Experiments in style: Disco version

A musical interlude

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

In today’s experiment I’d like to tell the story in the style of a disco song. First, though, here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

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The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

Cryptic crossword solution

A few weeks ago I posted a cryptic crossword version of the story. Here it is, in case you missed it.

Here is the solution. Don’t read further until you’ve had a go yourself. No cheating now!

Readers’ contributions

Before anything else, I’d like to share with you contributions I’ve had from readers. Firstly,

Nathan Slake

, who writes the wonderfully esoteric prose over at Slake, sent me these AI-generated versions of the hardboiled style:

I’m not sure why there’s a man in a uniform in the first version, but still. It certainly contributes to the noirness of it, and reminds me of the film Casablanca. I like the style of the second one because it reminds me of the old Superman comics, which were among my favourite reads.

The naming of parts (parts of speech) style grabbed the attention of both

Mitchell Allen

and

Rebecca Holden

. Mitch writes a great puzzle newsletter, and made a very incisive and informative comment about heat signatures — sorting by colour — and a comment about using Excel to draw out patterns. In the latter comment he provided a link to an article he wrote about automation. That is well worth checking out.

Finally, Rebecca, who is always getting lost, and with whom I have an ongoing correspondence on Wednesdays, sent me these graphs for the naming of parts version:

In the left-hand version, Rebecca has plotted the frequency of letters in alphabetical order, while the right-hand version shows the same information but with the letters arranged in decreasing order of frequency of occurrence. Fascinating. If you have any comments about these contributions, here’s your chance to make them:

Musical versions

Right, we’re almost at the moment you’ve been waiting for, but before I unveil the disco version you might like to have a look at the Blues version, and the Soul version, so that when I set you an essay question along the lines of ‘compare and contrast’ etc, you won’t be staring at a blank screen for an hour.

And now, at last, let’s hear it for…

Disco version: I wanna groove with you, by Funkmaster Tel and the Groovepots

12 inch version, courtesy of Dall-e

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Oh yeah

Oooh, ooh-ooh

Baby I was gonna call you, on Saturday Night

So I could see you, and treat you right.

I was gonna groove with you all night long,

But something happened, and it all went wrong.

Oooh, ooh-ooh let’s move it

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s groove it

Oh yeah, woman

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s groove it

All night long

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s move it

I went to the bathroom, but I hit the wall

Before I knew it, I started to fall

My head was spinning, around and around

And all I wanted was to get my body down

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna groove it

Oh yeah baby

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna move it

I wanna groove it with you

Oooh, ooh-ooh let’s move it

All night long

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s groove it

C’mon now

<Mega cool sax solo goes here, then some vibes, then some funky synth bass>

Oooh, ooh-ooh let’s move it

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s groove it

Oh yeah, baby

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s groove it

All night long

Oooh, ooh-ooh, let’s move it

I took myself down to A & E

Weren’t nobody obeying the rules, far as I could see

I saw the doctor, he said I’d be fine

But you gotta take it easy, for a little time

He said no grooving, and an early night

But it would be ok just to read and write

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna groove it

Oh yeah baby

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna move it

Ooh I wanna groove with you, woman

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna groove it

Till the morning light

Oooh, ooh-ooh, I wanna move it

Yeah, I gotta groove it with ya baby

etc etc fade out

Over to you

OK, so what do you think? And before anyone says anything, no I am not going to perform it!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s version.

For more experiments, please see the index. Paid subscribers also get behind the scenes information about some of these experiments as well as access to the whole of the back catalogue so to speak.