Nothingness and whatnot...
Amazon.com has a bunch of new features. They list a text's "Statistically Improbably Phrases" (very funny), and have stuff like "Average Syllables per Word" and "Words per Dollar." All of this stuff is tres cool. But the one that I like best is called Concordance.
Concordance finds the 100 most used words in a book (excluding incredibly common words such as "the" and "an") and lists them in alphabetical order, with each individual word's font size denoting how often it's used. Tons of fun, in my opinion. While browsing through some concordances, I came across this one, from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." And I'll be damned if that doesn't read like one exceptionally beautiful poem. Just really quite lovely.
So there's your bit of post-modern poetry for the day: an alphabetical list of common words from a philosophy textbook. (Seriously, you should read it. It's beautiful.)
Concordance finds the 100 most used words in a book (excluding incredibly common words such as "the" and "an") and lists them in alphabetical order, with each individual word's font size denoting how often it's used. Tons of fun, in my opinion. While browsing through some concordances, I came across this one, from Jean-Paul Sartre's "Being and Nothingness." And I'll be damned if that doesn't read like one exceptionally beautiful poem. Just really quite lovely.
So there's your bit of post-modern poetry for the day: an alphabetical list of common words from a philosophy textbook. (Seriously, you should read it. It's beautiful.)