Thread: Zooropa/The Book of Matt

I've been playing with a lot of... weird stuff lately, as a result of reading Scott Pilgrim and listening to 90s U2, and this is kind of the start of the result.... I think. I''ve yet to sort a running order for the first five or so sections. This first bit is, I think, the foreword, but don't hold me to that.

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I like the message your delivering, but is seems kind of redundant at times. I don't see two different points being made here like you stated at the very beginning, and at the beginning of the last paragraph. The only thing your really saying is that life is unpredictable and often crazy, albeit in an interesting way.

Philosophical. If thats your intention then great.

How did Zooropa by U2 inspire this? Is this the beginning of your story? The tone came across as arrogant and there is no sign of a story. Is it meant to be a story? Or is it a work of non fiction?

Sorry I am asking more questions than giving feedback. But not sure whats to be said. It reads like a magazine article or editors comment.

Originally Posted by Robdemanc

Philosophical. If thats your intention then great.

How did Zooropa by U2 inspire this? Is this the beginning of your story? The tone came across as arrogant and there is no sign of a story. Is it meant to be a story? Or is it a work of non fiction?

Sorry I am asking more questions than giving feedback. But not sure whats to be said. It reads like a magazine article or editors comment.

Yeah, it kind of is (an editor's comment), to be honest. It's supposed to be rather tongue-in-cheek as well, but that doesn't come across so well. *sighs* My original concept for the foreword was for a biographical piece about the life and death of Jeff Buckley, but I had a miserable time getting anything which I felt any kind of flow in done with that setting so I scrapped the concept and wrote the above. Should I go back to the first idea, you think?

Zooropa helped out (as did Achtung Baby) in setting my brain off-kilter. The idea is for the whole story to be postmodern, and I don't mean stylistically except at a few turns when I feel like going there. Both sonically and lyrically, those albums go there. The Fly off of Achtung, would probably be the song I'd have to credit with being the most inspirational to me, but it doesn't have the same ring to it.

... it's not technically the beginning. The technical beginning is an infodump piece I wrote just to help solidify some of the backstory. I will not be posting that, though; the chronological story proper actually begins with the prologue.

Hi Vertigo. Achtung Baby is my most played album! It is inspiring. I saw a doc about the making of it. When I see the video for The Fly I get a notion of the end of our culture.

I just read the prologue you posted. Will read it again later and give more feedback

I have read this twice now and have to say its not clear to me what you are saying. I get the impression your character is on a dying planet, alone, yearning for the lord. I am not sure who the "you" is meant to be. But it comes up many times. I get the feeling you are trying to fuse a futuristic science fiction type genre with something idealistic (religious). Not sure who you meant by "father", whether you were talking about a parent or a god.

There appears to be some intentional contradictions too. "What do you have? Parsecs aren’t for time, I know that. I never learned; I didn’t have time to learn, thanks to you. " That line irritated me. I don't know if to take the narator seriously now.

I have to say it is very unusual and I wonder if you are trying to be too abstract/clever. Maybe it means a lot to you but you must try to think about the reader.

The only bit that reminded me of U2 was the line: "I took your money; I drank your wine." I think from Until the End of the World ("we ate the food, we drank the wine, everybody was having a good time")

I admire your boldness with this text, but it is not very clear what you are saying or whether this is a story or not.

I'm sorry to say I'm not familiar with U2's repertoire, so hopefully that hasn't robbed this piece of crucial meaning. I found the whole thing intriguing, if ambiguous. Possibly too ambiguous. Ambiguity can be great but I have a hard time even deciding how ambiguous this is, and whether the narrator (whose identity is mysterious) is being philosophically or sarcastically ambiguous. In other words, are they for real or some deluded self-important joker? At this stage I can't tell, and that's not necessarily a problem at all, provided there is something I can say I understand with certainty, but this is all coming off a little... what's the word... contrived? The questions being raised seem more for dramatic effect than to drive some process forwards. Maybe I'm too tired to follow it, but that's the impression I'm getting at the moment. Having said that it does sound interesting, I get the impression that there is something worth pursuing in here, provided it doesn't get lost amid metaphor and irony.