Shall I compare memes to a summer's day?
Thou love to party and got tiger blood:
Rough winds do shake the rainbow, all the way,
And summer's double rainbow. Oh my God.
Sometime too hot the numa numa shines,
And often that's racist complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair over 9000,
By chance or nature's changing oh my dayum!
But thy eternal turtles shall not fade
Nor lose your base that are belong to us;
Nor Boxxy brag thou trawll'st in his shade,
When epic winning trololo to time thou growest:
So long as Charlie bit me eyes can see,
So long lives this and this now back at me.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
The idea behind Cillit Bang by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Cillit Bang by Percy Bysshe Shelley takes inspiration from various sources. In spirit it is closest to the kind of remixed media found on Youtube. In this respect it is patchwriting and also a form of intertextual copypasta. Yet it also resembles an Oulipo piece, because there is at least one fixed constraint imposed on the writing process. While it uses Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias as its basic material, the text is altered by mixing in words and phrases from the Cillit Bang ads. The constraint is that the inserted text be actual words and phrases from the ads, rather than words and phrases that could be from the ads. That is not to say they need to be complete sentences or entirely meaningful.
The rest of the guidelines are indeed no more than guidelines, and allow some flexibility. They are: to keep to the original meter as much as possible, and to maintain rhyme where practical. The spirit of the ad now infuses the romantic spirit of the original, and the two cohabit the same space. Whereas Ozymandias' rigid structure more or less keeps the house together, the invasion of latter day sales talk occasionally spills out the door, marking its novelty.
In a sense there is a struggle for the identity of the poem, and both sides are changed in the process.
The rest of the guidelines are indeed no more than guidelines, and allow some flexibility. They are: to keep to the original meter as much as possible, and to maintain rhyme where practical. The spirit of the ad now infuses the romantic spirit of the original, and the two cohabit the same space. Whereas Ozymandias' rigid structure more or less keeps the house together, the invasion of latter day sales talk occasionally spills out the door, marking its novelty.
In a sense there is a struggle for the identity of the poem, and both sides are changed in the process.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Cillit Bang by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met Barry Scott here from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and toughest toilet stains
Look at this blockage. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered limescale, rust, whose shine
And ground-in dirt, and sneer of Cillit Bang,
Tell that one bottle well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these pongy drains,
The hand that sparkles, and the dirt is gone;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"I'm Barry Scott and I'm here with Jill
Look on my works, what do you think? Well Barry ..."
Nothing beside remains. Cleaning is a doddle
with that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
flowing free and smelling fresh stretch far away.
Who said: Two vast and toughest toilet stains
Look at this blockage. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered limescale, rust, whose shine
And ground-in dirt, and sneer of Cillit Bang,
Tell that one bottle well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these pongy drains,
The hand that sparkles, and the dirt is gone;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"I'm Barry Scott and I'm here with Jill
Look on my works, what do you think? Well Barry ..."
Nothing beside remains. Cleaning is a doddle
with that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
flowing free and smelling fresh stretch far away.
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