Ok this is a bizarro, messed up book, with inappropriate and offensive content.    However I thought it was a mesmerizing read.  Why? well it was so illogical and unrealistic.  The tone was sort of a gritty realism but I really did not think the action was intended as literal.  This is similar to the extravegences in Wolf's Orlando.  Orland is - I mean people do not live for 400 years and switch between sexes magically without surgical intervention.  But the tone of orlando is not magical realism but realism, we are supposed to focus not on the fantastical nature of the narrative but on something else. Same is the case with B&G in HS.  What exactly are we supposed to focus on? 

What I loved about B&G in HS is the seamless way she included bits of poetry from other authors, retelling of the same event over and over again like a literary groundhogs day, the drawings - that map is nuts! - and the word play in the farsi translations.  It is experimental, but the experiments are treated as mundane and this makes the experiments readable. It is not a masculine experimentalism that calls attention to pyrotechnics so that we may know how brilliant the author is. Rather it is an experimentalism that attempts to hide behind offensive content and matter of factness.  And the experiment is most effective to tell a story and create a new language to share somrething beyond language - or something that was beyond language before Acker wrote her book. 

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So - here is a a handly dandy website that tells you what to do:

http://blog.willj.net/2011/05/31/setting-up-postgresql-for-ruby-on-rails-deve...

Basically just remember:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

createdb -Ousername -Eutf8 dbname

AND rake db:migrate

Also when you hit this error :

Is the server running locally and accepting
        connections on Unix domain socket

Your path variable is looking at /usr/bin/psql.

Force your path to use:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

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I am currently reading Infinite Jest. This may be the year of big male books (I just finished Ulysses after all, which I think threw down the gauntlet in the d*!k waving category.   

Anyway, Infinite Jest is definately readable, although I am not always sure how the current scenario relates to the 'PLOT'.  Is there a PLOT or am I hopelessly modern never to move into the plotless pomo world where other structureless forms exist - like noise music.

Inspite of this, the episodes in I.J. are amusing and somewhat less male than say gravity's rainbow or the entire corpus of Philip Roth.  However, really what I attribute my ability to read this immense tomb is that I am reading it on my iphone or my ipad and this does not reflect that actual printed page of I.J.   

The printed page of I.J is an insurmountable wall of text where as the e-version provides nice small chunks of text and it does not matter whether or not it is intended or punctuated.

The wall of text makes the paperback version of I.J unreadable, but the e-version of I.J readable. On the iphone, though, around 3 iphone pages equal 1 paperback page.  This is much less taxing on my short attention span eyes.

The take away - and this is really the lesson of Apple, web 2.0 and Ikea.  Design Matters.  When you read - design matters.  Lets leave the page long sentences to Proust, I dont really think this contributes to the evolution of the novel.

I dont think I'll pick up my bed side version of IJ - that is a book I will never read.  The e-version though I will probably finish in 2 weeks.

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In between eating, watching Breaking Bad streaming on my computer, ding ding ding, doing some redesign and rebranding for crowdcollection now called thecrwd, I have been trying to improve my algorithmic poetry.  To this end, I picked up a book, 'Virtual Muse', which was written in 1995 but seems very contemporary. 

Although I am just in chapter two I am taking a moment to ponder the author's analysis of Jabberwocky and other non-sensical poems.  The salent thought - anything can appear to make sense if you a) use sentence structure or word order that implies the function of a word b) use meaninful words without proper sentence structure that force the reader to 'interpolate' the sentence (not interpret so much - I liken this to bootstraping a yield curve from implied interest rates rather than interpreting the meaning of a lowering an interest rate).

Anyway - it would not be so difficult to create a program that contained certain sentence structures and they allowed the program to plug in non-sensical words.  However, creating non-sensical words is itself an art: 

The beginning of Jabberwocky: 

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

What is happening here?  What are the rules?  All the words are non-sense except for particles, conjunctions and verbs (this is more evident the further you read the poem). 'Gyre' and 'Gimble; seem to be verbs, but they act more like gerunds. First rule: nouns, gerunds, and adjectives and adverbs are non-sense words.  But all these nonsense words mimsy mome, raths - could be real words - they are pronouncable and seem almost English.  He is not creating fake arabic words but fake english words.  So Rule 2 - we need another rule defining how to create fake english words (if we are creating an english poem).  

