Seeing stories

I've been really really frustrated with my Visual Texts class. My teacher is brilliant, make no mistake about that. The amount of stuff she knows and the amount of work she's done in the field is awe inspiring. (Well, to me anyone who's been published is awe inspiring.) But she spends too mcuh time belabouring certain points that she could have made in less than 5 minutes. What is a book? When we talk about children's books that question gets a little sticky and I appreciate that. But at the end of the day, it's not worth fighting over it for an hour. Are wordless books books because they're all pictures and no words? Books HAVE to have words don't they? But then if you're going to be complicated about it words ARE pictures. Dude, cuneiform, Chinese characters, even the alphabet-- mga picture yan! But ok, maybe I'm being too pilosopa here. But in the words of countless academics: perhaps it is worth noting ek ek. Now that I'm writing this entry it feels like I did learn a lot. But I would have learned much more if we'd spent more time on the actual picturebooks.
I think we all agreed that for as long as the 'book' gets you to see a story or make a story or follow a story-- then it's a book. People seem to think that words are the only source of narrative but if you think about it, we're always making stories, we're always making sense of things. The story in pictures-- it's called visual literacy.
Then we have toy books like Maisy's House which looks like a book from the outside but when you open it, there are hardly any words and it opens up into a kind of paper dollhouse. The paper engineering is awesome. There's no clear-cut story but you can imagine people making up a story because they'd be drawing on things that they knew from other Maisy books and imagining what her days must be like in her house.
Then you have books like You Choose by Pippa Goodheart and Nick Sharratt. It's like a picturebook/catalogue/choose-your-own-adventure. The text is sparse-- it only poses questions like: where do you want to start the story? which bed do you want to sleep in? blah blah blah. Each 2 page spread is filled with different beds, pictures, fairies and You Choose which one you want to keep the story going. Tuwa.

We have wordless books like the ones by Mitsumasa Anno where you have to glean the story from the pictures. There are hardly any words (except perhaps at the end of the book-- like a message to the reader giving clues as to what to look for. CLUES? Teka teka teka...). The illustrations are very fine and small but they cover each two page spread. What you find as you 'read' the books is that he's hidden images all over the place. It's like finding the sailboat in a 3d poster or looking for Larry Alcala's signature in his Slice of Life weekly cartoon (I remember one special cartoon where he had 15 faces hidden in the same spread. Can't remember if I spotted all of them.) or finding Wally. In Anno's England he hides little figures from history and literature-- I remember spotting a tiny Alice in Wodnerland with a White Rabbit playing on a tiny spot of the large English countryside. Anno is lots of fun once you know what the game is.

We touched on peritexts (ex. extra-feaures of the book like toys or websites, external features of the book that picturebook makers play with to make their books more fun like the covers and stuff...) which are things that are not necessarily in the words but are part of the book as a whole.
One book that I really really got interested in was Kit Williams' Masquerade. This book is great on its own. Good story, beautiful illustrations. BUT HERE'S THE SPECIAL BIT. In the beginning of the story, it says, there is a hare hidden in this book can you find it? And apparently Kit Williams had fashioned an actual hare out of gold anf precious stones and hid it somewhere on the British Isles. The book was a story but it was also a map and a riddle. Some people actually found the gold bunny... Galeng. http://www.bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/

I guess at the end of the day, the real value of books like these are whether they get kids hooked on the adventure of reading or not; whether they get these kids (and grown-ups who don't want to grow up-- like me) to think about the world in different ways. Diba?