[The tournament is back on! It will be decided before the 1 year anniversary of the tournament!- ed.]

[matchup #48 in Tournament of Bookshit]

i’m not on facebook, cause i guess i’m like THAT GUY or whatever, so what happened is that my gf gave me her login info so that i could browse it and be able to accurately judge this battle but all i did was look at her emails and private messages, and, like, pictures of dudes who comment on her pictures and also i looked at pictures of attractive women who seemed to show up a lot in general. but right now i can’t think of a single thing worse than facebook-based political ‘activism’ such as the bunch of posts i couldn’t help seeing that attempted to ‘deal with the problem’ of animal suffering and eating meat re thanksgiving and veganism. i maybe half respected the lady on the street who yelled “make the leap, go vegan!” at me as i passed but what i did on thanksgiving was sneak downstairs late after dinner and eat cold turkey by the light of the refrigerator, thinking of her. do i even have to mention ows here or can i just ignore it the same way everyone ignored the local elections last month?

litblogging at age 35 seems fine since nobody cares about lit blogs and nobody cares about 35 year olds. it’s cool to be 20-something and even early 30s can be good because you get a fair amount of pity but at 35 everyone knows you’re well past being interested in anything anymore so you lose plausible deniability that the reason you’re blogging at all is anything but an attempt at getting new kinds of laid. we can all let that slide since we’re americans and the pursuit of happiness is something we grant everyone equally and 35 year olds are not yet a protected minority, though probably they should be because there maybe isn’t a single worse thing that can happen to you in life than simply just being 35.

- Matthew Savoca

- – -

WINNER: facebook-based political ‘activism’

The Sky Conducting

The Sky Conducting is what post-apocalyptic America will look like. There won’t be as much bloodshed as some of the ‘gore-mongers’ would like. Don’t bother saving all those containers of spam. They aren’t going to prepare you for the overwhelming emotion.

War on a Lunchbreak 

Croatian-American poet Ana Bozicevic’s new Belladonna chaplet, War on a Lunchbreak, is a short, intense collection both carefully and carelessly written, working against the confines of time in an always clocked-in environment, where we can’t afford to lyricize.

I love this: writing about not having the time to write, and so positioning the poem as a reclamation of stolen time, founded in its own impossibility, embodying its own disembodiment. That is to say she completes the poem stealthily under the panoptic gaze of the boss, the clock, and so performs what French social theorist Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press 1984) calls “la perruque”—“the worker’s own work being performed at the place of employment under the disguise of work for the boss. Nothing of value is stolen; what is taken advantage of is time” (Weidemann 2000). Bozicevic’s work speaks to this need to write in a society that has no need for poetry, and negatively appropriates the surveillance-productivist logic of our laboring culture into the content of the poem, informing us of the circumstance both preventing and, thru la perruque, producing the poem.

Woe to Whitman’s “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” for not anticipating the “casual terror and pain” of being gendered, where the female in Greek mythology is so often “that white herd of cows / gliding like brides / to the small green island in the middle,” where they will be spectacularly raped. With Bozicevic, the “I” ironically identifies with these archetypes, liquidated into brand names for capitalism, and offers no definitive moral closure on any such reconciliation between her and mass culture. It does, however, leave one overall uplifted, with the sense of an ultimately loving sentiment behind the poem, wanting to form a private to public connection by way of confession.

Throughout the collection the poet’s voice unpredictably turns on itself, glides into pastoral melodies—the motif of the apple ripening—and then on a whim more of dissociation than caprice, is seized by violence and cynicism— “the other dark pearl earring.”

I should say here she’s no anti-Whitman, no pure uppity downer, but an interrogator of such politics as his poems suggest, from the standpoint of a (post)feminist confronting, with no lack of sass, her imagined audience— “difficult adult bambies” (lol):

Moods of revenge, jealousy, and lust—perhaps an outrage that we’ve been manipulated into finding such culture attractive—turn into a dream that’s hollow but still arousing. Meanwhile deep consciousness images and meditations on Nature (di Prima) lead us into more elemental and empowering territory, where the spirit finds itself in the earth: the body and the mind as one. However, how such a spirit is embodied in reality when in a marginalized social position (as woman, immigrant, lesbian, commodity, wage-laborer, etc.) is a constant negotiation, something Bozicevic does both callously and carefully with exquisite limberness.

***

Work Cited: Weidemann, Jason. Some Words on de Certeau. The University of Minnesota, 2000. Web. 9 May 2012.

***

An earlier version of this review originally appeared at http://nickytiso.blogspot.com/.

