A Season In RAM -- the ReadMe file
`A Season in RAM' is a poetry generator that writes in the style of the decadent French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), as translated by Wallace Fowlie. It first appeared in the disk magazine Tech Noir in the late 1980's and was dusted off and tweaked for Aminet distribution in 1996.
You alter the program's settings by clicking the mouse to bring up a requester. Make your selections then click on `OKAY.'
The best way to enjoy `A Season In RAM' is with Endless Screen Loop and Voice On selected, and the sound played through a decent stereo. Ideally late at night drinking Pernod. The program has a vocabulary of about 6,000 words, and is a good demonstration of how the Amiga's speech facility sounds if you take the time to spell out in phonemes those words it can't pronounce correctly on its own.
Known bugs:
- This is rare, but sometimes it fails to speak a word or two. Seems to be an operating system bug.
- Sometimes aspects of a poem are in questionable taste. Is this a bug or a feature? When combining randomness and a vocabulary of words that have some "charge" to them, offensiveness is a risk.
By the way, Rimbaud's name is pronounced "ram-BOW" ('bow' as in 'bow and arrow,' emphasis on the second syllable, not like the Sylvester Stallone character [though I read somewhere that Stallone came up with the name Rambo as an homage to the poet]). Rimbaud was a real teen prodigy, writing almost his entire body of work between the ages of 16 and 19.
His big insight was expressed in an 1871 letter: the artist must "...arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses..." William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, and Jim Morrison are among the 20th century Rimbaud fans who have consciously employed the disorder-the-senses technique. Though one may immediately think of drug use with this exalted pantheon, Burroughs also employed Brion Gysin's cut-up method as a mechanical alternative. He would literally cut pages of text into columns, re-arrange them, and transcribe the surprising associations he would find. `A Season In RAM' uses the computer's randomness function to automate this kind of disordering.