Thursday, September 24, 2026

Kid Stuff

People who know me won’t be surprised that I have a keen interest in folklore, including the folklore of children.

Any Gen Xer can tell you about the Kentucky Fried Rat.  A woman -- and it was always a woman -- choked while eating a bucket of KFC in a movie theater.  When she was brought out into the light, they found (dramatic pause) a breaded, fried, and half-eaten rat!!

We would have also heard -- in hushed tones -- the sad fate of Mikey, or at least the actor who played him in the Life cereal commercials.  Poor lad’s stomach exploded after consuming Pop Rocks washed down with a Coke.  This was accepted as Gospel truth.

The "Cool S"

Then there was the “cool S”, that angular sigil made from two sets of three vertical lines.  As someone named Steven, you can bet my notebooks were all emblazoned with it.

What about the songs?

Jingle Bells

Batman smells

Robin laid an egg

The Batmobile 

lost a wheel

And the Joker got away

Hey!

Or this one:

Do your balls hang low?

Can you swing ‘em to and fro?

Can you tie ‘em in a knot?

Can you tie ‘em in a bow?

Can you beat your meat on the toilet seat?

Do your balls

Hang

Low?

Then there was another version.  Maybe they were two verses.  I definitely heard various combinations of the above with the following, funnier version:

Do your balls hang low?

Can you drag ‘em in the snow?

Can you tie ‘em in a knot?

Can you tie ‘em in a bow?

Can you swing ‘em over yer shoulder like a Continental soldier?

Do your balls

Hang

Low?

Which version do you remember?

Then there was this little ditty, which would likely get a kid expelled today:

Hi ho! 

Hi ho!

It’s off to school we go!

With hand grenades and razor blades,

Hi ho!

Hi ho!

I was a military brat.  I went to elementary school in Hawaii, South Carolina, and Naples, Italy.  I heard these things in all those places.  Military brats diffused this stuff easily because kids I went to school with had equally, if not even more itinerant childhoods.  Maybe we were the ones responsible for spreading them across the country in the first place; indeed the world.  Wherever American kids’ parents were stationed for that two or three years.

Thoughts?

Monday, August 3, 2026

Myster Palindrome NO Satanist

Michael Aquino, Sammy Davis, Jr., Anton LaVey

I used to have a small obsession with a guy who had a few videos on the YouTube with palindrome titles, all under different accounts.  Hip-Hop sampling Boyd Rice?  Curiosity: piqued. He goes by "God-Dog." Here are "Post Modern-Ish" and "Doom-Mood." There was a "Live-Evil." Maybe the ghost of Miles Davis threatened to beat his ass if he didn't take it down.

One includes the line "9-11 was a work of art" and "I made her call me God before she ate the dick."  Apparently a LaVeyan Satanist, which is always fun.  I wish I could find those other videos.  You don't all that many African-Americans in Satanism.

As far as I can tell, he's from New Orleans. And maybe worked for the city or county working at a lock or a canal of some sort.

God-Dog, if you are out there, contact me!

Post Modern-Ish 





Thursday, October 2, 2025

More adventures in LoFi Twilight Language

A Kirk is a Church. 

A Tyler is a Masonic officer. 

A 33-hour manhunt.

 More to come.

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Beacons for Spacefaring Satanists disguised as Public Parks!

I just couldn't get into this one, but enormous Pentagrams and land art are always fun. Nazca lines and all that.  The first one is a park in Poland, plac Paderewskiego, in Nysa.  Everything I found online is in Polish.

The rest I provided links. The second is in Kazakhstan.  The third is in the Emirates or some such. And my lazy ass calls it done. Read the links.


https://lawsofsilence.blogspot.com/2023/12/its-always-sunny-in-kazakhstan.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/huge-mysterious-pentagram-remote-kazakhstan-explained-6c10843939





Wednesday, November 27, 2024

The Saga of Vagrant Holiday


A few years back I was scoping out stuff on YouTube and some random video popped up by a user called Vagrant Holiday.

His channel: (YouTube | Bitchute )

The "Vagrant" is a young guy, and his videos are like an FPS video game.  He wanders around Europe with his camera in hand, and in a kind of deadpan tone comments on what he sees.  He is cynical, sarcastic, and swears like a sailor.  What really was unusual is that he slept, as the title would suggest, like a vagrant, finding a place to stash his gear during his peripatetic day, then returning at night to sleep under bushes in parks, in abandoned buildings, or in wooded urban areas.  In one video his gear is stolen and he sleeps in a university building bathroom (Salamanca) or under the stairs in a hotel (Porto).