***

Nicky Tiso received his BA in English from The Evergreen State College in 2010. He recently finished an internship with Siglio Press, a new, independent press in Los Angeles dedicated to publishing uncommon books that live at the intersections of art and literature. He’s about to move to Minneapolis to attend The University of Minnesota’s MFA program. He blogs at nickytiso.blogspot.com.

Editor’s Note: Ida Stewart is the author of the poetry collection Gloss, from which “The mountaintop is as as is is” is taken. She lives in Georgia.

1.

The mountaintop is as as is is
by Ida Stewart

Disaster, asterisk:

another man’s treasure
island.

My kiss-
your-sorry-ass-
goodbye goodbye

letters’ river-
ripple cursive

when I’m feeling
wishy.

My highway mirage,
your missed ache

.       or ashen mist
oasis.

2.

A Few Notes About the Poem

When I began writing the poems that comprise my first book of poetry, Gloss, I imagined the upheaval and aftermath of mountaintop removal coal mining—violent explosions, stony wastelands, and choked streams—to be forms of communication. I attuned my ear to the ways in which the earth might speak and attended via poetry to the act of translating an inaudible language. Invoking poetic license, I imagined words tumbling from the mouth of a mine and indulged the notion that a mountain’s peak might speak. In “the mountaintop” I embodied natural and manmade flux in a female voice, a feminine presence—both opening and obstacle, both speaking and silent/silenced.

I wrote with awareness of the risks and limits of the type of personification termed the “pathetic fallacy”—a potentially un-ecological trope that can repeat disregard for the autonomy of a non-speaking nature by putting words in its mouth, so to speak; for an entity such as the earth is truly silenced when it is spoken for, rather than listened to. Despite these risks, I determined that personification was the best choice for my poetic project; rather than conflating the mountainous landscape with sentience or emotion, I was actually conflating it with language and communication. Gloss puts the reader in—as in immersed in—communication with the natural world. I dug into the stuff of words and phrases, extracting pieces of sound and rough tatters of sense, getting my hands dirty in the dictionary. I wrote with my ear to the earth and also—or moreso—with my ear to land of language. Perhaps the tendency in my poetic process toward upheaval of language is what led me to see poetic images and metaphors in the upheaval of mountains. That ruptured landscape proved to be fertile ground for the roots of ruptured language to take hold.

Writing Gloss eventually led me to hear not the earth’s speech but the earth’s silence—the lack of sound that is drowned out by the desirous din of the heart’s clambering to hear and to know, the human impulse to control and pin things to meaning. Rather than “What does the earth say?” I wrote—and continue to write—motivated by questions such as What and how do humans hear in silence? Why? How do we speak or act in return? Does language connect or separate? I tap into the senses a person uses to navigate the woods in order to make her conscious of the sense she uses to navigate within the limits of her own mind. Writing about the environment, I have gone into language, rather than polemic, to supplant dualistic political debate with the clarifying confusion of poetry. That is, I question the difference between mudslinging and mudslinging.

“The mountaintop is as as is is” is from a series nestled within a series in Gloss. Within the series of “The mountaintop…” poems are a few poems that play with the state of being “as is”—which is, often, flawed, marred, chipped, irregular. While writing these poems, I was thinking about the conflicting senses of both submissive resignation and resilient insistence-on-existence that are packed into that four-letter term. Gosh—see those words I just used? I can’t even write about this poem now without little ises sprouting up everywhere—see the is in insistence and existence, and see the inverse of is in resignation? Si? Yes!? The poem is still happening! As is: issing, hissing, fizzing! This mountaintop poem—and this chunk of prose in which we’re currently immersed—are microcosms of my writing process: proliferative compression, creating echo-chambers by drawing walls up around the wild sounds of language so they can find (re)definition in the reverb. In this terse, short-lined poem, linebreaks and white space are the defining, confining, refining “walls.”

In this poem, I’m also interested in the way encountering repetition feels a bit like bouncing off a wall—not only those slithering “as is” sounds, but also the more drastic direct repetitions within very short lines: “Disaster, asterisk:” and “goodbye goodbye.” I’m reminded of those little rubber bouncy balls we all used to buy for a quarter in the ubiquitous vending machines outside of grocery stores. Sometimes they were packaged in little plastic capsules, but sometimes they were loose, and you could lose one before you ever even had it. (See Mom rummaging for another quarter.) I remember keeping one in my pocket to fling against the brick elementary school walls during recess. Ka-ping! Whoaaah! The thrill of the far-flung, the far-fetched, the far-gone—

Ken Sparling is a writer. He works in a library in Toronto. He has written six novels. His latest is Intention, Implication, Wind from Pedlar Press. His first, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf in 1996 will be reissued by Mud Luscious Press in August.

