THE SAME is at Gnoetry Daily

REPOSTED from what light already light:

You can read my current poetic project, The Same, currently being published serially at Gnoetry Daily. I might be pulling five or six of them soon so I can send them out for publication in print journals, but for now they’re all available to read, even the ones I’m not going to include in the final edit.

The poems are all written using the Gnoetry 0.2 program. There is currently a pool of 19 source texts, of which I more or less arbitrarily select three for each poem. The source texts are mostly from the mid-19th century through the early 20th century, and focus on islands, continental philosophy, religion and scientific discovery. The form I have chosen is three eight-line stanzas in blank verse. As a further constraint, I have barred all personal and personal possessive pronouns to the best of my ability. The titles are taken from each poem’s first two words, which are “the ______.”

As each poem develops, stanza by stanza, several themes arise from the beginning object (“the ______”) and are explored semantically and/or aurally and brought into relationship with each other. Syntax is broken or twisted to suit the building of these relationships, with the hope to creating an impression or understanding that rises above – while dwelling within – the words and ideas.

Currently the project is being influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil, whose themes and perceptions seem to be eerily in line with my own. What is meant by “the same” in this project is meant to be multiple, but I think it is something that is wrong, perhaps the “profound indifference” of contemporary consumer culture; and possibly a solution, already present, ubiquitous, secret. Are these poems definitions? The opposite? What is the opposite of a definition, and would the imposition of anti-definitions be a meaningful act? These are the questions I’m working through right now.

In any case, enjoy the poems!

Adding Source Texts to Gnoetry

Want to add your favorite book or custom selection of texts to Gnoetry? Adding new source texts into Gnoetry is a simple process. If you are working between operating systems, though, the steps below can help you to avoid any problems.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

1. Acquire or create a plain text file of your source. Make sure the file is saved as plain text (.txt) , preferably in UTF-8 or Western (US/ASCII) encoding. In Ubuntu, it is best to create this file using the Text Editor program; in Windows, use the Notepad program. These programs will not add any metadata to the text files.

TIP: As a failsafe, make sure any file you create can open with the Text Editor program in Ubuntu, remove any gobbledygook metadata that you find from the top of the file, and save it as plain text.

2. At the top of your source file, you must append this header at the top:

@BEGIN_HEADER
Title: Moby Dick
Author: Herman Melville
@END_HEADER

Replace the title and author in the example above with your text’s, and make sure there are no spaces between the four lines.

3. Save the text file (again, as a plain text file) in the texts-txt folder in your gnoetry directory.

4. In the Terminal, go to gnoetry/tools and run the tokenize-all.py script. You may do this as often as you like. It simply adds new or modified text files in the texts-txt file to gnoetry’s database of sources.

% cd gnoetry/tools

% ./tokenize-all.py

Don’t worry about the “dropped sentences” that the script reports. These are often parts of the text file such as ordered lists (2.) that end in periods but contain no sentences or words. It usually reports a “loss” of about 5-10% of the “words” in the file.

5. That should do it. Get back to gnoetry/interface and run the gnoetry script as usually. Your new texts should show up on the list.

% cd ../interface (.. sends you up one directory)

% ./gnoetry

New Member on the Gnoetry Daily Blog

After several attempts over two months, I finally got Gnoetry running on my comrade Chad Hardy’s Mac. He is now posting his work with Gnoetry alongside Eric Elshtain’s, Gregory Fraser’s and mine at Gnoetry Daily.

Check it out.

Try Gnoetry Without Installing Ubuntu

If you want to try Gnoetry, but don’t feel up to building it yourself and installing Ubuntu alongside your other OS, there is a simpler option available using the Ubuntu Live CD option and the pre-built Gnoetry program folders below.

You will need a black CD and a flash disk with ~250 MB of free space.

Also, I’m not sure if the LiveCD will work with Macs. I’ve not tested that yet.

Step 1: Download and Burn

Get the latest Ubuntu Desktop LiveCD. In recent Ubuntu versions, the LiveCD is included as an option in the installation disc, so download the correct image for your system (32 bit or 64 bit) and burn it to a blank CD. Make sure your burn the image to the disk and don’t just put the iso file onto a data cd (your burning software should have this option).

Also, download and extract the correct pre-built Gnoetry program folder below to a flash disk. The zip and tar.bz2 files contain the same things – just choose what you prefer:

• For 32 bit Ubuntu: gnoetry-0.2-i686-2.6 (zip, tar.bz2)
• For 64 bit Ubuntu: gnoetry-0.2-x64 (zip, tar.bz2)

When you extract it, make sure that you end up with the gnoetry directory in the base directory of you flash disk (not within some other folder).

