Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
You can't judge a cover by its book
Would you not include Joyce’s Ulysses as a “cover”?
Posted by mike on from dublin 07/26 at 05:52 AM1984 with a new section about marketing....no wait a minute...thats the real world now isn’t it.
Posted by michael on from Scotland 07/26 at 06:18 AMI like the way you think, Michael. But Mike: Gee, thanks. you proved me wrong before I even got out of the gate. Oh well, two-part question: Do you know of any existing"cover books” (other than Joyce) or do you have any ideas to pitch?
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 10:14 AMdon’t want to turn this into a lot of comedy posts (well i do actually but i won’t if i don’t get any encouragement!) but i think that this topic invites a lot of funny cultural juxtapositions. some that have been done like this already are the story of the birth of jesus re-written from the point of view of one of the sheep (douglas adams - the church gave them shit and they withdrew it).
what about crime and punishment but this time its the anti-terrorism squad that are after raskolnikov and put 5 bullets in his head before they ask him anything? - might ruin the point of the book a bit.
2 classic examples (one is 5 minutes and the other 10)can be found here - i didn’t make them - but i wish i did!
as with the films its the fellowship first then the other one.
Posted by Michael Greenwell on from scotland 07/26 at 11:12 AMComedy is welcome.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 11:21 AMok then.
if anyone is interested (and mickey wants to) then tomorrow i will post ‘the gospel according to a sheep’ by douglas adams which i think is one of the funniest things you will ever read and is not available to buy anymore. its not long. its not anywhere on the net either.incidentally...the reason it was removed from publication is that the publishers had recently got a contract to publish the bible and even though the short story was part of a charity fundraising book the church insisted that they pull it. thus the church stopped a fair amount of money from booksales going to africa. this is the church of england who - until recently at least and maybe still do- have/had investments in weapons manufacturers. there is so much of it out there but sometimes the level of shit going on still stuns you.
Posted by Michael Greenwell on from scotland 07/26 at 11:42 AManimal farm - except its about people this time.
might sound absurd but george orwell was turned down (at first) for publication of animal farm in the US because the publisher said “sorry mr orwell but there is no market for animal stories in the US at the moment”
i have never come across a clearer example of someone missing the point.
Posted by michael on from scotland 07/26 at 11:50 AMWould it fit as a comment here, Michael?
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 12:03 PMOther covers? Great question. I’ve got the book “Anarchist Farm”, written by Jane Doe, which isn’t exactly a cover of Animal Farm, so I don’t think it counts. That’s just off the top of my head, after reading other comments. I’ll think about it a bit more.
Second question. I’d have to say a cover of Minority Report, which wouldn’t focus on the prevention of individual crimes, but would instead focus on preventing what is perceived or described as possible “future criminal acts” or “terrorist acts” on a larger level, say by nation states. I’ll assume you know where that’s going..
To answer a question with a question… Mickey, why do you think there is a lack of “cover books”? What is it about books/writing/reading that has caused this?
here’s a great link, somewhat related…
http://www.illegal-art.org/print/index.html
be sure to check video, visual, and audio if you can access it.Posted by mike on from dublin 07/26 at 12:20 PMThere’s somethiq ¨¦D ¨¦D written word (and I don’t just mean legal issues) that defies a remake. After all, a movie remake will have a new cast, modern film techniques, changes in dialogue, etc. A cover song might have a new guitar solo...even lyrics. But a book? Besides it being plagiarism, we simply cannot republish a book with a new cover and byline...or can we?
Perhaps what Duchamp did to the Mona Lisa might be a model. Just add a mustache and call it art.
