overwriting

Set in the near future, in a Paris devastated by revolution and disease, Empire of the Senseless is narrated by two terrorists and occasional lovers, Thivai, a pirate, and Abhor, part robot, part human. Together and apart, the two undertake an odyssey of carnage, a holocaust of the erotic. “An elegy for the world of our fathers,” as Kathy Acker calls it, where the terrorists and the wretched of the earth are in command, marching down a road charted by Genet to a Marseillaise composed by Sade.

(Source: Grove Atlantic catalog copy)

Writing (2012) was inspired by and built with Joe Davis’s Telescopic Text, pairing the possibilities of expanding, effacing essay with the musings of a Monson or a Mezzanine. An introspective, interactive non-fiction, the work unfurls, an exploration of the processes of composition as much as a finished literary product. As the piece grew to dozens of junctions and thousand of words, the editing interface slowed dramatically, each erasure oredit taking a minute or more. This in turn forced an accountability to first thought – it became easier to publically ‘rewrite’ mistakes, misspeaks and infelicitous phrases than to invisibly edit them away. The result is a thinking aloud on the (web)page, a map to the writer’s trains of thought for the reader to unfold and explore. Writing featured in the 2013 electronic poetry edition of Australian literary journal Overland.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

All of the prior remixes of Nick Montfort's _Taroko Gorge_ rewrote the text, while leaving Nick's code unchanged or almost so. I thought that was a shame. I also thought it was an opportunity! Since they all essentially consisted of word-lists plugged into a schema, I was able to remix them together on two axes at the same time:* Combining the word-lists of any two poems;* Mutating the stanza schema.I also took the opportunity to randomize the color schemes of the pages. (But not the font choices or the background imagery that some of the poems indulged in. Optima for everybody, I'm afraid.)Nick's original poem generates a constant ABBA-C pattern, with some extra B's thrown in. This page essentially invents a new pattern (for example A-, or BC-BA, or CCC, or so on) for each block. The code for the pattern is on the left, and the generated output is on the right.To answer the obvious question: Yes, this page really does execute the code that's displayed in the left column, and it really does generate the text in the right column.The most entertaining part of this project was inventing a way to mutate Nick's original code, while still having it *look* distinctly like Nick's original code. If you're not painfully familiar with that code - e.g, if you're neither Nick nor me - go to http://nickm.com/poems/taroko_gorge.html and select "View Source" in your browser, and look near the bottom. You'll recognize the form of the "do_line()" routine. Some of mine are simpler than his; some are more complex.The *complete* code for this page is of course much more involved than Nick's (because it has to *generate* Nick's code, plus a lot more). But I tried to stick to Nick's coding style wherever I could.The blocks strictly alternate between a single poem (with a mutated schema, but the original word lists) and a mix of two poems. I thought that would be the best lead-in for someone familiar with the original poems.A (perhaps interesting) result of my mixing is that some poems dominate others. Yoko Engorged has the longest word-lists, Fred and George has the shortest; so if they get mixed together, the randomizer selects many more Beatles references than Potter ones. I could have adjusted for this, but I didn't.

(Source: Author's notes in the source code of the work)