Cut it up!!!1

[ChristopherSea]

Good to see it's being put to use

Don't forget the site has a pastebin- you can save your stuff there, or copy stuff to lace your own with, should you feel like it. I posted the URL at 4chan's /lit/ board as well, and got a lot of good response. Some anons are already making cut-ups and saving them

I may experiment with your machine. I can appreciate Dadaism as a movement that deeply influenced visual artists. It brought us the collage, surrealism, the avant-garde and as you point out 'the beat' Burroughs brought it to literature in the cut-up. However, I did not care for his work that made use of them. Very exhausting to read for me! Cutting up an entire piece or a shuffle cut-up of two is usually a bit of nonsense. On the other hand, a judicious use of it could produce some interesting effects, e.g., an acid trip , a stream of unconsciousness, ha ha, disorientation, etc. At worst, a great phrase or two, perhaps. Fold in poems and found poems are very interesting to me. I will try it and post anything that I find interesting. Thank you in advance, for the intriguing opportunity to scramble a piece in your dice-o-matic!

I find the cut-up method to be quite useful in several ways. Most of all, as is seen with your example, it allows the author to step out of his poem. It feels like the text reclaims itself. I like that. A lot.

While I have to agree the Burroughs cut-up novels are not easy reading, I am on the other end of the apreciation spectrum. I think what he did, especially with Nova Express (with which he developed the fold-in technique), is some of the most brilliant writing to come out of the 20th century. Interesting article on the subject here: http://realitystudio.org/scholarship/rid...a-express/

To mention some uses of the cut-up technique I've found especially neat, apart from distracted amusement- is the composition of 'modulative' passages - like the classic composers would do in their sonatas - play out contrasting themes against each other and let them modulate into something new... Burroughs perfected this approach in Nova Express.

I also like to paste news bulletins and cut them up- gives me a morbid pleasure. Feels like ramming something sharp through the balloon of propaganda

It all sounds fun Moobs! Thanks for sharing you insights and experience with the technique./Chris

put the url in your sig and stop spaming the site
i'm thinking this might be better in for fun or miscellaneous, we'll see ho it goes, good to see you back.

can you make an iambic engine

i forgot, hi again

And a salute to you

Well, I had a hard time figuring out where to post this- but since this forum seemed like the one most akin to 'general discussion' I thought it'd be apropriate. I think this goes beyond 'fun'- there's a lot of aspects to be discussed, very relevant to writing, I think...

Regarding a iambic engine- tell me what you want it to do, and I'll see what I can come up with... Mind you- what I think you have in mind will probably require some kind of dictionary/database (a computer can't count syllables or determine which are stressed), and while it would be doable, the construction of said database would be very time consuming- so don't get your hopes up...