To celebrate the release of his new book, The Alligators of Abraham, Robert Kloss invited a bunch of writers to respond with textual/video/musical formations and deformations of their own that somehow connect to the original. It's well worth delving into the other pieces by folks such as Mike Meginnis, Amber Sparks, Mike Young, Steve Himmer, and many others. My own approach was to perform a set of classic Oulipean techniques with the text, including:


1) rewriting a section without the letter "e," (a lipogram)

2) running N+1 and N+2 algorithms on it,

3) creating a cento by splicing a quote from it with lines from some other books lying around,

4) doing a snowball and reverse snowball using words found in it, and finally

5) larding, or planting sentences of my own between Kloss's own sentences and then adding further sentences still between those.


I had a lot of fun doing it, and I feel that it actually helped me to engage with the book in some elemental ways. Needless to say, The Alligators of Abraham is a monster and everyone should read it. So, a link to my responses: http://sundoglit.com/texts-inspired-b.... And a link to the book itself:The Alligators of Abraham