Cut-Up

In class last Wednesday, we made "cut-ups", which are basically pieces of text that are chopped up and rearranged. I've never really heard of doing this before this class, so it seemed pretty weird to me to be doing this. There are different ways you can "cut-up" a piece of text, I tried a couple. The first time, I folded a paper I wrote up into quarters and cut along the folds and then rearranged the quarters. No matter how I arranged the pieces, the new text made absolutely no sense, so I tried this same technique with a different piece of text (a page from the book Parrot in the Oven). This made even less sense than the first attempt. So finally, I decided to try cutting up a page from the book in a different way, I cut each paragraph out and just rearranged them, that way seemed to flow much better and wasn't completely crazy sounding.

Here's an example of the use of the "quartering method" (a page from Parrot in the Oven):

"Magda and Pedi wen see anything so won-site sides of the couch, lying on the
couch. And of the blanket against ut the whole room: the was fanned
out on a pily cherub angels on the her as she lay there, hehe glass-top coffee
table, line of black mascara leaming in the sunlight one eye. I went over
any mother spent so much fled and turned her faceping together, and what then I
sat down och energy tearing apart. And watched them. I like a place
I was meant there's no way of explain that I had come back to or wanted to, but
I knew being away. My home. and the bright walls of as closing in
around me, re lying asleep, on oppo-me, that I'd never again each crunching
their enddrous as my two sisters their chest. Magda's hair it wasn't just
them, below, unteased. I watched squiggly TV, the lump mouth half open, a
thin frame of the painting, taking from the corner of my mother's animals, wiped
it, and she snuf-This room was what me away. energy cleaning and keen
Dad's cushioned chair my father spent so much won't say why, because and it was
wondrous, I why, even if I could to be. A place, I felt as my eyes got
drowsy after a long journey of the room glowed around the light in the room"