This blog is a series of short stories based on the public domain idea of a boy, a wild cat, and a boy stuck in a lifeboat. The idea became an international open source idea when the Canadian Yann Martel retold a story by Brizilian writer Moacyr Scliar as The Life of Pi. Martel hadn’t even read Scliar's work. However he had read a review in the The New York Times Book Review that Martel mysteriously attributed to John Upike. (Updike for his part, does not recall having written this review.)
In turn this blog is a sequence of stories based simply on the idea of: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat. Just as Martel didn’t read Scliar, I am not suggesting that anyone read Martel. The open source idea is: a boy, a wild cat, a lifeboat.
If you are interested in contributing a story concerning a boy, a wild cat (such as a tiger), and a lifeboat in any style or form that pleases you, it be my pleasure to receive this story at matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail so that I can post it here.
My own story, a Boy, a Cat, and LifeBoat will be released in a collection of stories called The End is the Beginning on April 16th, 2007 by Final State Press.
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1 comment:
Someone sent me a note. I thought I'd post the note and my response here. Thanks!
Note: I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I'm the only person I know (who reads fiction, that is) who hasn't read Life of Pi.
Response: I haven't read it either. But if Yann Martal can use Moacyr Scliar without reading his work, then we can use Yann Martal's use of the Moacyr Scliar without reading it.
I guess I'm interested in seeing how flexible this basic premise of a boy, a jaguar/tiger/wild cat, in a lifeboat can be, especially since this idea was the source of the controversy about Yann Martel's "originality." Was he a plagiarist? Why did his work receive so much attention, when Moacyr Scliar's did not?
I'm also curious about what I keep thinking about as protocol-based fiction, or fiction that is organized around what is sometimes called a high concept. Or you might think of it as writers working out the same writing exercise. Or it could be kind of like that movie about the joke, The Aristocrats. Same joke, same concept, different execution depending on the style of the comedian. It is also sort of like the Oulipo (actually kind of like a collective Exercises in Style By Raymond Queneau but not as rigorous. That is you can define a kind of limit around a subject and see how writers react to the limit.
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