rude horses
I go for my walk around 7 every night. It's getting to hot to walk during the day, and usually I just want to drink coffee in the morning, though walking naturally energizes me and it's more healthy . . . anyway . . . tonight our neighbors across the street and down a ways have blindfolded a few of their horses. Anyone know why horses need to be blindfolded? One of the blindfolded horses was quite rude. Imagine a blindfolded horse staring at you. I know it was because its head followed me. Sort of rude, really.
So Lyle suggested readers guess what my new project is about. I'll give a big hint: it's NOT about the circus. Feel free to guess, and whoever comes the closest will recieve a special prize!
I've been very interested in retellings lately--you know fairy tales, riffs off famous stories, poems, etc. I've written a few retelling pieces lately. One's in the vein of Roth retelling Kafka, same situation but with a different form of the character, and when I went back to it today, I decided it was just too close. I made it my own, and it had an allusion to the original, but it still doesn't quite work. The other is more of a folkloric retelling, and it was was just as bad (lol). I tried to use facts with folklore and it just didn't work. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I think it's interesting, and dare I say that ugly word (postmodern!). I may try a cut-up with the first one, which was a riff off a prose poem--possibly even taking the original and doing a sort of cut-up. . . or taking a part of the original text and making a sort of "found poem" within my version. Holy shit, am I becoming experimental? Post-avante?! How did Burroughs do his cut-ups? I may try something like that. Another good source for retellings is American Indian folklore. I love their fables. I think fairy tales are dated. They've already been done to death. Same with the Greek myths. Anyway, it might make for an interesting short story collection--a series of retellings in drastically different forms with drastically different approaches.
But no, the new project is not a retelling. The shorts are just something I like to tinker with when I finish my daily word count, 1000 words.
posted by Unknown @ 10:47 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
Blindfolding the horses. Hmm. Clearly the people are doing something they don't want the horses to witness (so they can't testify against the people later in court).
"Rude horses" actually sounds like a great name for a band.
The retellings sound intriguing. As I was sitting here reading about it, I started thinking about some other retellings that might have interesting results. For instance, Flannery O'Connor retelling Charles Dickens, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez retelling Ernest Hemingway, or Kurt Vonnegut retelling "Dracula."
Or Tennesee Williams retelling one of the Brontes.
Since your new project doesn't involve the circus, I'll make another guess: you've started filming an underground documentary film about large migratory rocks in the southern United States, and exploring various theories about where the rocks originate. (Music soundtrack by the Rude Horses.)
The horses are probably wearing fly masks. They look pretty opaque -you can't see the horse's eyes- but the horses can see fine. Believe me, it makes them way less miserable in the summer.
Here's a pic (this one has ear coverings too):http://www.moonrakerqh.com/tack/gfx/ss-10792.jpg
Lyle, Vonnegut retelling Dracula! And yes, there are stones in my new project--not really big enough to be rocks.
Audacia, yup--that's what they look like. They cover their backs too--with a white tarp looking thing. I suspected maybe it was to keep them cool.
Have you read Margaret Atwood's poems that retell certain fairy tales?
Great job on editing MIPO by the way.
Hey Kate, yeah I've read Atwood's fairytales. She also did a series of retellings on Circe from The Odyssey which I liked quite a lot. Retellings seem more popular in poetry than in prose form. But Jane Rhys did one of Bronte. Roth did one of Kafka. There are other modern novels which take a character and use it. I don't think I could pull it off for a whole novel. A series of shorts would be fun though, maybe with a few pages of nonfiction after each retold story, sort of saying how I came to retell it and what I did different, what I kept the same, and my reasons for these choices.
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