Mark C. Newton's Remix Project ::Update:: and ::Spring!::

Wahay, my story's up at Mark Newton's blog, go check it out here!





See, now I'm nervous and fight the urge to find me a big dry rock to crawl under.

Okay, moment passed. I can breathe again.


I think we've got a poltergeist here. Cats roam around, find a corner in an empty room (like the cellar, or the bathroom, far far from where I am) and start mewling. No, mewling doesn't sound like the sound they're making. "Maowing" should do it. So they maow maow at the wall. And just when I think I should go look at what's the matter, they scurry in a flurry through the house, find some high ground where they do a fast paced "The Exorcist" dance, and then they scurryflurry to somewhere else, usually outside. Psychocat, in all the confusion usually ends up on the table, before she realizes that that's the one place cats are not supposed to be in our house. At least when the twoleggers are home/standinrightbesidecha. So see, poltergeist.

Hold on, that can't be right. *snaps fingers* I know what this is! It's: nothing says spring like:

FLEAS!

Oh my lovelies, are we going to have a fun day of Advantage rubbing! And making fun of your punk hairdos. And laugh at your all-wrinkly "ooh this smells baaaaaaaad" faces.

Mark C. Newton's Remix Project

What's it about? Well:
Mark C. Newton offered a story for remixing, look here and here.

Already three remixes are up. I'm done fiddling with mine and I've sent it off. Don't know if all the samples work, but there. Hacked, shaken and stirred. Not polished to perfection, so there will be stupid typos. Always are, aren't there?

So there: find my version in pdf here. Edit: also, Mark posted it on his blog HERE.
You think it works?

So, what did I do, how did I do it?

Naturally, I read the original first. Tried to keep track of the links my mind made up as I read, jotting down a Possible Sample list.
Kipling's Jungle Book was an obvious choice. To make it easy I downloaded a .txt version from Project Gutenberg and scanned through it searching for key words. For some reason my mind also felt the Sex Pistol's No Future was a dead given. Must be Britain, class issues, stuff like that. I googled up the lyrics, because I wouldn't want quotefail while sampling, right? Then again, who knows how right those online lyrics are?
Grabbed my completely read-to-pieces Immortal Poems of the English Language from the shelf, because it's been way too long since I memorized Blake's The Tiger.

I let everything simmer for a few days, then read the original again, this time indicating what words in the original prompted for what samples. Taking note of what I wanted the flow to be, the new rhythm of the story. Checked out those cultural references that don't belong to my ready knowledge. Got some more sample ideas jotted down.

Okay, so now I have the annotated original, and a file with snippets of samples I might want to use. The samples aren't just text, but also idea samples, because writing is more than just stringing up words. For instance, upon the second read, the image of Baseema's angry father in blue shirt and hands moving about mixed in my head with the Mahakala image I saw some years back in the V&A and remember thinking "scary blue dude".

From the top, I hacked away at the original words, compressing the story into a different rhythm. Sometimes rewriting a word or two, making the text my own. Google at the ready to hunt down some idea sparks for other samples, rejecting or adding as I saw fit. Sampling the new version itself, like self-reference, which is something I just like to do when writing. There's this resonance build-up when you do that. Echoes. I like 'm.

Then the first draft was done. I didn't change much after that, just tightened up some prose in the corners, added some more (new) samples. I could probably go on, adding, revising. But I'm going to end here, and refrain from further polishing, because I've got books to read and other stories to write.

I think it works, hope it works if you're not me. Not sure whether the Kipling samples, being ye Olde English, blend in well enough. I thought about adapting them to modern English, but feared the samples might get lost that way, and that would defeat the purpose of sampling, since, well, covering Madonna and using my own version as sample in a song just isn't the same as sampling Madonna. Though, I did adapt samples to fit tense or a sentence's subject, but somehow that felt less intrusive, because that's just speeding up the sample to fit my beat. Hmmm. Who knows?

Ideas I threw in, apart from Mahakala:

• a reference to the deer of the Three Senseless Creatures in Buddhism, representing love sickness
• red ballerinas, yellow brick road. If something needs fixing, you need to see the wizard. Or witch, in this case. It just unrolled like that when they stepped off the bus and I could see the blind strip twisting into the suburbs. I'm not even sure if blind strips exist in London outside the city. But hey, we writers make shit up.
  
