The Event
The phones rang on and off for the whole three hours. I wound up documenting thirty of the calls that came in-- there were more calls, but some were casualties of either slow information-processing (it took me, on average, a minute to document a call and there were some ringing phones I simply couldn't get to in time) or "interference" (as I'd hoped, some passersby unknowingly participated in the project. They'd answer a phone, and usually hang up on the callers after about two seconds.) Still, thirty calls in three hours is an average of a call every five minutes-- certainly more action than that bank of payphones normally sees.
Talking to people from all over was fun; the majority of callers were people I didn't know, and chatting with them proved an enlightening experience. Callers seemed evenly distributed from around the United States, although the coasts seemed better represented than the heartland. I recieved one intercontinental call, from London.
Initially I had intended to simply stitch the contributed sentences end-to-end and let that be the poem.As the sentences began to amass, however, I noticed that reading them straight through in that fashion was unsatisfying. Switching from one sentence to the next was jarring, so the sentences remained discrete from each other, and the poem altogether failed to become an organic whole.But I was determined not to introduce my intentionality into the project; the whole point was supposed to be that the piece would have no one "author."
Fortunately, Big Bill Burroughs came to the rescue: I decided to use the cut-up technique on the amassed sentences. I went to www.netmonkey.com/1997/features/cutup/index.html and pasted two copies of the complete sentence list into their Cut-Up Engine, which is essentially a syntax blender, as an attempt to break down the divisions between the individual sentences.
I took the resulting chance-operated text block and added to it:
- line and section breaks
- a handful of commas (between five and ten)
- one dash
and nothing more. I maintained the word order that the Cut-Up Engine had provided (the title is the first word of the block).
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