While I was reading this chapter I kept thinking that algorithmic is a great tool for stimulating poetic thinking, a version of brainstorming.  

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I would like to say there are a number of things wrong with this algorithm. But in my defense I wrote it in two hours and had never used the python nltk (natural language tool kit).  

First the code and then the critique: 

import nltk, re, pprint,sys,string
from urllib import urlopen
from sets import Set

try:
        filename = "input"
        stanza = ["evil","sin","punish"]#,"blessing"]
        couplet = ["redeem"]
        if sys.argv[1] == filename:
                url = sys.argv[2]
                data = urlopen(url).read()
                tokens = nltk.word_tokenize(data)
                text = nltk.Text(tokens)
                #text = nltk.Text(nltk.corpus.gutenberg.words('bible-kjv.txt'))
                for i in stanza:
                        text.concordance(i,lines=4)
                        #text.similar(i)
                for i in couplet:
                        text.concordance(i,lines=2)
                        #text.similar(i)
        else:
                pattern = re.compile("[0-9]|\;|\:|\,")
                poemwords = re.compile("|".join(stanza+couplet))
                poem = []
                f = open(filename,"r")
                lines = f.readlines()
                f.close()
                lines = lines[1:len(lines)]
                f = open(sys.argv[1]+".txt","w")
                for l in lines:
                        if l.strip()[-1] != ":" :
                                sense = pattern.split(l)
                                newline = [s for s in sense if poemwords.search(s) != None][0].strip()
                                print newline+"\n"
                                f.write(newline+"\r")
                f.close()


except:
    print "Error"
    for arg in sys.argv:
        print arg

--------------

The bash script:

python damnengine.py input http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10/pg10.txt > input
python damnengine.py damn

-----------

The Algorithm

The overarching idea was to use the sonnet structure abab cdcd efef gg and to use a different word related to subject of the poem for each stanza. Because I had no time to find rhyming words when I was writing this (perhaps I will do this in v2) I just used the basic 4 line 2 line structure.

What did I do?

1. I picked the words for each stanza and the couplet at the end- 4 words total- that relate to my subject matter. These words were not terribly imaginative on my part. I could probably use the text.similar function to select words.
2. Downloaded the text from gutenberg (free) and load it into the nltk parser. Really I should have postparsed the text and divided it up by sentences rather than lines. There are plenty of lines that start with partial words.
3. Used text.concordance to find the first 4 lines in the text with my key words, and then find 2 lines with the couplet words. Really what I should have done is find all lines with the selected words (or the similar words) and then selected the lines with the appropriate rhymes and/or manipulate the word structure of lines or mix and match lines. The list goes on...
4. Then because concordance prints everything to the standard output I ended up writing a shell script that pipes this output into a file and then processes the file again. I could have just redefined the standard output to a file and avoided the whole shell script thing but then I wrote this in 2 hours, and spent 10 minutes saying f@#$@k why isn't the concordance output going into my hashtable.
5. I ran the program a second time (this is processed in the second part of the massive conditional statemnt in the program). This time I processed the results of the concordance. I split each line based upon punctuation and select the part of the sentence that contains my ket word. Again this feels like a hack, and I had to do it because the line breaks broke in the middle of words so I could not just take an entire line willy nilly. But when I run this script against something punctuation light - like Njal's saga, it does not work. This just means I would have to preparse for sentences.
6. Thats it. There is something buggy - because one time I ran this program it output 3 lines 4 lines 3 lines 2 lines and I think it has something to do with my splitting up the line based on punctuation.

Conclusion

• Despite all these shortcomings I am actually quite happy with the poems that this generates and they do in some sense seem to be my poems - although slightly dada. I do feel like I have authorial power over these creations. First, by the selection of the format (the modified sonnet), and then by the selection of the key words and the decision to have each stanza contain one key word.