Not a stranger to making his books by hand (he handmade his second novel), his latest project, The Serial Library, involves taking old hardback books, ripping some pages out and pasting new test in along with old photographs and artwork. There are ten handmade books in The Serial Library and they are loaned out to people in such locations as Montreal, Calgary, Brooklyn, and Pennsylvania. The book I took out of The Serial Library was a one of kind—more than one of a kind. It was the only one—made from Dennis Cooper’s hardcover Try. The Last Time I Saw the Wind continues Sparling’s experimental narratives. There is a prince who likes to have affairs, but he eventually focuses on one woman. At the same time a first person narrator tells seemingly unrelated anecdotes from his life, including queries on love and touch, a portrait of a hot dog man, and such short fizzles as the following: “When I say I feel like I’ve been lucky, I mean to say that I didn’t get what I wanted out of life. Not ever. That was pretty lucky.”

Ken had this to say about the process:

There’s only going to be one of each book, but I’m going to keep making them. I’m treating this like performance, as opposed to composition. As in jazz, the performance is never the same as the original composition. So I have a manuscript that I was originally going to try to get into shape to submit to my publisher. That’s the composition. It’s about 100,000 words at the moment. Each performance involves selecting a book to deface, finding pictures, gluing them in, selecting text, revising and adding as I go (improvisation), formatting the text, then printing, ripping or cutting, then gluing. I select the pictures and text as I go, never jumping ahead more than a page or two. I also remove pages from the original book to keep the new book from getting too fat.

To maintain its essence as performance, the book has to change hands regularly; otherwise it just becomes another object on someone’s shelf. If it truly is a performance, then it can only realize its full potential in the hands of a new witness/reader. Thus the serial library.

I’ve slowed down in terms of making the books, but I do a bit of work almost every day. For sure I do a bit of writing every day, and often a bit of book construction. It’s very much improvisational, based on texture and rhythm and the music of the language, but also trying to see how much language can really say about anything, wondering about that. I’ve never felt so calm and unconcerned about anything I wrote. I think it’s because I know I’ll be making something new tomorrow and there’s no wall to run up against, no place where what I write turns to stone the way a manuscript eventually does when you funnel all your efforts toward making a book that will be mass produced.

***

GG: Can you tell me about the images used. Where did you get them? In the book I read, I noticed many incredible shots, including stunning photos of groups of people taken from a bird’s eye view.

KEN: I get the images for the serial library books from magazines and books that I mostly buy in Book Ends, which is a bookstore at the library run by the Friends of the Library. They sell stuff pretty cheap. I like books of photography or fine art books with reproductions, and also old magazines if I can get them, like National Geographic or Life. It’s fun going up to the store every once in a while and browsing. I bought a lot of National Geographics from Book Ends a while back.

When I’m making the books, I pick the images that capture me. I seem to be drawn to black and white images, or nearly black and white images. I have a couple great old Life magazines with some images that I really love, but have yet to find a place in the books because the images in

Life are so big and I’m hesitant to crop them. I like to tear, not cut, the images out of books, but I’ll use scissors sometimes if it makes sense.

GG: There is a high degree of sensuality in the book The Last Time I Saw the Wind: “The hot smell of her shadows touched my face and warmed my face and something in my stomach warmed and sometimes my chin would brush her shoulder. The girl kept her eyes closed and her head tipped back and I could feel the warmth coming off her skin.”

This section is opposite a page with two photographs. In one, a small, pale blond haired child holds a sea-shell to her ear, and in the other a horse stands tall in the mud over a man who is bent before him. In the background is a mountain. Many things can be drawn from the interplay of text and image here. What, if anything, governs your choices in making the books?

KEN: Whatever governs my choices in creating the books is very visual, very intuitive. I select pictures I like, pictures that move me. The system has everything to do with the logistics of giving the pictures I am moved by a place that does them justice, visually, in the book. It comes down to finding a space that can accommodate them…even just in terms of the size of the pictures, or how much I can get away with cropping without diminishing the power of the image. I love finding an image that has another image on the back and I can use both images in the book. Or coming across a blank page in the book (between chapters, or whatever) that I can utilize somehow.

I don’t ever select a picture based on text on a facing page. Although I’ll often place the blank back of a text page next to an image where I want the image to stand alone, with no text opposite it.

GG: I’ve read a number of your books and a most have a fragmented narrative. A story will begin and then another story will start, then another. Sometimes you come back to these stories, sometimes not. What draws you to this style of writing?

KEN: Do you know Brad Mahldau, the pianist? I just read an essay he wrote about the balance between composition and improvisation, and in it he talks about the compositions of Thelonious Monk, saying: “Indeed, we almost need another name than melody here; it is more like the remaining broken shards of a melody that once existed.”

