Open Wound

Talking about William S. Burroughs' cut-up method with students last week, I came across this online text-recombining engine. My favorite thing about it is that it's called Open Wound 1.0, but it's a pretty interesting version of a randomizer. It assigns tags to words based on their parts of speech, and tried to reassemble a grammatical text. As such, it doesn't actually work, but the attempt is interesting. This is the beginning of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, reassembled:

From the Technical image of technical Literature by technical voltaire
I was in an mill, panting on the everything can, my battle picked by the
gown 's head, when I suddenly felt the lavish can of the old metal ruled
from shrill! Leaning need to free words, chiseling them from the steel of
the bushy period. It has, of course, like any life, a divine head, a
master, two steps, and two noble feet, but will never have two meters.
Something to know with, run a few steps, and then stop, bristling, almost
immediately!

Snow in North Carolina

Speaking of collision and accumulation

From the chapter "HABIT is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit" [bold mine]:

Something comes along. Something else comes along. They collide and stick. They stay together, perhaps combine with something else again to form a larger combination. This is called a "connective synthesis." An example is sediment. A grain comes to rest. Another joins it. Many grains follow from a variety of sources, brought to a point of accumulation by chance. Not brute chance. Chance discrimination. . . . Not all grains answering to the description join the gang. Given a particular grain, no one, however savvy in sedimentation, can predict whether it will be one of the select. . . . A statistical process of this kind, combining chance and approximate necessity, can be called "selection." A selection is an act of perception, since something, in this case a set of natural laws, "perceives" the grains that come together in a layer. The resulting muck is an "individual."

un/familiar

friends sang a song in another language (hebrew?) and i told them what i thought it was about, "a strip of scorching white under strip of faded blue, with a sixth sense of many looking towards the horizon, many who were sad and now are hopeful, happy, looking at a bread loaf afloat, or a boat coming towards them." it turned out the song is usually sung before sabbath, while everyone looks at the door waiting/welcoming a feminine spirit(?) to eat bread.

in return, i sang for them in hindi and they responded, "there is a sense of flowing, like water, as if the entire language existed in not only a temporal flow, but in, as well, a spatial flow."

For my first post, somebody else's image: today on BoingBoing, a photo from London of fallen leaves accidentally pressed into fresh tarmac. Look also for links to two other images in comments.

Paper Dreams

Found this yesterday across the street from our apartment. Our neighborhood has many Somali families, and it made me really happy to find this. As it turns out, I saved it from the snow that fell last night.