Step 2: Open Ubuntu Live Session

Now that you have a burned LiveCD and a flash disk with Gnoetry on it, insert the LiveCD into your CD drive and restart your computer. Your computer should automatically boot from the CD (or ask you if you want to do this) and bring you to this screen:

Choose the first option, “Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer.” Once Ubuntu has loaded, insert your USB flash drive.

Step 3: Run Gnoetry in Terminal

Now open the Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal). The flash disk is mounted at /media/disk, so you must do the following to get to gnoetry directory and run the program (don’t type the % signs):

%  cd /media/disk/gnoetry/interface/

%  ./gnoetry

This is assuming that your gnoetry directory was extracted to the top directory of your flash drive in Step 1. If not, you will have to navigate to whatever directory you put it in.

That’s it! Enjoy the program.

Updates and Responses to the Gnoetry and Mchain Howtos

Wow! I’ve been swamped with responses over the past few days regarding the Gnoetry and Mchain 0.3 installation howtos. It’s great to see such a response so soon. There have been a few issues with installation, so all of the pages have been updated to clarify or extend the instructions.

One MAJOR update: the mchain-0.3.zip file that was downloadable from the website appears to have had a bug in it that made it fail during build. I’ve uploaded a corrected file for download along with an md5 checksum so you can make sure that the mchain-0.3.zip file has not been corrupted during download. If you had trouble building the program in the past, please download the updated version and try it again. If you have problems still, e-mail me at escovel@gmail.com or leave a response on the blog and I will do my best to assist you.

Also, Jon Trowbridge has responded to the howto and informed me that some version of my fixes to the scripts will be added to the svn repository, so the complicated Step 3 of my howto may soon be irrelevant. I’ll let y’all know when that goes down.

Digital Poetics Ho!

Explore the Updated mchainpoetics.wordpress.com

Over the last week, the blog has undergone some much needed changes. A simpler theme has been chosen, and now the most important sections of the blog are now the pages for Gnoetry and Mchain (see the Pages links in the right sidebar), which explain the programs (with screenshots) and give detailed instuctions on how to get them installed and working on computers running any operating system. Mchain 0.2 and 0.3 have always been fully portable, but now Gnoetry can be run via some clever workarounds on any base system. All of the pages and links have been updated and revised to be more helpful to future users of Mchain and Gnoetry, too.

The goal of Markovian Parallax Generate is to spread the use of Mchain, Gnoetry and the digital writing process in poetry as widely as possible. On top of that, I plan to develop new programs and host them on this website. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged, especially from new users. Drop a comment and let me know how you react to writing with programs such as these. It opened my eyes to new possibilities in language and writing, and my wish is that it do the same for others.

New and Updated Pages:

• The Programs – Info and Screenshots [NEW]
• Gnoetry 0.2 – Download and Install Howto [NEW]
• Mchain 0.2 Script – Download and Usage [UPDATED]
• Mchain 0.3 – Source Code (C++) Installation and Usage [NEW]

Howto: Installing Gnoetry 0.2 On Any Platform

Updated and Corrected: 2 July, 2009 @ 1:33 PM

This guide will install Gnoetry 0.2 on your computer, whether it’s PC or Mac. For some idea of what the Gnoetry program can do, visit Beard of Bees Press and look at the Gnoetry collaborations published there or browse through the Gnoetry Daily weblog. The program is still in its development stage, so it is not all that simple to get it running. It is more complicated depending on your operating system.

Gnoetry was originally written to run in Ubuntu using the Gnome desktop environment. This guide will first show you how to install a working virtual partition or virtual machine image of Ubuntu onto a Windows or Mac OS X machine, then it will guide you through the installation of Gnoetry 0.2 in your Ubuntu installation.

It’s worth all of the work in the end, though.

Installing Ubuntu on a Windows System with Wubi

A project that the Ubuntu team has been working on for a while now makes it much simpler to install a working virtual partition of Ubuntu on a Windows system. I have chosen this method for simplicity’s sake.

INSTALLING WUBI

First, download the Wubi installer, run wubi.exe, and follow the instructions. Everything should work and you’ll have the option to run Ubuntu or Windows on your next reboot.

It the wubi.exe file is downloading the wrong image for your system architecture (what it did to me), then you will have to download the newest installation image for Ubuntu. Go to the Ubuntu Dowload Page. The latest version should be selected already. Make sure you choose the correct system architecture for your computer (whether it has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor) at the bottom of the page. Currently, the 32-bit version file is named ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso.

Once that has downloaded, make sure that the Ubuntu installation image you downloaded above is in the same directory as the Wubi installer (wubi.exe); e.g., if wubi.exe is in c:\, then your Ubuntu ISO file should also be in c:\. Run wubi.exe and follow the prompts to install.

