The Great Gatsby

Here I am performing the Erasure’s method for one page of the Great Gatsby.

Erasure’s method I am using is what I called the “8 to 13 method”. For every new paragraph, I will erase the 8th word, then I will erase the 9th word, the 10th, 11th … 13th and start over until this paragraph ends.

writing this method in pseudo-code will be something like this:

pos = 8
for p in paragraphs:
  while p not end:
    if pos != 14:
        erase_word(pos)
        pos += 1
    else:
        pos = 8
        erase_word(pos)

I manually performed the erase method.

The page on the left is the one I erased and the original document is the one on the right. I read through the erased document. Surprisingly, it still makes sense(with little gramma error)! Here is the erased document if you feel interested in reading it.

The ‘death car’ as the newspapers called , didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around next bend. Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its color — he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently , knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark with the dust.

Michaelis and this man reached her first when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was loose like a flap and there was no need to for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and at the corners as though she had choked a little in up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

We saw the three or four automobiles the crowd when we were still some distance away.

‘Wreck!’ said Tom. ‘That’s good. Wilson’ll have little business at last.’

He slowed down, but still without any of stopping until, as we came nearer, the intent faces of the people at the garage door him automatically put on the brakes.

‘We’ll take a look,’ he said doubtfully, ‘a look.’

I became aware now of a hollow, sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a which as we got out of the coupé and toward the door resolved itself into the words ‘Oh, my !’ uttered over and over in a gasping moan.