This one is for everyone here… And for the occasion, I’ve brought a huge punchbowl of lime jello (it’s spiked). However, there’s a catch: There is only one spoon. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be communal. I did bring a package of plastic spoons for the seriously cootie conscious. But I must say that it’s not as fun that way.
I was just wondering what everyone thought about the rumored cover change for the 2004 paperback Solitaire.
I like the cover the way it is, but something about it has always (well, since the day I picked it up) reminded me of Tori Amos. I think it’s the little open square. There’s nothing wrong with Tori Amos (two words: Kate Bush. I’m being cursed by a Tori fan right now, I’m sure). Has anyone else felt that way about it? Perhaps it wouldn’t look so “Tori” if half of her face was being pulled away…like the painting (the one that was in the style of Munch’s, The Scream) in Solitaire. Or, if half of her face was white with a black smudge for an eye…like the other painting. I think it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, are made in the cover.
In the 3rd grade, my mom got rid of cable. I got in trouble at school for drawing inappropriate Halloween scenes. It was an art project – we had to cut out a haunted house. This was done with black construction paper. Then we had to paste it onto Manila paper. The houses had windows with shutters. In each window, we had to draw something scary… for Halloween. While everyone else had pumkins, bats and witches behind their shutters, I had a severed head on a platter, a blood stained crucifix on a blood spattered mattress, a hand clenching a bloody machete, etc., etc…. My brother, who is seven yrs. older than me, let me watch the movies he and his friends watched. We didn’t even get the movie channels, but everyone knew that if you undid the cable box and stuck a pin in a strategic location, you’d get them. So, I saw “Friday the 13th”, “Halloween”, “The Exorcist”, “Heavy Metal”, “The Wall”, “Trilogy of Terror”… you name it. Needless to say, I had a different idea of “scary”. And maybe, for more personal reasons than I thought, I’d like to see a more dramatic cover (minus all the blood, of course) – something in the style of Estar.
Anyway, that is all.
Lindsey
I’ve just recently seen the new cover and it rocks. I think you will not be disappointed. It’s fantastic, I love it, and it’s very different from the current cover.
It’s designed by Archie Ferguson, an artist and designer who works for Knopf and has designed a truckload of wonderful covers including William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition.
This could have come out of Estar’s brain, for sure. I will be interested to hear what people think of it. I’m feeling quite fortunate. I’ve had two great covers with very different images – two chances to reach different audiences.
The Scariest Movies In The World for me have been Alien, Jaws, and The Haunting Of Hill House (the original, not the silly remake). Anyone who enjoys great writing and has never read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, yikes, do yourself a favor. She wrote beautifully. Other scary novel favorites: Ghost Story by Peter Straub, The Shining by Stephen King. It’s always a treat when a writer is good enough to tell a frightening story without having to serve up a buffet of body parts. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or any other of the million billion Grade-B horror movies or novels running loose in the world just don’t do it for me. Graphic violence is no substitute for good writing or good storytelling.
I guess I can see the “Tori” feel in the hardcover. Which isn’t a bad thing. Lindsey, I get your Amos-Bush point, too. Yes, before Tori Amos there were Kate Bush and Jane Siberry. I’ve already been forced to pull out all my Bush and Siberry albums before, when I had to educate Esmeralda—biggest Tori fan—album cover by album cover and song by song, about the fact that those two women were not impersonating Tori, as she was saying. If she wanted to pass such obtuse judgments about artistic influences and feedback, then she should at least have her time-lines and attributions right. (I was going to expand on how I *love* the conversation/insemination that takes place between artists here, but I’ll save it for one of the other posts on today’s Virtual Pint.) I can’t say there’s anything wrong with Tori, since I’m also her fan. And she’s classy enough to acknowledge Kate Bush as an influence and hence the “Running up that Hill” cover. More to her credit, Tori hasn’t remained fixed on Kate-Bush territory, but has pushed outside her comfort zone so much it’s even pissed off many of her fans, and she’s evolved into a—to me—beautiful and healthy artist. Eek. I guess I did fall into ranting mode after all… let’s move on.
