Catchy words

A virus operates autonomously, attaching itself to and feeding off hosts, growing and spreading. It is with this in mind that the creators of languageisavirus.com produced a Web site featuring toys, games and gizmos to treat the imagination and serve as literary inspiration. The site features a wide variety of writing activities for visitors, from a random line generator to a Haiku-a-Tron. It also presents brief informational entries about popular writing experiments and techniques, such as Rimbaud’s systematic derangement of the senses and Anaïs Nin’s collage technique, as well as essays on related topics — check out the one assessing the viability of dub fiction, the literary equivalent of dub reggae. The best exercise available on languageisavirus.com is a deep reading of ontological anarchy from avant-garde philosopher Hakim Bey’s “Poetic Terrorism and Wild Children.”