Pete McPartlan

I’m taking part in Essaying Essays, a project by FREE PRESS/ PLAN 9 BRISTOL in which a group of us:

“explore the possibilities of the essay form. What forms can the essay take and how can such texts be read? What is an essay and who is essaying and where? What kinds of knowledge can be produced? What is lost and gained in moving beyond conventional discursive approaches into using visual and textual material, the space of the page, variations of typography and design?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the books I own but either haven’t read, forgotten, got distracted from or plain don’t-understand-a-word-of, and trying to put a physical shape to those ideas. As part of the Essaying Essays project we are putting together a quick publication with three pages per contribution, my section is called - Reader’s Block(s):Mapping Missunderstanding(s) (which I only just realized for definite is a spelling error as the red wiggly line appeared, I was 50/50 that it was, but decided to leave it and if it was wrong I’d say it was deliberate.) The title is deliberately mispelled, misspelled because I’m curious about the way text can easily be distracting, conjuring ideas that can’t be anticipated by the writer. Is it the writer’s job to accurately steer you towards their mental picture of something? And is it necessarily the reader’s job to be obedient?

Did James Joyce realise after his years of slaving away at Finnegan’s Wake there would be a partially read (maybe 2%) red and black copy lying on the floor of my room, so I can stand on it to more easily smoke out of the window? I’ve been thinking about this as a Fluxus like performance of “not reading Finnegan’s Wake” so it feels like I’m learning something from the book without looking at the words. A less extreme idea but in a similar vein stems from my experience with a compilation of Stan Brakage’s letters and essays, which I am continually reading the first chapter of because I get so wrapped up in his elaborate metaphors and puns that it makes me think about new pieces of work or imagine films instead of concentrating on the content of the text. I always put it down to write in my sketchbook at around page 12. So I’m thinking about this as a property of the text, a fluctuating ball of possible meanings, readings and contexts and trying to visualise it somehow.

Anyway, I made four pages worth of stuff so I thought I’d post the additional page here as the drawings didn’t quite fit with the theme of the rest, (and they’re a bit sillier). I’ll post a link to the publication when it is published later this week.