30/12/2004
From old site—unearthed the idea for another book. It flowed from the following quotation of an aphorism from 'Poesies' by Lautréamont in John Miller's "The Mnemonic Book: Ed Ruscha's Fugitive Publications" (published in a volume of selected writings: 'The Price Club', JRP Éditions & les presses du réel, 2000:
'Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It closely grasps an author's sentence, uses his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with a right one.'
This can be reduced to replacing nothing but names to make sentences from diverse sources cohere, on the surface level,while generating muted nausea on the level of 'content'. Choice criteria and the generation of plot is a mystery at the moment; keeping this parsimonious is the actual work that needs to be carried out before the work can begin. Of course, everyone can write this, but no one will (but will I?).
Kosuth, in his novel 'Purloined', keeps the names (I guess) intact, in fact like everything else on the chosen page, and confines himself to rearranging pages that 'link' in terms of producing grammatical, if odd, sentences in conjunction with adjacent found pages. The generation of a long string of pages must have been the biggest problem, each page having two constraints on grammatical sentences; missing links must have plagued him. In the back of the book is a photo which shows the author (Kosuth) hovering gently above the piles of crime and mystery novels spread out on a carpet embroidered with (illegible) words.