Seven prose pieces written using 'BrekDown', a text analysis and text generation program written in Turbo Pascal for IBM-compatible personal computers, devised in 1985 by the San Francisco programmer Neil J. Rubenking. 'Brekdown' can also blend the styles of two or more texts, and reconstruct a text with the characteristics of this blended style.
'The stories . . . I got "Brekdown" to mix text samples by two different writers in a kind of conceptual blender, and produce a new text with the characteristics of both. I produced seven stories, about ten pages each. The drafts that Brekdown gave me needed a lot of reworking. The story "Howling Twins" was heavily reworked from a draft originating in a blend of two text samples, one from Allen Ginsberg's notorious poem "Howl", and one from a chapter of "The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip." The piece titled "Lonely Chaps" began as a sample from Radclyffe Hall's febrile novel of pre-war middle-class lesbian passion, "The Well of Loneliness", blended with "Biggles Defies the Swastika."
Source: Interview with John Kinsella, August 1999, John Kinsella website, www.johnkinsella.org (sighted 14/10/2002)
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