You talk about a fragmented narrative in my writing, but I’d like to think of another name than narrative here. Maybe what you call a fragmented narrative is less a series of broken narrative shards, more a kind of straining toward narrative, in the same way we strain to make of our lives a thread that leads us somewhere we like to imagine ourselves eventually arriving.

A jazz tune generally starts with a composed melody, the head, and then the players riff over the harmonic structure that underlies the head. There’s no composed head in the serial library books. But I hope the writing in the serial library books seems to refer to a kind of structure that you could understand in terms of narrative. That underlying structure might just be my life up to now, or my writing up to the brink of the serial library. So that now my writing has become one unbroken improvisation, and each book in the serial library is a continuation of my improvising on the same tune I’ve been improvising on all along. The fact that there are a bunch of discrete entities in the serial library is akin to the fact that the day comes to an end. Yes, each book in the serial library is a fixed entity enclosed in a cover, so it seems that each of the books comes to an end, but from my perspective, there’s no break, no beginning, no end, I just keep carrying on with the improvisation, which is why, I think, this is turning out to be so supremely satisfying. I’m not thinking in terms of a project, or any kind of end. There is just this ongoing improvisation using language that I do each morning for ten or twenty minutes, and on the weekends for a little longer sometimes, and sometimes after work (but mostly I’m just too exhausted at the end of the day) or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, which is more nights than not these days.

Here’s something else Mahldau says: “Monk was onto something else, though, and it involves the actual development of themes during his solo. By development, I mean that the musical content unfolds with a narrative logic; each idea springs from the previous one… The way in which this organic development continues during Monk’s solo suggests that when a song has a deeply embedded architecture like that of “I Mean You,” it will lend itself to formally richer solos, but only if the soloist is aware of the architecture and wishes to comment on it.”
With literature, maybe you could think of the reader as the soloist. To the extent that the reader is aware of the architecture of what I’m doing and wishes to comment on it, that reader will have a richer reading experience, the way a soloist will have a richer experience if he understands what Monk was doing and has a hunger to comment or respond.

“Monk set the bar for an approach to improvisation in which form itself becomes an expressive means.”

The form I’ve chosen, this straining toward narrative, I hope will become for the reader an expressive means that underlies and complements the content of what I write.

I don’t know where I’m going, I swear to God.

His shadow was in the way.

I can’t blame my whole year on one week. It was a pretty rotten year all around.

Just bear with me.

Snoop Dogg is my neighbor.

And I’m not being nice to myself, trust me. I’m ripping myself. As ugly as it is and painful as it is, believe me, it’s really tough for me, and I’m trying.

It was a pretty big tree, and I asked for any volunteers to climb up the tree, but nobody spoke up.

There’s this timing, and if I miss that timing, then I have to start over.

As crazy as it sounds, I really don’t know.

The rest you saw. I don’t really want to go through it again.

It hit me in the inner thigh.

I’m going to try to take out the whole waggle, no waggle.

Honestly, it’s going to be a battle.

We Bury the Landscape

 
If for one minute, I got lost in the galleries of Kristine Ong Muslim’s mind, I don’t know if I’d ever be able to leave. We Bury the Landscape is a collection of one-hundred ekphrastic works of flash fiction and prose poetry pieces that act as glimpses— better yet— conduits, into parallel universes constructed and inspired by a surreal, but brilliant, forge of one-hundred unique paintings. Visceral is a word that gets overused. But in this case, the text leaps off the pages, claws it ways onto your bones, gnaws and tears and embeds itself inside the cavities of your brain. Many of the stories are short and can be quickly read, but each of them lingers hauntingly as in, “The Taxidermist and the Girl Made of Dead Things:”

It’s a fitting analogy for many of the stories that inhabit the collection. The prose is both blunt and subtle, sometimes making a strategic strike to draw you in, other times, setting up a premise that will be contorted around. “The Village of the Mermaids,” is a good example, starting with a description of Paul Delvaux’s work of the same name:

The women seem harmless enough. But as most great paintings have texture, layers that can be stripped away (both physically and artistically), there are hidden themes that insinuate and dig their way in. These expose not just a tattered moment in dissolute time, but a peep show into the artist in relation to her subject. The curtain gets shredded and Muslim introduces her own twisted slant on the Village:

Every character has a secret, something buried in the landscape. Uncovering the deeper insight, or burying it under more layers, is in many ways the plight of humanity. We struggle for meaning, chase after idols while losing sight of the overall geography. The truth is an admirable goal as long as it’s someone else’s skeletons being revealed. As, “Abandoned Dwellings,” the piece that has the line from which the collection gets its name, explains:

