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Auden’t

In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc. — but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand. – WH Auden

I must protest with WH. For I am sober as a Mormon, and tonight my hand is cold and unmoved to write much of anything. I truly believe that if I pounded a beer, chugged an expresso, sucked a Winston, and swallowed some bennies (a quaint amphetamine that beatniks used to harvest from asthma inhalers)… then I would have something more interesting to say than to riff on a quote by WH Auden, who himself relied on a variety of substances to churn out his prose and his poetry.

What would WH have thought about this prose generator? Granted the gibberish that is output hardly qualifies as literary composition, but is it really all that different from the theory put forth and the example exhibited in Kerouac’s treatise “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”?

I’ve tried to write spontaneous prose before, as a way to unclog the stoppage of words that my hand refuses to issue. Somehow my spontaneous prose becomes a pile up of similes and adverbs, plus it’s impossible for me to write with “no periods separating sentence-structures already arbitrarily riddled by false colons and timid usually needless commas.” Obviously Kerouac was so hopped up on bennies that he had no patience for punctuation. One of many reasons to just say no, kids.

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