not affirmative authority, a larded psalm

not affirmative authority, a psalm

 

there are no more fires in the

restroom true I continue to

be very confident in our position

 

in the litigation the data just isn’t

there you do have your critics

out there the earth is full of

your mercy not our business

 

our kids are not commodities

finally let the people decide

I wasn’t so sure about that very

modest there’s one side of me

 

that says to go ahead the people

should decide teach me your

laws I’ve noticed that they’re

exiting kids as quickly as they

 

accept them all it really did was

allow them the right to proceed

the halls are no longer like a party

  

Source

Falkenberg, Lisa. Not Sold On Abbott’s School Takeover Plan. Houston Chronicle. 25 Apr. 2014. B1, B7

 

Collier, Kish. Sports Authority Debt Lawsuit is Back On. Houston Chronicle. 25 Apr. 2014. B2.

 

Bible Verse. Psalm 119: 64. Houston Chronicle. 25 Apr. 2014. B8

 

Krauthammer, Charles. Court Makes Right Call on Affirmative Action. Houston Chronicle. 25 Apr. 2014. B9

 

Note:

I enjoyed this a lot. Given the relatively free range I had, I decided to limit myself to one section of the newspaper, the B section, which is usually where local news, opinions, and (I only just discovered this) a bible verse all reside. Two news items, an opinion piece, and the aforementioned bible verse gave me all I needed. There were no erasures, but I did play a little loose with the definition of sentence. In some cases what appeared to be two separate closures were separated by a colon, which I treated like a period. My starting two-sentence piece was “there are no more fires in the restrooms. The halls are no longer ‘like a party.’” Then, I just inserted the most promising of my building blocks between them, and so on and so on. I finished up by making the lines roughly the same length and organizing them in a way that I liked.

 

Here is the prompt I was responding to:

 

Larding aka “line stretching.” From your newspaper text, pick two sentences. Add a new sentence between the first two; then two sentences in the new intervals that have become available; and continue to add sentences until the passage has attained the length desired. The supplementary sentences must either enrich the existing narrative or create a new narrative continuity.