Part of his charm was his cavalier attitude towards trespassing and vagrancy, just no fear.  He hops fences and manages to scale cathedrals under renovation, a cloud-shrouded castle in Heidelberg, wherever.  He walks through abandoned train yards.  He eats free breakfast in hotel buffets.  He definitely has some decent hobo survival skills.

In his final video, he reports being robbed in Mexico.  Many said it was inevitable given his methods, but I don't think one needs to travel the way he did to have that happen.  Getting robbed is just a fact of life in Central America and Mexico.  In 5 months there my truck was broken into twice.  His one fuck-up I saw was fooling around with drug dealers in Lisbon, pretending his baking soda was coke.  Later, approached by yet another dealer, instead of just saying "go away" he engages with the guy and tries to secretly film him.  I've been to Lisbon, those guys are generally harmless, but you don't try to film them.  Just ignore them.

I've been an addict on and off for years.  I've scored in cities and countries worldwide and never had trouble.  You don't film dealers.  Or else you get sucker punched.

In another video he train hops and for a long time is out in the desert and gets dangerously low on water.  Definitely under-prepared. But he does make it out alive and avoids being caught, so he has that going for him.

So I found out about this at the end of 2023. 
It all came to end this year where he posted a rather scathing update on his bio:
I'm done with videos. No more will be posted here. Vagrant Holiday was a side project done purely for fun and not profit. http://www.bitchute.com/vagrantholiday
No need to read further if you're sane.
Do not try to find or contact me for any reason. I owe nothing to anyone. I'm not your friend. I have no idea who you are. If you claim I've saved your life, no I didn't. You don't need to know what I'm doing. It's not your business. If someone not posting to the internet on a regular basis is upsetting or the most mysterious thing you've experienced, I can't help you with your problem.
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
There's nowhere else I'll be posting to. Rumors surrounding this channel are likely made up by attention seekers. If it sounds dumb, it probably is. If it doesn't, you might be the one who's dumb.
Go outside.
P.S. To those asking if I'm dead, the answer is yes. Funeral was last week. You weren't invited.

So I guess I'm not sane! A lot of people were angered by this. Especially these guys at Hardpoint. These guys were onto VH about 2 months before he quit. They got hold of video from the Seattle riots and there is a guy in a scene which VH had filmed, and there he is, all in black, wearing the backpack VH carries in his videos.  They seem to think he does owe people something, that he did change lives, and that they might have pushed him to post the renunciation above.

I figure it's his right. A lot of people were trying to figure out who he is.  And he basically shows himself breaking the law. In one video, Forbidden Island, he kayaks over to an island which is a maximum security prison for sex offenders and wanders through an abandoned prison.

Another video, Riot Holiday, ended up being used to identify a man who took a rifle from a burnt out cop car during the 2020 Seattle riots (DOJ PDF). That man, from this article, was convicted and sentenced to 16 months in prison. That would make me nervous. My guess is that getting robbed in Mexico, having his video used to put a man in prison, and the possibility of getting doxxed after having filmed himself trespassing and train-hopping might have contributed to his departure and the harsh "goodbye".

His videos are really well done. They probably took a while to produce. Maybe he just got bored with it. I'm thinking he was starting to get spooked by the dots being connected, that he was found in another video, the DOJ had used his film. If anyone could, the DOJ could probably find him, if they wanted.

Vagrant is almost certainly also a guy known as Surveillance Camera Man (Bitchute). Same snarky comments, same FPS-style camera work.  Both from Seattle.  In this video (9:50), Vagrant explains why he always wears black.  In this SCM video he films a man who at 19:50 goes on about how SCM is dressed all in black.  From the FP glimpses we see in both users' videos, there are similar clothes and builds.  The concepts are different, but the style of the video is essentially the same

This is especially true of this "lost footage" video Vagrant took at the Seattle CHAZ.  About three minutes in he starts filming people, not backing down when they confront him.  He just films and says nothing.  It's exactly like SCM footage.

Another potential piece of evidence is a video he posted as Elevator Man.  Similar content, although not always FP.  The guy is all in black, too.  There's no question Elevator Man is Vagrant, because in his third video (54:20) he posts an excerpt from the Elevator Man video. 

Elevator Man. Surveillance Camera Man.  Could be a coincidence. But with the build, the clothes, the style of video, the voice and the snark they are surely the same guy.  And if Elevator Man is SCM, then VH is also the same man 
  
So, that is what we know about Vagrant Holiday.  I hesitated to publish this, because I did't want him to be unmasked, but nothing here isn't already online.  I may have brought it all together, but it was just a matter of a few Google searches.

