introduction autocento of the breakfast table is a hypertextual exploration of the workings of revision across time somebody citation needed once said that every relationship we have is part of the same relationship the same is true of authorship as we write as we continue writing across our lives patterns thread themselves through our work images certain phrases preoccupations this project attempts to make those threads more apparent using the technology of hypertext i'm also an mfa candidate at northern arizona university nau this is my thesis genesis this project revolves around two sister concepts the hapax legomenon and the cento hapax legomenon is greek for something said only once it's used in linguistics to describe words that appear only once in a corpus if expanded to n-grams it can be used to describe utterances that occur only once and this is where it gets interesting if this line of thinking is taken to its logical conclusion we can say that all writing all utterances are hapax legomena because they appear only once in the world as they are in short everything is individual everything is differentiated everything is an island on the other hand a cento from the latin from the greek meaning patchwork garment is a poem composed completely of fragments of other poems it's a mash-up that makes up for its lack of originality in utterance with a novelty in arrangement usually it refers to taking phrases lines or stanzas from other authors works but i don't see why it couldn't refer to n-grams or individual words if this line of thinking is taken to its logical conclusion we can say that no writing is truly original that every utterance has in some scrambled way at least been uttered before in other words nothing is individual we float on an ocean of language which we did nothing to create and the best we can hope for is to find some combination that hasn't been thought of too many times before as solomon said there is nothing new under the sun autocento of the breakfast table works within the tension caused by these two concepts process in compiling the works that make up this text i've pulled from a few different projects elegies for alternate selves and html the book of hezekiah prelude html stark raving table contents html buildings out of air art html as well as added new articles written quite recently as i've compiled them into this project i've linked them together based on common images or language moving back and forth through time this should give the reader a fair idea of what my head looks like on the inside technology because this project lives online i've used a fair amount of technology to get it there first i converted all the articles1 present into plain text files which are viewable here then i used john mcfarlane's venerable document preparation system pandoc along with a short script to compile the text sources to html using this template the compiled html is what you're reading now 2 to host the project i'm using github an online code-collaboration tool with the version control system git under the hood this enables me and you dear reader to explore the path of revision even more from beginning to end based on my commits to the repository you can view the repository and its changes and files at my github profile 3 using this site all of the articles on this site are linked together hypertextually i e like a webpage this means that all you need to do to explore the creative threads linking these articles together is to start clicking links however if you find you're looping around to a lot of the same articles you can head back to the index and click through the titles in order that article contains the titles of all the other works in this project alternatively you can click the lozenge loz at the bottom of each page it'll take you to a random article in the project thanks to this javascript if you want to experience the earlier projects in something resembling the original orders previous and next links are provided at the bottom of each page next to the lozenge sometimes there are more than one of each of these or there are none dependant on the structure of their original project things still to do autocento of the breakfast table is a work in progress the first draft is completed but some revision and aesthetic work remains to be done for me to consider it fully published what does this word mean in 2015 you can see the full list of to-dos by visiting the issues page of the github site contact me if you'd like to contact me about the state of this work or my writing in general you can email me at case autocento me links footnotes of the breakfast table http //www ibiblio org/eldritch/owh/abt html citation needed https //en wikipedia org/wiki/wikipedia citing sources dealing with unsourced material nau http //nau edu/cal/english/degrees-programs/graduate/mfa/ i'm aware that the true etymology http //www etymonline com/index php search article of article does not reflect my use of it namely a little chunk of art a la the personal folk derivation of icicle treicle etc this means that if in the future i choose to convert this project to a printable form for example pdf odt or even docx i'll be able to with a fairly small amount of work 3 for more information on the technological aspect of this project see the readme md https //github com/duckwork/autocento/blob/gh-pages/readme md file at the root of the github repo