I made a comment that a cut up shouldn't seem like a cut up, but I guess it can. Maybe it has a purpose, is it just for fun? Does it highlight the style or the works being cut? Or the novelty of cutting? Can you make a sonnet cut up make sense? Does it have to have meter and rhyme? What is my point? How do you decide what form you use if any? Is it a whim, what makes a ghazal about love? Lot of subjects I'm bouncing around here. I think I use forms as a safety net, sometimes I pick them just randomly to see what happens and what I come up with. I haven't wanted to workshop anything in a long time, but I still like writing in general.
For me, the purpose of doing a cut-up is liberation. Not having to follow any rules, not having to make allowances for the reader. They are edited; what initially comes out is pure gibberish. So there is a huge amount of editing involved, but not editing for the reader's sake, but for the original texts' sake. I try to retain the feel of those originals while making something that can be read and is equally liberating for the reader.
I've done more than 300 of these over time but I'm still figuring it out. I haven't found an audience for them (except for myself) and it's unlikely I ever will. But I believe they are worth reading.
I can say, based on my experiments, that you really can't make a cut-up out of poems because you need the things you mention for a poem (form, rhythym etc.). It's strictly a prose medium. You might pull off a prose poem, but that's as close to poetry as you'll get.
The most famous practitioner of our time, William S. Burroughs, cut-up his own text. So first you get something logical, an obvious if outlandish narrative. Then you hit a cut-up of portions of that chapter and maybe chapters you have not read yet. Then back to a logical narrative. And then back to cut-up. And on and on. What I'm doing lacks those islands of narrative, which is most likely the problem I'm having finding an audience.
There is a writer who published entire novels that were completely made up of cut-ups (I think, based on what I've read about her work secondhand). Her name is Kathy Acker.
I read 15 pages of a book. Watch Tv. Never come back to that book. Start books in random, I don't like the word random, play music, stand up, read a few pages.
The cut-up effect, is art, and paranormal, that is strange, expe
experience is a going through of
out of this tunnel
say, a centipede, or a worm, or pipe is a world,
you segment and, here t is this open like worm blood a world here
so, there are leaks, not mirrors, you come gushing out another section of sectional reality. You are linked by cuts.
The juice is no cuts. I mean, the real thing. The moving real, out of, that, this, this, this, blaack and whiite, color, maga, coversong
You take one, you more, you this, that you, take, put,: with standard, popular, wellknown things, and cut them up, and what leaks
Cutup isnt art, it's reality. The art is the doing of it. The aesthetics is important and so is the reality.
You take what people know and have known, you know something, cause youre taking them, one thing, more things, anything, cut up, read.
It's more of a thing in me to cut up audio. And putting audio over video. And a sound happens in relation to another sound, or sound and sight, and connections, and pathways, and things come up.
After my last post, commenting on one of dukealien's poems, I went to YouTube and typed in cut-ups.
This is the first video that came up. I haven't watched/listened to it:
Tell me if it ties-in with this discussion.
I'm not going to watch/listen to it.
So clew/cut me in/out.
I did go ahead and watch this one. Do with it what thou wilt.
Oh, Georgina
Well, they definitely tie into the discussion, since they are about the modern master of the form, though I'd argue Burroughs and Brion Gysin (?) did not invent it. None of my cut-ups have ever predicted the future as far as I can tell.
It's interesting that you, Rowens and he, Burroughs, both mentioned something "leaking out" of cut-up: you (Rowens), Reality, he (Burroughs), the Future.
The Future sure as hell is Reality.
(I haven't yet watched the 2nd one because it's 20 minutes long and, well, I just woke up and that's too long. I listened to enough to think I will go back to it, so thank you for posting it.)
I have the avatars and slogans cut off. But I think your slogan/signature was a Kurt Vonnegut quote. That's where I got the word Leak from.
Anytime I take a leak i steal a mirror
Have you ever set a mirror on the floor and watched your reflection pissing on your reflection?
I'm just asking.
Did the piss obscure the reflection of the piss?
(08-23-2021, 09:13 AM)CRNDLSM Wrote: [ -> ]Anytime I take a leak i steal a mirror
Now that is the beginning of a surrealist poem.
