This website was completed to fulfill the requirements of the graduate student final project for 20th Century Innovators: John Cage, a class taught by Dr. Elainie Lillios at Bowling Green State University.

     The aim of this website is to further the development of John Cage's poetic form, the mesostic, into the realm of the Internet. Cage employed computer programs himself, written by Andrew Culver, to aid in the writing of mesostics and for many other uses, such as I-Ching readings, randomized light cues, assemblage of tape music or texts, to determine the locations of furniture and artwork in installations, performance timings, and even to choose pencil sizes for a series of drawings entitled Ryoanji.

     The Internet is a vast interconnection of information in many forms. For the purposes of this project, the interest lies in the textual data available (and not, for example, graphics or sound media). It is a resource Cage may have known about, but as far as I have been able to determine, never used. The Mesostomatic, as this project is dubbed, aims to extend Cage's use of source texts to generate chance poems by substituting interconnected portions of the Internet as the source text.

     The Mesostomatic is a web site where users can enter a "spine word" (the capitalized word running vertically down the center of the mesostics) and a location on the web. The software engine will then render a mesostic using the given spine and the text on the given web page as the source text. This website implements the "Read Through" mesostic-writing process, and the "50% rule", in PHP, an open-source web scripting language.

     If time permits, extended features will be added to the site to provide for random sorting of the source text, random page retrieval using the Google search engine, and enabling additional options for the user to choose.

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