Hey,
Here’s the first email Exquisite Corpse. We based this on one sentence. I’ve added each of our initials following the sentence(s) we added.
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The box of birds was starting to rattle. (je) A dozen orphans were sauntering to their hoosegow. ™ The oldest was doing a barely adequate job of concealing an irregularly shaped package under his dirty shirt. (da) With little left to lose, the ersatz patriarch of this ramshackle family finally took their prospects in hand, hustled what was left of his motley crew out the door, stuffed a few crumpled bills from the cash register into his pockets, dragged the hapless security guard’s corpse behind the counter and set the whole place ablaze in an exquisite conflagration of whiskey, wood and squandered innocence. (gj)
It cracks me up that Greg’s entry was about twice the size of the rest of the entries combined!
Yeah, as I said in my comment accompanying my contribution to Jay, I decided to say fuck it and just go completely over the top. I also figured I’d take the fairly cheesy approach of incorporating both exquisite and corpse into my sentence. If my sentence had been as short as you guys’, the whole thing would have been about as long as a haiku. Tom’s sentence is pretty non-sequitur following on Jason’s, unless by “birds” and “box” Tom took that to be figurative and mean young people in jail. That’s what I’ve always taken hoosegow to mean, although maybe it originally means chicken coop. I’m willing to bet that’s the word Danny said he had to look up.
I’m inclined to say that we need to make these a little longer than they are. But how exactly to do that while maintaining the unpredictability is tricky. I think trying to work it in a cycle could be interesting, but I’m afraid that when the second pass comes around you will already have some inkling of where it’s going, or where it’s been. But maybe that’s not all bad. Maybe if it just goes around two times it won’t become totally predictable and lose its spontaneity.
Or maybe I’m trying to make it too much like a real story and what it really should be is a random quick-fire burst of thoughts with little or no cohesion except randomness.
Also, the addition of more players (to bring the total up to 6-7) may flesh things out some more. Now that we have seen it all, I wanted to ask Jason- Was your line inspired by the Church album of the same name?
Here’s the latest addition, single sentence style this time…
The bewildered gambler delicately inserted his greasy manservant.
There was actually quite a bit of thought put into my “hoosegow” sentence. I was using that word as a synonym for “jail” – although mostly just to shake things up a bit. After some amount of thought, I opted to use “box of birds” as slang for “carton of eggs” and that’s why I threw in the “dozen” reference as well as used orphans and jail as a sort of loose association for the dead, unborn birds stuck in a box. Obviously there’s no direct correlation to whatever story we were trying to produce, but I choose to just add more subtle connections and see where it went.
Oh yeah, I was also about to suggest doing an exquisite corpse haiku. There would be an odd man out if we each got a line, unless we actually broke that up by words too – or split the seven syllable line up into 3 and 4, but that might be tricky.