THE CONTROLS
IN THE LOCKER ROOM
“A HUMUMENT”, BY TOM PHILLIPS
Last January, after seeing a couple of my newspaper blackout poems, Winston Smith e-mailed and recommended to me a book called “A Humument” by an artist named Tom Phillips. In the mid-sixties, Phillips took an old Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called “A Human Document” and started blacking out the pages to make a new book, ” A Humument.” Well, I thought this sounded pretty interesting, but was too lazy to look it up, or even Google it, and pretty soon I’d forgotten all about it.
A year later, Drew Dernavich e-mails me a link to Humument.com, the official site of the book! Little did I know that you can see every page from the book online. (There’s also a new edition you can buy online from Amazon.)
Too cool.
AN EPIGRAPH FOR THE FUTURE
I see no necessity to apologize for the imperfections of this or of any similar imagery. Analogies of this kind are only intended to assist us in our attempt to make the complications of mental functioning intelligible.—Sigmund Freud, talking about his dream diagrams
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I think I might use this someday as the epigraph for one of my comics. I collaged it onto the front of my sketchbook, with a few changes:
Clive Thompson made the great point, “your tools help determine how you think. So long as Freud used realistic modes of drawing, he was hemmed in by the dictates of straightforward physiology. To ponder the abstracts of human behavior, he needed to turn to abstract comix.”
Read some more about Freud’s drawings.