australian/sokel hoax

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

Eric on THE ERN MALLEY AFFAIR. 

>            Fun to read, and a nice tack on the importance of the author and
> his/her biography. Y'see, it turns out that these pomes they had created
> were actually pretty good reading.

Years ago, a friend of mine wrote a simple computer program (in basic, 
nogal) which churned out grammatically correct poems at the touch of a 
button. Some of them were nonsense, some were hylarius, others were 
really good. It just shows how (much) meaning is projected. What made 
the whole affair even funnier is that the poems were all in Afrikaans (which 
has a simpler grammatical structure than English) and since my friend 
couldn't speak Afrikaans (he had picked words out of a dictionary 
pretty much at random) he had to consult me to find out if the 
program worked.
I'm quite sure that this is some kind of sophisticated postmodern 
analogy - now if only someone could explain it to me....

hg
hag at iafrica.com