There are infinite stories lurking latent within any piece of text, and all that is needed to release them is a pair of scissors. Texts are all the time perilously close to this reformation: a genre (like a poem or a play or a novel), or a form (like a newspaper or a book) is a frame for momentarily holding in place text that, subject to a little bit of pressure, will easily scatter into new orders.
Fun -- I love Borges "pumping the legacies of Smollett's baptism" -- but I suspect cutting up phrases, rather than words, is to put one's thumb heavily on the aleatory scales... And the fragments of A.E. Stallings' sonnet "The Fiftieth Danaid" I can see in there are reminders of the real thing: an intertextual text entirely processed through a creative human mind.
Fun -- I love Borges "pumping the legacies of Smollett's baptism" -- but I suspect cutting up phrases, rather than words, is to put one's thumb heavily on the aleatory scales... And the fragments of A.E. Stallings' sonnet "The Fiftieth Danaid" I can see in there are reminders of the real thing: an intertextual text entirely processed through a creative human mind.
Mike