Number of these references that are specifically either book titles or published content: 40
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I read Umberto Eco in Reflections On The Name Of The Rose (Minerva, 1994) explaining his creative process, saying after he read and reread “medieval chroniclers, to acquire their rhythm and their innocence” to be “freed from suspicion” (of just plain faking the contents of the book) - but not from “the echoes of intertextuality” - he “rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books”, which I take to mean that writers walk into the act of writing having (ideally) already read a lot of books, the influences of which will dictate the way the writers will eventually write what will hopefully be books that would have the same effect on other writers, texts with chapters with paragraphs with sentences with words with letters like Russian dolls that just open and open and open and open and open and open, ad nausea.
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A few years before his death, Uncle Wowie would periodically drop by the Cubao house with books borrowed from the Quezon City Library. Of note is a wide hardcover about whales and dolphins, with large full-colour oil paintings of the animals, with anatomical facts and other information printed by the sides. In my head they are larger than life, larger than their subjects, larger than their “whale facts”: the pale narwhal, the unicorn horn an extension of teeth; the gigantic blue whale, largest animal alive, several elephants long, yet appetite whetted by unicellular sea plants; and the half-gallon of semen they require to propagate their species, older than Man.
Another book of note from Uncle Wowie: a collection of seemingly normal Renaissance paintings, but are actually elaborate optical illusions, images made up of other images: the walls of portraits are baskets of fruits and vegetables; the baskets of fruits and vegetables are packs of animals in landscapes; the packs of animals in landscapes are collages of nudes; the collages of nudes are patches of flowers; the patches of flowers are angels in flight; the angels in flight are walls of portraits; so on and so forth, all of God’s creation within dog-eared pages between water-stained covers.
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Also: like the cartoon Abraham Lincoln portrait made up of female nudes, captioned “What Goes On In The Minds Of Men”.
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Books on hand that directly dictate this book, by order of influence:
Pieces Of Payne, by Alfred Goldbarth (Graywolf Press, 2003); How To Be An Artist, by Eddie Campbell (Eddie Campbell Comics, 2001); How To Be Fashionable Or Consume Like Me, by Andrew Coulter Enright (The YNT Press, 2003); the internet and everyone, by john chris jones (ellipsis, 2000); Kwentong Tambay, by Nicanor David, Jr (Psicom, 2006); Trout Fishing In America, by Richard Brautigan (Dell, 1967); Lights Out For The Territory, by Iain Sinclair (Granta, 1997); My Dark Places, by James Ellroy (Knopf, 1996); ilang talang luma buhat sa talaarawan ng isang may nunal sa talampakan, by Jun Cruz Reyes (UP Press, 1998); Rapid Eye Movement, by Simon Dwyer (Creation, 2000); A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Vintage, 2001); The Extraordinary Works Of Alan Moore, edited by George Khoury and Friends (TwoMorrows, 2003); the New Comics, edited by Gary Groth and Robert Fiore (Berkeley, 1988); Lo!, by Charles Fort (John Brown Publishing, 1996).
I pull these books from the shelves and on the floor I stack them one on top of the other, finding it provides shaky foundation for much of anything else besides the writing of this book.
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Or, if you prefer this other “dolls = books” image: anthropomorphic marionette babies of various nationalities swaying hand-in-hand singing “It’s A Small World After All”, and by “World” meaning only of course a library of Borgesian proportions, which is to say not very “Small” at all.
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And that’s just talking about the books. Also within this book (between letters, words, lines, pages, covers) are movies, magazines, records, people, TV shows, blogs, websites, podcasts, issues, insecurities, conversations, songs, ideas, jokes, games, secrets, photographs, text messages, advice, states of mind.
