LATENT NEWS

I found this surrealist game in Ron Sakolsky’s SURREALIST SUBVERSIONS – Rants, Writings And Images of the Surrealist Movement in the United States - that I bought at the Montreal anarchist Book Fair. Latent News is described as a situation where “one or more persons cuts out each individual line from several different newspaper stories, mixes them up, and then rearranges them as quickly as possible into entirely new stories, the only rule being that the lines must be arranged into syntactically correct sentences. The name is derived from the impulse behind the game: to disorder the mystification called ‘news’ and thereby to reveal something of its LATENT content.”

The results can also be hilarious. Here is one done by me with the Saturday, May 15 2005 Montreal Gazette.

The death toll from years of vigorous lobbying by the leader of the Conservative Party made calculations even more feverish in London. After the scandal erupted, the Labour government hanged a cancer-stricken Tory MP. I saw this happen once before as Parliament is consumed with talk of cancer. More gunfire was heard and bodies went unburied after Parliament was shut down. Meanwhile, soldiers loyal to Uzbekistan’s authoritarian leader, a US ally, look like oafs. Undignified is too small a word for the spectacle of people checking for bombs before staring their cars, or lining up to the right for clerical sexual abuse. Deeply familiar with the position and standing ready to take over is the new wing at the Vatican.