Walking Commentary
Thoughts and cycling from Manchester to Rome in 2023
The fundamentals of graph theory, the mathematical structures that model relations between paired objects, may only have been formalised recently but lattices have been recognised since humans started to trap, build and weave.
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I was rereading Geoff Dyer’s fascinating essay collection See/Saw when its subtitle stimulated a question. Which of these images would a computer like if it was ‘Looking at Photographs’? My computer is already involved in photo management, development and chapbook layout so why not have it make the selections for once? And so I ‘invited’ my desktop computer to collaborate for this edition.
Your experience of this chapbook starts with looking. Perhaps you’ll find more geographic detail than can be comprehended, perhaps less image resolution than you’d like.
MOMENTS
Reading Caspar Henderson’s 21st Century Bestiary, reminded me that the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub defined the ‘dimension of the present moment’ as a little less than three seconds.
‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ is the string of words that I got from a spreadsheet I made this morning. I took ten sentences from a book and typed them into a spreadsheet. I devised a formula to randomly select one word from each sentence. With the resulting ten words, I used a random number generator to select the number of sequential words that I should grab from the arbitrary, nonsensical list. Four was the magic number, four contiguous words from ten. I purposely biased the experiment by choosing the sequential four that made some sense to me. ‘Societies becoming software civilisation’ was my reward for creating the word list in the first place.
‘I want a poem
I can grow old in.’ ¹
Poet and Professor Eavan Boland died a year ago yesterday.