Each of the one-hundred stories is an abandoned dwelling that deserves exploration; that dilapidated shack on the corner as well as the skyscraper crumbling from years of recession, smelling of spray paint, piss, and homeless eclectics. It’s a question of introspection, the honesty to be candid with oneself, to delve into the attics and basements we’d all willingly forget. The darker properties resonated with me personally, but there are happier dwellings in the lot as in, “Rain of Men:”

And one particular line I appreciated in, “What Better Lure,” was:

Many of the stories seem like they could go on, a tantalizing preview to which Muslim invites the reader and then quickly proceeds, an artist in full control of the pace of her show. Any gallery undergoes countless hours of debate, which angles to highlight, which portraits to under-light or flood with electricity. Some of the images are disturbing and had me squirming uncomfortably in my seat. It’s never an easy task to ask to recreate the feeling of writhing anguish. But Muslim gives us that and something more; empathy for the characters she weaves. No matter how horrifying a creation, there’s an air of melancholy, even pity to their actions. The greatest artists and writers are the best psychologists, and each of the profiles contained within the book can be expanded into a journey, epic, bizarre, gleefully strange.

In, “The Collage Artist,” we get an idea for Muslim’s role as curator:

I’m still wandering the gallery of Kristine Ong Muslim’s mind. I just reread the, “Boy With a Propeller Head,” and wish I could fly away with a propeller of my own sticking out of my head. I want to discourse with, “The Great Architect,” based on Salvador Dali’s Surrealist Architecture. The rooms intertwine, a labyrinthine maze of recurring enigmas. I look at the paintings accentuated by centuries of movements, use We Bury the Landscape as guide to navigate. I’m lost, but then again, I’m in no hurry to leave. A painting is sucking me into the canvas. Don’t worry. Just bury me with all the others.

***

Peter Tieryas Liu has stories that have recently appeared in Bartleby Snopes, the Evergreen Review, the Indiana Review, and Punchnel’s. His collection of short stories, Watering Heaven, is coming out in the fall of 2012 from Signal 8 Press. You can follow him at: www.tieryasxu.com

For this technique you need a text editor with spell check capacity (I’ll demonstrate it using Microsoft Word 2003), plus some text. It doesn’t really matter what the text is.

Let’s start with a good chunk of lorem ipsum (generated through this website). (Note that you can use any starting text you like; I’m using lorem ipsum just for this example.)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas eu fermentum mi. Suspendisse potenti. Pellentesque rhoncus, tellus id tincidunt tristique, nulla lectus gravida nunc, at luctus dui ipsum nec ipsum. Vivamus eu justo leo, at tincidunt metus. Integer orci leo, tempus eu rutrum id, vestibulum eu nisl. Suspendisse et neque enim, non iaculis nibh. Sed dolor nisi, lacinia eu scelerisque ut, porta ac nisl. Vestibulum eget tellus eget metus tempor placerat. Vivamus purus risus, varius nec sodales sed, ultrices a nisl. Pellentesque ac magna ultricies massa vestibulum euismod eu vel quam. Praesent ut neque sit amet mauris eleifend laoreet adipiscing eu felis. Nunc quam velit, tincidunt eget tincidunt at, auctor quis odio. Etiam vitae tortor tortor, quis mollis nisl. Integer mollis, libero tristique consectetur aliquam, leo nibh vestibulum leo, quis feugiat sapien sapien eget mauris. Donec quis neque justo. Morbi vehicula, felis sed lacinia cursus, turpis lectus molestie risus, non dignissim tortor purus a eros. Nam et purus scelerisque libero interdum fermentum. Pellentesque rutrum convallis libero et iaculis. Cras eget luctus massa. Phasellus eleifend cursus mauris sed tincidunt. Nullam dignissim pellentesque varius. Phasellus condimentum, felis sed ornare vulputate, eros sem aliquam turpis, ut scelerisque enim ante non tellus. Vivamus imperdiet, augue et lacinia blandit, leo urna facilisis neque, at imperdiet lorem nibh ut ante. Etiam mattis luctus est, at convallis tortor pulvinar eu. Integer in ligula magna. Quisque a augue convallis magna vulputate vulputate. Curabitur sollicitudin semper magna, eu ultricies quam pulvinar ac. Vestibulum sit amet nunc felis. Curabitur luctus imperdiet lorem, id accumsan mi auctor at. Nam eget nibh metus. Aenean suscipit lorem eu risus tristique a rutrum urna sagittis. Aliquam porttitor, nisi quis malesuada placerat, tortor odio elementum arcu, in varius risus purus sed felis. Suspendisse purus tellus, facilisis vitae faucibus quis, fermentum sit amet justo. Etiam et dapibus metus. Nulla luctus leo in est rutrum ornare. Curabitur at dui neque, a egestas tellus. Vestibulum quis accumsan eros. Curabitur elementum metus non mauris lobortis malesuada consequat neque posuere. Nulla aliquet aliquet odio at pretium. Nunc gravida pellentesque nulla sed bibendum. Pellentesque porttitor tempus auctor. Vivamus elementum, velit vitae fringilla tempor, enim dolor mattis nunc, et placerat sem magna vitae massa. Aliquam eu tincidunt justo. Nunc ultrices sem eget elit aliquam accumsan. Pellentesque dapibus elit id augue elementum imperdiet. Phasellus condimentum porttitor vestibulum. Vestibulum vitae pretium tellus. Integer cursus adipiscing sem, at laoreet felis sollicitudin eget. In dignissim convallis felis sed porttitor. Fusce dapibus ligula cursus massa volutpat tincidunt. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. In nunc nibh, blandit sed ornare id, mollis id nisl. Etiam at sem quis lorem ultricies pulvinar nec lacinia orci. Nunc elementum arcu porttitor orci mattis non venenatis erat fringilla. Praesent at est sed ligula volutpat tempus. Curabitur mollis dictum dolor. Proin tellus lorem, sodales vitae ornare a, porta auctor enim. Vestibulum vel mauris a erat adipiscing placerat.

