Book selected: Collected Short Stories, by Kingsley Amis
New title: Collected unreadable short stories
As soon as I received the book I started reading it, well attempting to to read it, as I have to travel to and from work, I decided to take it with me and start reading it whilst travelling.
I must say that I started each story many times and I had to keep going back every time because either I couldn't remember the beginning of it or at some point I got lost in it, so this was one of the first ideas I worked with.
As I got to handle the book quite a lot it started splitting on the spine. I decided to rip each page and playing with the original idea I started to put them back together altering the order they should be in, so for instance instead of being page 1,3,5 - I sewed them together one after another in the following order 1,4,6; so I worked with the idea of a narrative but without making any sense, or being unable to follow the story. The idea of sewing the book came from including an action that has nothing to do with the content of the stories of the book as they are mainly about soldiers and generals and as a female and a reader I felt I wanted to leave my mark on it.
I played with different ideas using the existing text and also getting inspiration from words that appear on the pages, then I used actions like drawing directly onto the pages with a biro, felt tip pen, cutting right through the pages, gluing things onto the pages, tippexing them, sellotaping them, sawing them, burning them and perforating them.
By altering or modifying the text (totally or partially at times) I wanted to reinforce the idea of not being able of following the story right through and also of having some gaps that our imaginations will then fill in.
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