`A Season in RAM' is a poetry generator that writes in the style
 of the decadent French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891),
 as translated by Wallace Fowlie.  It first appeared in the disk
 magazine Tech Noir in the late 1980's and was dusted off and tweaked
 for Aminet distribution in 1996.

 You alter the program's settings by clicking the mouse to bring up
 a requester.  Make your selections then click on `OKAY.'  The Print
 option puts two poems on each sheet.  Do not select `Yes' unless you
 have a printer hooked up and turned on.
 
 The best way to enjoy `A Season In RAM' is with Endless Screen Loop
 and Voice On selected, and the sound played through a decent stereo.
 Ideally late at night; drinking Pernod is optional.  The program has
 a vocabulary of about 6,000 words, and is a good demonstration of
 how the Amiga's speech facility sounds if you take the time to spell
 out in phonemes those words it can't pronounce correctly on its own.

 Unfortunately, there's a complication with Voice On.  You need to
 have both LIBS:translator.library (ver. 37.1, 10592 or 10524 bytes)
 and DEVS:narrator.device (version 33.2, 23280 bytes). The problem
 is these are copyrighted, so I can't include them in this archive.
 Find someone with a copy of Workbench 1.3 and lift 'em from there.
 The program defaults to Voice Off so people without these files
 can run it without crashing as long as they don't select Voice On.

 (Later versions of narrator.device sound like Robin Leach and speak
 in a halting fashion that will drive you crazy.  They must be
 avoided at all costs for use with this program!)

 Before installing the WB1.3 narrator.device, list DEVS:.  If
 there's a 65760-byte narrator.device (or some other large size
 like that), follow these steps:

 1. Rename narrator.device as narrator.device.latest.
 2. Copy the 23280-byte narrator.device into DEVS:
 3. Reboot and run `Season.'  It'll sound good.

 Later, when you're sick of poetry, do this:
 1. Rename the 23280-byte narrator.device as narrator.device.season.
 2. Rename 65760-byte narrator.device.latest as narrator.device.
 You'll be back to normal.

 Known bugs:
 -- This is rare, but sometimes it fails to speak a word or two.
 -- Sometimes aspects of a poem are in questionable taste. Is this 
    a bug or a feature?  When combining randomness and a vocabulary
    of words that have some "charge" to them, offensiveness is a risk.
                                                _
 By the way, Rimbaud's name is pronounced "ram-BO" (emphasis on the
 second syllable, not like the Stallone character). He was a real
 teen prodigy, writing almost his entire body of work between the
 ages of 16 and 19.

 His big insight was expressed in an 1871 letter: the artist must
 "...arrive at the unknown through the disordering of all the senses..."
 In this century William S. Burroughs, Jim Morrison, and Patti Smith
 are among the artists influenced by Rimbaud who have consciously
 employed his disorder-the-senses technique.  Though this has often
 been interpreted to mean drug use, Burroughs, along with collaborator
 Brion Gysin, developed a mechanical alternative called the cut-up
 method.  He would literally cut pages of text into columns, re-arrange
 them, and transcribe the surprising associations he would find.
 `A Season In RAM' uses the computer's randomness function to automate
 this disordering.

 If you like `A Season In RAM' then check out my random talking head,
 SteveHeadroom, and my random collage-generator, PictureGarden.
 For a total multimedia experience, get Season talking then send it to
 the back with Left Amiga-M and run PictureGarden.

 Direct choirs of sober reflection and vagabond extravagance to:

       Steve Tiffany             -or-       stiffany@isd.net
       3255 14th Ave. S. #4
       Minneapolis, MN  55407        (addresses current January 96)