Synchronicities are happening, I was going to say all the time, but time is just another expression in which for things to occur. Working with symbol correspondences, you have keys to things. You could say you make things happen, or things are going to happen and you mold yourself into having had wanted those things to happen. The theorizing, like time, is another expression in which things happen.
I use three sets of standards, Keys, Knives and Correspondences. Keys/Languages, Knives/Contexts, Correspondences/Resonances.
William Burroughs talks of agents, fitting the world of mid Twentieth Century agencies of control, the aesthetic knives and atmospheres of CIA programs and Nazi laboratories and pulp novels, magazines and newspapers. Other people use angels in their contextual realms. And others use angles.
If you're in a rather large old apartment with stairs and a high ceiling, you can look at the outlines of the room and highlight, in your mind, the angles, and things can resonate in and around you. And if there is a mirror on a wall there are added other layers and dimensions to move through in your adventure. I find it useful to concentrate on lines and angles, and close my eyes, sometimes using different intensities of light and one eye or the other open and closed. It doesn't take long for the geometry to show up clearly in dark of your closed eyes. These in different colors and in different dimensions. I sit with my eyes closed, and let whatever appears appear in a form of scrying. Since the original geometrical shapes and sigils morph into other shapes and colors beyond what I started with.
This goes over into my dreams. There are the states of dreams pouring over me before I fall asleep and as I'm waking up, and layered dreams and mirrors of dreams. Using these symbols and imprinting them on/in me gives me cues in waking life and in dreams. And though I'm often lucid on some level of my dreams, the more I utilize symbol sets and act them out in repetitive ritual early in the morning and late at night, the more often I can perform long and powerful rituals, and be instructed by angels and spirits in my sleep.
Doing meditations, sitting and walking meditations at the same times each day, Whatever you're doing you stop and meditate, breaking up the momentum of each situation, that is a cut-up method, cutting up experience.
Another thing, denying the validity of every idea that comes into my mind, thinking or overhearing, blasting the reality and weight of everything, synchronicities flow, and as my mind is clear and receptive, and my arena of context able to see the connections, and all without that horrid experience of paranoia that can come if you let the undeniably specific and multirelevant synchronicities get to you.
My dead friend Philip was big on synchonicity. I should have been taking notes. I was his listener.
He was also big into the Bible Code, then it was some guy who tapped into the internet, collected the myriad discussions, fed them into some computer program and analyzed the chatter to predict the future. I foreget his name or what he called it, but he sent out a "report" every few months, 50 pages of dense prophecies. I used to buy them for Philip because he had no credit cards.
Before that it was Remote Viewing.
Shit, I miss him. I didn't believe half of what he said and I don't really believe in prophecy. I think your technique is more valid. The future is what we face every day and going beyond the day is fruitless. Not that I don't think we need prophets.
Philip considered himself the Paul Revere of our time, trying to alert people to what was coming. He wanted to live to see the end of the world. Then he gave up I guess.
Everything is very conservative. Very intellectual and categorical. These kids on YouTube are very knowledgeable and efficient. Very orderly and academic. Nothing is weird. Nothing is counterculture. Yet weirdos are still weirdos. Bums are still bums. Stigmas are still stigmas. Creeps are still creeps. And people still care about their reputations.
I blast all of that. I embrace cliches and blast them. I blast selfhood narcissistically. Everything is fair game. Commercials that interrupt YouTube videos can be annoying and you can recognize them as cut-ups. All commercials are cut-ups, cutting up the narratives of movies and shows. The various news going across the bottom of the screen on the news is cut-ups. Mainstream media uses cut-up methods. You notice how surreal commercials are, using Theatre of the Absurd methods? The Internet is a drug, addictive and paranoia-inducing.
I think of all the rebellious rock n roll paraphernalia I bought as a teenager. All the alcohol I drink. All the drug dealers my angry, jealous old friends gave all their money and girls to.
Exchange is exciting. Money, Time, Technologies, these realities of Exchange add momentum to the atmosphere and aesthetic of the means of divination and art and pattern-following.
Most all of that is intense ways of distracting your mind, while the dreamwork is going on, sorting out what's what.
But if you don't go Silent a few times a day, or at least a weak, you'll burn out or become trapped in the methods until there is nothing but addiction.
