Wordle, William S. Burroughs

So there's this awesome, pointless little Web toy I've been screwing around with a little bit: Wordle. Found it through Rob Donoghue's blog a while ago, and I think a lot of folks have probably seen it, by now. Still, I have to talk it up now because I just found some fun text to material into it: the full text of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.



Click for bigger, of course.

So, what Wordle does is take a pile of text and count up occurrences of each word. Then it assembles a big cloud of those words, making the more common words larger. The great big "like" in the middle of this cloud is the result of Burroughs' love of similes such as the following:

"like an obscene, festering mouth"
"like an Aztec Earth Goddess"
"like a great black wind through the bones"
"like a gorged boa constrictor"
"like a picture moving in and out of focus"
"like a old rotten cantaloupe"
"like music down a windy street"
"like an invisible blue blow torch of orgones"
"like death in the throat"
"like an Eskimo in heat"
"like an overloaded thinking machine"

I'm digging on Burroughs all over again, lately. I've got an audio version of Naked Lunch I've been listening to, but the damn thing's abridged. It's also read by the man himself, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. So, for the sake of completeness and clarity, I've also been following along on a text version I found on some Hungarian website.

And, man, Interzone is such a roleplaying game setting. I've been thinking a lot about what I could do with it, or with some bastardized, RPGed-up version of it.