This link has been bookmarked by 2 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jul 2007, by Ole C Brudvik.
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30 Jul 07
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Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can't we writers have some fun as well?
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With this in mind, we could use Richie Hawtin's CD as the template for a novel. We need to create 38 stories, which then blend into each other using the CD's diagram as a guide. As one story comes to an end, another story, or two other stories, are mixed into it. These new stories are then carried on, until further stories are added to the mix.
Hawtin will return to the same record twice, or to a different remix of the record; we can use this technique to allow our various stories to reappear at different places in the narrative. The special effects and the drum machine elements can be interpreted in their own ways, according to the individual imagination. There are no rules, only opportunities. Above all, imagine the pleasure gained from following the various stories through the mix.
This gives just one possible structure for a post-futurist novel. I now want to talk a little about the language that such a novel could use. We have become very adept in this country, at writing "books". By this, I mean that we tend to concentrate on the big picture, rather than the interplay of words.
Looked at in a different light, however, words become a liquid medium, a malleable substance capable of being transformed in surprising ways. Words can be stretched, broken, melted, drugged, mutated, forced into submission, set free. We need writers who revel in the wild excitement of language, at this deepest level, creating a kind of dub fiction. -
Hip-hop DJs have a phrase to describe the detailed, moment to moment controlling of a set of turntables, celebrated in the classic early track by Gang Starr, "DJ Premier in Deep Concentration". The post-futurist novel will employ just such a concentration in its use of language.
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