Next Steps

• Break out the key word selection to a function or externa file 
• Add functionality for finding rhyming words
• Look at all concordances not just the first 4 lines and find the 'best' match - whatever I decide best is. 
• Preparse the text based on sentences. I do think however that I should not be matching entire lines and bringing them into a poem. So perhaps I need to...
• Work on some syllable analysis functionality AND
• I would say some sentence structure analysis but this seems antithetical to poetry - eventually I will probably incorporate sentence structure information so I can create my own grammatically incorrect lines with some intentionality 

Final Thoughts

Sometimes less is more. This is a super simple algorithm but produces lovely cryptic poems. The artistry is in the selection of the text and the selection of the key words. 

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After weeks of thinking about algorithmic poetry this weekend I finally had the opportunity to try out some algorithmic poetry.  I wrote a program that attempts to build a sonnet relating to love and marrage from some external data source (I used the King James Bible in this case).  But this is sort of a private program so I decided to rework it a bit and create a poem about punishment and redemption. Again I used the King James Bible. 

This is the output from the algorithm:

he tree of the knowledge of good and evil
to know good and evil
the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually
the imagination of man 's heart is evil from his youth
sin lieth at the door
and because their sin is very grievous
ought on me and on my kingdom a great sin
what is my sin
then I will punish you seven times more for your sins
and will punish you yet seven times for your sins
Also to punish the just is not good
I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the
and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm
very firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb

The marrage blessing came out much better.  I will post the algorithm with my algorithm critique tomorrow. 

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Two friends are getting married tomorrow and to celebrate the bride, the bride's friends requested that everyone create some sort of prayer (poem, collage, crocheted robot, whatever) for the couple. This would then be collected into an audio book format and distributed to the bride.

I had major difficulties coming up with an idea. First I thought - I could use a photograph of one of our trips together.  However, the couple has so much cool arty swagg in their house, I doubted whether my photo would be able to have any artistic merit.  My mind raced, video montage/painting of photo/crocheted animal - all things that would be really impossible to do in 10 days, 9 days 8 days - the days dwindling as I could not make up my mind what to do.   Then I thought ahh - audio piece - this would incorporate our enjoyment and radiolab and savage love podcasts as well as audio from really bad vacation video.   Unfortunately, my vacation video is on a harddrive with a bizarre port and I was too exhausted to walk the extra two blocks to techserve today and find an appropriate cable.  Also I think it was a bit ambitious as well to be able to do create in audio piece in 2 days.

There I sat tonight, watching a Taiwanese dance troup at bam thinking in the back of my mind I have nothing crafty or creative to offer this couple as a blessing.  But then I remembered it was a blessing! And I thought - ah ha! I am going to do a blessing mashup.  It is going to combine algorithmic poetry with sincere blessing.  I am excited.   

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I was sitting on the m14a this morning with my dog otto who was farting away in his little carrying case.  Otto is a boston terrier and has bad gas because his little nose forces him to inhale air while he eats. 

In any case, I was thinking about Freedom (Franzen) and how this is like one of those 19th century french novels where a bright young thing comes tries to make his way in the world and comes up against society and convention, conscience and love.  Both are about how people attempt to construct their lives and how this construction is thwarted or redirected in unanticipated ways by the realities of life.

At first I was thinking  Dostoevsky could be in that category.  Various fine young things attempting to make their way in the world. I am making my way through the Dostoevsky opus after watching the woman with 5 elephants, a film about an ancient Russian who lives in Germany and translates D.

Anyway this description - a sort of psychoanalysis cum social analysis cum melodrama depicting bougeois or upper class life.   Rather D creates thought experiments.  What would happen to a man who acted with childlike innocence and without malice (the idiot)? What would happen to the regular man who tried force greatness upon himself (crime & punishment)?  These thought experiments frame a situation that the characters work their way through.  I suppose here D is being the arbitrary Creator, creating an absurdist world where the characters have to make meaning for their own lives rather than derive it from the world of the story. The world of the story operates by physics different from the everyday world we live in. Very Existential :)

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It might seem a little bizarre comparing Joyce to Franzen but I have been reading through the works of these two authors so in my mind they are related.  That, and I recently saw Franzen at the New Yorker festival and have been having debates with my friend Jane as to whether or not Freedom is the 'Great American Novel'.  

