I was thinking about how the experience of seeing pictures/images/paintings contributes to the 'storytelling experience.' When did this tradition of attaching pre-made pictures to storybooks begin? Was it more 'modern' fantasy-storybook editions of works such as Treasure Island or was it pop-up books that made imagery-accents standard? As film evolved from the silent black-and-white era into the modern CGI/IMAX era, "seeing became believing." We can imagine therefore a time when images and imagery-attachments were considered both/either unnecessary and/or even heretical. To evaluate such a 'progression' in the art-world genre of creative-writing is to come to a better (and more intelligent) appreciation of euphoria-empiricism themed works such as Dante's Inferno (the video game), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie's incendiary religion-hallucination novel), and Avatar (an IMAX-marketed film). It's all rather interesting (and fun!). ==== Desiree realized she was in a real jam with this LA night-club owner named Eddie Nash whom seemed more and more like the folkloric death-contract imp Rumpelstiltskin. Desiree started drawing psychotic doodles and charcoal-drawings of Nash as Rumpelstiltskin and then sold them to a Borders bookstore where they became an instant-hit with the kids' Friday-night reading-circle. Kids would try to guess who the Rumpelstiltskin character could represent in the modern world --- simply by looking at Desiree's eccentric sketches of the imp! An editor informed Desiree that her drawings were to be collected in an 'interactive storybook' presentation (modelled after the Borders kids-circle activity), and young readers across America would send in votes (by electronic voting) to determine who was a real modern-day Rumpelstiltskin. Votes came in across the nation, and primary 'Rumpelstiltskin-candidates' included Newt Gingrich, Bill Gates, and Elvis Presley (and Desiree won the Nobel Prize in Literature). When asked by an interviewer what she thought of imagery complementing storytelling in the modern age, Desiree simply stated, "Isn't psychiatry just cinema?" ====
