The Registry of Forgotten — C Studio Project II
- Brainstorming stage!
I landed on 2 directions for my book:
- 1 is exploring death! And the way different cultures understand and celerbate death.
- 2 is exploring mythologies and shared mythology: The life of myths and how they interconnect — showcasing the underlying common points that has resonated with people from different sides of the world.
Exploration of direction 1:
This is a book about death.
Or rather, what happens after it.
Focusing on the craft side, the social side and the cultural side of keeping someone’s memory alive — through rituals, through religion, through…
Mourning and memory
Not just a grieving of death, but a celebration of life.
As long as one person remembers you, you are not gone. You are not gone. If no one remembers you, are you gone?
- Burning ghost money
- Death anniversary events/celebrations
How do different cultures keep the memory of someone alive after their death?
Death, memories and humanity’s shared need to not get forgotten
How do one remember someone they never knew? A book on generational memory.
Keeping the memories of ancestors alive…
Explorations through 2 sides: 1 side very factual and informational on these artifacts, and 1 side having stories from people and how they deal with memory, grief,…
Vietnam: Ăn cỗ, đốt vàng mã
Shared memories in terms of death/How does like literally every culture/approach memorizing people after their deaths?
This is a book about death.
Shared mythologies and shared stories
The shared stories that built culture -> What is pop culture really? What are the shared stories that built a culture? What are the shared stories that built generations? What are the shared stories that built humanity as a whole? The hero’s journey…
Timeless tropes/timeless stories?
Registry: definition? Structure? This is not about emmeory. This is a registry: of things, of people, of stuf….
Exploration of direction 2:
Looking for pieces of writing…
Right now, as I am searching for content, I have encountered a pretty unique problem.
I want my book to feel like an actual live registry — but not in the sense of having everything be extremely dry and informational. What I found though is, maybe due to the nature of my research and my subject matter, that the writing/works I see either lean into a very academic and formal, analysis tone with a lot of tables, or it leans into a very emotional and storytelling tone. So I am thinking of a structure where I have my main pieces of writing be emotional and deep and thought provoking, while my supplementary writing (ones that are more focused on actual documentation/listing out the myths, variations or different stories) be in the form of tables and imageries that supports the main piece of writing in its’ content. Now I’m going to try to extract pieces of writing from the ones I found and group them into 2 groups: Documentation or Commentary.
- 300 ramayanas — five examples and three thoughts on translation
How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one.
This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there is a Ramayana . [1] The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan — to say nothing of Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures. [2] Camille Bulcke, a student of the Ramayana , counted three hundred tellings. [3] It’s no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata , because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Ramayana poets ( tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali ). In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.
In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time. The stories are there, ‘always already.’”
2. The carrier bag theory of fiction
3. The Heroine with 1001 faces
4. The origins of the world’s mythologies
5. The flood myth
file:///Users/lanvb/Downloads/_OceanofPDF.com_The_flood_of_myth_-_Alan_dundes.pdf
6. Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider
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https://books.google.je/books?id=76Oh3p2vpe4C&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false
7. The evolution of Myths — https://www.scribd.com/document/900075961/Evolution-of-Myths
8. Braiding Sweetgrass —
https://ccncsj.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Braiding-Sweetgrass-Robin-Wall-Kimmerer.pdf
9. The simpler way
https://archive.org/details/simplerway00whea
Idea! For visuals!
How and why myths and folktales evolve.
There should be a feeling of contrast between something that is so so free flowing, culutral, and natural and oral, like mythology, with the idea of categorizing them and academizing them. Like visually, how does it feel to put a frame on it?
Things I like and want to use:
A numbering system. A very harsh registry/numbering system. A high number/high volume of things?
Logic:
- A very logical and scientific explanation that links it to ancestry, migration and typicalness -> A tree (The evolution of Myths):
Tracing the past - A more emotional and tangible way of telling things -> Wendy Doniger (The Implied Spider) -> A web
Making sense of the past and the presence - A more modern, speculative piece on the present and the future of myths and stories
Understanding the future
Type studies
With my type studies, there is one thing I really really wanted to keep consistent, which is the feeling that I am mixing order with a flowiness/chaos and non-conformity of mythology.
Some key changes + feedback:
- Quirky typefaces like Happy Times at the IKOB have a lot of personality/is a big deviation from the normal typeface — so if I do want to mix the 2 of them, I should not have too many steps of changes (weight, slant and type). Pick less of those variables and try them one by one, not all at the same time.
- The current sans-serif , which is Neue Hauus Grotesk, can carry a feeling of corporate coldness/properness — find sans-serifs that has the neutrality I want but less generic/used in too many places.
I found some quirky typefaces and a new body type! Monument Grotesk has the same level of neutrality but a bit of unrefinedness that makes it less dry and corporate. I also found a serif that feels pretty romantic with a lot of drama — which contrasts nicely with monumnet Grotesk’s neutrality.
Type testing! The biggest thing I am thinking about right now is how to separate the critique/academic text, which makes up a bulk of my text, with the little portions of mythology and stories that I would weave in. I am experiementing with a couple of different options mainly for the heading and the special text.
Project Brief: Once, Again
Book Dummy and Speed dating time!
Content planning…
Grid time!
Grid 1: 4 Column grid
Grid 2: Built specifically for pushing content edges in and out
Grid 3: 6 column grid
