The Age of Earthquakes

Matthew McNulla

The Age of Earthquakes is an unsettling book, describing both the immediate present and the near future at a quick pace, all the while making the world appear to be bleak as humans become more reliant on the internet and less capable of anything themselves. The form of the text plays a significant role into the way it is perceived and understood. While anybody looking at the text would say it is a book, after all it does consist of pages bound together between two covers, the content and way that is written varies dramatically. The pages are constantly changing in their font and orientation, sometimes spreading a single word across an entire spread, or flipping the words upside down, the reader constantly is changing the way that they read to understand the book. This plays into the role of the book, pointing out the short attention spans of people in the internet era, the book will constantly change and alter the way it presents itself, keeping the audience captivated and interested in an extended idea, while keeping itself brief enough in a single form the reader's short attention span never disrupts the reading of it. Also the book contains a significant number of drawings and photographs, and with the exception of the cover, none of them use color. This contributes to the bleakness felt about the world now and in the future. Using grayscale makes everything appear more dreary, no light colors which lighten up the mood, only black gray and white appear, which makes for a book without much hope for the future, despite keeping a pragmatic tone used throughout the text, excluding color forces the reader to look upon the world with a sense of hopelessness and bleakness that what is happening cannot be stopped. (298 words)

Pastiche

Random actions are what make us feel like individuals when we are all truly doing the same thing