Once upon a time there was a man who was exceedingly lonely. He wept so often and so long even God was disgusted, and he cursed the slovenly creature so that rather than tears, he wept out stories instead. Each story was as bitter and unpleasant as poison, but they never stopped flowing.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on June 13th, 2020
__________Somehow my A Thousand And One fairy tales project has reached Tale #100 today, and to celebrate that I’ve decided to make some new tales explicitly out of old ones, rather than just sort of generally out of old ones.
And so, in The New Brothers Grimm, I take sentences, paragraphs, and fragments of original Brothers Grimm tales, and then re-assemble them into something new.
The First New Tale
The Second New Tale
The Third New Tale
The Fourth New Tale
The Fifth New Tale
The Sixth New Tale
The Seventh New Tale
The Eighth New Tale
The Ninth New Tale
The Tenth New Tale
The Eleventh New Tale
The Twelfth New Tale
The Thirteenth New Tale
__________
Notes:
1. All of these were made in February and March 2020
2. They were all made using sentences from the Jack Zipes translations used in The Complete Fairy Tales collection, published in 2007 by Vintage.
3. Various minor changes to nouns, tenses, names, etc, were made to keep things consistent.
4. In a similar way to the In The Terminals Of Minraud trilogy of Burroughs cut-ups I made last year.
5. Which I thought might be interesting at the time
6. But which proved not to be interesting at all
7. To anyone
8. But me.
I was supposed to be telling the class a story
all their faces looking up at mine
waiting for me to fill the silence
But I froze
and the silence
stretched out
so long
that this
absence of story
became the story
to be remembered long beyond any
I could ever have told them
This tale of the silent man
looming
and strange
lonely
and slowly
moving
towards
silent
tears
__________
Notes:
1. Written on September 23rd, 2019
2. And not based on a true story
3. Thankfully
4. But on an anxiety dream
5. instead
___________
Notes:
1. Written on 11th November, 2012
2. I always really liked this one