Wednesday 28 November 2007

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.

[...]





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.

Monday 26 November 2007

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.



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.

Monday 19 November 2007

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.



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.

Tuesday 13 November 2007

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.



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.

Friday 9 November 2007

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.



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.