Project Three: Meta-text

So, for this project I took three stories, two of which I've written and one from a web-series I regularly watch. For them I tried three different methods of alteration.

The first story is the prologue of a young adult novel I started writing for my English 318 class. I chose this story because I knew there were words spell checker wouldn't like to begin with. I also chose it because I wanted to see my own words which I spent hours working on and perfecting changed into something that is still mine, yet at the same time it isn't. While most of the words are mine, there are a number that are not because the computer compiled them together. Also, there is a question as to whether the story is still mine because of the fact that it is not the story I wrote, in truth a program technically wrote it using my words. Anyways, for this one, I chopped it into five sections reordered them, then I ran it through spell checker. This had multiple changes. For one it changed all of the made up names, such as Joren to Jorgen and T? to Twyla. Parts of the story seem right (or rightish) such as the first sentence "Woods as a precession offending filled the quiet Chords of choked in single file lint and hooded figures wall thirty robbers in the brightness odors danced along the trey." Where you can get the gist of a story, except words like lint, odors, and trey destroy the meaning of the story by giving an air of randomness. I've also noticed that the closer you get to the end of the peice the less understandable and more random it becomes, almost as if it is a model of entropy. I find this interesting, because that is the spirit of what I was trying to do, take something orderly and make it chaotic.

My second piece is also a story I've written, but this one was from a first draft. I chose it for two reasons: 1) It has very complex language so that when I translate it some of the complexity will disappear or be mistranslated. 2) The tone of the work is serious and dark and I wanted to see how the tone would change. With this work I simply translated it though a number of languages before translating it back to English. Some notable changes that I liked in it were the random mention of China stocks and Federal Republic of Germany. I also liked how "I killed a hero and a good man." turned into "I am a good man and a hero died." The original idea is completely lost. I also like how somewhere in the translations "Nighthawk" became "Owl", which is in fact a night hawk, or the fact that the narrator got a random "e" added to the end of his name. Out of the entire piece I like the following phrases: " I'm cold rain, until the day of the bullets", "I'm horrible death in the desert planet", "I'm dead and the living legends", "Thousands of pain and suffering for the people". The first two describe the character perfectly, the interesting fact is that these sentences were not originally about the main character. The third phrase is supposed to say is a lovely juxtaposition, but still describes the character. The last one has a nice poetic (if not dark) quality to it. As for the tone of the piece, in most parts it maintains it's dark feel; however, it also occasionally slips into absurdism with it's weird sayings. Example: "China stocks and their parts and pure hatred that divided only pull the trigger". A few last things about this piece that I found interesting are: 1) only one portion of it was left unchanged "Hergan" apparently either does not appear in any language unlike Fala, Riac, or Kalvian. Of course it could be I stumbled upon a word that fits in all languages. 2) Only one non-English word found it's way into the piece: "Menen". 3) For some reason Galaxy decided to become all caps.

The last piece that I altered was not my own. It it the transcript of an episode of the web-series Red vs. Blue. I choose to use this because the web-series often uses randomness as humor often showed through how characters react to certain situations regardless of how major (or minor) the situation is. Starting out I thought that there wasn't any way I could make it more bizarre, but I was wrong. Here I simply changed all non-personal nouns and adjectives with random ones. The end result is just random and most things don't make sense such as a "sweat, null facade" or "The Meta is subtle more than a camera seeking to increase its corn". Pretty much the partially absurd dialogue became fully absurd. The one thing I really liked about this attempt was that the word "shield" was replaced with "facade", making certain phrases funnier. EX "The Facade will fail" or "Drop the facade".