With the prose version of the text, when I removed the words removed from the original list, I was left, not surprisingly, with many sentences which were incongruous, which no longer made sense. Reading through these and thinking about this project as a whole, I realised that these texts are like palimpsests, whereby words are removed but traces still remain, e.g. the words on either side of the removed words. This fits in with the fact I’m working within and writing about an area which is itself a palimpsest – an urban palimpsest, an area which has seen huge changes, but in which parts of the past are still present, albeit quite incongruous.
Perhaps it would be an idea for these lists and prose passages to be written up in pencil, and then words rubbed out, giving the work the look and feel of a genuine palimpsest.