“Every Something Is an Echo of Nothing” is a publishing project inspired by the National Novel Writing Month competition. Intrigued by the promise of five free copies of my “novel,” I decided to create a text in the spirit of Karen Reimer’s Legendary, Lexical, Loquacious Love (1996) and Some Someone Someone Someone Something Somewhere, my own alphabetization of Elizabeth Alexander’s 2008 inaugural poem. Rather than using a straightforward ordering of a text, I wrote a short bit of code in Python to exhaustively print the combinations formed from the seven words in the title (a quote from John Cage’s Silence) and then shuffled those sentences, randomly adding punctuation and paragraph breaks. Each sentence is unique, meaning that the original phrase—the title of the book—appears only once. Since this text fulfilled NaNoWriMo’s 50,000-word requirement for a novel, I received five copies of the book as printed by CreateSpace.
The book may be ordered for $10 from Amazon (or directly from me while copies remain). An analytical investigation of the work written by Jensen Suther can be found at his blog, Spirit Disfigured.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 