Another model: Situationist detournment. When I produced zines, I used to white-out the words in Dick Tracy or Peanuts and replace them with radical, bizarre, insane dialogue.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 12:26 PMThe case of “Ulysses” is an interesting one. Joyce’s book is only a cover in the broadest sense--though it is certainly a modern retelling of the Odysseus myth, it uses Homeric episodes to root its imagery and give thematic coherency to each chapter much more than it retells the plot. This varies, of course, from chapter to chapter: in “Cyclops,” Leopold Bloom literally confronts a drunk, one-eyed man; in “Scylla and Charybdis,” Daedelus is caught (much more metaphorically) between two aspects of his own self.
Not to say, of course, that Ulysses isn’t a cover--Mike is completely right to mention it-- but, as is always the case with Joyce, it’s very complicated!
For a more straight-up example from literature, I’d look to the Faust story. The most famous Faust, of course, is Goethe’s, but Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Mann, and others have also written Fausts. These books work in almost precisely the same way as, say, an album cover. The Goethe and Marlowe versions have basically the same plot, but are in two totally different styles (19th century German romanticism versus English early Elizabethan).
“Covering” a book is much easier to do with mythical stories, because you can’t offend a living author (or worse, copyright holder!) and you don’t appear derivative. Maxine Hong Kingston, for instance, covered the Fa Mulan story in “Woman Warrior,” but turned it into a jumping-off point for an autobiographical study of the Asian-American experience. But since that was a story, not a book, it’s hard to consider that a cover, as opposed to a “literaturization” of a myth.
There may be better examples I am forgetting.
Posted by The Infanta on from Sherman Oaks 07/26 at 01:44 PMHere’s where what started as a silly musing on my part becomes a valuable lesson (I’ve never even heard of Maxine Hong Kingston, for example). Very cool. In the same sense, one could call “West Side Story” a “cover play” for its updating of “Romeo and Juliet.” But then again, “remakes” are standard in theater as in opera, classical music, jazz, etc.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 02:21 PMBorges wrote an interesting story “about” someone doing a cover of Don Quixote.
There are some contemporary artists that do “covers” of other’s work—one sculptor who simply turns all of De Chirico’s (Or maybe Max Ernst?) work into 3-D versions.
Posted by Christine Hamm on from nimby 07/26 at 07:16 PMIf you’re not careful, I just might do a cover of this blog post soon.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/26 at 07:26 PMOkay, to tell who is linking to your site and if they use google to get there, go here:
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=home and sign up for a sitemeter and then insert the html code on your page. You can then tell who visits, how long, where they link from, where they live and their blood type.You can click on the little squarish rainbowish flag on the bottom corner of my blog to see any example.
Posted by Christine Hamm on from nimby 07/26 at 10:16 PMPhillip Roth’s <style</i> by Strunk and White, but rewritten specifically to handle the malpropisms of the Malpropisminator-in-Chief. (Oh, wait, there’s like a whole section of books like that at my local bookstore...)
Posted by Keir on from The Hague 07/27 at 04:23 AMsorry, last comment ravaged by bad attempt at html...here’s the point:
Phillip Roth’s The Breast as a cover of Kafka’s Metamorphosis as a cover of Gogol’s The Nose. Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ might count as a cover as well. For a new cover, how about Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird but with the kid lost in an urban ghetto someplace like LA or Sao Paulo or Lagos? Or--okay, now I’m just looking at my bookshelf--The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, but rewritten specifically to handle the malpropisms of the Malpropisminator-in-Chief. (Oh, wait, there’s like a whole section of books like that at my local bookstore...)
Posted by Keir on from The Hague 07/27 at 04:27 AMNow we’re getting somewhere...thanks, Keir.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/27 at 04:30 AMPynchon´s Gravity´s Rainbow riffs on the opening of Ulysses in the first chapter with Pirate Prentice climbing to roof of his maisonette to pick bananas. I read an interview with Rushdie who said Midnight´s Children is an attempt at an Indian Tin Drum. A lot of Spaniards here think every novel is a cover of Quixote.
Posted by Owen on from Barcelona 07/27 at 05:32 AMThanks, Owen. “Nothing new under the sun,” I guess.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 07/27 at 11:29 AM
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