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[In late July, The New Sins (Los Pecados Nuevos), a new book by David Byrne, will become available. This week we are presenting, in four parts, David Byrne's account of the birth of the book, up through its recent debut at the Valencia Biennal. This is the second part. READ PART I. - - - - PART II: I Began Writing, Feverishly I began writing, feverishly, whenever I had a spare moment. I knew I had to write more than I would need, as I like to edit things from abundance down to their essence, if possible. Kara and Kate, who work with me at Todo Mundo, helped me scan pictures, resize and crop and print them out on our little office printer. There were lots of images I thought might be appropriate. The wall was filled with pinned-up pages of text and pictures, in clumps and sometimes in alternating sequences. The whole book was on the wall, both Spanish and English versions — Valencia had insisted the book be in Spanish, too — and every day we'd add, remove and rearrange the sequence. It was a bit like storyboarding a film. I bought some religious texts on La Guardia Place as examples of the kind of printing and the size of book I had in mind. One was called The Imitation Of Christ and the other What Jesus Means, or something like that. Both featured colored type, and some lovely pictures. I was also reading Faulkner at the time, which had a definite influence on some sections Ð- there's a quote from a character in As I Lay Dying in one section of the book. Round about this time I determined that I would need a designer, a collaborator who would also know how much something like this would cost (the Valencia folks were getting itchy to know). I am a fan of McSweeney's but didn't see anyone listed in the legal page as designer, so I emailed them directly and described my project and said I wanted to employ their designer, whoever it might be. Turns out the McSweeney's Representative (M.R.) does the design, and, in a weird coincidence, he also has a collection of 19th-century Bibles, which he counts as among his primary design inspirations. This was getting to be too good to be true. We met after I had assembled a collection of pictures for possible inclusion and had written some more pages for the book. He seemed to like the project, and I could see that the old Bibles, a few of which he brought by, were indeed a font of typographic and design inspiration. Lastly, while on a field trip to see my record label artist Jim White perform at a club in Mobile, Alabama, I picked up some religious tracts. One of them even had a website, www.mountzion.org, which was a source of lots of fevered and twisted language from many English-speaking countries including some essays dating back hundreds of years. Pure poetry, and some of it I couldn't make heads or tails of which was even better. - - - - TOMORROW: Part III. If you are a media person and would like to interview Mr. Byrne about his book, email us at byrnebook@mcsweeneys.net. In the subject header, please write BYRNE INTERVIEW. If you are a reviewer or writer about books and would like a review copy of this David Byrne book, email us at julie@mcsweeneys.net.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S STORIES:
Why I Had to Make This Book, Part I By David Byrne Announcing: Neal Pollack's Timothy McSweeney's Festival of Literature, Theater, and Music Some Things That Have Gone Wrong With My Techno-Thriller By J.M. Martinez The Office Party By M. David Hornbuckle Circumstances Under Which I Would Have Sex With Some of My Fellow Jurors By Peter Ferland |
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