I was afraid I would have to explain everything about my book, but I am glad that everyone understood. I had it planned out in my head, but when I put it together in the book, it seemed kind of scattered. The book is attempts an explanation for why people do what they do and how they become who they are. Ultimately, the need for an explanation is put into question by the inevitable fact of extinction.
My first idea was to use the Grey’s Anatomy book and mesh together pictures of anatomy with portraits. However, the book was too long and I did not want my modifications to get lost in the pages. Another idea I had, which I decided to go with, was to take the book The Wasted Americans literally. It was originally about people on welfare, but I changed the meaning of the book by adding pictures of my friends partying, literally “wasted Americans.” This didn’t seem like enough, so I started looking at the other books for more ideas.
One book was about dinosaurs and I knew I wanted to use dinosaurs in the project, but I did not know how. Then, I noticed that this book and Grey’s Anatomy had a lot of similar pictures of growth and anatomy (the fetus, birth, skeletons). I questioned how different we really are from dinosaurs and saw this as a point of comparison for my book. Another book was a children’s alphabet book and I used these pictures to show the growth of children. A narrative of a human life began to take shape in my head.
The book begins with the preface of dinosaur life, birth, growth, fighting, and extinction. This is actually a brief summary of the rest of the book, which is about humans rather than dinosaurs. The dinosaurs appear a few more times in the book in relation to the events of human life to keep the comparison going.
The first chapter, “The Catalyst”, begins with sex (the catalyst for life) and conception. It is not sexual, but anatomical, because this is not what I want people to remember about the book. However, this is visually my favorite part of the book. I used colored images of the ovary, bones and other parts of the human body as backgrounds for the black and white images of humans. The ovary is behind the father (the mother is surrounded by sperm). This is my way of showing the act of sex conceptually by showing the parts involved. This is done again with the female and male pelvises. Microscopic views of cells are behind the growing fetuses. The child is not born until the next chapter. The first piece of text appears at the end of this chapter and sets up the next chapter. It starts another theme in the book: the mindset of the human, which is the desire to have an effect on the world. The rest of the book explains what can happen when that desire fails to become reality.
The text came from the book How to Raise a Human Being. This is a very interesting and meaningful title and I thought about using this as the main book, but I liked the idea of wasted Americans more. It focuses the book on the possible outcome of raising a human being (the wasted Americans) rather than the actual process. Instead, I used “How to Raise a Human Being” as a chapter in my book. This is the chapter in which the human becomes American. He or she learns to read, count, and how to be American. The astronaut and fairy are meant to represent typical daydreams of American boys and girls. The text about lying to children comes after this chapter. American children are told they can be anything they want (astronauts), but it is not true. When this disenchanted child grows older, she or he does not fully believe the dangers of things such as LSD or alcohol, which they have been lectured about.
The main chapter is the culmination of the previous ones. It represents the transition into adulthood and the struggle between letting go of childhood and becoming an adult. As the text suggests, alcohol is a destructive means of coping with the transition. The black and white pictures show young people drinking. The numbered bears represent the grasp they still have on childhood, while also counting the destructive acts of drinking. The pictures get more blurry and disorienting until the last picture of the young man passed out. The fire on the next pages represents the burning of this wasted time. The chapter does not end on a completely negative note, however. This behavior is not healthy, but also not pointless. The criticism is not on the wasted Americans, but the environment around them. These Americans are stuck in transition. There is no chapter about adulthood. This is because the book is coming from the point of view of one of these young people. For now, we are not finished growing up and adulthood still seems to be far away.
Many elements in the book are meant to be humorous, a reminder that life isn’t really that bad even though the book may make it seem so. The very last page, “About the Author” has a picture of me. I have appeared in previous pictures and the viewer hopefully recognizes me. With this, I am saying that I am not judging anyone, especially the people in the book. I am one of the wasted Americans and it is okay if you are too. This is meant to be one of the humorous elements in the book. I did not mean for the book to be as depressing as it was perceived, but after evaluating and rereading it, I can see this.
The last chapter represents death, but it is not supposed to be sad. I put the dinosaur bones with the human skeleton to suggest that maybe human life means no more than a dinosaur’s life. Life eventually leads to extinction. Does it really matter that we were wasted Americans?
This project was a new experience for me. I do not like destroying books or even magazines. In the end, it was actually fun. I was surprised at the many different ways people thought of to change and add to the books and how these changes could alter the mood and meaning of each one.
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