The words that comprise the attached texts have been cut out of various issues of The New York Times.
Peter Wortsman is the author of works in various modes, including four books of fiction, two plays, an Independent Publishers Book Award-winning travel memoir, and numerous translations from German.
not many
sustain
perception
thrown into
gloom and disrepair
the aftermath
vapor
trails
aimless
floating
seething
undernourished
to the end
Source: The New York Times
Method: I revert to cut-ups when I am too distracted, depressed, dumbfounded or deranged to write coherently and just feel like letting loose. I circle the words that catch my eye for whatever reason and then cut them out and rearrange them on the page. My method is to read a text vertically, latching onto words and phrases as the eye runs down the page and linking them together by what I would call magnetic imminence. I let it lead me with little intent. The result is often amusing, sometimes irreverent, occasionally poetic.
Peter Wortsman is the author, most recently, of a novel “Cold Earth Wanderers” (Pelekinesis, 2014); a travel memoir “Ghost Dance in Berlin” (Travelers Tales, 2013)—recipient of a 2014 Independent Publishers Book Award (IPPY); an anthology which he compiled, edited and translated “Tales of the German Imagination” (Penguin Classics, 2013); and a collection of short prose “Footprints in Wet Cement” (Pelekinesis, forthcoming in 2017).
