from Um Um: A Novel To Lips

an alteration of Tom Phillips's A Humument

by Emily Hunt

Tom Phillips first transformed A Human Document, a Victorian novel by W. H. Mallock (1982), into A Humument in 1970 and has since completed 4 volumes. Um Um: A Novel To Lips is an alteration of his 1st volume.

Flipping through the densely inked and painted pages, I was tempted to cover the majority of them with cool, quiet, thick white paint. I found pleasure in cleaning up each composition, whiting out excess noise in the images, and condensing the narrative to the point where some pages now display only a single word – or even a single letter – on which the reader can zero in. I used an exacto knife to scratch away certain words, and I have collected the dust of this text in a cigarette carton. The second sentence of Um Um references the use of the knife: “Purple inside my um um operation, a sharp and swell tongue.” In my narration, the knife functions as tool in the construction of my voice, just as the tongue does in the literal sense. The remainder of this sentence extends the significance of the tongue, “softened a moment to eat a picture.”

Click here to view images of several pages and here to read a selection of the narrative.