![imscared ost maze imscared ost maze](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V5IL7yGcV4o/maxresdefault.jpg)
In retrospect, this was likely how Bowie worked as well. But then I started tinkering with the sequence-it’s got to make some kinda sense, I thought-and wound up smoothing and rejiggering things until I had the below entry. At last it was far more jumbled, which was nice. The Bowie stuff was all together, generally in order, and most of the quotes were in one clump in the “middle.” Not cut-up enough! So I did it again, then again.
![imscared ost maze imscared ost maze](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/o_b3JDifR2I/maxresdefault.jpg)
I cut it all up, tossed the pieces of paper in a cap, pulled them out one by one and…it was weirdly coherent. Other bits came from a never-finished 1974 entry on my old blog, Locust St., and from other things that I’ve since forgotten. The Thatcher stuff came from (I believe) Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed. I also cut up quotes that I found in a few books, particularly in Jonathan Raban’s wonderful urban study Soft City and also in a couple of London histories. So I wrote out a “straight” entry on paper and then cut it up, typically in paragraphs but sometimes just sentences. In its place: the big triptych of the album. Originally it was going to be “We Are the Dead,” but the need for that entry to spell out the George Orwell connections of Diamond Dogs required some coherence and form. I’d planned to do one Diamond Dogs entry in the spirit of 1974: assembling it through Bowie’s favorite method of cutting up lines of verse, jumbling them, selecting the pieces in random order and then pasting together something new from the sequences. This was the “cut up” entry of the blog, and it didn’t quite work (well, maybe you thought it did). One of the more radically transformed entries in the book, with good reason.