Thursday, March 13, 2014

Cut-up Fold-in Paste-up Atempt

"The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts."
My plunge into poverty happened in an instant. I never saw it coming.

Imagine this was your job: you had to wake up every morning, read and watch what was going on in the world, and then, even if you didn’t actually feel this way — in fact, in spite of the fact that you didn’t feel this way—react with outrage about all of it.
There is nothing journalists and pundits love discussing more than each other, so predictably the launch of the “Explanatory Journalism” site Vox.com has been accompanied by a vapor trail of commentary, ranging from serious analysis of its news-delivery style, to discussions of staff diversity, to snark, envy, and mockery of Matt Yglesias’ hipster suit in the launch video.
Then again, there was no reason to feel particularly vulnerable. Two years ago, I was a political reporter at Politico, and I spent my days covering the back-and-forth of presidential politics. I had access to the White House because of my reporting beat, and I was a regular commentator on MSNBC. My career had been on an upward trajectory for 30 years, and at age 50 I still anticipated a long career.
Increasingly, this is the life of the blogger. Despite all the attention and traffic of Upworthy gets for being “positive” these days, outrage and indignation are and always will be pageview magnets. “Outrage porn,” as we’ve come to call it, checks all the boxes of compelling content—it’s high valence, it drives comments, it assuages the ego, projects guilt onto a scapegoat and looks good in your Facebook Feed.
There are indeed many interesting angles here, both serious and snarky. But maybe the most interesting of all is the trend of young and young-ish liberal journalists abandoning posts at legacy mainstream media institutions to go run their own sites. That trend is the reverse of the career pattern most of these journalists began with.
Sources making the cut - The Atlantic, Beta Beat and The Federalist

13 comments:

ricpic said...

Politico has reporters? Ha ha ha ha ha...

"And in today's lead story the evil meany Republicans once again blocked the path to paradise mapped out by our idealistic Left and for no discernible reason that this reporter can discern other than sheer orneriness."

Chip Ahoy said...

I got no problem with schizophrenia. Yes I do.

I heard a tap on the door from a distant land, and then the rap become insistent, nearer, that's the metal rapper now, nobody uses that. That is my door, that rap is for me! I awoke in a snap from a deep sleep ordered my legs to work, to carry me to the door, never mind the underwear thing, they'll appreciate speed more than pants. And that's how I got laughed at laughed straight at first thing today, and those guys are supposed to be professional.

Icepick said...

Do a mash up of Andrew Sullivan on politics from 2002 and from 2012.

Icepick said...

Also, Holy Shit, I'm in the sidebar! I'd better add new content.

deborah said...

Grats Icepick!

May I suggest a series on Mr. Icepick's Neighborhood? No? Slinks away......

deborah said...

Lem, did you do that cut-up?

deborah said...

OIC by the title you did. Great job, really :)

Interesting idea, it's just one step further from what most bloggers do already. Cheaty, cheeky, and plagiaristic.

Icepick said...

Deborah, I should probably be quiet about the one set of neighbors. Don't interfere with your enemies when they are fucking up, and they've accrued $2,500 in fines from the county in the last month, he has lost his public defender on his felony case for an unknown conflict of interest, the company that holds the mortgage on their house has started foreclosure proceedings, etc. OTOH, they got at least one of their damned dogs back, which they immediately set loose in the neighborhood and left it unattended for 24 hours. I'm pretty sure the power has been shut off again and they're using the house to warehouse dogs while they crash somewhere. Oh, they also bought a boat. Unfuckingbelievable!

Next time they let a dog run loose, though, I call animal services again and they will start racking up more fines. The only reason I didn't last weekend was because I just couldn't believe it and wanted to talk to animal services first. Turns out that you can have dangerous dogs with a history of violence against people and thousands in unpaid fines and still get the dogs back. Florida, the rules are different here.

deborah said...

If you could swing it without anyone seeing you do it, I'd get a dog crate, trap the dog, drive three counties away and drop it at the dog pound.

Icepick said...

The male is unstable, violent, and under pressure. (He is facing a minimum of five years in prison for a hit & run because of prior felony convictions.) And he is fixated on me. We have a nice reciprocal hate arrangement. If something bad happens he blames me for it. When his dogs got confiscated fir biting someone I don't know, he blamed me for it. So I'm going to lie low while they self destruct.

You see, sometimes I can predict the future. I'll spare you details. It isn't anything mystical, it's just my mind making projections. Sometimes I just know what's going to happen and it does. I've learned to trust It when I get a feeling of certainty. And this idiot next door is going to get someone killed some day. There's a good chance it will be himself that he kills, and then next family. But I'm going to steer clear of him if possible, so it isn't me. In a month or two they're going to be gone, with a good chance he's a butt burglar in Raiford. I just need to exercise a little restraint.

deborah said...

Damn, Ice, I recall a while back you said you tried to stay on his good side...I see it didn't work. Glad he'll be gone.

What you said about predicting the future reminds me of one my fave movie lines ever, though from an average movie, 'Bandits.' Billy Bob Thornton plays opposite Bruce Willis. They have a crime planned and Willis brings his girlfriend in on the plan. Billy Bob says, 'You know the problem with being this intelligent? You know what's gonna happen. There's no suspense.'

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Lem, did you do that cut-up?

I cut and pasted yes, from the different columns trying to see if some sort of coherent narrative could emerge.

deborah said...

Well, it worked.

From the wiki article:

"Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."[2] Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form.

lol too cool.