Jane says yes, because Freedom touches on all aspects of a sort of bougeois life in the late 20th/21th american life in a revealing way, I say no because it does not reflect the 'american myth'  or even a perversion of the 'american myth'.  I would say that Freedom reminds me more of Balzac, or that French novel trope of bourgeois striving.  

My vote for 'Great American Novel' goes to The Great Gatsby probably because I read it at an impressionable age.  It seemed to me then a perfectly crafted novel addressing the sort of striving inherent in the american experience and the dichotomy between the aristocratic elitisms of the east (including europe) and the forging of identity in the west (or at least the middle west).  And the great myth of american is the forging of identity - at least in my opinion.

Jane's kiwi husband asks why does America even need a great American novel, people don't talk about 'The Great English Novel'. Both Jane and I were emphatic that the idea of the great American novel is important, even though we cannot agree on what the great American novel is.  

Why is it important? Because America is a construct.  Our government is constructed, our population is constructed, our culture is constructed. We have deep anxiety concerning who we 'really' are because America is on a certain level groundless, we are a completely historicized society without a prehistorical myth that tells us who we are.  We need 'The Great American Novel - really what it is is  'The Great American Myth' 

Ok not much about Joyce and Franzen - Maybe tomorrow.

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This is what my husband told me.  And then I stopped blogging and then I changed to 5 different blogging websites because I want to reinvent myself.  The net knows who you are though.   Slowly, it seemed like all my blog posts were meditations on media that I consumed.  I am more than a list of my likes and dislikes on facebook -goddamnit. 

To break the cycle of media definition I started writing for 20 minutes at 6 in the morning while making oatmeal and yams.  My mind at 6 am while eating yams - I wrote this in vi and the spelling, writing and formatting is all wonky.

In the heart of Africa live a tribe of twins.  Each mother gives birth to twins and the twins suck the two teats of their mothers. At the passing of the 7th moon diad the twins are weaned and another set of twins are reborn.  There is no word for a single child.  Single children are abberations and abnormalities, akin to giving birth to a scaled toad with wings.  The stories of the non twin births are ghost stories sent to scare people in the night. And old men, and witch women, and criminals are denounced as non twinning.
Everything exists in pairs.  And pairs of pairs.  Every twin has a set of 4 sandles, and two  waterskins.  There is no one of anything.  The one does not exist.Twins have one name and live their life together as one life - never separating.The natural state of man is two, says the Androche.  Why else would we have two of everything, 2 eyes, 2 ears, to breasts, 2 arms to hold the children.  They dont even say this.  They do not know how to talk about anything less than 2.  They dont understand it. There is nothing less than 2.   Something less than two is incomplete.  It is just a part  - it is not whole - like a piece of meat.  
When the androche go hunting for their meat, they can only hunt animals in packs with even numbers. The odd numbered packs are ill omens - incomplete packs.  Out in the wilderness there is part of the pack still wandering to seek revenge onthe androche.  When the androche goes hunting an even number of animals must be killed.  Everything is two, there is no one. 
The twin shamins and twin chiefs rule the tribe.  They are twins of a boy/girl pair from a high ranking family, and they dispense the wisdom and the justice for a tribe.The greatest crime is fratricide of cleaving yourself - and the price is banishment and death.  Each twin lives together as man and wife, even if the twin is man and man or wife and wife.  They take other twins as lovers to father and mother their future twins, but together the twins are whole.  They do not find unity in marrage to another.  
Male/Female twins are especially auspicious since they can reproduce. And in the case of the high ranking family of the androXi, the seers, and androZi, the warriors, they mate with their twins as well as with the twins of others. 
How did the androche come to be like this?   The androXi say that at the beginning of the world there was nothing.  There was the great Yam with 4 pair of eyes.  And the eyes sprouted forth the sun and the heavens from one pair, the earth from another, the antelopne from a third, and from the fourth sprouted the androche. 
Where did the yam come from?  The seers do not say, only that the Yam was always there with its 4 pairs of eyes. Why 4 pairs and not 1 pair. Well nothing begins with 1 not even a pair of 1.  A pair of two perhaps but two pairs of two is even more auspicious. But you may ask, there was one yam. Yes that is right. The Yam is forever giving birth, trying to find its twin.  And one day the yam will reunite with its twin.

