Friday, September 9
More on process
So two more things have been floating through my writers brain the past week or 10 days that are clearly shaping the novel that's taking place in my gray matter.
1: Sampling. Hip-hop and rap artists have been sampling others' work for 25 years now, borrowing (taking? stealing? looting?) beats and rythmns and what not for their music. A few months back, I read a review of video artists who are now sampling and recombining elements from movies into new works of art (for example, one couple when through 60 years of Hollywood films about Las Vegas or with Las Vegas settings and then recompiled or recut scenes in dozens of new ways to create a work of art).
So why not do that with novels? Sure, it's plagerism, but it's also an accepted process of art in other mediums (collage, music, film/video, etc.). So why not fiction? Why not collect or steal or sample bits and pieces of current nonfiction (or, for that matter, fiction) and sort and resort and run it through the novelists blender of a brain and come up with something new?
Why not indeed. So I've been pondering this, wondering if I could make it work while collecting for the past weeks potentially "sampled" text to use. And something interesting is happening. Something I will pursue.
2. We watched a film -- Kitchen Stories -- about Swedish efficiency experts studing the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers, a quiet, touching look at solo male relationships. Which made me start thinking about solo guys -- perhaps in conjunction with the timing of the release of the Steve Carrell vehicle The 40 Year Old Virgin -- and for some reason the image of a middle-age suburban corporate bachelor sprung to mind.
I thought about him for several days and he slowly became someone who had love as a young man but then lost it and slowly settled into a very happy (he thinks) life as a creatue of routine, giving up much of what most of us think is important to a happy, healthy, well-rounded life in exchange for a clean, simple, almost zenlike monk's life (in 21st century America, of course, most likely a resident of my fictional town, Utopia, Colorado (the eventual setting of all my novels, when I get around to rewriting/fixing them). But then the world crashes in around him in the guise of a potential lover who would have to have a very messynormal personal life, etc. etc. Stick these two people into the same chapter and I guess I'll see what happens.
So I see these two things -- sampling, happy bachelors -- working together some how.
And then, of course, Katrina hit and depressesd the hell out of me, on a karmic level, just like the big funk I sunk into after 9/11 from all the death and destruction, but doubly pissed by the government's lack of a response and doubleNEWspeak media relations. And I woke up again. And so we write. We must write to survive.
1: Sampling. Hip-hop and rap artists have been sampling others' work for 25 years now, borrowing (taking? stealing? looting?) beats and rythmns and what not for their music. A few months back, I read a review of video artists who are now sampling and recombining elements from movies into new works of art (for example, one couple when through 60 years of Hollywood films about Las Vegas or with Las Vegas settings and then recompiled or recut scenes in dozens of new ways to create a work of art).
So why not do that with novels? Sure, it's plagerism, but it's also an accepted process of art in other mediums (collage, music, film/video, etc.). So why not fiction? Why not collect or steal or sample bits and pieces of current nonfiction (or, for that matter, fiction) and sort and resort and run it through the novelists blender of a brain and come up with something new?
Why not indeed. So I've been pondering this, wondering if I could make it work while collecting for the past weeks potentially "sampled" text to use. And something interesting is happening. Something I will pursue.
2. We watched a film -- Kitchen Stories -- about Swedish efficiency experts studing the kitchen habits of Norwegian bachelor farmers, a quiet, touching look at solo male relationships. Which made me start thinking about solo guys -- perhaps in conjunction with the timing of the release of the Steve Carrell vehicle The 40 Year Old Virgin -- and for some reason the image of a middle-age suburban corporate bachelor sprung to mind.
I thought about him for several days and he slowly became someone who had love as a young man but then lost it and slowly settled into a very happy (he thinks) life as a creatue of routine, giving up much of what most of us think is important to a happy, healthy, well-rounded life in exchange for a clean, simple, almost zenlike monk's life (in 21st century America, of course, most likely a resident of my fictional town, Utopia, Colorado (the eventual setting of all my novels, when I get around to rewriting/fixing them). But then the world crashes in around him in the guise of a potential lover who would have to have a very messynormal personal life, etc. etc. Stick these two people into the same chapter and I guess I'll see what happens.
So I see these two things -- sampling, happy bachelors -- working together some how.
And then, of course, Katrina hit and depressesd the hell out of me, on a karmic level, just like the big funk I sunk into after 9/11 from all the death and destruction, but doubly pissed by the government's lack of a response and doubleNEWspeak media relations. And I woke up again. And so we write. We must write to survive.
