I'm a little disheartened now and then at the way that people perceive Expressionism. Of course anyone with even a passing knowledge of the genre in terms of painting or sculture knows how wonderfully colourful and vibrant it is, and even though this vibrancy does often go into expressing (ha!) troubled attitudes the work itself is often quite fun and happy. So I lay the blame for the lay perception of Expressionism as dark, mysterious, brooding and generally the scariest thing since the Other at the feet of really, really good movies. Screw you Caligari.

A somewhat pointless post. I found a couple of books containing the complete works of Franz Marc (photographs, rather than the genuine article), and I've been mulling on it in the five minutes since I left the bookshelf and came upstairs.

On the way I also had an idea, given to me by the heaviness of the volumes, of a story that followed the old trend of setting itself entirely inside an infinite library. I could build on the sorts of things that John Barth does in Giles Goat-Boy, but without the rest of the University, so to speak. Anyway people would tap into the sprinkler systems to obtain water and mulch periodicals to grow mushrooms in. The most obvious thing is to have a divide between "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction", with the two groups conducting raids between eachother to try and obtain the books necessary to understand their own volumes. The periodicals would keep stocking themselves up by growing every few months like paper flowers, thus ensuring a constant supply of food. The inhabitants of the library would be a race of Librarians, greatly withered and hideous.

Alternatively, there could be a character from this world who has the ability to enter the meta-plane, where any single place or event expands out into an entire self-contained universe which intersects ever so slightly with our own. It could be a children's book or some nonsense like that, except that things would often end with the character having made things much, much worse, but learnt a valuable lesson in the process.

Clyde Amongst the Librarians, coming soon to a remainder bin near you.

Also I started a painting, it's rubbish, I'm going to start again. I wish I had more paint/some money. I am quite poor.

Tags: book ideas, caligari, expressionism, germans
Current Location: The Cognidrome
Current Mood: thoughtful