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I am moving over my blog posts from super.fluo.us (powered by the bullshit machine ) over to posterous.  I will probably have to write a script to do this. After building the bullshit machine and running it for a few months - I feel I can move on to the next chapter of my life.

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1) Problems with verifiable answers and...
2) Those without verifiable answers (or the verification is proved by statistically sampling)

Verifiable answers:

Algorithms in this category address problems like, find me all the numbers in this list, or even, find me the fastest route between point a and b.

The value in the algorithm is not the correctness, it is easy to find the answers to these problems, rather the value in these algorithms are the speed with which they are executed and the amount of data you have to solve your problem.

So for example there are many different kinds of sorting algorithms - they all correctly sort, but some are faster and some use less memory. This is where the ingenuity or value of the sorting algorithm comes in.

For the mapping example, it is not difficult to map the fastest route between two points. But you could imagine an algorithm that used realtime traffic data would provide faster routes than other algorithms. The answer these algorithms may be different, but their actual processing of information - the algorithm itself - may be the same. The only difference is the input data used by the algorithm.

Now onto the algorithms with no answers -
these are the interesting algorithms that answer questions like - find the top 10 sites on music, or recommend movies I'll like, or find me a date.

In the case of search - the answer can be the top 10 sites on music are the top music sites that people link to (google's algorithm), or the top 10 sites that my friends like (a facebook solution)

In the case of recommendations, we would have an algorithm like that produced by the netflix prize, a statistical sampling of user preferences run through a barrages of matrix filters. We could also have the pandora algorithm, create a genetic code for a piece of music based on frequency, btm, etc and then find other similar genetic codes.

For dating there is a little less innovation out there. Most sites ask a set of questions (perhaps developed by behavioral specialists), and match those with similar or compatible answers, or let users shop for dates by displaying the answers to these behavioral questions.

But that is it go forth and create algorithms for problems with no answers

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For example convert stock market feeds into audio sounds, or convert twitter feeds into graphical visualization.

Data visualization and audio visualization are forms of transduction - translating from one form into another. The issue with transduction is how do we perform the translation. This is where the real art of data visualization or data sonification takes place. There are infinate numbers of ways to map the frequency of #brit on twitter to a visual cue. What signifies frequency (line size?), what signifies subject matter (color?), where do you place the visualization on the screen (existence in different social networks?). All of these are arbitrary and the criterion of success is how transparent the visualization is for understanding the data, or how aesthetically pleasing the result is.

I have been writing an application called doh rae tweet which lets you compose music via twitter. Here again the mappings are arbitrary. an 'A' is a note 'a', but a space is S (it could just be a space). The default time signature is 4/4 unless you start your tweet with something else like 8|8. and you adjust the beat of a note by + or - so A- (in 4/4) would be a half note. This is all arbitrary and it is not necessarily transduction but translation. Not transforming one type of thing into something else, but representing something (musical notation) in something else (140 characters on twitter) . In this way it is much more similar to writing a compiler than writing a data visualization.

However doh rae tweet can also can be used as a transduction engine. I can feed through random twitter feed and use the music compilation engine to hear what that tweet sounds like according to my 'compiler' Although it probably wont sound very nice. Most letters will not have an audio mapping. So for this sort of application I would want to replace my compiler or lexical engine with another. Ideally anyone could create their own mapping. I think it would be interesting to do this via a GUI and feedback loop so you could adjust your mappings visually as you hear the effects of your changes.