If you have trouble, refer to the FAQ’s on Wubi website.

Now you have to option on every restart to enter either Windows or Ubuntu. Isn’t it wonderful?

Installing Ubuntu on Mac OS X with VMWare Fusion

VMWare Fusion is a virtualization suite for the Mac OS X operating system. Unfortunately, it is not free software ($79.99), so you may have to fork over some cash to get it. There is a free evaluation option if you just want to try it out. As of June 2009, VMWare has not released a free Player for OS X like it has for Windows and Linux.

Fortunately, though, there is already an excellent howto on Laurent’s Weblog called “Install Ubuntu 8.04 using VMware Fusion on Mac OS X.” Follow the instructions there. The only difference of note is that Ubuntu is now on version 9.04, so make sure you get the newest version to install.

Gnoetry Installation HowTo – Ubuntu 9.04

Now that you are in Ubuntu Linux, by whichever method you have chosen, you can get to installing Gnoetry 0.2. The only requirement at this point is that you have a working internet connection and that you remember your Ubuntu username and password. You will often need to enter your password for sudo commands (see below).

1. INSTALLING NECESSARY PACKAGES

In the terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal), run the commands below. NOTE: Each command begins after the %, and you should hit enter to execute it:

% sudo apt-get update
% sudo apt-get install subversion libglib2.0-dev python2.6-dev python-gtk2 libgtk2.0-dev

That should install the above files and all other necessary build files for step 2. This may take some time, depending on the speed of your internet connection. Make sure you spell everything correctly, or it will not work.

2. DOWNLOAD AND SETUP GNOETRY

Still in the terminal, type:

% svn co http://svn.trowbridge.org/gnoetry
% cd gnoetry/gnoetics
% ./setup.py build
% cd ../tools
% ./tokenize-all.py

3. CORRECT TWO OF THE SCRIPTS TO COMPLETE SETUP

First, before you apply these patches, skip to step 4 and see if Gnoetry works out of the box. Otherwise, follow these directions as closely as you can. The fixes to the second script may also be unnecessary for your system, so try to run it before editing the second file, too.

NOTE: A user recently installing Gnoetry has sent in this correction / word of caution:

When correcting the scripts in step #3, I copied and pasted directly from your instructions. However, the quotation marks you use (or rather, used by your font) aren’t straight up and down, which apparently is enough to throw the whole thing into a conniption fit. A quick Googling taught me as much …, but in any case, you might want to change that in the instructions so other people don’t make the same mistake.

First Script (filename: gnoetry/interface/gnoetry):

Apply the following changes to lines in gnoetry/interface/gnoetry:

Line 1:

#!/usr/bin/python

should be

#!/usr/bin/env python

Line 11:

sys.path.append(“..”) # add path for gnoetics library

should be

sys.path.append(“../gnoetics”) # add path for gnoetics library

Line 14:

gtk.gdk.threads_init()

should be

gtk.threads_init()

Lines 60-62:

# No splash screen, just go straight to the callback.
#splash.splash(4, post_splash_cb)
post_splash_cb()

should just be one line,

splash.splash(4, post_splash_cb)

Save the changes to gnoetry/interface/gnoetry. Overwrite the file that is there.

Second Script (filename: gnoetry/gnoetics/gnoetics.py)

The fix for this file has to do with your system architecture and the path to the build directory that contains xxx_gnoetics.so. If you have a 32-bit system, replace line 4 (underneath “build”) with:

“lib.linux-i686-2.6″)

if you have a 64-bit system, replace the same line with:

“lib.linux-x86_64-2.5″)

** Note: make sure you include the ” ” and the ).

Now save the above script as gnoetics.py in the gnoetry/gnoetics directory. Overwrite the file that is already there.

If neither of those worked, and Gnoetry crashes when you try to run it, then navigate in a file browser to the gnoetry/gnoetics/build directory and copy and paste the name of the directory there (the one without “temp” in front of it) inside of the quotation marks in line 4 of gnoetics.py. That is the information it’s looking for.

Final Note on Step 3: File Permissions

Proceed to step four. If step four fails, you may have to change the permissions of the gnoetry and gnoetics.py files. Go into the File Browser again, right click on the files, choose “Properties,” go to the “Permissions” tab and check the box that says “Allow to execute as program”). Let me know if you have any trouble with this step.

4. RUN GNOETRY

Go back to the terminal. From your home directory, you will cd into the gnoetry/interface directory and run the program:

% cd gnoetry/interface
% ./gnoetry

Have fun!