(I like to use at least a page’s worth of text, preferably two or three.) The next step is to get rid of everything that isn’t a letter. So we’ll use the find/replace command (control + h) to strip out all of the punctuation and spaces (and numbers, if there happen to be any). Get rid of paragraph breaks, too (^p); just replace each one of those things with nothing. The result should be a single string of letters:

loremipsumdolorsitametconsecteturadipiscingelitmaecenaseufermentummi [...]

Note that I’ve also converted the text to all lowercase. This will produce better results.

Next, we have to break it up into chunks. I write and use a macro to do this, like so:

1. Click on Tools > Macro > Record New Macro.
2. Assign it a name, and a keyboard combination. (I use “control + 0″.) Then close that window.
3. You’re now recording. The macro is very simple: using the right arrow key, move the cursor 5 or 6 letters to the right, then press the space bar. (I’m going to use 6 letters for now.)
4. And that’s it! Stop recording the macro.
5. You can now use the macro (hold down “control + 0″) to break the block of text up into 5- or 6- letter chunks.

(I used to work as a technical writer. Can you tell?)

By now, the text should look like this:

loremi psumdo lorsit ametco nsecte turadi piscin gelitm aecena seufer mentum misusp endiss epoten tipell entesq uerhon custel lusidt incidu nttris tiquen ullale ctusgr avidan uncatl uctusd uiipsu mnecip sumviv amuseu justol eoatti ncidun tmetus intege rorcil eotemp useuru trumid vestib ulumeu nislsu spendi sseetn equeen imnoni aculis nibhse ddolor nisila ciniae uscele risque utport aacnis lvesti bulume gettel lusege tmetus tempor placer atviva muspur usrisu svariu snecso daless edultr icesan islpel lentes queacm agnaul tricie smassa vestib ulumeu ismode uvelqu amprae sentut neques itamet mauris eleife ndlaor eetadi piscin geufel isnunc quamve littin cidunt egetti ncidun tatauc torqui sodioe tiamvi taetor tortor torqui smolli snisli nteger mollis libero tristi quecon sectet uraliq uamleo nibhve stibul umleoq uisfeu giatsa piensa pieneg etmaur isdone cquisn equeju stomor bivehi culafe lissed lacini acursu sturpi slectu smoles tieris usnond igniss imtort orpuru saeros nametp urussc eleris quelib eroint erdumf erment umpell entesq uerutr umconv allisl iberoe tiacul iscras egetlu ctusma ssapha sellus eleife ndcurs usmaur issedt incidu ntnull amdign issimp ellent esquev ariusp hasell uscond imentu mfelis sedorn arevul putate erosse maliqu amturp isutsc eleris queeni manten ontell usviva musimp erdiet auguee tlacin iablan ditleo urnafa cilisi sneque atimpe rdietl oremni bhutan teetia mmatti sluctu sestat conval listor torpul vinare uinteg erinli gulama gnaqui squeaa ugueco nvalli smagna vulput atevul putate curabi tursol licitu dinsem permag naeuul tricie squamp ulvina racves tibulu msitam etnunc felisc urabit urluct usimpe rdietl oremid accums anmiau ctorat namege tnibhm etusae neansu scipit loreme urisus tristi quearu trumur nasagi ttisal iquamp orttit ornisi quisma lesuad aplace rattor torodi oeleme ntumar cuinva riusri suspur ussedf elissu spendi ssepur ustell usfaci lisisv itaefa ucibus quisfe rmentu msitam etjust oetiam etdapi busmet usnull aluctu sleoin estrut rumorn arecur abitur atduin equeae gestas tellus vestib ulumqu isaccu msaner oscura biture lement ummetu snonma urislo bortis malesu adacon sequat nequep osuere nullaa liquet alique todioa tpreti umnunc gravid apelle ntesqu enulla sedbib endump ellent esquep orttit ortemp usauct orviva musele mentum velitv itaefr ingill atempo renimd olorma ttisnu ncetpl acerat semmag navita emassa aliqua meutin cidunt juston uncult ricess emeget elital iquama ccumsa npelle ntesqu edapib uselit idaugu eeleme ntumim perdie tphase llusco ndimen tumpor ttitor vestib ulumve stibul umvita epreti umtell usinte gercur susadi piscin gsemat laoree tfelis sollic itudin egetin dignis simcon vallis feliss edport titorf usceda pibusl igulac ursusm assavo lutpat tincid untinh achabi tassep latead ictums tinnun cnibhb landit sedorn areidm ollisi dnisle tiamat semqui slorem ultric iespul vinarn eclaci niaorc inunce lement umarcu portti tororc imatti snonve nenati seratf ringil laprae sentat estsed ligula volutp attemp uscura biturm ollisd ictumd olorpr ointel luslor emsoda lesvit aeorna reapor taauct orenim vestib ulumve lmauri saerat adipis cingpl acerat