One final though - I also want to use this mapping for other notation schemes. One that seems a natural is chess. With the 8x8 chess board mapping to the diatonic scale. However, this too would need its own mapping. ( Also what do you play, to just play the chess piece that is moved - or all the chess pieces. ) I went online to see if anyone has attempted sonficiations of chess notation and found the following:

Halfbakery This has some links relating chess to music
Chess History A list of articles and historical documents connecting chess with music (not very informative but interesting from a historical standpoint).
Music and Chess A great website with all sort of information linking chess and music. I got this from that site: "The Oxford Companion to Chess is a comprehensive encyclopedia of chess. It contains articles on history, terminology, chess players, and the relationship between chess and other subjects such as music, art, theatre, literature and philosophy. Many of the terms listed in this book are also musical terms. For example, in chess, a person who creates puzzles and problems to be solved is called a composer, and two different sequences of moves that lead from one given position to another are said to be related by transposition. Some other terms that are used in chess and music are: play, piece, notation, score, tempo, theme, variation, development, minimal composition, round, major and minor, position, second, retrograde, mirror, attack, anticipation, phase and echo."

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Why did I reevaluate?? I dont know. Perhaps the language... there is a certain lyricism - and i am a sucker for dialogue. But, at the end of the book a few things struck me...

1) Such a wide expanse of time was covered in such a 200 page book. The fragmented storytelling conveyed more information and feeling than a 1000 page tomb of today's magical realism.
2) What is the story?? The book is really about the construction of narrative, or the construction of myth and meaning. At the end of the day - when you read a story or a myth everything seems so tidy - but the construction itself is messy. While the story is being written you have no sense of the whole completed version - the sound of the fury is like a story writing itself
3) Roshimon - Whose point of view is correct? Seeing the compson family through the eyes of the different narrators in a stream of consciousness voice bring home the fact that every story is told from a point of view.
4) It is a mind fuck - the story seems like a puzzle. Not a post modern puzzle, where the whole point of the novel is the puzzle (like paul auster - of whom I am a big fan). Perhaps puzzle is the wrong word... It is coded. I feel like if i diagramed the whole novel out - parsing out the different stories by the different narrators at different times in the life of the characters I would get another story. There is a second story hidden in the story.
5) This is a modern novel. It struggles with modern themes (and it was written in 1930s I think). Sexuality, Economics, Race, Class - the treatment of these issues are not preachy but are integral to the lives of the character. this is great storytelling - bringing up weighty issues as part of the characters struggles

Anyway I am inspired - I may experiment with this sort of writing for some of my short stories. Also reading Sarte's critique of faulkner - I'm into sarte as literary critic (just was gifted book 5 of the family idiot about flaubert).

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So - what i am doing is adding a cached directory of ffmpeg to every map-reduce computer i use

#!/usr/bin/bash
./elastic-mapreduce --create --stream --alive --name $1 \
-c credentials.json \
--input s3n://13bit.videoout \
--mapper s3://13bit.scripts/compression.py \
--reduce s3://13bit.scripts/reduce.py \
--output s3n://13bit.videoout.ts \
--log-uri s3n://13bit.log \
--cache-archive s3n://13bit.scripts/ffmpeg.zip#ffmpeg

in order to build ffmpeg i started up a debian sqeeze box via aleatic ami (ami-daf615b3) http://alestic.com/. I then had to update apt-get (apt-get update), install git, download ffmpeg and related libraries and run the ffmpeg configure switch --prefix to set the install directory. I am now zipping it up and testing it on another instance of the squeeze debian - at which point i will start up the map reduce process again

i am also looking at boston terrier art on etsy (thanks to Jane Kim)
http://www.etsy.com/listing/37552859/boston-terrier-dog-art-original-painting
I am doing this while my boston terrier sleeps and farts next to me.

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On another note- I ran across the following art project by cory arcangle - it culls the internet for blog posts that begin with i'm sorry. I am a big fan of his video work, especially mario clouds video & the the one where he just projects fields of color from the projector. However, this 'sorry' project is sort of in bad taste. What is it? A project mocking people attempting to maintain blog? I am not quite sure what its purpose is. I doubt it is to be inspired by the heart felt apologies - as cory writes on his blog. So what exactly is the point of this project? to call attention to the dead blogs in the world, to show how apologies have become meaningless, is it supposed to just be funny, it it supposed to show how pathetic people are, how people have no imagination (except for cory)? not sure - here is a blog art project i just blew out of my ass - probably similar to the process of other net artists (although my process does not involve weed) - a dictionary of common words as spelled by bloggers ( or twitters)....