I admire the guy.  He's wily, smart, funny, and maybe not always wise, but pretty courageous.  He reminds me of some of the things I got up to as a young feller.  I didn't want to invade his privacy as he's clear he wants people to leave him alone. And for good reason. He's broke a host of petty laws and maybe even bigger ones when he toured Forbidden Island and hopped several trains.  One video helped put a guy in prison.  All good reasons to keep a low profile.

So, people might rightly say I'm not respecting that. Well, all of this information is already online, a lot of it together. I may have assembled a fuller picture but it's far from complete.  It's just my mania for being a completist and organizing my thoughts in public.

I'd document my own vagabond experiences, but to be honest, I wouldn't want people like me writing about it. If you truly want to be left alone, don't leave a permanent record accessible by hundreds of thousands of people. And certainly don't whinge about it. People can't resist solving a mystery. Dressing and acting like a ninja and making enjoyable art in a mask invites people to look underneath.

If you really want to be left alone, don't publish videos on multiple platforms, eh?

 

I just came across this article from a Seattle weekly which I'm sure is about Vagrant: Is the Creepy Cameraman Hanging out on Capitol Hill?
Yesterday evening, around 5:20pm, my friends and I were accosted by this guy aggressively recording us at the bus stop on Madison between 13th and 12th. When asked to stop politely, he would simply step closer. Attempting to dissuade him from continuing we moved, trying to keep him at our backs; he responded by remaining silent and moving around to try and get our faces on camera, getting really up close and aggressive. While one of us contacted SPD, my friend snapped a picture, attached. Finally, still silent, he decided to leave, putting away the camera and walking up Madison, turning on 13th.

Reading this, I wonder if VH is entitled to his privacy. This behavior is unsettling and upsetting to people. VH/SCM had no qualms about putting that online.

So, I figure if you're willing to freak people out by getting in their faces, filming them, and posting it online, a bit of turnabout is fair play.

Sorry Vagrant.

Tuesday, May 21, 2024

Heil Drumpf.

We've featured some Trump campaign tweets and campaign ads that inadvertently (or not) feature Nazi imagery: eagles, red triangles, soldiers, rune stages, etc. It's happened either through dog whistling or gross incompetence. Either way isn't very encouraging.

Here are four past examples where Trump campaign tweets or ads have featured Nazi imagery: Meaningful Coincidences

So what gives when a recent Trump advertisement promises that if elected America will be a "unified reich"? Gross oversight? Freudian slip? Jesus, these fucknuts are just not very good with the internets. Or just using that for plausible denial.  This has happened five times now.

Politico Article

Like past gaffes, an unnamed staffer is to blame....

Saturday, January 20, 2024

Hip Knox, an Eye, and a Nipple walk into a bar....


So this guy Hip Knox wears a shower cap and in this caper, a queer machine, with a suggestive yoni slash lingam at his crotch and on his chest, an eye.  It's in the middle, but in this shot it appears to replace a nipple.  This eye-nipple connection is something we've covered quite a bit, but here we just present this example for your pleasure.

Hip Knox himself is a pretty crazy comic book hero, but instead of reinventing the wheel, check out this article.  An injured baby is left on the doorstep of a scientist who experiments on said baby, giving him hypnotic powers he uses to defeat and subsequently humiliate his nemesis -- making him flop about on the ground like a fish, for example. Weird stuff.


Be sure to check out previous posts covering the theme of the eye and the nipple 

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

It's always sunny in Kazakhstan


It's It's been a while, but because we're a) into flags, b) into suns, and c) into numbers associated with Freemasonry, we thought we'd take a gander at the flag of Kazakhstan.

The flag adheres to the basic "rules" of good flag design: not too many colors (2 or 3), meaningful symbolism, no seals or writing, simplicity, and uniqueness.

One might argue the vertical band to the left is an unnecessary complication, but I don't think so, because it's a typical pattern of Kazakhstan.  That said, I could see the flag without the design and not "losing" anything.  The band was originally red, and changing it to yellow was a good decision.

The design of the sun is not like the Argentine/Uruguay type but more like that of Taiwan or Namibia, in that the rays are triangles detached from the circle.   And there are 32 of them. These 32 rays are said to represent the stages of grain development, but I always geek out on the Masonic use of this number.  There are 32 degrees in the Scottish Rite, or 33 if we count the ultimate, honorary degree.  The Rite is also, it so happens, to be symbolized by an eagle.

