Graham Holliday's Blog, page 9
January 26, 2015
cut ups part 8
This is the last in a series of three “stories” I made using the William Burroughs Cut-Up technique to combine a passage from my book Eating Việt Nam — Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table with a passage from The Quiet American by Graham Greene. His life lurked under the gutters of coconut. Thoughts came from eight […]
cut ups part 7
This is the second in a series of three “stories” I made using the William Burroughs Cut-Up technique to combine a passage from my book Eating Việt Nam — Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table with a passage from The Quiet American by Graham Greene. This is the only “story” of the three that I assembled at […]
January 23, 2015
cut ups part 6
For part 6 of the cut ups series, which coincides with #NationalHandwritingDay, I decided to jot down the first line of everything I could find on my desk; books, notebooks, newspapers, twitter, pieces of paper, contracts etc. that was written in English. Here’s what I got, Maces Spring, Virginia, home of the Carter Family, circle […]
cut ups part 5
From a 2013 interview with Donna Tartt about her novel The Goldfinch on Salon.com. She uses cut ups, You’ve got some bravura passages in this book depicting post-traumatic disorientation. The first is Theo’s experience in the Metropolitan Museum of Art after the terrorist bombing and the second, which I won’t describe because it happens much […]
cut ups part 4
Another way of cutting up the present, after cutting up Twitter, is to cut up Instagram. Take ten words from a current news story: The former head of MI6, Sir John Sawers, has called for a new surveillance compact between internet companies and the security services in the UK and US in the wake of […]
January 22, 2015
cut ups part 3
Many musicians have used Burroughs’ cut-up techniques to make music and write lyrics; Iggy Pop, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Brian Eno and Bauhaus among others. Possibly as a result, much of the lyrical output of these bands sometimes appears pretentious and impenetrable. Bauhaus, and others, would often defend their lyrics along the […]
blow up
Get the structure wrong and you blow up shortly after takeoff. Get it right and you save yourself an aborted manuscript and months and months of wasted writing. Make your structure original and you may end up with a novel that looks unlike any other. link David Mitchell on writing in The Paris Review.
January 20, 2015
cut ups part 2
This is an experiment to adapt the cut-up techniques of writing, first developed by the DaDaists, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, to the modern day. Burroughs thought that “language is a virus from outer space”. That it was a means of control. And that, by cutting up text, you disrupt the structure of language, break […]
cut ups part 1
I made this using the William Burroughs Cut-Up technique. I combined a passage from my book Eating Việt Nam — Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table with a passage from The Quiet American by Graham Greene. I had run a long way. I was condemned to the chance I envied the least : the homesick wall in the […]
January 17, 2015
by accident
“The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for seventy years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots […]
