http://languageisavirus.com/cutupmachine.html
Cut up some random William Everson The Veritable Years, The Noel Coward Diaries, David Metzler's No Eyes Lester Young and some stuff from Coleridge's Complete Poetical Works (Variorum Text) and got this:
QUOTE
shed Lo! cease adrift light historic flash a hasty strife that means sex a liquid should of stage night the I again Sage as back wondrous presses Lo! and soft a Patriot debut outside debut soul universe thy smoke battle subtly a God found the of shepherds presses & man Another made wondrous dawns farther in up flash of inner onwards drained should went Priestly flash week has found eyes should my a of eyes for night the week inner stage this flash lowly Hall a home battle out their dig a strife battle you strife all you sunrise of surging wondrous elate in as of as has elixirs up Carnegie make that your why
UNQUOTE
Ofcourse, Burroughs kept on cutting up until he found the truth. He edited intesively. I would keep the following out of the above "adrift light historic flash.....strife that means sex a liquid.....battle subtly a god.....surging wondrous elate......Another made wondrous dawns.....Carnegie make that your why"
If I didn't have wife and kids, I would be tempted to follow Burroughs. Not with H, but with the voodoo word magic, continue the experiments and the dynamic sorcery of The Western Lands. Its strange how once you start using cut ups you enter the multi-god, deviant sex kick universe of Burroughs. It comes with the territory.
I thought you might get a kick out of that site. I use to get altered and spend countless hours writing, then using the generator, and then editing it while I was getting my degree. It leads to some pretty interesting discoveries.
Last edited by Prof Kelp (2009-11-06 17:43:32)
No, never read The Diceman, doesn't seem to fit in with the Beat aesthetic. Similar to Scarlet Street, I have experimented with cut ups, but at the time the vibes were all wrong and the results meaningless, couldn't cut into the demon word hord or spirit universe. Now I have an humunculus as an ally, things may be quite different.
Maybe start with "Junkie"?
Or Queer, there the two that stick to regular structure.
I started with Cities of the Red Night because it's what I found at the used book store. It has a bit of a narrative but if you want or need traditional resolution, don't bother. Junky or Queer are good places to start. I would recommend "Interzone" over both, however. It has straight narrative stories plus longer routines. I think it allows someone to get a feel for what they are getting themselves in to. AF is right, plenty of people claim to read Burroughs but never really do. I've found that the more I read and reread his work, the more I get lost in his world. You start to understand things that you didn't see or didn't get the first time around. It also helps to read his essays and interviews.l