Tuesday, July 10, 2007

60 windows for Jenny

Jenny Diski's Poet writes her a poem "composed entirely of phrases taken from page sixty of sixty novels, for Jenny on her sixtieth birthday, 8 July 2007".

(The amazing thing here, other than that it's a very good poem, is that sixty out of a thousand+ novels should include the word "window" on page 60. But maybe it's like the whole birthday thing, and any word in the top five hundred most common or something like that can be found in five percent of all novels within a given page span. I would love to see a mathematician write some delightful explication of certain Oulipo-type schemes to do with the frequency of word use, the prevalence or absence of certain letters, etc.)

1 comment:

  1. Wonderful! It remindes me of Walter Abish's 99: THE NEW MEANING, a book I often think about even though I've never seen a copy...

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