Back to the cover. I think these days every image we see reminds us of something else, just like every song we hear and every conversation we have and every book we read and every movie we watch. We are living in Info-Flux World. Each swimmer in this ocean is itself but also others. Or it is itself but also exists in relation to—or because of—others. When I see the paperback cover, it reminds me more of Dave McKean than the hardcover reminds me of Tori/Kate. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I also like that the two covers are so different and agree with Kelley when she say’s they’ll reach diverse audiences.
What bugs me now that I’ve found that other Bruce Sterling book is that publishers would recycle covers. It makes me mad. It makes me want to slap the publisher. I know I love mashups and music covers and movie remakes, so I’m well aware of the contradiction I’m expressing when I say this paperback cover-sharing makes me mad. I’m glad it doesn’t bother any of the authors.
I wonder how Archie Ferguson feels about having two very different books display the same image. As an ex-graphic designer, it’s giving me a stomachache even as I type this. If I put so much time and work into posters for low-budget plays that were rehearsed and produced in a few months, why wouldn’t a publisher see the value of giving each book its own special treatment and face. Really, it takes authors years to write those works. Argh!
When I was commissioned to make a poster for a play, I sat through an entire week of rehearsals. I took photos of the actors both on stage and in the privacy of their homes. This dedication may or may not have been apparent on the final product. I hope it is there and not only in my head. Here’s a link to some of the posters. With Cumbia, for example, the director had described what he envisioned for the poster and I put together the piece with the red-and-black background. When he saw it, he said I’d given him exactly what he had asked for, but it wasn’t really what he wanted. He confessed he’d hired me because he’d seen the poster I made for a Medea monologue and fell in love with that style. So I visited Cumbia‘s lead actress at her home and took another series of rougher images and produced the one with the dirty-wall background. Once I had a look-and-feel for a play approved, I laid out all the publicity pieces—poster, program handouts, press kits, newspaper ads, etc.—making sure they retained a certain consistency but were also at least slightly unique, as shown in the two Medea Redux pieces on that album.
You’d think producers/publishers would make sure every one of the creations under their roof were tended to with dedicate care. I know I’m very idealistic/romantic about these things, so I’ll put a lid on it… designer rant is off. I’m really giving myself not only a tummy-ache but now also a headache. I’ll be back for more Virtual Pints after a cooling-down walk to the bank.
On my way to the bank, I thought about the fact that it doesn’t bother me to have seen Remedios Varo’s work used as the cover for a number of books before Dangerous Space. I guess reading Sterling’s comment that publishers used the same covers set me off on a rage regarding Solitaire.
I will go back to my original assumption, which was that Ferguson just happened to like Eric Dinyer’s image and the publisher bought the rights without knowing that it had been used on another work of SF. This scenario of coincidences and resonance doesn’t make me mad at all. On the contrary, it makes me think how wonderful it is that different people come up with similar stuff. Cool. Let’s stick to the coincidence/resonance version and forget the whole conspiracy of evil publishers and lazy designers. I just googled Ferguson and all his work seems consistently great. I’m sorry I smoked and fumed on my previous comment. My apologies to all.
Whew, now I can celebrate the many merits of the paperback cover. I love the layering. I love the textures. They have the quality of dreams and a reality that’s about to be ruptured anytime. They suggest there’s a multiplicity of beings hidden behind every shape and shadow. Every light is a window and every window is a light in this part of darkness. A single face can become an entire narrative. This cover hints at a self that is fragmented but also extends itself through that fragmentation. It reaches out to a vast network of electricity with its filaments. That self can see us through the spyglass more than we see it. We are not the ones behind the curtain, unless this image is also a mirror. It may very well be.
I modeled much of my early photography, video and web work after Eric Dinyer’s and Dave McKean’s aesthetics. I connected to a woman who is now one of my best friends through our mutual appreciation of Dinyer and McKean. I bought Solitaire because of its cover—I’ll buy anything those two guys have designed for—, so I guess it did an awesome job as a selling device. I enjoyed reading the novel but didn’t look at the bio blurb. I purposefully avoid looking at author bios. That changed the day I found Dangerous Space and began connecting the dots and dug up Solitaire from one of my storage boxes. So I will not harbor any more ill feelings towards this cover. I am at peace and grateful that this visual artwork brought some fine literature my way.