About this book

In music lessons at school, we learnt that the fairground organ music in the Beatles’ track ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ was created semi-randomly; the tape that fed the musical automata was chopped into pieces with scissors, thrown into the air, and taped back together in a random order. The result is sporadic, yet has a character all of its own.

‘Butterflies and Sand’ is designed to be a ‘living’ book - over time, its content will shift and re-organise along the same semi-random lines as ‘Mr Kite’. Each time the book is published, its pages are knitted together from a selection of haiku. The scissors have been replaced by code.

Sometimes haiku will have been used before, but never in the same combination. By using a random order and random titles, the “narrative” of any given publishing is left up to chance, and the mood of the reader.

Like the book, I try to stick to certain haiku rules - or guidelines and restrictions, at least; some are more stringent than others. And like the book, each haiku is wholly unpredictable before it ‘happens’. Within the guidelines laid out, a whole world can happen in one breath.

Please do check out the list of thank-yous at the end of the book, and send through your thoughts to @6loss on Twitter, or by e-mail to butterfliesandsand@exmosis.net.

PHP source is available at:

https://github.com/exmosis/haikuchaos

Thanks for supporting the experiment.

Graham | Scribe | @6loss
April 30th 2012 (updated March 2013)