Billy Budd re-write

I have been wanting to share this with you guys for awhile, but had trouble tracking down the files. Luckily, one of my collaborators still had a couple of the files. Forgive the backtracking.

So, back in 06, my first semester at Bama, I was in a yearlong novel workshop run by Kate Bernheimer (if you like fairytales, check out her Fairytale Review). The first semester, we did not write. Not exactly. We brainstormed, complained about writing and ourselves as writers, we wrote a little, read about the coming ecological apocalypse, and read and then re-wrote Billy Budd in teams of 6.

Our version ended up playing on how the themes refracted through a viewing of Blade Runner. Andy Farkas, one of our group mates, loves Philip K Dick.

I was thinking about this project in terms of textual history (how we decide what to do, who to write what and the algorithm for how to set things in motion) as well as the question of the author in terms of intent, language, etc. It is clear that is it all over the place because we each had our own agendas. Even though we all did brain dumps that semester so we could get to writing the hundred pages Kate demanded of us the next semester, and so never looked at this again, I recognized it immediately. My writing is decidedly different. Chapters 8, 9, 17, 18, 26 and 27. Though there are places where I clearly edited a bunch since we all took turns editing the whole thing as we progressed. It is especially interesting for me to see again because there are some things in there that would seem obvious to me now, but that I don't feel I had much intellectual critical thinking grounding for yet. My sarcastic condemnation of the corporation was clearly in the voice of me loving Melville, but also, dare I say, a wee bit Marxist. Weird for an avowed Marxists-are-silly person (at the time). I suspect these ideas came more from my phase of reading of 19th century mystery novels, combined with my involvement with New Narrative writers, and my intense interest in the prison industrial complex.

If you want to peak, it is wildly imperfect, but also short.

Billy Budd/Blade Runner redux draft