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The Aleph: Twitter and Gutenberg mashup tribute to Jorge Luis Borges: A neat project by David Hirmes: The Aleph: Infinite Wonder / Infinite Pity. Sentences from Project Gutenberg and Twitter that start with two words: "I saw..."
You can view only Gutenberg, or only Twitter, or mush them both to produce beautiful word salad like this:
I saw wild hands upcast to the gloom above, a shrunken, pallid face, the gleam of snow-white hair. I saw and smelt that they used real powder. I saw the horrible glare of her eyes, but I could not see so much of her as I wished, and I said that I would call again in the morning. I saw her first five years ago at Gerard's; she came from Switzerland, where she had taken refuge. I saw him the other night, and from what he said, and what she says, I can see pretty well how things are going. I saw a picture of @AmalJamal_ on prom night. lol.
The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. The website's creator David Hirmes explains:
I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase "I saw."
The title of the piece is a reference to the narrator's summing up of the vast whirring world he's seen, one of "infinite wonder and infinite pity".
(HT: @samryan)
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