When I learned about this,. I didn't think it was an intentional Masonic message wink to those on the level.  A 32-rayed sun?  Coincidence.

Here's Wikipedia on the flag's symbolism.  No Masonry mentioned:

....The pattern represents the art and cultural traditions of the old Khanate and the Kazakh people. The turquoise background symbolises the peace, freedom, cultural, and ethnic unity of Kazakh people including the various Turkic people that make up the present-day population such as the Kazakhs, Tatars, Uyghurs, Uzbeks, as well as the significant Indo-European peoples. The sun represents a source of life and energy. It is also a symbol of wealth and abundance; the sun's rays are a symbol of the steppe's grain which is the basis of abundance and prosperity.

People of different Kazakh tribes had the golden eagle on their flags for centuries. The eagle symbolises the power of the state. For the modern nation of Kazakhstan the eagle is a symbol of independence, freedom and flight to the future.

So, there you go.  The end.  And then....

I was about to put this to bed and then decided to Google  "masonry and Kazakhstan."   What resulted surprised me. Apparently the capital city, created pretty much from scratch, is considered to be rife with occult and Masonic symbolism in it's architecture, parks, and monuments, including pyramids, towers, 32 symbolism, pentagrams, an owls.  Hoo boy, this place has it all.  I have a lot to unpack here; it's not so much a rabbit hole as a full-on warren. Gonna need to dig into this and get back atcha.

Until then, check out this link.  Don't know if I can add much more, and it's just so much to deal with!

Link

Monday, December 25, 2023

Salaam Alaikum, Minnesota!

Effective May 11, 2024

I just looked into this story after seeing a post about it on Facebook.  Minnesota has chosen a new flag. It's a decent flag in my opinion, and better than any of the five other finalists that the redesign commission had chosen. Problematic cultural issues aside, which are by far enough to merit a redesign, the old flag was just an aesthetic mess. It was not only ugly and indistinguishable from any number of similar state flags, it managed to be both busy and boring.  

The outgoing flag, 1957 revision 

So, good on Minnesota for changing it.  Now the state has a distinct, striking, and streamlined flag.  Ted Kaye, who literally wrote the book on flag design, gives it an A+.

Kaye, of the North American Vexillological Association, considers it to be one of the ten best US state flags.  A far cry from 2001, when the same Association named the previous flag one of the ten worst.   If I recall correctly, the old flag breaks at least 4 of Kaye's rules for effective flag design (it does).

Critics of the new flag are crying foul, saying it's wokeism run amok.  Some even claim it represents a kind of Somali "takeover" of Minnesota, because of a perceived likeness to the flag of Jubaland.  Jubaland is a part of Somalia, and Minneapolis has a large Somali community, the largest outside of Somalia; when I called the High School in Minneapolis, where my son did a year abroad, one could continue one's call in Somali. 

Talk of takeover and nativist, "great replacement" fear-mongering is ironic, because the old flag literally depicted the actual historical takeover of what is now Minnesota from the Native Americans....an Indian rides away as Sven sews his newly stolen fields...

Flag of Jubaland, home of Minnesota's new overlords

But like removing confederate imagery from southern states' flags, it's time; our  political symbols must reflect, respect, and represent all of our citizens. And man, the old flag was an eyesore. I can't imagine anyone actually being proud of it. Time will tell for the new one, but at least they've given the people something to work with.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Open Source Band Name List VII

Back on the D

Dave Chapel Perilous


Bone Bone


Ticket to Armageddon 


The Nun is Dun


Nightmare Alley Oop


Edward Snowed-In


Dorkalopolis


Chicking out the Checks


Vlad the Inhaler


Glue-Huff Gilly


Garponamous Rex


Devilled Hambone


Harpahock Hilly and Gimperimpamus


Gödsück


Hellmaker


Geronimo's Head


Skull and Bums


Pooh Habit


Corpseduster


Coprophobia


Camino de Mierda


Hatemaker


Calla Preest


Joan D'ork


Socialist Limp Nugget


Hipstaz


Manbun Murder Spree


More on TV


Golden Age of Golf


Blinkyblunk


Cock Rope


Megatons of Fun


More Pushin' for the Cushion


Prussia no Russia?


Vlad an Ear Poot In 


Barechested Autocrat


Judomino Theory

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Success by Association


Originally written on June 20th.

