Some Thoughts on Cut-Up

Cut-ups are done by taking magazines, newspapers, personal writings, etc. and totally reassembling them. As far as I can tell there is no set technique for doing this; some cut pages into blocks and randomly assemble them, others search for specific lines and thoughts which they order in such a way as to create something new. The "author" could approach this with no vision for the finished product at all, only randomly taking and pasting parts, or he might take a more active role in selecting and ordering, even inserting or changing the text to a certain degree.
As I see it, Cut-ups are a strange concept which somehow manages nonetheless to construct an original product. How this is possible when using only other people's work, I'm not really sure. There almost seems to be some magical moment, between the cutting and the gluing, where the Muses breath life into the Cut-up and it begins to stand and walk on its own. I don't know exactly how Cut-ups have been used in the past but I think they have a lot of potential. I don't necessarily think a traditional book could survive a Cut-up, but I think there are certainly other areas that might be interesting to experiment with. I wonder how far the Cut-up method has been taken; into photography, film, art?
My Cut-up is below. I took all the parts from the November 16th, 2007 edition of the Isthmus. The first version is what I imagine a cut-up would look like if you were to unknowingly encounter it. As you read, ask yourself whether you could believe it had been intentionally written word-for-word like it is now. The second one I have color-coded to each article I borrowed from. I just include it because it may be fun to check your suspicions against.

Cut-Up

Isthmus

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense. I know for a fact there is no evidence to connect what the school teaches with any kind of atrocities.

Kids will enlist, but they’ll probably be black-and brown-skinned kids, or Hmong, and blue-collar kids who aren’t laser-focused. You escape by slaying people in dark alleys and grungy buildings. If the sons and daughters of the elite and professional classes were clad in olive drab and routinely being blown up in IED booby traps, the killing can feel a bit like a one-trick pony; hide in a shadow, sneak, kill, repeat. Gangster life is our cultural paradigm, played out as big business by the powerful, as crime by the powerless. In an era of gated communities, privatized public services, Blackwater mercenaries and revived left wing suspicion of the military: savages…eager to glut their savage thirst with the blood of the vanquished.

Murders, torture and other atrocities carried out by soldiers trained at the School of the Americas; I feel this is my right under the law of man and the law of God. Its graduates have committed human rights abuses throughout Latin America, including the murder of nuns and priests. It hands out scary literature to little kids at fast-food restaurants. It seeks total animal liberation: no meat or dairy in people’s diets, no hunting or fishing, no use of animals in medical research. Even seeing-eye dogs don’t make the cut. The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

Isthmus II (colors indicate different articles)

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense. I know for a fact there is no evidence to connect what the school teaches with any kind of atrocities.

Kids will enlist, but they’ll probably be black-and brown-skinned kids, or Hmong, and blue-collar kids who aren’t laser-focused. You escape by slaying people in dark alleys and grungy buildings. If the sons and daughters of the elite and professional classes were clad in olive drab and routinely being blown up in IED booby traps, the killing can feel a bit like a one-trick pony; hide in a shadow, sneak, kill, repeat. Gangster life is our cultural paradigm, played out as big business by the powerful, as crime by the powerless. In an era of gated communities, privatized public services, Blackwater mercenaries and revived left wing suspicion of the military: savages…eager to glut their savage thirst with the blood of the vanquished.

Murders, torture and other atrocities carried out by soldiers trained at the School of the Americas; I feel this is my right under the law of man and the law of God. Its graduates have committed human rights abuses throughout Latin America, including the murder of nuns and priests. It hands out scary literature to little kids at fast-food restaurants. It seeks total animal liberation: no meat or dairy in people’s diets, no hunting or fishing, no use of animals in medical research. Even seeing-eye dogs don’t make the cut. The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.