Poster Boy's gargoyle posters

The arrest of "New York's Banksy", Poster Boy, by the NYPD for his razor-assisted anti-consumerist subway poster art can be seen as a subtle play on the theme of authority chasing down those who violate copyright for artistic purpose. What interests me about Poster Boy's work is the fact that he uses a razor, that analog tool for splicing audio tape, on digitally produced images. By doing so, Poster Boy's art is not just a variation on the Burroughs cut-up theme, but actually a form of mashup. The Guardian's Ed Pilkington picks up on this as well:

Poster Boy has taken the reliance on razor blades inherent in scratchiti and put it to much more sophisticated and intriguing use. He realised that the film and product adverts at subway stations are now made with self-adhesive backing, rendering them giant stickers, which can be cut up into bits and remodelled in an echo of a digital mash-up.

There is one work from Poster Boy in particular that I think illustrates that Poster Boy's work is more closely akin to mashup than cut-up.

The pixelated version of the poster above can be construed as the fractured digital image, the point at which the flow of binary data breaks up and allows another flow of data to enter in, thereby "gargoyling" the text. In this piece of work, Poster Boy has merely pixelated the image without inserting an alien data stream, thereby foregrounding the essential digital manipulation behind his analog razor. When the two alien data streams are brought together with artistic intention, the mashup rather than the "corrupted file" occurs with the result that social comment is made in a fresh, razor-edged way.

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mashed sauces

For more Poster Boy click here.

The New York Times also finds the mashup in Poster Boy's art.

Queequeg the Ethiop

Now Ishmael read that an angel of the Lord had said to Philip, "Go to the desert road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." The looming of the spirit moved within Ishmael, that having no money or much to interest him on shore, he should quietly take to a ship and quit pausing before coffin warehouses.

So Ishmael started out, leaving the city of old Manhatto for New Bedford. On arriving at the Spouter-Inn, he found Queequeg, a native of an island far away on which his father was king. "Here then is Philip's Ethiopian eunuch," Ishmael thought.

Like the eunuch who had gone to Jerusalem to worship, Queequeg had just returned from the chapel, and was sitting on a chariot bench before the fire, with his feet on the stove hearth.

On his lap, a large book lay. He was counting the pages with deliberate regularity; and at every fiftieth page, stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and giving utterance to a long-drawn gurgling whistle of astonishment.

Ishmael then began to be sensible to a strange feeling of being mysteriously drawn towards him. No more were his splintered heart and maddened hand turned against the wolfish world. Rather, they became the very magnets that drew him to a man who would have repelled most others. Ishmael then recognised the spirit's urge to him to sit close by Queequeg and stay there. He thought, "I'll try this pagan friend, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy."

With much interest, Ishmael sat, closely scanning him. Through all his unearthly tattooings, Ishmael thought he saw the traces of a simple honest heart. Queequeg, meanwhile, never troubled himself with so much as a single glance at Ishmael; but appeared wholly occupied with counting the pages of the book.

Ishmael then noticed that Queequeg had stopped with this action in the middle of the book of Isaiah the prophet. Ishmael drew his bench near him. "Do you understand what you are reading?" Ishmael asked.

"How can I," he said, "unless someone reads it to me?" So he invited Ishmael to come and sit with him. Ishmael picked up the book at where Queequeg had left it open and began reading this passage of Scripture: "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his descendants? For his life was taken from the earth."

Queequeg asked Ishmael, "Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" So Ishmael endeavored to explain to him, from this scripture and the few pictures that were in the book, the good news about Jesus. Whereupon Queequeg told Ishmael that he had been actuated to leave his native land by a profound desire to learn among the Christians. So struck by his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain of a whaling ship put the fine young cannibal down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him.

As they sailed along, Queequeg said to the captain, "Look, here is water all around us. Why shouldn't I be baptized?" So the captain gave orders to stop the ship. Then both the captain and Queequeg were lowered in a whaling boat whereupon the captain, acting as chaplain, baptized him in the sea.

But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; more so, than all his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbour; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave his Christianity up for lost. Thought he, "It's a wicked world in all meridians; I'll die a pagan."

