Experimental Fiction techniques

Experimental Writing 

What is reality?

How is agreed upon?

—cf. superstition, miracles, quantum physics, etc.

How do we represent it? 

Experimental vs. the conventional ways of representing reality and its structures and hierarchies?

What is “fiction”?

How does it work?

What is “reading”?

How is “data” different than fiction?

What if you concentrate on only one element: form, lexicon, etc.

How you can interrogate a text to examine its (and our) assumptions about something?
How can it show how we think? feel? what consciousness is like? 
What a single moment is like? A single human?
How meaning works, how language works?
How does fiction organize experience? reality? the human and non-human?
Whose reality? And how did this fiction get to us? 
Who made it? How? 
Who else is included or excluded from it?


What happens when you throw a spanner in the works?

How can highlighting one element reveal something significant?
What happens when things don't work the "normal way" in fiction"? 
What's revealed?

Andy Warhol: 24 hours of recorded speech

Kenny Goldsmith: everything he did for 24 hours.

Erasure:
Beaulieu: sounds of NY, but also who did the work?
https://www.jean-boite.fr/product/a-a-novel-by-derek-beaulieu

Heart of Darkness: erasing everything but the landscape.

Procedure—Animal Farm in Pig Latin. 

https://issuu.com/ourteeth/docs/animalway_armfay/6

Moby Dick in emojis

Extremes: entire book in 1 second.

Activities.

N+7
http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/

enter text.

Translations

https://translate.google.com/

-translate into several very different languages and then back to English.

Find and replace— with Word processor

-take text. replace all adjectives with “blue” (or another adjective) 

all nouns with “owl” (or another adjective.)

Constraint: lipograms

one syllable words only. Or Christian Bök: Eunoia words

recording of Christian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUNwHmQc9yk

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink

this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,

disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish

hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?

Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,

writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-

ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-

picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I

bitch; I kibitz — griping whilst criticizing dimwits,

sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-

tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.

Pilgrims, digging in shifts, dig till midnight in mining

pits, chipping flint with picks, drilling schist with drills,

striking it rich mining zinc. Irish firms, hiring micks

whilst firing Brits, bring in smiths with mining skills:

kilnwrights grilling brick in brickkilns, millwrights

grinding grist in gristmills. Irish tinsmiths, fiddling

with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin

whirring drillbits. I pitch in, fixing things. I rig this

winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping. I

dig this ditch, filling bins with dirt, piling it high, sift-

ing it, till I find bright prisms twinkling with glitz.

*
http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/07/christian-bok-excerpts-from-eunoia.html

*

Time Moving Backwards

“It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.

When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five