So, there I was, drinking a Guinness in downtown Toulouse with my nemesis, in a moment of detente after a hard day of shooting at each other as we ran through the streets and slid over car hoods, watching Toulouse lose to La Rochelle by 3 points in the French Rugby Championship. Seconds remained in the game and the mood was glum.

Then we heard a roar rolling down the streets, thousands of voices raised in joy. Then our TV, which must have been 30 seconds behind those enormous screens set up in Place Capitole for the benefit of the public, showed a magnificent play, as a Toulousain broke free from the melee and ran the entire field to score a touch.  Toulouse had just snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, one didn't need to understand rugby to understand that.

Despite ourselves we jumped for joy and hugged strangers and yelled yayyyyy. And true to the rugby spirit, said consoling words to three young women supporting La Rochelle.  Rugby is, after all, a sport for brutes played by gentlemen.

In the aftermath, President Macron visited the victorious team and was offered a beer, which he proceeded to down cul-sec: "dry bottom."  That is, to say in English, to gulp it down in one go. He chugged the fucker like a champ. Fast and clean. No dribbling chin, no gagging.


Of course, the (mostly) left wasn't having it. "Puerile" someone said.  "Toxic masculinity!" cried another.

Hogwash.  Anyone who can chug  a beer with such elan deserves a freaking thumbs up.  So, well done Manu.  Just do a better job of being President and get a handle on the current retirement age-related turmoil and you'll get a real cheer.

Friday, August 25, 2023

Gee I'm a Tree


Reminds of two things: 

The time people freaked out about pentagrams in a bus's brake lights.


The time a guy told me Freemasons in France often use triangles in their logos.

Monday, July 10, 2023

The The Sound and The Shape: Notes for an expo of collaged poetry

These are are notes I made for a more elaborate essay that never really gelled.  It's still a decent starting point for a look at found, concrete, and other forms of "visual" poetry.

Letters of the alphabet are images, symbols that indicate a sound.  Or not.

Strung together as written or printed words, letters communicate meaning via the eyes, not the ears.  Hence, what sound letters represent ceases to be important when reading.

But language is both visual and aural.  But neither is essential: the deaf communicate, as do the blind.

The deaf communicate visually, the blind aurally, and by touch.  

Communication can occur  via eyes, ears, or fingers.  Whatever conduit leads to the brain.

Hieroglyphics are letters of a sort, abstracted forms referring to nature: birds, plants, people, rivers. More complex than a simple letter, each one is a word unto itself.

Chinese pictograms are complex letters that might refer to a sound, or an entire word. "Tree" in English requires four letters. In Chinese, just one pictogram does the job.

Letters have an attached phoneme.  What a letter looks like and what it sounds like are two different things. Slam and rap lean on rhythm, meter: sound. Concrete or visual poetry leans on how letters or words look, are arranged, their relationship to the page. Like any collage, concrete poetry can be representative or abstract.


Both visual/concrete poetry and poetry more concerned with sounds may or may not be concerned with "meaning."


Asemic writing refers to writing without any semantic content. It is a purely visual medium and may use invented letters or glyphs, or existing letters.


 "Ph" = "F".    Philosophy = Filosofia


Sofia. Sophia. The relationship between sound and its visual representation is not fixed.


Does the Sator Square qualify as poetry?  Was it just a word game, a clever use of symmetry?  Did it have cosmic significance?  Magick? 


The oldest known square was found in Pompeii and thus predates the town's destruction in 62 CE.


S A T O R

A R E P O

T E N E T

O P E R A

R O T A S


Simmias of Rhodes Axe. 300 BC?



These texts were called carmen figurata. In addition to Axe (Pelekys), Simmias produced Pteryges (Wings), the Soon (Egg).


So called altar poems were of the same nature but the text represented an altar. Examples date back to antiquity.


Altar poems and the carmen figurata are essentially concrete poetry.


They form a recognizable image that is evoked by the words by which it composed.


1653


George Herbert Easter Wings



This would be reproduced in the 20th century by Apollinaire with his Calligrammes.  Apollinaire was considered avant-garde, but his method dated back to before the Common Era. 

Here words are used to form a picture, but it's still not exactly using words themselves like elements of a collage.

18th C.


William S. Burroughs experimented with text arranged into columns to mimic newspapers. He also read across columns and strung the fragments together to create new sentences. The technique differed from his cut-ups and fold-ins but was basically the same thing. Finding new sentences embedded in texts by rearranging fragments. However....