"And thus, as an old idolator at heart, I have lived among these Christians, wearing their clothes, and trying to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about me."

Once Queequeg had finished his tale, Ishmael proposed a social smoke. Producing his pouch and tomahawk, Queequeg quietly offered him a puff. And then they sat exchanging puffs between us.

By hints, Ishmael asked Queequeg whether he did not propose going back to native island. He answered no, not yet; and added that he was fearful Christianity, or rather Christians, had unfitted him for a return. But by and by, he said, he would return, as soon as he felt himself baptized out of it again. For the nonce, however, he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre now.

When their pipe had finished, Ishmael said, "Here is a jug of water. Why not be baptised out of it now?" Then both Ishmael and Queequeg went down into the inn's kitchen where Ishmael doused Queequeg with the jug of water. When Queequeg had wiped the water from his eyes, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Ishmael away, and Queequeg did not see him again, but spent the night rejoicing. Ishmael, however, appeared at Sag Harbour and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached San Francisco.

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mashed sauces

Samples from the opening chapters of Moby Dick provide the setting for this gargoyle.

The conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch occurs in Acts 8:26-40.

literary mashups: gargoyles/carved stone grotesques

I now have a name for my literary mashups: gargoyles. David Barnett writes in a Guardian opinion piece entitled "When Shakespeare met Seuss: mashing up literature" the following:

Being a bookish-type, undoubtedly of frail disposition and chary of crowds and vulgarity, you might not be aware of the concept of mash-ups.

Generally, in the strange and frightening world of young people, this involves some enterprising soul taking two popular music records and taking bits from one - normally the vocals - and playing them over bits from another, usually the music.

At a loose end, I started trying the same trick with literature. Not with the texts themselves (think of the gargoyles you'd produce! Ian McEwan's dialogue blended with Thomas Hardy's descriptions … ) but with the titles.

The titles game, however, is merely a pastime comedy act, as the merged book post on Miss Cellania humorously reveals. A few of my favorites include:

"Lorna Dune" - An English farmer, Paul Atreides, falls for the daughter of a notorious rival clan, the Harkonnens, and pursues a career as a giant worm jockey in order to impress her.

"The Remains of the Day of the Jackal" - A formal English butler puts his loyalty to his employer above all else, until he is persuaded to join a plot to assassinate Charles deGaulle.

"The Invisible Man of La Mancha"- Don Quixote discovers a mysterious elixir which renders him invisible. He proceeds to go on a mad rampage of corruption and terror, attacking innocent people in the streets and all the while singing "To fight the Invisible Man!" until he is finally stopped by a windmill.

Hmmmm, I think I might try these out for real. But it's the gargoyles idea that I love. Gargoyles are carved stone grotesques - combinations of animals and people - whose purpose is to spout water from the side of a building, but who also mythically act as guardians of the buildings on which they reside. There is reason in that mythical connection, because the gargoyle's ability to direct a flow of water away from a building in the form of a waterfall protects the building from decay. I guess what I'm getting at is that literature needs its gargoyles to prevent its decay.

Amen, brother

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mashed sauces

Youtube video entitled, "Video explains the world's most important 6-sec drum loop"

nourishing data

Nehemiah & Blake wrote:

"While books will remain a medium of their own, and continue to hold to themselves the mystique they have so generously earned, perhaps it is time for us to throw our many many books, the making of which there is no ending, into the particle generator that is post-modernity and send them spinning round until they smash into each other. When they do, let us then be there to collect the information freed from these collisions and allow our understanding of this ever deepening mystery of creation to be drawn on into new spheres of data for the nourishment of our souls."

shutting up heaven's door

Once upon a time, Iesus began to preach, "Goode men, for Godes luve, repent, leave off youre sinne, for the kingdome of heauen is at hand, hevenriche is now here. But woe vnto you, religious hypocrites; Yee shut vp the kingdom of heauen against robberes and pillagers and quellers of men's lives, against lechers and fornicators and traders who ply men with lies, yet yee neither goe in your selues, and your sinne diminishes hevenriche's joy."

