Tuesday, July 02, 2002

The strangest catch so far. I found the august highland collections by clicking on the newly updated link at blogger. When I find sites like this I always end up in a conflict of emotions that make me eventually reject them - although I like to make up a good reason for this rejection first.

The august highland collections is a collection of experimental writers and writings. The texts I have seen look like they have been generated by a computer, translated to an other language through babelfish and then translated back to English. I have seen similar things done in other contexts, John Cayley for instance lets his texts morph through random sequences into new texts, achieving much of the same scrambled result - but in his case the scrambling is a transitional stage and highly evocative.

What I am left with is a feeling that somebody might find the august highland collections interesting - and I think I have met that kind of people from time to time. There's something deliberately defiant, planned-as-underground, calculatingly chaotic about them that makes me think of bourgoise punks and week-end bikers. I know there are words to be used to describe it which would convey meaning and elicit admiring gasps from the crowd watching. But I just feel too common, too little educated into the mysteries of "high art", 20 years of academic life notwithstanding, to find those words. Still I leave the link here, because august highland is the kind of site that should be rejected or loved subjectively.

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