why don't writers write 'cover' novels in the same way that musicians play cover tunes? they could keep the same form in tact while perhaps radically revamping the style and 'point of view'...maybe expanding on different characters, giving different narrators a shot...foreshadowing...epiloging...think of a literary analogue of tony bennet covering ozzy's 'crazy train' or....hendrix's 'star spangled banner' from woodstock...
why the hell not?
[besides the fact of the auteur-solo-genius fortress that surrounds the act of writing which could only kill the act of making music---which is necessarily a more communal, interpersonal endeavor...]
are we still in the grip of bible-mania? that a text is somehow 'sacred'? unalterable? from the hand of god? [or king james...] not to be desecrated by the vulgar restylings [that i am suggesting]? that it's forever? immovable clay tablets for the ages? commandments for living? [i think i just heard a stone tablet falling...]
or that, since books require so much effort to read and to write, that the ping-ponging interplay of references and influences which come so readily to music, as you hear it in time, would be too painfully slow to sustain anyone's interest?
No comments:
Post a Comment