When you cut into the present, the future leaks out
Something REALLY neat that I just realised - Nancy is preparing a lay-out for the "Tigers Win!!!" headline, and is rearranging various different newspaper clippings for her layout.
Remember how I said it's weird that Nancy somehow managed to predict the events of that night's game before they happened?
Somehow Nancy rearranged the newspaper clippings to predict the future?
What makes this SO neat, is that it literally is Burroughs cut-up method! @gritstartar you will love this haha!
As a reminder - William Burroughs popularised the "cut-up" technique, where he'd take different snippets from a newspaper article, cut these up, and rearrange them to create new sentences.
One of my favourite quotes by Burroughs is:
“Now these experiments started not on tape-recorders but on paper. In 1959 Brion Gysin said that writing is fifty years behind painting and applied the montage technique to words on a page and this technique had already been used at that time in painting for fifty years, it was, in fact, kind of old hat in painting. Brion copied out phrases from newspapers and magazines, then took his scissors and cut these selections into pieces and rearranged the fragments at random and these cut-up experiments appeared in Minutes To Go in 1959. When you experiment with cut-ups over a period of time, you find that some of the cut-ups and rearranged texts seem to refer to future events. I cut up an article on.. written by John Paul Getty and got “it’s a bad thing to sue your own father”, (this was a rearrangement and wasn’t in the original text), and a year later one of his sons did sue him. We had no explanation for this at the time, (perhaps, suggesting that when you cut into the present the future leaks out), but we simply accepted it and continued the experiments…"
I love this! I LOVE that they literally had Nancy cut up a newspaper, rearrange the text, and have the future leak out! It's so great!
This further circles back and reaffirms my initial assumption that the infamous @strangerwriters tweet was an exemplary cut-up, while they were experimenting with non-linear narratives:
It's such a great hint! Like so great! I'm nerding out about it! As a final reminder, even Bowie heavily experimented with the cut-up method to generate the lyrics to several of his songs, and the visual similarities to the Bowie's cut-up and the @strangerwriters tweet is just *chef's kiss*.
