Book of the...

I'm not sure which route this should take. I want to lay out a thing before you. And then I want you to choose some way that this could be something you could like.

I'm thinking here about books (my number one fetish object, obvs) and what I am thinking of more specifically is the point before they become books. This is the stage when they are scraps of ideas, bundles of pages, a mish mash of thought. I want there to be something...dare I say consumable, product-y at this phase. I'll explain.

I have a number of these objects laying around my room, but I've never had the chance to really think of them as awesome. And if commodiying does anything it gets you looking at and thinking about objects. In my case there are a number of folders and they are full of notes and bits of story and sometimes drawings and little phrases. They are living notebooks of story, competely unrefined and open.

The idea I'm starting to get of these things is like the stuff of cultural epics...but like, as personal epics. What I mean is like the Book of the Dead, or the Bible or any other sort of book that at one point was a bunch of only marginally collected stories. Sure in reality it probably didn't have such a physical form in those cases. That was probably a bunch of people's stories that lived in people's heads. But I think you get that sense. Like you could get this great folder with an elastic band and just fill it with all the scraps of novel, or an anything. And then like, give it out that way. Just a collection of those sorts of scraps.

I mean, it becomes sort of silly when you think about selling it or playing it off like art. But if you put something together like this for you, or your friends, it could be your cultural epic. It doesn't necessarily need to be redacted and pulled into a recognizable shape. Especially if there are multiple people this is meant to tell a story for. Then it really should be shuffle-able and add-able-to.

Have I just suggested that you scrap book? Probably. But like, in a way cooler way. Just treat it like you are keeping the story of a people and then it won't seem quite so gay.