I found myself quite enjoying this week’s collage reading. The point wasn’t clear to me early on, as I read the piece chronologically from 312 onwards, but after a few hints that the ordering of things should not be relevant, I began scrolling randomly through the document, reading which ever number that caught my eye – which often happened to be the short single sentence ones, but that’s not important. After doing this for a considerable amount of the reading, it became clear that the individual sections managed to make sense whilst isolated, and without too much context.
Some of my favourite quotes:
326 – plots are for dead people
324 – The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things
353 – I hate quotations
And on 324, in relation to my experience reading this piece, the absence of plot left me thinking about several other things. The main thing being the music that I was listening to while I was reading. So now when I think back to the reading in making this post, I find myself thinking of varying Warpaint lyrics. Taking this idea of music, I got to thinking about the ways music listening differs these days, due to both technological and simply cultural reasons. The role of portable mp3 players, or let’s just say iPod, has resulted in a massive amount of music all being accessible form the one source. So this gives a huber of options: pick whatever single song you feel like listening to, make a playlist and shuffle it, or you could listen to an album in its set order. These differences are reminiscent of the idea of collages, as you can listen to songs in any order with ease, despite the musicians initial intentions demonstrated through their ordering of their album. I personally feel that listening to an album in its set order is the ultimate form of listening to music(pretentious, probably), but I could well be in the minority there. I sense that a collage or hypertext enthusiast might favour the idea of a shuffled playlist.