William Burroughs explanation for his typewriter machine poem accompanying this record (MAS basically a masking process): I enclose an experiment in machine writing that anyone can do on his own typewriter. The experiment consists in passing any prose through a grid. The prose I selected for the present example was press criticisms of Naked Lunch and my latest book Dead Fingers Talk. John Wayne, Philip Toynbee, Anthony Quinton (whoever he may be) John Donnelley (") some joker from the New Yorker and Time. I selected mostly unfavorable criticisms with a special attention to meaningless machine turned phrases such as 'irrelevant honesty of hysteria' the pocked dishonored flesh' ironically the format is banal' etc. Then ruled off a grid "”(Grid I) and wove the prose into it like start a sentence from J. Wane, in square I continue in square 3 5 and 7. Now a sentence from Toyby started in square 2 4 and 6. The reading of the grid back to straight prose can be done say one across and one down. Of course there are any number of ways in which the grid can be read off. I found that the material fell into dialogue form and seemed to contain some quite remarkable prose which I can enthuze over without immodesty since it contains no words of my own other than such quotations from my work as the critics themselves had selected. Of course this is only one of many possible grids. Here the units are square for convenience on the typewriter but this need not be adhered to. No doubt the mathematically inclined could progress from plane to solid geometry and put prose through spheres and cubes and hexegons. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.