The Father of beatnik, William Burroughs, devised a technique by which one's writing may be cleansed of its cultural and semantic bias. This technique has since been known as The Cut-Up. As Burroughs himself commented:

All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read, heard, overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound to kinesthetic.

- link to more Burroughs quotes on the Cut-up Technique

Today I found myself gripped by the urge to do cut-up, and so, using a couple of automatic cut-up generators I found on the internet (Non-Linear Adding Machine & The Lazarus Text-Mixing Desk), I began to experiment.

Taking a chunk of text I have been working on (for a young-adult novel) and editing the disjointed cut-up into a more manageable form I acheived these results. Ready your brain box:

What each eyelid felt like. Its weight, activities and goings on of the human; this forgotten realm, would be the new decomposition, a gigantic hoard of what faint echoes of the air, as it carried through to the lofts of the facility. It was a tiny, animated figure; iridescent lava flows smouldered up and finally let the door close itself.

“Of course ape-boy! Isn’t this the cube-shaped asylum?”, He laughed so at Max’s mandrill on earth.

Max gripped hold of each spine from the back of the bubble with little courtesy.

“I can’t see I have existed except for the fact of the stream of a comet or the Earth’s gaping mantle, sending light of the facility out there. The only window in your worries. But before I begin I place a series of words instead of bars outside of the cage.” said Max, entranced to make sure no one was coming.

Seen in the night sky, a grey stripe, right to his bright purple hooded companion had arrived in the quiet cage before him. It was the labyrinth that was his home. Ironically in fear of falling, spread up from the apes; devolving in form from one to one. A detailed story waiting to be heard, to see vegetables as he did right now. Watching him scratch his fur and force again on blinking his eyes as the voice of baboons, the majority little ape-boy... In the cave Max had decided to name the steel lining of his life. New forms which bound Max a tiny handful of what looked like nuts. Who took on such a simple action as this? Why would a deep echo of terror be heard, windy by the breakfast news? Inside and through the malign facility...

On the walls around him, the outside world may never dust from his clothes. Ahead of him surely? In his tiny bedroom the tone erupted, crawled forward on their bellies. Max had power they had over one’s supermarket he gave them all names. There was all its long corridors in this genus, a wild some 20 years lodged deep into the curve of his father. Gone was the grey without a flash bulb as standard... Earth would heal and life would crawl and shivered ever so slightly. Legs, and not a dash of colour anywhere, marched behind him, doing a funny kind of arc...

For the last few months whenever welcoming, perhaps, his head would feel his way back from the out, from the stories of war circling now; raising their hands in centre of so much attention, and so in the same place as Max moving off. It peaked for a few one of these passageways, Max’s dared atmosphere. The brow of the impact became the memory of Max’s dreams. He needed to think? Surely it wasn’t so with the planet Earth.

Below Max, and in women, who knows where they had, wished himself to a more alien issued digital camera which came around lunchtime on Sunday.

Partially successful?

I love these images in particular:

• Isn’t this the cube-shaped asylum?

• The only window in your worries. But before I begin I place a series of words instead of bars outside of the cage.

• On the walls around him, the outside world may never dust from his clothes.

• The brow of the impact became the memory of Max’s dreams. He needed to think? Surely it wasn’t so with the planet Earth.

Try it yourself at the links above and please feel free to come and share the results here or in The Forum...

And remember Language is a Virus...

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