posted
I'd like to reintroduce a game I remember playing here. I was rereading The Sun Also Rises this week, and thought of how fun it could be.
It's been a few years since we've played this one, so I'll restate some basic ground rules. Quote a passage (paraphrasing from memory is acceptable), and the next person has to write a passage similar to that one, but in the voice of another author. Your rewrite can be parody, or you can play it straight. Then supply another passage, and the next person can do a rewrite of that one. Name the author of the original passage, and footnote your passage with the name of your new author voice, so that people can see if they agree with your take. Also note (paraphrase) or (exact quote). Multiple takes are allowed, but don't get too bent out of shape if you don't agree with the original version- you're free to write your own version, but don't ignore the latest passage that has been posted. Somebody is waiting for that one to get a rewrite.
Feel free to futz with the details and change things up to fit the genre of your favorite author. Setting and characters can change, as long as the sense of the passage is intact. The idea is to imagine two writers trying to evoke the same idea: how would they do that?
I'll supply a relatively known one to get us started:
"I had two dreams recently, both had my Father in them. It's perculiar, because I'm older than he ever was by 20 years, so in a sense, I'm looking back on a younger man. The first one I don't remember too well: I was supposed to meet him in town somewhere, and he gave me some money. I think I lost it.
The second one, it was like we was both back in older times, going through this pass on horseback of a night. Going through this pass in the mountains. It was dark up ahead, and there was snow on the ground,, and he rode past me. Never said nothing going by, just rode on past. He had his blanked wrapped around him, and his head down. And as he rode past I seen he was carrying fire, in a horn the way that people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it, about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead; that he was fixing to make a fire somewhere, in all that dark, and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he would be there. And then I woke up"
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Paraphrased)
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
-Go back and try it again. Go back and try it again. +OK, OK. Here it goes:
"It was an accomplishment. He felt renewed. Discharged. If it weren't for the smell, he might even go as far as to say that he was aroused. Ready to raise a cheek, wipe and lift off, then back to real life, the one happening on the other side of the white door, beyond the perfectly hung towels and the oval mirror with a small spatter of toothpaste; and so pulling a foot or two of tissue from the golden fixture, crushing it up into a finger protecting knot, he executed a well-practiced but tentative swab and, based upon the preliminary readings, followed up with a terminal, back to front wipe, the result of which he promptly dropped into the bowl as he rose from its cool surface to examine, as we all do, his amazing turd.
Woven into the long brown coil was what appeared to be a ring of white onion. He hesitated before flushing.
--I always feel like farting at this point...
++Wait, wait..."He hesitated before flushing and watched the loose end of the onion ring sway in the current..."
--...but it burns too much.
++"...So flushing he was sure he saw it wriggle."
-- Stop. Wait. I've heard this one before, the worm in his guts, the egg laying, the uncertainty.
++ You've got to get the head or it never stops.
-- Fruit of the loom!
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country, No Men (excerpt)
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I don't understand deerpark's comment. What do the "+" and "-" signs in his comment mean? Who is the supposed author of his paraphrase?
Posts: 676 | Registered: Feb 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
So you're coming up with your own passage for the rewrite--not just finding a similar passage from another author?
Posts: 5957 | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I understood the rules to mean you first rewrite the passage as another author, *then* supply a passage from a more different author who will then be the next rewrite.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Somewhere, if you stared in between the drooping heads of the sunflowers there should have been a darkness, an empty place, to fill with sorrow. Instead it was all calico, curlicues, all turning slowly towards the left, dancing.
"The work's pathos lies in the gesture of the hand lighting the torch, while its success resides in the depths of the shadows into which the mourning figure withdraws from the ending of the light. Its sorrow, the long gaze which precedes the failing light, its joy the flickering glow on walls which are closing."