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mashed sauces

The inspiratory source for this mash is a few lines from a piece of Medieval English verse called "Going to Hell" -- "Goode men, for Godes luve, bileveth suche sinne, For at then ende it binimeth hevenriche winne" -- in which the word's "hevenriche" means kingdom of heaven, and "winne", joy. Binimeth might be taken to mean diminish.

The other two sources for this mash are scriptural and come both from Matthew's gospel. I've opted for the 1611 KJV translation, thereby mashing together a medieval English with an early modern English. The verses in question are Matthew 4:17 and Matthew 23:13.

reverent data-mining

Radiohead has decided to "open source" the data to the House of Cards video, allowing anyone, theoretically at least, to mash-up the data, and, once they've messed around with it, use the data to produce their own interpretation.



To mash the words of James Frost with mine, "In a weird way [the mash-up] is a direct reflection of where we are in society. Everything is data."

If everything is data, words are data and writing is data mining. Writing is aggregation. Writing is sifting data and then writing code. Writing is always a mash-up, an aggregation of data remixed. So, "I make no apology for linking my thinking with computer technology."

But what are the consequences of viewing writing as such?

William Gibson's Laney, in his novel Idoru, has a peculiar knack with data-collection architectures. He is an intuitive fisher of patterns of information, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, skimming vast floes of undifferentiated data, looking for "nodal points" he's been trained to recognize. Laney's ability to locate key data in apparently random wastes of incidental information makes him wonder if there might be a larger system, a field of greater perspective that possesses its own nodal points, info-faults that might be followed down to some other kind of truth, another mode of knowing, deep within gray shoals of information. But only if there were someone there to pose the right question.

So, while writing is data-driven in some shape or form, there remains the need for someone, the writer, to ask the right question about what is lying concealed deep beneath the data flow.

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mashed sauces

Paragraph 1, and the James Frost quote are sampled and data-mined from the Guardian article "Is Radiohead the latest band to go open source?" by Sean Dodson.

The "make no apology" quote is a lyric from Faithless's track Reverence on the album of the same name.

The paragraph on William Gibson's Laney is mined directly from the novel and edited for the purposes of this post. Again I make no apology.

random scripture?

On the Guardian books blog, Andrew Gallix ponders Spam Lit and its literary forebears. The 3AM buzzwords blog has reposted the article entitling it Scriptures from the future, a phrase used by spam poet, Ben Myers. Gallix's article is a fascinating piece, not least because of the rich hyperlinks he has left for the reader to follow. Follow them is what I did. As I did, one word, "random" and its essence, "meaninglessness" kept on popping up. Here's a selection:

Disassociated press: "an algorithm for generating text based on another text. It is intended for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage. [...] The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random occurrence in the original text..."

Word salad: "Word salad is a mixture of seemingly meaningful words that together signify nothing." Spammers for instance add "large amounts of random text somewhere in their message" in the hopes of getting through filters.

Markov chain: "An example of a Markov chain is a simple random walk where the state space is a set of vertices of a graph and the transition steps involve moving to any of the neighbors of the current vertex with equal probability (regardless of the history of the walk)."

Spoetry: "Here, perhaps, is the new poetry of the 21st century, a reinvention of language that pushes the cut-up technique of William Burroughs or the randomly generated 'liquid writing' of Jeff Noon's Cobralingus."

Automatic writing/drawing: "In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move 'randomly' across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark-making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control."

Cut-up technique: "The cut-up technique, also known as fishbowling, is an aleatory literary technique or genre in which a text is cut up at random and rearranged to create a new text."

Aleatory literary technique: "Aleatory means "pertaining to luck", and derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice. Aleatoric, indeterminate, or chance art is that which exploits the principle of randomness."

Such randomness has strong connotations to the evolutionary theory of random mutations. Nevertheless, in all the above literary cases, the random element is subsequently exposed to an intense process of editing, i.e., the process of creating something out of "nothing", which brings in the God element. But then again, all the random elements above themselves are instigated by writer/programmer/spammer in question. The random rather is a result of a purposeful, creative energy desiring to see what can be achieved.

