Words of a Man’s Mouth is a new Jackson Fish Market (creators of They’re Beautiful) related project (pointed out by Blogschmog). It’s a blog with 54 pages, each one consisting of a page scanned in from a Chinese autograph book bought in Hong Kong which visitors are invited to translate and annotate. It’s written in both English and (mostly) Chinese – some entries are dated 1942.
Browsing this evokes a variety of responses. Randomly:
- I always wonder at what point those of us locked into Roman alpha-numeric character sets lost touch with the sensuous, aesthetic quality of writing every time I browse Chinese characters or kanji. Typography still remains a battle to try and win back a little of that ground.
- Is this an act of tribute or an act of colonisation?
- The book’s owned by the purchaser. The words are owned by the writers. And now it and the contributors’ photographs are published, analysed and reconstructed by us, the readers. I can’t imagine we’d do this to a 2005 high school year book. At what point do we pass into the public domain?
- “They still count the years in Taiwan starting from Sun Yat Sen’s foundation of the Republic, i.e. 1911.” I never knew that.
- By 1942, Shanghai was occupied by the Japanese and the International Settlement had been overrun. Meanwhile, the men in this book were graduating.
- One writer quotes Paul
“”I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18)”
Poignant in the circumstances they were living through but to which not one of the writers directly refers to. - The hand of this writer stands out, and that of the calligrapher on the following page.
My partner has a book from about 1890 or thereabouts, a bound manuscript handwritten in the tiniest of writing detailing hundreds of the parish churches from around England, their history and architecture. People have been blogging their passions for a long time. It’s just the readership is a little distributed. Perhaps the first qualification for the blogger is that otaku look in the eye, a passion waiting for the right enabling technology.
Filed under: Jackson Fish Market, aesthetics, blogging, blogs, history
This is fascinating, Michael. It seems to me that for as long as humanity has had language and the means to record our communications, there’s a primeval urge to connect and leave something of ourselves for others – whether its via cave paintings or stone carvings or annotations on old parchment or on blogs. It’s only now with todays technology that we can connect beyond physical boundaries.
BTW, my mum just gave us a signed photograph of Sun Yat Sun that had been given to her mother (my grandmother) by grandmother’s unrequited suitor who had met the great leader. Now, objects surviving through time – that’s a whole new post in itself…
Handling that must give a sense of astonishing connection to your family’s history. Closest equivalent I can think of is a manuscript of an 18th century recipe for mince pies of all things handed down through at least several generations of one side of my family. Traditional English mince pies with actual meat in them. Not quite in the same league as Sun Yat Sun, though!