Re: In a perfect world

On Mon, 27 Mar 1995, Eugene Volokh wrote:
>
> > "Erased Motherwell" reminds me of "Scrambled Updike". Viz.: We take
> > a John Updike short story of 5280 words. We pass the digitized text
> > through a random scrambler program, generating a new text of 5280
> > words. Every word in the original is in the new text, and no others.
> > Do we have an Updike derivative?
>
> In a perfect world, this would be much less of a problem, since
> no-one would pay a penny for either the Erased Motherwell or the
> Scrambled Updike (so few would make them and fewer would sue).
>
> We live, alas, in an imperfect world.

Don't be so sure. See, e.g., many of Samuel Beckett's later works, such as Lessness and Ping. In one, he assembled a series of verses (paragraphs) by placing snippets in a hat, removing them at random, writing them down, and repeating the exercise. Well received critically, and many paid their pennies. (In fact, statistical analysis reveals that he cheated a bit, stacking the deck to produce a particular ending. He was fond of doing this regularly, such as saying "thus there were x possible permutations" of Murphy's y choices of actions, and then either omitting or repeating one permutation.)

Michael Page
<mhpage[_at_]well.com> Received on Mon Mar 27 1995 - 21:09:21 GMT