Digital Writing with Python Course in NYC

I’m beginning my Python self-education this week while on vacation, with the intention of creating new programs to augment the ones I’ve been using to write digital poetry for the last three years (e.g. Gnoetry and Mchain). I’m starting with How to Think Like a Computer Science and working my way out from there. For shits and giggles, I was doing a Google search for info on python text processing +poetry and found a course description of the course I’ve dreamed of taking/teaching for the last year or so.

Digital Writing with Python is being taught this Summer in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) by Adam Parrish (check out his website – cool stuff). The course description:

This course introduces the Python programming language as a tool for writing digital text. This course is specifically geared to serve as a general-purpose introduction to programming in Python, but will be of special interest to students interested in poetics, language, creative writing and text analysis. Weekly programming exercises work toward a midterm project and culminate in a final project. Python topics covered include: functions; object-oriented programming; functional programming (list comprehensions, recursion); getting data from the web; displaying data on the web; parsing data formats (e.g., markup languages); visualization and interactivity with Python. Poetics topics covered include: character encodings (and other technical issues); cut-up and re-mixed texts; the algorithmic nature of poetic form (proposing poetic forms, generating text that conforms to poetic forms); transcoding/transcription (from/to text); generative algorithms: n-gram analysis, context-free grammars; performing digital writing. Prerequisites: Introduction to Computational Media or equivalent programming experience.

Summer Session II begins on June 29, so if you’re in New York and interested in innovative writing techniques, check it out. If my plans work out well, I’ll be in New York in August or September trying to get a job and exploring a digital arts/poetry/jazz scenes. Otherwise I would be there. If I could afford it now after the M.F.A. Sounds like a fantastic course.

P.S. – I’ve been putting off finalizing the cross-platform Gnoetry installation howto, but I think I’ll put it up in the next week or so. Something to look forward to.

Customizing Source Texts with Google

I’m starting a new Gnoetry or Mchain project, it would seem. I’ve been compiling a list of “pleasingwords” for a while now, but I haven’t known how to use them. Now I’m planning to begin searching for text using Google (or other sources) that contains these pleasingwords and creating a source text to use with Gnoetry or Mchain.

Just an idea.

Author’s Notes: dead OR died OR killed (1)

This post begins a series of short author’s notes to be compiled for the preface for my master’s thesis. The thesis is entitled Five Chapbooks, which – spoiler alert – is comprised of five distinct chapbooks.

One of these, dead OR died OR killed, is a conceptual poem which documents every unique result of a Google News search concerning reports of deaths on March 23, 2008. Here are the specific constraints that define the poem dead OR died OR killed.

1. It was composed using the internet database / search engine Google News which is limited by factors of its own.
2. It searched for news stories from one 24-hour period, 12:00 AM through 11:59 PM on March 23, 2008.
3. It asked for all articles containing any of the words dead, died, or killed. The title of the poem is the boolean search string that I used to compose it.

The idea for the project came unexpectedly to me. I had heard several reports about violent Chinese suppression of riots in Tibet, each of which reported a different number of deaths for that day and for the days leading up to it. Once I had worked out a search string that might answer my question, I thought about how morbid the search actually was, and also how much larger it could be if it was carried to its logical end. I decided to get reports of every death, violent or otherwise, that had been reported in english-language newspapers over an arbitrarily chosen 24-hour period.

I didn’t think about all of the implications of the search when I was conducting it. I assumed I would get a large number of reports of politically relevant deaths regarding wars, police actions, occupations, etc. This fortunately was not the case. What was increasingly interesting to me was how many of the deaths were domestic and accidental. Even more interesting was the specificity of the stories, with full names and often biographical snapshots of the deceased. Details of murders and ambushes add another level of morbid fascination the piece which became increasingly a testament ot the strangeness of life and death on this planet and even less of a political statement.

Still, there are deeper issues to interpret about the work. What statement(s) does it make about death? What does this concept poem accomplish as a work of literature? What do results about the Google News search engine? What does this poem say about knowledge, not just about what is comprensive or complete knowledge, but about what can satisfy curiosity about a  subject so difficult (impossible?) to come to full terms with as death?

When I took refuge in the Buddhas, I was given the curious name Sherab Tharkin, which translates roughly to Perfection of Knowledge. Aside from the religious meaning of that name, it made me wonder how knowledge could be perfect or complete in any form. I believe with a fair amount of confidence that knowledge is always incomplete and always imperfect, so what really concerns me here is what would be adequate knowledge, satisfactory knowledge. This project makes me ask this question: what kind of knowledge about death is complete or adequate for my own curiosity? My answer turns out to be none. I don’t think this poem should satisfy, but, actually, do the opposite, to make one think mortality in a different way, from a different perspective which encompasses the meaning of death on the individual and collective levels. I feel that knowledge is then not an end in itself; knowledge is only perfected when it dawns into wisdom.