Regruntled.com

Here’s another experiment, for no particular reason.  The box below displays random paragraphs from Secret Ballet:

You can reload the page to get a new fragment.  I seem to be pushing the limits of Blogger.  When I do something like this, some things will work, and some things won’t.  I can publish this post, but I can’t edit it on Blogger, I have to delete it, edit it on my computer, and repost it.

For some reason I find Secret Ballet fascinating.  I keep wanting to read just a little bit more, even though I know the book was assembled from sample sentences in  a dictionary.  There’s nothing really there.

Is television news any different?  News is a business.  The stories are composed, packaged, teased and delivered by professional news readers.  There is a pretense of substance, the idea that something important actually happened, but on a slow news day, the news business fills the same amount of air time with no substance at all.

Maybe the fascination is that Secret Ballet doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is.

There are 138,510 versions of this page. The background is randomized, as is the image to the right. Although Blogger, the platform, hosts zillions of people spewing mindless drivel, randomizing the images was surprisingly hard to do. I had to put the randomness on a different server and link to it.

Can I randomize the text of a blog post? Again, this is easy enough on another server, but not so easy on Blogger. But maybe there is a way.

In the literary world, the cut-up technique can be traced back to the Surrealists, but is mostly associated with Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs in the 50s. The name comes from cutting up newspapers with razor blades and physically juxtaposing pieces of paper.

The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart, is a novel about randomness. The protagonist makes life decisions by rolling dice. On the other hand, Secret Ballet, by Detlev Fischer, is a randomized novel. It is composed of example sentences from a dictionary, arranged with some assistance from the author. The resulting text is quite readable, and the effect is more aimlessness than randomness.