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Fourth splently that one all anot by need.
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Fourth splendid and religiou.

Ten strophes derived from a passage in Gertrude Stein's play Capital Capitals (A Stein Reader, [Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993], 421–26 [the play's end]), by running it first through DIASTEX5, Charles O. Hartman's most recent automation of one of my diastic reading-through text-selection procedures, employing as "seed" a paragraph from A Long Gay Book (Reader, 214, para. 7). In making this poem, 3 words from the seed were inserted into the source passage before it was run through DIASTEX5 to allow the program to complete one full period.

Periods were added to that program's output, and it was then sent through Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke's program TRAVESTY, which was asked for an order-4 "Travesty" of 2663 characters. Its output was revised in regard to sentence breaks and sentence-final punctuation, but the words and neowords and their order were left unchanged. Each sentence became a verse line and these lines were grouped into strophes in which the numbers of lines in succeeding strophes constituted two Lucas sequences: 1, 3, 4, 7, 11, 18, 29, followed by 1, 3, 4.

421 and 214 are permutations of 241, found by opening a math-table book I used in high school to a logarithm table. The extent of the source passage was determined by random-digit chance operations as were the Travesty's order number and number of characters.

Every typographical line ending indicates a short pause, strophe breaks somewhat longer ones. Periods and question marks call for sentence-final intonation contours.

Jackson Mac Low New York: 11-14 September 1998

Pub. May 2001

DRC