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The problem is I cant map/reduce on a disk that has ffmpeg. So what I did was compiled map reduce on my machine - zipped it - uploaded it to s3 then added a bootstrap action to unzip and ffmpeg whenever the program starts... lets see how this works - I think I need to recompile on debian though - currently using fedora

As for the arabian nights - i have learned that the arabic oral tradition no longer exists because people sit around in cafes and watch tv instead of telling/listening to stories - ahh technology

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In my romp I found that fairy tales were considered part of the genre of the Arabian Nights - and were very much in fashion in 1600s Europe. The author speculates that these were stories were relegated to children's tales as tales of the fantastic were usurped by science fiction.

Today I suppose tales of the fantastic are usurped by magical realism. It is interesting to think though that much of literature is to satisfy this desire for surprise and wonder. We are normally taught in school that fiction imparts some sort of cultural norms - such as homeric heroism. Rather literature engages our desire for something beyond the real. Literature is metaphysics. Perhaps these days video games have replaced this fantabulism because even magical realist books are not quite fantastic enough. We definitely see strands of this in contemporary tv such as Lost and true blood. Sometimes, however, a simple rendering of the real, in all its absurdity, is fantastic (hence my continued obsession with tao lin).

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What is interesting about the Arabian nights commentary is its discussion of literary scholarship. This all but disappeared with the advent of ideologies and literary criticism. Rather than the try piecing together of texts from various sources, trying to find the 'true text' in some sort of pseudo-scientific exploration, people now just interpret a text in light of some agenda - in some meta-pseudo-scientific pontification. We are really moving beyond the scientific method - it seems - as a mode of exploration and investigation of the world. String theory is not a result of empirical evidence and nor is the Lacanian interpretation of Pär Lagerkvist.

But back to the Arabian nights commentary. So one of the ideas that caught my eye was that scholars where attempting to create a sort of evolutionary tree of different editions of the Arabian nights. This is sort of an interesting thought to me that works of literature can have a history. Further along, we see that many of the stories in the Nights, have parallels in Chaucer, Boccaccio, various sanskrit works, and other. Here is yet another genealogy - the genealogy of an idea rather than the genealogy of a work. I feel like these sorts of ideas are used in the generation of books themselves, the questionable source of a work is used as a device in Don Quixote and in the "Dictionary of the Khazars" - and probably in 59% of Bevery Borges novels.

The sort of scholarship that went into this sort of detective work seems more apt for the computer age (or the Big Data Age) than the experimental age, however I dont think literature scholars are doing this sort of work anymore -

I leave you with some of my favorite lines from Tao Lin's "Shoplifting from American Apparel"
"On Christmas Eve Sam work around 7 p.m. in his brother's studio apartment in Manhattan. Sam had moved in November into a four-person apartment in Brooklyn but was staying at his brother's studio while his brother was on vacation with his girlfriend. Sam put on music very loud and showered in the dark with the bathroom door open. He put in earphones and walked ten blocks to an organic raw vegan restaurant. He ate a seaweed salad. He drank a smoothie. He walked back to the apartment. He drank an energy drink. He worked on writing for two and a half hours. He lay on his brother's queen-size bed and listened to music. He read most of the newest Stephen Dixon novel and fell asleep around 3 a.m.

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I was totally blown away by the production design of Parnassus' Monastery. After watching the DVD extras about the Monastery, it seemed that one of the great achievements of the film were the props. I often think this is the case with other films, and with theater in particular.

It seems after thousands of years of architectural masterpieces, 500 years of scupltural masterpieces, and about 200 years of painted canvas masterpieces - we are in an age where masterpieces are really transitory and in the service of other even more transitory masterpieces. I guess this is what happens when production is in service of entertainment or the triumph of bread on circuses.

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