S.KRAUSE

Mehta-Fictional Reflections

... aka The Blatant Rip-Off

15 Minutes of fame are really too few these days. Memories of Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass will fade in time. While the latter was immortalized in Shattered Glass (2003), I cannot imagine Ms. Viswanathan's story being committed to film. Thus it is up to us (the me-me generation, so to speak) to keep her memory alive, and to that end this 1st of May, 2006, I wish to begin The Opal Mehta Fiction Project, aka The Kaavya Viswanathan Memorial Fiction Project.

The fiction project is divided such:

• Steal-this-text: The writing/creation of new texts entirely from multiple documented excerpts of other texts.
• Paragraphs and Paraphrases: Reader's Digest Condensed Books on Crack—short, to the point, but with literary pretensions.
• Breaking the Language Barrier: Some works will never receive authorized translations into the world's myriad languages. While some might welcome a Shoshone or Hopi edition of The Da Vinci Code, we tend to think that Albanian and Basque editions of chick-lit represent a more immediate need.
• Wholetale and Retale: Why stop at 40 or so slightly altered passages? Slightly rewrite whole passages, chapters, etc.