yes I said yes I will Yes

I admit, it wasn’t my idea.

But it’s sooo cool!

The other day, I came across the most elegant mix of science and art. In his preface, the editor of a collection of scientific presentations summarized the contents with one single image: a word cloud of the most frequent words that appeared in all the articles.

Beautiful, and clever.

Because it’s never easy, at least to over-analytical people like me, to describe the contents of a piece of writing. When people ask me what my book is about, my heart sinks. I did write a 300-word synopsis and duly sent it to a literary agent. How bad must it have been for even the literary agent (notice I didn’t say publisher) to not grace my efforts with a polite “thanks but no thanks”?

I know now what I’m going to do. I’m going to generate a word cloud. And send it to those rude agents out there. When I’m asked what my book is about, instead of humming and hawing, I’ll be able to say: well, it’s about X, and Y, and Z. In 300 words.

But I’m a bit nervous. What if all these bad words that I used come out in screaming bold letter? What if no words come out apart from the boring little filler words? Word clouds don’t lie.

So I’m going to start with Joyce’s Ulysses.

I used http://www.wordle.net, like that inventive scientific editor I mentioned. And here are the results: Chap. 18 (Molly Bloom's soliloquy) , the one that ends with "yes I said yes I will Yes", and Chap. 4 (Leopold Bloom’s first appearance), the one that starts with "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." I selected the same font and colour scheme for both word clouds, only changing “rounder edges” for Molly to “straighter edges” for Leopold.

Fascinating no?

Molly’s big huge like, dwarfing all other words. And the famous yes that closes the book is there too, in what looks like second place. Men apparently are less single-minded - who would have known? More anchored in time too, with their thoughts consumed with day, morning, now, back, old and time. Although the pleasures of the flesh are not too far away, with tea, and kidney…

So now dear readers, stay tuned for the word cloud of my novel!