The flow thus goes: creator:random state:editor. In some cases creator and editor will be the same person, in others different people. Sometimes it is the creator that sets off the random state, other times the editor. That new things are created via the random state however, is the mystery. The mystery itself is hidden within the text, asking to be sought out, but always hiding in the random state.

cuckoo cut grass

O the cuckoo she's a pretty bird
Like lanes of Queen Anne's lace.
She singeth as she flies
At summer's moving pace.

Beneath the high-builded clouds
Like hedges snowlike strewn,
She bringeth good tidings
Of young-leafed June.

She telleth no lies
For to keep her voice clear:
"Long,long the death
Of the summer drawing near."

Yet the more she singeth cuckoo
Briefer is the breath
For the chestnut flowers
Till their hours of death.

Then the white lilac she sucketh,
Their white flowers exhale.
Their mown stalks are lost and bowed
And like cut grass, lies frail.

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mashed sauces

The two poems in this mash-up come from the Seamus Heaney/Ted Hughes edited Rattle Bag, an anthology of poems arranged in alphabetical order so as to allow the poems to "discover themselves."

The two poems that discovered themselves to me were the anonymous The Cuckoo and Philip Larkin's Cut Grass. Both on the same page, they juxtaposed the euphoric and pessimistic views of summer. Nevertheless, both poems traced a similar vocabulary, diction and rhythm. They were calling out to be made one.

subterranean homesick news

At last weekend's BBC-sponsored Mashed 08 (a festival held at Alexandra Palance that allows hackers to mash data streams for various ends), Team Bob came up with a mash-up in the spirit of the mashed_prophet that mixed live subtitles from BBC News with Bob Dylan's video for Subterranean Homesick Blues "in a little spoof called 'Subterranean Homesick News'".


BBC Dylan - News 24 Revisited (Full Version) from James Adam on Vimeo.

The Guardian may have called the the mashup "pointless but fun", but they're only things with "future application" eyes. The mashed_prophet sees the deeper subversive point as well as the fun.

cut-up vs. mash-up

How is the cut-up form of experimental writing different from the mash-up form? The embed below links to a clip from a documentary on William Burrough's cut-up technique.



The view of William Burroughs was that if the universe was pre-recorded, then the only thing that was not pre-recorded was the pre-recording itself. With his cut-ups, what he was attempting to do was to "tamper with the pre-recordings themselves." One thing that you'll note from the youtube clip though is that the cut-up technique is essentially a form of destructive editing, ie. in order to create a new text, the "original" texts need to be physical cut up. Hence the term. What this essentially means is that the original text cannot be returned to. In the attempt to tamper with the pre-recording, the pre-recording is lost.

The mash-up on the other hand is a non-destructive editing process, because it leaves the original text intact. Because it leaves the text intact, it thereby invites comparison on the one hand, and a return to that original text on the other. The mash-up both draws attention to itself and deflects attention away from itself at the same time. It wants the recognition of being a new creation in its own right, but wants the original text to be fully appreciated in its own right so that the mash-up itself can be fully appreciated. Rather than tampering with the pre-recorded universe, the mash up artist desires that comments on the universe be acknowledged.

Spiritual Consumption in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Lebow

An analysis of our enormously productive economy in the age of mechanical reproduction demands that we make consumption our way of life. This leads us to an all-important insight: mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of converting the buying and use of goods from a parasitical dependence on authentic artistic production into reproducible ritual. To an ever greater degree, the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to the work of consumption, for in consumption the total function of the "authentic" makes no sense and is reversed to be based on rituals which need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. For the first time in world history, we must do justice to the instance of consumption as being a relationship based not in the artistic production of a photographic negative, for example, but in the seeking of our spiritual satisfaction from any number of its prints.

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mashed sauces

The first mashed quote comes from Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I grabbed from the booktwo.org blog, a site which considers the future of the book.

The second mashed quote I came across in the witty and intelligent "Story of Stuff" film. It comes from a paper one Victor Lebow wrote in the 1950's. There is some discussion as to whether Lebow made this comment prescriptively for the U.S. economy or descriptively in describing the nature of the U.S. economy.

