I stumbled across a site this morning called Language is a Virus. There are tons of tools and suggestions meant to inspire creativity for writers.

While there are the standard references to the dadaists and surrealists, and an overabundance of techniques from the beat era, I find it odd that there are almost no references to my favorite experimental literary group, OULIPO. Although, a number of OULIPO exercises are mentioned in other contexts.

I could write and write about each and every link on this site, but what I'm most intrigued by is Jeff Noon's concept of Cobralingus. His theory is that, in the same way that experimental electronic music is sent through filters and sound gates to affect and often destroy the sound waves, a piece of writing could go through similar "filter gates" to produce a new kind of writing.

I'm not sure I'm buying it.

But I'm certainly not discounting it either. I'm fascinated by the concept of "sampling" other people's writing. This isn't as easy as it may seem. DJs and producers sample to take a single layer (a drum beat, a vocal melody line) and repeat it, combine it, and make a multi-layered track.

This is what is missing for me: you can only read one word at a time; i.e., writing is inherently a single-track operation. Sure, a sentence can act like a bounding bass line, but the moment it switches to melody, the bass line turns off. I can think of experiments in which a text is triple spaces so that single words can be placed (sampled) nearby other words, so that they are not so much READ as they are SEEN. It's sorta like forcing an allusion, or corrupting an allusion. If these "floater words" were paced in a certain way, they could form a kind of beat -- your eyes would wander from the main text in such a way as to stop you (even for a split second) enough for your reading to feel a rhythm. If these "floater words," when taken together, formed a loose narrative, then perhaps a simultaneous narrative could be constructed.

Words in the main text could be colored to force or alter meanings, and create double meanings.

Hmmm. I'll get right on this.