The field of inadvertent literature is either needle-eye small or black hole sprawl depending on whom you ask. Loosely defined, inadvertent literature is any work of literary merit produced unintentionally. Under the strictest standards, the convergence of events needed to produce any entity worthy of the name is astoundingly rare, but recently the Society for the Propagation of Inadvertent Literary Labors has adamantly insisted that so long as a work is mostly produced by accident, that is, at least 80% of the whole, it is thought to conform to industry standards and earns the coveted stamp (the giddy monkey-some have called him "impish"- twirling the typewriter atop one of its digits).
Examples of the pure stuff include the cat stalking across a keyboard in Birmingham which produced, "Hop lunge chip," (immortalized on Youtube, where its hits are six of figure) and the short but illustrious oeuvre of a Blackberry, neglected in the back pocket of an Operations Analyst for several hours, that generated, amidst gibberish and spam-like emails, the haunting, if elliptical, incantations, "Topos, Uncle Zeke," and "Bent gone?" - punctuation and all. Though they aren't accidental, SPILL has enshrined works such as Borges's "Library of Babel," with its implied card catalog of chance-forged works rivaling anything in all of Western literature-or, more accurately, said works refurbished as chance's own. In recent years the group has attempted to secure grant money to fund a supercomputer that would perform the labors of the monkeys with their typewriters, and rumor already sings of a program that can isolate swatches of "likely sense" within what one member memorably referred to as a "slush Everest." Still, the money's gone to needier or sexier causes, and animal rights activists have heretofore sabotaged several well-intentioned attempts to employ various creatures (sea lions, albino tamarins, monera) in some variation of that fashion immortalized by the archetypal primates. (Attempts to use prelinguistic children in the same capacity were squelched even earlier in the IRB process).
Lowering the threshold, endlessly controversial though it is, opens things up considerably. At 72%, "qicjnlypo nfasionbu woirrl," ostensibly random spewage, becomes, "Quick, Calypso, fashion a worry," which, while perhaps unworthy of the Singer of Tales, has to be seen as an improvement over letter detritus. With a fringe wing trying to get things down to 60%, and their mirror image outliers, the Sheers, for whom any deviation from complete accident is unacceptable, no resolution is in sight. All that can be said for sure is that in the heated debates, the phrase "Make no mistake" cannot be said without laughter ricocheting about the room, as members recall the historic occasion on which this phrase took nearly four minutes to emerge comprehensibly from the lips of founder Maurice Rabinski at the podium. When he blew a .3 a half-mile down the road (his last official act at the organization's helm) he could hardly have been clearer.
Of course, even lower than the low-percentage wing are those who would find inadvertent literature everywhere: in the sight of a boy chasing a loosed watermelon through a grocery, in the conversation of two sisters, one of whom says, "He offers me 'kudos,' he's fucking her and he offers me 'kudos,' for shit's sake," and the other of whom responds, "Oh my god, sake! Let's get sushi and drown your sorrows. I thought of it because you said sake and I saw the word in my mind and thought of…d'y'wanna?" Like the percussionist for whom every surface is tantalizingly drummable, such folk find literature in the evening news, in hair caught in a drain, in a stain that recalls no exact number or letter in its shape yet seems, somehow, denotative, in the dream that ends with the crosshairs of a sniper's gun aimed at a frenemy and then turned on oneself. Wallowing in their puke they own allegory, in cancer seek solace in leitmotif. For these few, SPILL's annual meetings offer a sort of respite from the inundation of literature with which they are pelted year-round; the sterile hotel rooms and stiff, overcaffeinated academic conversations that permeate the convention are their sole chances to escape, momentarily, from the single, endless act of reading that encases them like skin.