Plath vs. Bronte: Wuthering Heights

I lingered round the sleepers in that quiet earth, under that benign sky leaning on me. Me, the one upright among all horizontals; the one still able to listen to the soft wind breathing through the grass, beating it distractedly against the moths fluttering along the heath and harebells. Now, in this narrow valley closing to darkness like a black purse, I wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for them whose house lights gleam like small change. For unlike them, darkness terrifies me. I am too delicate for a life in such company.

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mashed sauces

The first source comes from the closing sentiments of the narrator in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.

As I read the closing passage to Wuthering Heights, triggered in my mind was the memory of Sylvia Plath's poem of the same name, and in particular, the line "The grass is beating its head distractedly." This line comes from the poem's closing stanza, and it is this stanza which I have chosen to mash with Bronte's closing lines.

the medium is the mash-up

According to Will Self, via the 3AM blog via a BBC magazine article, "the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head."

This comment was made in relation to writers continuing to use typewriters. In fact the BBC story headline reads "Why typewriters beat computers". Which is true, but then computers beat typewriters, and pens beat computers and pencils top pens. It's the old Mcluhanism at work - the medium is the message, and each medium brings something to the message that another medium doesn't. So the mashed prophet is not going to get worked up about what is the superior medium. What is pertinent for this blog is Will Self's comment in relation to textual mash-ups.

If you're old enough to remember when CD's first appeared, they made a big hoo-haa on the CD sleeves about which particular recording technique was used. AAD, ADD, DDD and so on, in which A stood for analogue and D for digital, with each letter standing for the corresponding step in the recording process.

I've often thought of this system in relation to writing mash-ups, because I can choose how I am going to record it. Most often I like to retype the texts that I am going to be mashing instead of say copying and pasting from an online source. That would give the process an analogue element. Sometimes I'm lazy, or what I want to use is too long, so I just copy and paste. Sometimes I work on paper and then transfer it to the computer screen. Maybe, one day in the future, I'll buy a typewriter and use that as well just for fun. But whether I'm thinking on the screen, or thinking in my head, using a non-destructive editing process that the computer screen offers me, or a destructive editing process that a pen and a piece of paper offers me (and maybe in the future a typewriter), the writing process remains beautifully mysterious, allowing for the strengths and weaknesses of the medium in which writing records itself to incarnate the Word.

Bonney & Swift, aka Bonnie & Clyde.

Shirley Dent, on the Guardian Books blog reports of a blogosphere spat between Bonney and Swift in which she notes that Swift,

taking his cue from Madonna, "strikes a pose" in postmodernist style (is it me or does Madonna seem omnipresent in discussions about postmodernism?), arguing for "a genuinely radical postmodern poetics". This involves breaking formal barriers, requisitioning pop-culture techniques such as "mash-up" and using then to produce a postmodern poetry that gives us "resistance-as-fun".

What the mashed_prophet likes about Swift's thinking on Eyewear is the notion of the mash-up being a resistance strategy to capitalism:

"Olsen's essay resists some of the more perplexing ambiguities circulating around current questions of entertainment, and digital media (including piracy), in the global arena: that is, people no longer interact with even capitalist-created cultural product passively. They mash-up and mix music - they alter it - engaged, as readers, with the text. Some of these activities (copyleft and further) can hardly be categorised as anything but anti-capitalist. It might be hard for a British linguistically innovative poet to say so, but elements of popular culture are fun, can be ironically and politically transformed by engagegement with their discourse(s)."

Mashed_prophet, being linguistically innovative, has no problem agreeing with this.

Don Kropotkin, or the Quixotic Origin of Anarchy

At a certain village in La Mancha, the ants and termites of Prince Kropotkin not long ago renounced one of those old-fashioned Hobbesian gentlemen, whom I shall not name, but who wrote, 'Never be without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse, and a greyhound, for man is all the better for war.'

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mashed sauces

Here the opening sentence of Don Quixote (the Motteux translation) mashes with the opening shot of Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue

Prince Kropotkin was a communalist anarchist in Russia before the revolution. The Hobbesian gentleman is of course he who knows that life is nasty, shortish and brute, or something along those lines.

digital sources for mashed sauces

Online library gives readers access to 1.5 million books from PhysOrg.com

The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online.

[...]

