There’s this Russian site that has reprinted the entire text of William Gibson’s short story, New Rose Hotel (http://lib.sarbc.ru/win/GIBSON/hotel.txt). I wanted to read it but I didn’t have time right then so I tried printing it out to read later. But for some reason it wouldn’t print. So I copied the text into NotePad and saved it for later. It sat there for a few months.

While cleaning out my personal folders today, I found it again and decided I wanted to read it. However, I didn’t want to print it from NotePad because NotePad prints the name of the file at the top of every bloody page and that just rubs me the wrong way for some reason. So I decided to copy it into Word.

There are hard returns at the end of each line of the text I copied from that Russian site which means the text ran in a skinny column down the left side of the page in Word. So I decided to go through and get rid of all those unwanted hard returns and replace them with a space so that the lines would continue on uninterrupted except when the paragraph legitimately ended.

You still with me?

Only problem is I forgot to enter my “replace with” criteria, a space, so what happened was I replaced all 290 hard returns with nothing. This caused 290 pairs of words to run together throughout the document.

While I was going through and separating all those pairs of words, I started noticing a strange cohesiveness among them. Some of it was jibberish, but quite a lot more of it was oddly poetic.

Here is New Rose Poem, made up of 290 pairs of accidentally joined words from Gibson’s New Rose Hotel.