The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed (1984)

lisemeitner:

click through for a full link to The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed (1984)
The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed is a compilation of writings by Racter, an artificial intelligence program written in compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM in the early 1980s. The program was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, who claimed it had the ability to:
conjugate both regular and irregular verbs
print the singular and plural of both regular and irregular nouns
remember the gender of nouns
assign variable status to randomly chosen “things”
Through a combination of these skills, Chamberlain once explained that Racter was thus able to navigate language:
“What the computer "forms” is dependent upon what it finds in its files, and what it can find is an extremely wide range of words that are categorized in a specific fashion and what might be called “syntax directive,” which tell the computer how to string the words together. An important faculty of the program is its ability to direct the computer to maintain certain randomly chosen variables (words or phrases), which will then appear and reappear as a given block of prose is generated. This seems to spin a thread of what might initially pass for coherent thinking throughout the computer-generated copy so that once the program is run, its output is not only new and unknowable, it is apparently thoughtful. It is crazy “thinking,” I grant you, but “thinking” that is expressed in perfect English.“
Excerpt:
"More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity,
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber,
I need it for my dreams.”

One of the links there didn’t work for me, but this one did.

The writing does make a surreal kind of sense (although I expect that much of the meaning is constructed in the mind of the readers) and it’s definitely grammatical. It’s even, in some cases, lyrical: there are several limericks which scan perfectly although I can’t quite say they’re humorous:

There once was a silly proud noun
Whose pipe organ quickly would sound
They went out and wagged
But still never gagged
And that’s why they seemed like a crown.

Both in terms of content and concept, this reminds me a bit of Christian Bök’s experimental writing in lipograms and with bacteria.

3EVERLASTING LIGHT