
Warhol's "A: A Novel," published in 1968, is based on 24 hours of tape recordings (24 one-hour tapes) of Ondine speaking. His tape-recorded musings were transcribed and typed up and serve as the basis of the novel, which was disingenuously presented as one day in the life of Ondine. The book is one of the premier artifacts of the Pop art movement/Pop culture. Warhol followed Ondine around New York City with a tape recorder, recording their conversations. Ondine was addicted to amphetamines and was prone to wild verbal flights that covered many subjects. To type up the tapes, Warhol hired teenage girls, some of whom were barely literate and made many errors. Warhol "edited" the resulting manuscript during a series of concerts given by The Velvet Underground (Lou Reed is one of the "characters" in the novel), sitting in the rear of the theater in the dark, reading proof sheets with a flashlight. Like James Joyce when confronted with transcription errors made by the French printers/compositors of the first edition of "Ulysses" (1922), Warhol loved the mistakes and decided to keep them in. He thought the mistakes improved the book as it made it worse, more of a Pop manifesto, and insisted that all the errata be left in the final draft, which he fancied as a Pop "Finnegans Wake." In his later book/memoir "Popism," Warhol explained, "I wanted to do a 'bad book' just the way I'd done 'bad movies' and 'bad art,' because when you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something." Warhol, the author, refused to filter out the "background noise" or "static," thus preventing the reader from following a coherent narrative thread. The book intentionally is boring, as are many of Warhol's films. Of his films Warhold said that talking about them was more interesting than actually viewing them, and this likely was his intent with "A: A Novel" -- to create an artifact that made people talk about it -- and think.
(imdb.com)