1760's....Caleb Whitefoord - wine merchant, diplomat, poet - and London neighbor and friend of Benjamin Franklin, was doing a form of cut-up in the late eighteenth century:


It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns—rather than reading down to the column’s next line—you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses.

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, 

undertake a voyage round—

The head-dress of the present month.


Wanted to take care of an elderly gentlewoman—

An active young man just come from the country.


Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.


Removed to Marylebone, for the benefit of the air—

The City and Liberties of Westminster.


Notice is hereby given—

And no notice taken.

Burroughs did exactly that and cut-ups and fold-ins mimic the process.  


1868-70


Isidore Ducasse/Lautréamont


Maldoror included lines lifted directly from previous texts, especially descriptions of nature. As Burroughs said:  if Josef Conrad had described a treeline perfectly, why not just lift the text and use it as the background for the action in your text, much like collage?


In artistic practice, there is a history of repurposing and plagiarism that predates the digital. The pseudonymous Comte de Lautréamont, a French poet who died in 1870, whose work later influenced the Surrealists and Situationists, said:

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas."

A man of his word, Lautréamont plagiarised in his two major works: Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies.

1914 Constantinople, a 'ferro-concrete poem' from Tango with Cows by Vasily Kamensky.



1918 Apollinaire Calligrammes.



Made poems to resemble the subject. Rain, for example.  Very much in the vein of Herbert.


1920


How to Make a Dadaist Poem

(method of Tristan Tzara)


To make a Dadaist poem:

  • Take a newspaper.

  • Take a pair of scissors.

  • Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.

  • Cut out the article.

  • Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.

  • Shake it gently.

  • Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.

  • Copy conscientiously.

  • The poem will be like you.

  • And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.



T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy (1930-36)


Incorporated newspaper clippings.


Burroughs and Gysin, Cut-ups, 1950’s & 60's


The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise) — in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.


The Nova Trilogy (1961-1967)

Minutes to Go 1960

The Exterminator 1960


The Burroughs File


Letters are represented by symbols and colors.


The Travel Agency is on Fire 


The editor says there are three collections of cutups that may number 11K+ pages each....


There’s been a lot of [objections to the cut-ups], a sort of a superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can’t cut up these words. Why can’t I? I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers—doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are….People say to me, “Oh, this is all very good, but you got it by cutting up.” I say that has nothing to do with it, how I got it. What is any writing but a cut-up? Somebody has to…*do* the cutting up. Remember that I first made selections. Out of hundreds of possible sentences that I might have used, I chose one

Oulipo

Lettrisme

Situationism

Fluxus


All these movements experimented with language, asemic writing, concrete poetry.


1964-1965 Charles Henri Ford Poster Poems



https://www.moma.org/collection/works/134480


Concrete Poetry


Postwar Brazil


d.a. levy


From Levy's Tibetan Stroboscope. 
 
Levy wrote poetry but experimented a lot with concrete poetry.  In the Stroboscope, he experimented with what he called "destructive writing.". Burroughs exhorted readers "trop rub out the word" but his cut-ups still used words. In his journals he went further and replaced words with symbols or different colored dots.  But until his scrapbooks are published we can only find some examples in The Burroughs File.

Levy achieved a similar goal in the Stroboscope poems.  By over inking his mimeograph machine or overprinting text, he arrived at what looked like text but was in fact illegible.  An example of asemic writing.

1967E  Emmett Williams Anthology of Concrete Poetry


Gysin's permutations


Visual Poetry


John M. Bennett


Sound Poetry


1960 Pistol Poem Gysin


Pure sound. Found sound. Asemic writing. If language is both visual and aural, isn't using sampled sound akin to using some words in found texts (or vice versa)?


1970’s


Bowie and the Stones used cutups for lyrics, under Burroughs’ influence.


1980's


Hip-Hop and EDM: Sampling. See: Pistol Poem (Brion Gysin)


2007


Jonathan Lethem The Ecstasy of Influence


All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .—John Donne


Emojis.  Acronyms: WTF, LOL, LMFAO, IMO, etc.



Blackout Poetry



John Carroll



Austin Kleon


Take a text and start blacking out words until a poem is formed by the remaining words.


Some trace this back to Whitefoord, through Tzara and Burroughs. It's not the exact same technique, but a variation on manipulating a found text to create something new. Whether using fragments cut from a paper, or words left after redacting a text with a sharpie, or lifting paragraphs to re-use in one's own text.


Is it plagiarism or theft? I think not.. No because the origin of the texts is clear. There's no attempt to "fool" the reader. In fact, that the texts are found is part of the attraction.