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mashed sauces

What's this got to do with mashed lit? Just thought it was interesting. In the same way a dj remixes from digital sources, so the textual dj remixes from digital sources. Ulib.org will no doubt provide an amazing resource for the textual dj.

kathy in the sky with diamonds

Picture yourself in a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Michigan seems like a dream on a river:
A boat and a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
She calls you, and you answer quite slowly,
“The man in the gabardine suit is a spy.”
She says, "Be careful, his bow tie is really a camera."
There are cellophane flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
But when you look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, she's gone.
So you buy a pack of cigarettes,
And one of Mrs. Wagner's pies,
Then walk off to look for America.

You follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
where the moon rises over an open field
In which rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.
So you look at the scenery, as she reads her magazine;
Everyone smiles as they drift past the flowers,
That grow so incredibly high.
"Kathy, I'm lost", you say, though you know she is sleeping.
"I'm empty and aching and I don't know why."
Then a Newspaper taxi appears on the shore,
Waiting to take you away.
You climb in the back with your head in the clouds, and you're gone.
On the New Jersey Turnpike, you count all the cars
Thinking they've all come to look for America.

You find yourself on a train in a station,
Playing games with the faces of plasticine porters,
Laughing at their looking glass ties.
Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile,
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes.
"Toss me a cigarette," she say as boards the train.
"I think there's one in my raincoat."
"No, you smoked smoked the last one an hour ago."
"Kathy," I say, "It took me four days
To hitch-hike from Saginaw.
I've come to look for America."
"We've all come to look for America," she says, before she's gone,
"With Lucy in the sky with diamonds."

Kathy in the sky with diamonds.
Let us be lovers,
We'll marry our fortunes together.
Kathy in the sky with diamonds.
I've got some real estate
Here in my bag.
Kathy in the sky with diamonds.

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mashed sauces

As I sat listening to Lucy on the Beatles mashed Love album, a line out of Simon and Garfunkel's America hit me. This is the story of the sixties mashed: wandering pilgrimages across geographical and psychedelic landscapes.

scrip_pop #2: we didn't start the tongue's fire

The tongue is a fire that we didn't start:
A world of evil among the body's parts;
A world of fire always burning
Ever since the world's been turning.

The tongue corrupts the whole of a person
Sets the whole course of life on fire.
E'en though the fire's one we didn't light,
Yet it's a fire we're trying to fight.
But in vain, for it was set by hell
The tongues of which no man can quell.

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mashed sauces

Is this mash a bit cheesy? Well, if you're going to mash-up Billy Joel, then you're asking for it. Recognise the We didn't start the fire chorus from the Stormfront album?

Continuing with me mash-ups from the New Testament epistle of James, this come from 3:6, with a very interesting linkup of the tongue with hell.

call me insatiate

Call me Ishmael, wild donkey of a man. In a selfish maelstrom was I flung headlong across the aethereal sky; from hyperion to satyr insatiate I fell.

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mashed sauces

The first sentence mashes Melville's wonderful opening line to Moby Dick, with the Angel's prophecy to Hagar, Abraham's slave about her son, Ishmael.

The second sentence follows as a non sequitur: a mash of the famous line from Milton's Paradise Lost where God throws Satan out of heaven, with an equally famous line from Hamlet's "How stale the world is" soliloquy, in which he describes his disgust with uncle's political machinations.

scrip_pop #1: Sit Down, James

To those who find themselves religious
who seek the religion that is pure and faultless
Sit down next to me, and listen:

Those who feel the breath of sadness
to look on orphans and widows in their distress,
Sit down next to me, for I am them.

Those who find they're touched by madness
in trying to keep from being polluted by this world,
Sit down next to me, for I am clean.

Those who find themselves ridiculous
Who hope that God exists,
Who hope, who pray,
Sit down next to me
Whether in love, in fear, in hate, in tears
Or in sympathy for who I am.

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mashed sauces

I've discovered that mashups can act as a form on meditating on the Word; a form of looking intently into the perfect law. The opening phrase of these couple of verses from James 1:26-27 triggered the memory of the song Sit Down by UK band James. The name irony is of course purely coincidental, but also somewhat, if I may say, sublime.