…which means we’re finally ready to run spell check (Tools > Spelling and Grammar—or just press F7).

If you like, you can spell check each 6-letter-chunk individually, picking whatever replacement word you prefer. But because I’m lazy, I just accept the first option spell check suggests. And since I’m doing that, I choose to change all, which saves a bit more time. (Note that you can run through the text very quickly by holding down  “alt + l,” the shortcut for “change all.”)

Doing all this produces a list of actual words:

lore pseudo florist amerce insect tirade piscine gelid aecia suffer centum misuse ends epode tip ell enters heron castle lucid inside nitric toque allele causer avian uncut ictus quips kneecap survive amuse justly coati incident thetas integer racial totem user tumid vestal lumen nisus spend seen equine minion caulis niches dolor nosily canine upscale risqué tort acnes lest blame getter liege thetas temper placer Aviva museum sunrise sari specs dales adult iceman isle lentos quack agnail trice smash vestal lumen is mode velum amperage setout nexus itemed manures alewife nodular etude piscine refuel insane quaver letting cadent emetic incident attic torque sodium triumvir teeter torpor torque smelly snails integer mollies libber trusty quaking sestet Uralic cameo niche stipule umlaut useful gaits pinesap pine teamer is done cousin equijoin stoma Divehi carafe lisped lacing accurse strip select smiles tiers unsound bigness import ordure sears nametape prussic elemis quail eroding eardrum ferment ump ell enters aerator icon Allis Iberia teacup scars gentle cuts sashay sells alewife incurs USAir issued inside annul adding is imp relent sequel arias hazel ascend pimento mêlées sedan arrival puttee erase milieu mature ictus elemis queen marten on tell survive museum erudite ague talking Alban title unsafe cilice sequel time riel remind Bhutan tetra matte slot sestet coeval list or torpor venire unite eerily Glama gangue squeal uGu co novella magma volute fateful puttee crab torso licit dines permit maul trice sump olivine races tubule smite tenancy folic rabbit eruct simper riel roamed accuse anima cottar name thigh tease means script lore me arises trusty queer tremor massage tidal equip rotted cornice quasar loused palace ratter trod elemi tumor china riser suspire used pelisse spend sweeper us tell surface lisps idea cubes quiche rent smite adjust optima escape busmen us null lacto slain strut rumor recur arbiter attain equate gusts tells vestal Urumqi sack meaner obscure biter lament unmet snowman arils borates males deacon squat equip osier Nula piquet aliquot tedious trait unman gravid paella nets Enola seedbed end ump relent equip rotted mortem saucy revive muscle centum veldt eater infill tempo remind flora tins incept ace rat stemma naïveté amass aliquot meeting cadent just on uncut recess emerged elite iguana comas Noelle nets elapid use lit Ida uGu elemi nutmeg per die phase loco dime tumor titter vestal flume stipule amrita egret umbel suite mercury subsidy piscine great laree trellis solid it din egesting dings simony valise felids deport tutor used piously ligulas ruses cassava output timid uniting Achebe tassel late ad ictus tin nun cinch land it sedan arid ollas dingle teammate sequin sore ultras dispel vinery éclair nark inane lament march potty torpor matte shone neonate serrate ringgit laree sent at sensed ligulas volute attempt usurer biter ollas dictum loop lintel lisle embody levity adorn reaper taut uranium vestal flume laurel seat adipose kingly ace rat

