squeeeb

musicians, especially rappers, have been sampling for years. i always wondered what if i took a Shakespeare play and added a few words, could i call it sampling and sell it as my own?

but that's not the point. the point is, i was at the bookstore and i saw "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.

that is pure fucking genius!

he took a classic book, changed a few words around, added some words (i am grossly over exaggerating the simplicity of what he did, i know he did more than that) and now its a different book but the same. and its got zombies.

i wish i had thought of it first.

how do you feel about it? is it sacrilege? is it innovative? a stupid novelty? or do you think this will start a new genre?

and if it does start a new genre, how would it affect the literature world?

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onward to mayhem!

Baraka_Guru

In this case, a stupid novelty. What's interesting about the zombie book is that it's put an otherwise tiny publisher into the position of selling over 300,000 copies of a book in an otherwise damned industry. (For reference, a small publisher is lucky, and happy, to sell over 1,000 copies of a title.) All the power to them, but it isn't sustainable.

This isn't entirely new. Authors have even wrote "sequels" to classic works. Films have been "sampling" from Shakespeare (Clueless, etc.). The publisher I work for produced a book by a musician who did a "cover" of a Thomas Hardy novel. Shakespeare himself can be said to be "sampling" from his source tales. I think there are even services where you can have a company produce a classic book (such as Austen) where you replace characters' names with names of your friends and family.

What we see here with the zombie book is, I assume, a sloppy, sensational example of it. Otherwise, "sampling" in a literary aspect is perhaps more subtle and often cryptic compared to other art forms. (Or maybe I will say it should be.)

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

collage is as old as writing is. everything you see is a collage. everything you say is a collage.

the illusion, which came later, is that of pure form, creation in a void without reference to what precedes it, what conditions it.

then comes capitalism which confused a romantic mythology of creativity--the Genius who is the Recepticle for the Breath of some God, a demiurge which enables the Emergence of Absolute Novelty because he is a conduction device for the Emanations of the Beyond. this gets mixed with the equally bizarre notion of private property and voila, a notion of ownership of cultural work is born that's entirely at cross purposes with the way in which it actually does work.

as the material basis for wealth generation slipped away from the metropole, new and improved extensions of this basically ridiculous notion of ownership began to develop--intellectual property law they called this new mutant.

internalized, the property-centered norms which inform all this lead you to see things upside-down. now collage becomes transgressive.

i liked the idea of this book for a few minutes. then i lost interest.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

tisonlyi

Most/All of Shakespeare's plays were retellings, with or without a twist, of earlier stories which circulated around Europe with the travelling theatre troupe things of the time. Names and locations usually changed, obviously, with grafts here and there.

I was tempted to say hither and yon.

Glad I didn't.

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"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--

telekinetic

I've often wondered about this. How hard would it be to take a novel, distill it down to its basic plot skeleton (scenes, plot, etc), remask the characters and locations, re-tune the dialog, and re-release it? I am mostly thinking about trashy paperback fiction here, but it seems like the same book could be written and reshelled for westerns, vampires, generic sci fi, star wars sci fi, fantasy, kid-friendly fantasy, etc etc, with only minor changes.

"And then [PROTAGONIST1] pointed his [AMMOBASEDPROJECTILEWEAPON] at [ANTAGONIST5] from accross the [CLIMACTIC LOCATION] and yelled 'I know you only have 2 [AMMO UNITS] left, and there are three of us...how is this going to end, [ANTAGONIST5]?'"

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twisted no more

Baraka_Guru

If you were to analyze our collective myths, stories, novels, films, etc., (and some have), you generally come up with around 5 major story types. These have been around for thousands of years, and yet they're still in current use. It's the details that change.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Reese

The only problem I have with sampling is when it's recent source material and the original artist isn't credited. I hear hiphop songs sampling great music from the 70s and I know about a million teenagers that love the song have no idea that that hip hop artist didn't do anything but sing new lyrics to the song.

Many of the greatest movies ever made were direct copies or sampled scenes and plots from other movies. I'm sure it's the same with books. The Magnificant Seven, a great western is based on Seven Samurai by Akira Kurosawa. On the Topic of Kurosawa, Roshomon, another of his great films is based on a short story made years before and has been copied many times since. A 3rd great film by him, Yojimbo is Clint Eastwood's Fistful of Dollars, a great speghetti western.

Star wars takes scenes right out of old WW2 movie which I can't remember the name atm, but it's the scene when Han says Don't get cocky, kid. Hell, Star wars even has a little bit of Seven Samurai in it.

Sam Raimi took his cheaply made Evil dead movie, re-wrote it with a budget and made Evil Dead 2.

I just think it's important to look a little deeper into the things you enjoy, you might find that it was greatly influenced by another great work. I don't look down samples in hip hop anymore because I've looked though the history books and I've seen that great work can have elements directly copied from earlier works.

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