(Beethoven, L., Opus 131, trans. anonymous)
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I really want to play this game I just can't do it from work. I'll try to take a turn in the next 48 hours. I miss the games here.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
Thirty feet up an escarpment at the crux a climber noticed how ten feet of rope looped down and hung sickeningly from his harness: meanwhile below one earbud dangling down tickled the neck of the boy on belay, who failed to pick up the slack, tapping his foot to accompany that noise in his ear: one false move ahead of Dad.
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Not because she said you were a treehouse and to get inside you had to climb the flimsiest of wooden rungs nailed, nailed, and re-nailed in the trunk or that your walls were mainly windows in a plywood mosaic, but because you stayed there overnight alone, when everybody said they'd come-- as if a life depended on it, or a life depended on a life depending on it, as it did.
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
deer park is very annoying. despite having his own thread, he continues to spam this one. i am actually interested to, see this game played for real. it sounds interesting. anyone care to, take a turn?
Posts: 87 | Registered: Dec 2011
| IP: Logged |
posted
Deerpark: Orincoro started this thread with a pretty clear purpose and you are flouncing around in it. Please respect Orincoro's wishes, and either participate in the game legitimately, comment on the game as it progresses, or post your poetry in another thread that isn't dedicated to a game.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:"I had two dreams recently, both had my Father in them. It's perculiar, because I'm older than he ever was by 20 years, so in a sense, I'm looking back on a younger man. The first one I don't remember too well: I was supposed to meet him in town somewhere, and he gave me some money. I think I lost it.
The second one, it was like we was both back in older times, going through this pass on horseback of a night. Going through this pass in the mountains. It was dark up ahead, and there was snow on the ground,, and he rode past me. Never said nothing going by, just rode on past. He had his blanked wrapped around him, and his head down. And as he rode past I seen he was carrying fire, in a horn the way that people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it, about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead; that he was fixing to make a fire somewhere, in all that dark, and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he would be there. And then I woke up"
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Paraphrased)
quote:Dreamscapes, shaped by forces unknown, unaccounted for; swirling down into the heated floorboards as his head swung up against the breaking of the light. Father – pinned into consciousness by some oft-known and oft-forgot childhood idyll, framed by music of thought in a dusty town painted the color of old-pesos and dried chalk from the cases of salon-girls come-up from South.
Passing on now, into the evening blackened peaks just North of the Rio, opening and closing gaps more ethereal than imagined from back home – cold from the open drifts trenched open by forces long ascribed to man’s dream for conquest now realized as a desperate cries from failing tycoons well East of here. Father pushing on past, gone down against the fading of the light, pushing on along the edges of his consciousness opening to mysteries long sealed up. And when he arrives, always Father there bringing light when all he wanted was to embrace the dark.
--In the voice of: Thomas Pynchon
It sounds like you thought the next passage could or even should be from a different author. Too bad:
quote: A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city....
posted
Behold, a worm. It was in the peanuts this time, but still provocative. It was as if it were on TV, the way they squirmed in the broken shell, a documentary about contagion. The raven, which I expected might resolve the puzzle, had been shot dead--by a man in a jacuzzi off the back of a trailer home about 60 miles north of Thunder Bay. "They peck the eyes out of the calves," muttered the cowboy, reloading. Regardless, the nest is rebuilt, in spite of it all.
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
deerpark: I've asked you to stop, and you have not responded, yet keep posting here. If you continue to do so, I'll be looking at disciplinary measures.
Posts: 1194 | Registered: Jun 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
You have. You have indeed. I have failed to respond in a direct, polite, or conventionally respectful fashion. I have one question left: if a thread, like this one, is more or less 'dead', is it still breaking rules to lay something on its grave?
Posts: 1154 | Registered: Dec 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
To that I would say, not for the most part, But if I may, when looking from the start, This thread found death at your careless fingers, And still freshly dead yet, it's rot still lingers. So when one's murderer comes bearing flowers, Be it for the grave, yet it provokes glowers. So away with you now, let that suit your fancy, And please do not dabble in thread necromancy.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[The Wave]](graemlins/thewave.gif)
.
