CeridwenRemix is a mash-up of Philip K. Dick's "Ubik" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". I didn't use the whole poem, just cut bits and pieces out and modified them with Ubick-ness. You could say I took the operating system written by Ginsberg and plugged in the data written by Philip K. Dick and then added my own wetware software.

Howl has long been my favorite poem, and I manage to read it in a different light each time. It's the book that sits on my nightstand, and there's an extra copy in my backpack and in the glove compartment of my car. I read Howl, and I read the other poems in the City Lights copy of it, with a rather alarming regularity. So it was no surprise that when reading Ubik I started drawing connections. I chose to focus on the position of Ella Runciter...a lone soldier in the battle against Jory. Ginsberg positioned himself as a soldier (not alone, perhaps) in a battle against the destruction of everything soulful and alive and real. A battle against government intervention and invasion and consumption.

For Ginsberg, Carl Solomon was the emblem of the "best minds of my generation" being shoved through grinding machinery and destroyed. For Ella, Joe Chip was yet another soul being eaten by Jory. In both cases there are larger issues. For Ginsberg and Howl, the ideas of government and society and control are at stake. As are concepts of individuality and freedom and intellect. In other words, all we claim to hold dear. For Ella, though perhaps not stated, is the ethical issue of being in cold-PAC in the first place. Their souls, if we choose to call them that, are being held captive (subjective view, I know), their bodies frozen. Rather than death, they face a slow decay. And the benefit is not to them, but to those left behind. Issues of eternity and immortality and selfishness, life and death and love and loss, are hauled into the harsh light of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium.

I chose to select chunks of Howl to use rather than to work with the poem in its entirety for two reasons. One, to keep the resulting piece manageable and easy to read in one sitting, and two, in the spirit of a remix and in a small effort to inflict my own presence on the piece. The changes made may have been editorial rather than content-oriented, but they are my own.

The basic technique was this: re-read Ubik quickly, jotting down names, words, dates, etc...basically anything that jumped out of the page as significant somehow. Then, re-read Howl, hacking out parts that reminded me of situations in Ubik. Replace proper nouns, certain phrases, expressions, etc. from Howl with the list of things from Ubik and voilà! A mash-up of the two pieces. The individuality comes from my very subjective process of selection. I filtered out more than 99% of the words of the book, I'd estimate. I also filtered out about half of the lines of the poem, and replaced half of those remaining with parts of Ubik. In other words, I took the vast amounts of information in each text and boiled it down to something I feel is short, easy to read, and interesting.

For me it was reminiscent and representative of the task we all face each day: a seemingly (perhaps truly) infinite stream of information. Information overload! The only way to make sense of it all is to make selections, for better or for worse. We chose to concentrate on some things and ignore others. We combine facts and stories in our own way to gain meaning. Juxtaposition is no longer random but incredibly significant. Do you remember the activities in children's books where there were two or more images next to each other, and the task was to synthesize a word?

My own (slightly more adult but still easy) favorite:

+ = ???

Its a highly simplified example but it gets the point across. We take two seemingly unrelated things and create one meaning out of it. Another favorite is Mad Gab, the board game. "It's not what you say, it's what you hear!" There are several words written on a card. When read aloud with the right rhythm and pitch they sound like another word or phrase. If not, it sounds like mumbo-jumbo and makes no sense. A few examples (read them out loud..although if you're doing it in public you might end up in an institution):

"ASK RUDE ARRIVE HER"

"hype people earth duh hey"

"Dish hippie slaw stats he"

"up he such ease"

So, you take seemingly random terms and force them through your brain until they have meaning. And, you sound like an idiot :). Anyway, the idea was to take two separate texts and mash them together to synthesize something with significance.

Ginsberg's use of repetition, both of words and of patterns, worked well for me. In my mind it was the perfect tool to emphasize the feeling of relentless inevitability that Ubik presents us with. It creates a drive that both leads you on and creates moments of pause, or caesura, in which to reflect.

~ Ceridwen