• apparently there was a movie made in 1997, title of Chudail. Which I didn't see, but there. Couldn't help it.
  

Nothing says spring like

A LADYBUG!

First draft of the Remix Project done. Getting colder again outside, so I just as well might use the afternoon to finish it instead of gardening.

Angina Irretis (or Interretis?)

Online presence is good, right? You're there, airing opinions, being Someone. Though I must confess seeing how there's no comments, followers, yaddayadda, makes me feel ambivalent.

Then suddenly there's: Train-wrecks! Implosions! and while they are interesting from a voyeuristic viewpoint, the thing I'm seeing hits me with some weird PTS. Because, a long time ago I got into a serious train-wreck. It was emotionally devastating and the worst part was: those idiots were too far away! In a bar I would stomp off in a huff and have them look at my shiny hiney/you can't touch this. I'd pour my beer over their stupid faces, or better yet, steaming hot coffee. Eat this mofos. If necessary I'd kick them in the gonads and give them strife and then some!
But online, you're helpless like that and I don't cope well with helpless. Helpless makes me cry, then the tears make me even more angry and then I cry even harder. Angry snowball of snot and tears. Not pretty.

So back then, I concluded online presence is not good. Don't get me wrong, I met some great people through online life, and funnily, it's hard to stay in touch with them online once they've migrated from an existence as digital blip to real life persons. Also, I have this thing where I have to overcome a great feeling of "bother" to meet up with people in real life. It's not a life-impeding angst or something. Just, *le sigh* such a bother.
Anyways, I want to be a published author, not a columnist. I'm not looking to go out into the street and voice my opinions to strangers. I want to sit at home, with a safe distance between me and the strangers, and write my shit. That's all. Strangers are scary. Unlike people I know, and people I think up, I don't know how they'll react. They're scarily ... strange and alien like that and very exhausting.

I had some point I was going to figure out while I poked at it, about how if you're the center of flame it is more intimate and personal than being paraded through the streets in peck and feathers. It's so in your face, all over your little window into digiworld like a firewall. And the only thing you can do to stop it, is pull the plug, put the computer to sleep. Which is sort of like poking your eyes out because some discussion derailed into the flames of hell, which is kinda overkill.

But I think instead I'm going to finish the Remix Project first draft and do real life stuff, like cleaning and groceries.

In it for the money, or in it for the art?

Interesting article by Ursula Le Guin over at the Book View Cafe on the Axolotl Roadkill/Strobo incident of last month. I'm not sure which blog directed me to the New York Times article at the time, but seeing how little heated debate it has actually generated, except for articles that nearly dismiss the issues at hand (here and here for instance) in a sort of been there, done that tone. And I guess, if you look at the Axolotl Roadkill/Strobo incident from the plagiarism angle, it is just that clear and cut (hammer/nail anyone?). That's why I found it refreshing to see one of the real issues pointed out by Le Guin: literature is not information.

I've added my fist full of euros in the comments section. I swear it was just going to be two cents, but then I stumbled across the differences between the industries that are compared, and got sidetracked. I decided the main difference is the money involved, in the business end as well as the legal end of the matter. Can we trust the suits to defend our artistic value? Do we need to? Are we in this for the money or for the art?

While there are legal limits to what is and is not plagiarism in most countries, I remain by my conclusion that it is up to the writing community itself to come to a code of conduct.

But, the whole nature of the publishing business (i.e. copying your manuscript) adds another layer to the issue, I realized. Does "not complaining" about the violation equal you giving your copyright away? Would a publisher urge you to defend your copyright, or even do it for you, if your sales have been miserable and the media storm helps them sell copy? What if, after let's say the two years stipulated in the contract, the copyright is about to revert back to you? Would you be able to sue the publisher for devaluating your work? Hmm, let's find someone who can answer those questions...

Other news: yesterday the reading I've been doing this week has paid off, though you'd think tearing through a cyberpunk novel or two would urge me towards my own cyberpunk WIP. Ha! The cow-watching part of my mind moves in mysterious way. I'm itching to continue the work, but for now I'm gonna give Newton's Remix Project story another look and see what Cow Watch has done with the first two iterations.