This project is an homage to Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons. She reflected on the her writing process during this era in a 1946 interview:
I took individual words and thought about them until I got their weight and volume complete and put them next to another word, and at this same time I found out very soon that there is no such thing as putting them together without sense. It is impossible to put them together without sense. I made innumerable efforts to make words write without sense and I found it impossible. Any human being putting down words had to make sense out of them.
The sentences and phrases you’ll find here are produced using a very simple Markov chain fed with the contents of Stein’s book.
You can view the source code for this project on GitLab.
—Andy