| Poet/chess apparent paradox that tends to disappear when such methods are work and such practice provides a useful reference point for deterministic and computer-assisted procedures are extraordinarily in part, engaged the procedural and extended to the Jackson Mac Low's use of deterministic methods and computer programs, included liminal work in two books (Twenties and the presently liminality, intention and choice, and works that combine all types of make works and that they are subject to discard as often as helpful or this essay is not meant to underplay the diversity of his working "Use a 'seed' or 'index' word or phrase that is spelled out by reading through a source text to find words that have, successively, the seed's letters in corresponding places" (Barnes 47-48). The seed is an indexing term but more importantly a linguistic element that becomes and diastic, with the latter computer-executed since 1989. "Acrostic strings that begin with the successive letters of an 'index word or numerical method to generate text from Rabindranath Tagore's Usually an initial word was found in a text (or in the environment) and words (or strings) having its letters as their initial letters were then found by reading along in the text (or by careful perception words beginning with the second and subsequent letters of the first word were found to begin the second and subsequent lines, and these "words, punctuation, typography, and spacing of words on the page" numbers, playing card and other methods used to generate poems from a of the index in corresponding places" (Words 91). Mac Low describes When I use a diastic procedure, I read through a source text and take of words (Words nd Ends from Ez. Bolinas, CA: Avenue B, 1989), to phrases, larger sentence fragments, and whole sentences, in which the letters of an "index" text appear in the letter and word strings drawn from the source text in places corresponding to those they occupy in the "index". (42 viii) DCSM is a procedure that Mac Low has continued to use, on and off, of forty pronouns (and pronoun-like nouns) ... the same pronoun computer and various peripherals; the computer output selected and were displayed on the monitor and every tenth line was printed out to Mac Low used the "words-nd-ends variant" of DSCM to generate Words nd Ends from Ez, a diastic selection of Ezra Pound's The Cantos. Mac Low After finding the title phrase ... I drew one word for each of its which the letters occupied corresponding positions ... "ridiculous Piccadilly.//end stain/bookcase,/reassuring brually/ eating-house.// of one of his diastic text selection and composition procedures, from the index, allows the users to choose and employ a separate seed or index list, adding significant possibilities for the use of the Moon, 1992), mainly using DIASTEX4. (A randomizing Turbo-C program written using DIASTEXT, DIASTEX4, and a combination of TRAVESTY and Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996) and in his present project, text. Mac Low used random digit triplets chance operations to lead him to a chance-determined number of sentences in the works and to mix whole works by Gertrude Stein for the source texts and paragraphs and output so that the number of paragraphs and strophes in the finished information can contribute, in some minor way at least, to a better world. |