The latest issue of Tentacular Magazine is the Random issue, ed. by Jonathan Catherall and guest editor Iris Colomb. Not a theme but a structural conceit, whereby pieces submitted were accepted by a random, computer-generated process.

I decided to submit something different to recent fair, a side project that took a few months spread over about a year. ‘Midlife‘ took a slightly random idea – to repeatedly anagrammatise the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno until I had something resembling coherence. Wilfully, I took something likely to arrive at a random outcome and pushed against that randomness as hard as I could, trying to make it meaningful to me.

Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via’ is an obvious influence. Where she collages multiple versions/translation of Dante’s first three lines, I opted for a strict Outranspian anagram even to the point of preserving the ‘é’ line 3. Over-constraining, for me, is a way of get closer to one’s ‘self’ (no matter how constructed, fake, unstable, temporary), rather than allowing the conceptualist author to recede into a curatorial/editorial ghostliness.

The title is a little throwaway-obvious, but let’s be honest, acceptance wasn’t based on quality. You could have shat on a newspaper and photographed the resulting ‘collage’ with equal chances of acceptance. (Yes, yes, OK, I did consider this when I first saw the call out, or some metaphorical equivalent, but it felt like sending hatemail to the very nice editors.)

The issue is surprisingly readable, partly because Tentacular has built up an interesting (seemingly? can I conclude anything about a random process?) community over its past nine issues.

But there’s the added fascination of trawling through the submissions looking for spontaneously-generated contextual connections, as I did when reading Bergvall’s ‘Via’. Or, for that matter, as I threw random letters into words, searching for some kind of continuity with each repeating tercet.