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Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Literature. Show all posts

Thursday, August 25, 2005

T.M. Umar's "avant-garde" tale of revisiting Malaysian Independence through time-traveling

On Thursday, August 25th, 2005, Edmund Yeo sent me T.M. Umar's script-story "The 50's Project" with the intention that I would edit and/or critique it. I set to the task with aplomb, only to find that the text consisted of nothing but implausible dialogue in the service of some kind of time-travel plot to discover the origins of Malaysia. There was nothing of narrative or grammatical interest. Faced with my assignment yet unable to continue reading, the only thing I could do was apply William S. Burroughs' cut-up technique to the text, interspersed with any random observations that Umar's subliterate nonsense prompted in me. The results are as follows. T.M. Umar's text is represented in regular font. My comments are represented in bold. The original text is presented mostly in excerpts, as to inflict its full length on readers would be an unpardonable offense.