When I write these kinds of messages, that's method.
Everything else, including my poems, are Silence.
404 Error, cutting me up. Send an agent.
"The world is quiet here."
Actually, I’ve got the same problem. I’ll look into it.
Raw or cooked, the agents I mean? Hosannah, I'm connected again!!
I'm going to post that poem I wrote after your post beginning "Everything is conservative..." It was your post plus Instant Dreams, a movie about Polaroid cameras and the oddballs who still use them, write histories of them, try to re=invent it (formula is lost) that made it.
Then I was going to confess that I live in what is, essentially, a southern mansion on the Guadelupe River. Hint: Bob Dylan's Idiot Wind "I can't help it if I'm lucky" So I think you mentioned being connected to nature, and certainly I am, if living in a deer park counts. And skunks and snakes but they keep to the river bank, mostly. Lots of turtles.**
My poem is not about that.
Human commodities
disdained into alienation
disclaimed in laborious solitude
restrained by horse-hide whips
of the multitudes, beatific hermaphrodites
struggle through the streams
of a digital dark age
past the edges of empathy
lifted out of sin by sequential angels.
Particles cut off
are painted with ashes,
prayed into dust.
The dance of the instant,
spirits of off-chance slavery
sing with severed tongues.
These offerings of contradiction
empiricist feuds fueled by spite
hegemonic demons claw back
with metallic arguments.
Dictated nerves cry out
salvation in a pin-hole
where orbital eclipses
dismember and calculate.
Clattering madness
of indivisible veins opened
for penetration by cooling
underground delight
finite and so bright.
**************************************************************
but today at was at a different house, the one in Austin where I grew up, where I saw my father die and where my son died about 10 feet away 47 years later. clearing it out so developers in Central Austin can have a bidding war to buy it and demolish it and build what goes for a 21st century mansion. My parents raised 4 kids and then me in a 2 bedroom "bungalow" is the nice term the realtors use. My grandfather and an uncle built it. No nature there just family history thick as pythons as in a Tarzan movie.
************************* so, bring it nack to the subject of the thread, that was my cut-up day, how was yours? Anybody can answer.
I'm reading in installments. And keeping the battery low, so each time I don't know if I'll get cut off. A method.
I was going to comment on your poem here in the other place where it is, but I've found it harder and harder to do practical things.
I Ching has been the most accurate divination I've ever used. I never use it. It works too well.
I make a point to study things, knowledge, methods, and stop and forget and let fade.
Poetry, Divination, Love: all these things have always worked best for me when I experience it all painfully and then be a lazy drunk.
Whether or not these things work at all for me is open. But I'm being honest.
(08-30-2021, 07:20 AM)rowens Wrote: [ -> ]I was going to comment on your poem here in the other place where it is, but I've found it harder and harder to do practical things.
I Ching has been the most accurate divination I've ever used. I never use it. It works too well.
I make a point to study things, knowledge, methods, and stop and forget and let fade.
Poetry, Divination, Love: all these things have always worked best for me when I experience it all painfully and then be a lazy drunk.
Whether or not these things work at all for me is open. But I'm being honest.
"In the end it was magic that had the honour of my ruins, and still today, when I walk there, I find its vestiges." Molloy, by Samuel Beckett.
In the falltime approaching, I feel excitement. One reason it's prescribed to belong to a sangha or magical order is to be around some pointers when dealing with the Demon of Madness. But I'm an optimistic Cynic, and will step right into the crocodile's mouth and out its backside with no loss of wit.
I'm excited and terrified, going into the fall, especially with my watery nature, those dark days and nights ahead. Terrified, but scared? Who I look like?
"Impossible to know, not only what the human race, but what an individual can become" Leopardi's Index to his Zibaldone.
September flips a switch for me, although really, it's still summer here.
By October, weather reality will match my daily hope for cool wet breezes and falling leaves. Leaves are falling, but it's probably heat exhaustion.
I think Leopardi is going to be very important to me.
Oddly, around here, to judge by the decals on their trucks, and the saturnine expressions when they step out of those trucks, a lot of guys want to be viewed as man/demon on the street. So I rarely leave my house, I'd much rather be here, with my own demons.