Book of Jokes: the video preview

[imomus]

I'm writing a long fiction called The Book of Jokes right now. Basically it's the story of the world's most dysfunctional family -- a family defined by some of the world's darkest jokes. It'll be published by La Volte in September 2008, initially in French. La Volte will license it to other publishers (if you're a publisher and interested in the rights for your country, contact Xavier Belrose). Here's a mock-up of what the English edition of the book might look like when it comes out next year:



I thought it might be interesting -- very much in the spirit of jokes, which are a kind of open source oral culture, but also in the spirit of 18th century subscription publishing -- to open up the composition process over the next months by doing a series of readings of excerpts of the book (unedited drafts, basically) on a new YouTube channel called bookofjokes. So here's the first reading, a couple of bits from Chapter One concerning our glass house, my father the trouser snake, and the death -- in a hunting accident -- of my uncle The Englishman:

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Disclaimer: This material is dark and filthy and sick and deranged. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is a total fucking joke, mate.

Comments

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

Thanks, this is great. I dig the bees buzzing around in the background.

Also the book jacket is some nice design, even if it makes a bit of a joke out of earlier-this-week's street art entry. Hey, dialectic: street art vs. patina!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The bees are the sound of me messing around on my Korg Mono/Poly, with which I've recently been re-united.

And yes, there's tagging on the book jacket! It's a photo of a chair I shot at the Beaux Arts in Paris and it actually suggests the underground, writeable, illicit nature of jokes quite well. It also looks a bit Arabic, that tag. But more important is the doodle below, which says "Merder". And the whole kind of "put your butt here" nature of a chair. It's the essence of comedy.

[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

this book cover needs much improving. i fear, it wouldn't look very distinguished on a book store table, more like a random, badly (boringly) designed art magazine (german mag "texte zur kunst" springs to mind). would be better to translate the world of the book into a strong graphical take on the cover. your mock-up is a little bit a reprise of what made the cover for "ocky milk" quite weak: though overall nicely designed, the snap on the cover was rather boring, didn't really "say" anything, at least not anything that would inspire an interesting new association with the content of the album. while the previous two covers, for "oscar", and "otto", have exactly what i tried to say aboth, a fascinating, excelently executed wandering of the music into the graphic realm. works the same with literature.