The last update I had on my work was my series The Same, which has died and come back and died again a few times in the last year or so. It’s past now. Dead to me. I’ve moved on to better things.

Some highlights on the Gnoetry Daily site:

• A range of poetry generators are being used (Gnoetry, ePoGees, n+7, diastic reading, mchain, JanusNode)
• GnoetryLeaks is a new series that Eric Elshtain started recently using Wikeleaks for source material and threatens to go viral
• Poems written using of popular music and rap lyrics as source texts
• Obscene Anti-Poetry of the End Times (6x6x6)
• Gertrude Stein makes some hypermediated appearances (gertbot)
• 1337 (that’s LEETSPEAK)
• SciFi Gnoetry
• And much much more

The His & Hers poems that I wrote in 2008 are back up on the blog I began the project on. I had felt that their self-publication would have been a barrier to journal publication later on, but I now think those fears were ungrounded.

The poems along with the links to the source texts that I used with mchain 0.3 are all up in the order that I wrote them. I hope they will serve others interested in using mchain or other text manipulation tools as examples of what can come out of a project that uses these tools.

If you don’t feel like navigating to that page to download mchain 0.3, you can get it here: mchain-0.3.zip

Enjoy!

Update your links and bookmarks. Gnoetry Daily has moved over to WordPress and been given a makeover. There’s plenty going on over there now: I’m writing several serial works, Chad’s pumping out the Zapatagraphy, and new posts by Eric Elshtain, Gregory Fraser and Matthew Lafferty go up often.

New members are always welcome! If you are interested e-mail me at escovel@gmail.com. The software is free, although some assembly is definitely required (see the howtos on this blog).

Thanks to my brother, who is obsessed with the Something Awful forums, I have learned that this has already been done. Go see the RANDOM FUN GENERATOR. Dozens (or hundreds) of users have already taken part of a flash game on the forum where you fill in the empty word bubbles of a generated three-panel comic. The results have been cut-up and reassembled randomly into fantastically entertaining comics. Digital and conceptual, cut-up aesthetics and all. It’s great. Gary Sullivan’s sense of humor and satire are indispensable to his comics, but some randomness is amusing, too. I wish I was doing this kind of stuff sometimes.

You can fill in the word bubbles on your own, use the Laff Maker to click and select from preformed phrases, or use the Random Laffs for a quick chuckle. Here are some panels I got out of the Random Laffs function:

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!

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

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

Check it out.

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 blank 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).

Next, download and extract the correct pre-built Gnoetry program folder from the MediaFire Gnoetry Shared Folder 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 or tar.bz2)
• For 64 bit Ubuntu: gnoetry-0.2-x64 (zip or 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.