then you flip the page and you get the word "mystery." Yeah, that's working for me.

And that's it for this time. Until we meet again, I'm wishing you lots of open windows and streams of bracing fresh air. And Boston people, and West, Texas people, and in my own backyard, Sandy Hook people...my heart was and is with you.

If you're steaming along with this series, you may find Part 6 here: http://lauratringaliholmes.blogspot.com/2013/05/dont-get-jittery-on-mepart-6-or.html