Success! You now have a vocabulary list that you can use for whatever evil purpose you desire. You can stop right there and call the text “finished” and “yours” (which isn’t to my own liking, but who’s to stop you?). Or you can keep the words in this order but “write through them”—

Lore matters not to pseudo-florists who, due to a bureaucratic hiccup in this city’s statutes, cannot be amerced. Each has her own dubious means for warding off root-rot and insects, and equally dubious tirades defending them. My sister’s fave uses piscine molds to shape a curry-molasses mixture into gelids, which she then buries around the base of each acacia; she claims it discourages the onset of aecia. I, watching silently, see only how the plants suffer. Each of those noble trees can live a centum, and such cruel misuse soon ends any pleasure of those one hundred years.

Or you can do what I used to do, which is to use only those words that appeal to you, discarding the rest. More specifically, I used to print out the list (this is why I liked having a few pages’ worth), then keep the sheets close at hand when writing. Whenever I’d get stuck, I’d quickly scan my eyes over the lists, looking for intriguing words and word pairs—

• enters the heron castle
• survive a museum sunrise
• arid sedans
• hazel arias
• crab torso
• smelly snails
• deacons squat
• potty torpor
• unmet snowman
• trusty quaking
• teasing thighs
• elite iguana
• kingly ace rat

—crossing them out as I used them. (I used different colored pens, because I liked the way it made the page look. Sensuality is everything!) (I should mention that when doing this, I often found it more helpful to scan the list vertically, rather than horizontally.) I’d also free associate while doing this, letting the words suggest phrases and ideas—”Broke, he used a quiche to pay the rent.” (It’s basically a form of assisted daydreaming.)

A few more things to consider:

1. This technique is a great way to learn new words! (It’s akin to randomly flipping through a dictionary—something else I’m fond of doing—but it generates more text more quickly.)
2. It’s also a great way to learn how to better use text-editing software. For those reasons and more, I think that it should be taught in schools.
3. Obviously the technique’s “real” value is that it suggests words other than what you’d normally use, thereby suggesting many new directions for your work.
4. That said, the problem with this technique is that it suggests many new directions for your work! I used this technique when I wrote the first few drafts of my first novel, Giant Slugs (c. 2003), and found that I had to employ many other formal techniques to keep reining things back in. (You can still see evidence of the technique in the the finished novel—for instance, see here, here, and here. I didn’t actually use this technique to write those particular passages, but its use elsewhere, and early on, did help establish the novel’s hyber-verbose style.)
5. Changing the size of the chunks will change what spell check results you get. From my own experiences, I’ve found that chunks of 5 and 6 letters return the best results. If you use very short chunks (1–3 letters), you’ll get the same few words over and over again. If you use longer ones (over 7 letters), you’ll often confound the spell check, which won’t suggest any results.
6. This technique is limited to whatever words spell check knows. (You can add words to it, though.)
7. No doubt there exists now some random word generator online that you could use instead, but I think this technique is still fun and has its own merits.
8. For instance, it’s recursive: you can take the word list that you generate, or the text that you write using it, and resubmit it to the procedure. And if you choose a different letter-chunk-length, you’ll get pretty different results. For instance, here’s my florist sentence from above, redone (stripped, lowercased, broken into 5-letter chunks this time, and spell checked):

lore attar snotty poseur dolor rests who’d entomb urea crate chic pint hissy tryst astute scan obeah mercer detach hashes round dubious smear sow ardent gofer outré tandem insect sander quall dub oust rides defend ding hammy sister refax eases piscine memo dittos happen curry moles semi true into elides which sheath ember year found heaps elodea Chaka cash éclair misted viscous rages then setoff aecia watch hinges inlet lyses only other plant scuff erect haft oxen blear escape naive accent summand such realm issue sooner dean plea sure ethos one under dears

This leads to some overlap, but mostly you’re once again off to the races. (And the overlap can be useful: the way the technique sometimes produces variations on recurring letter chunks can result in a certain unity.)

OK, I hope you find this fun/useful/interesting. Enjoy & good luck!

Illustrations for Melville's Pierre by Maurice Sendak