Reorganizing some long-lost demos of mine, I found my programmatic nod to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique. While I recall I was originally going to allow users to input text into the demo, I never got around to it. Here’s the demo, with the sample text as my entry on “fascist word processors”.

It’s obviously not perfect (the amount of parenthesis really messes up this sample), but it still sort of works. The script scans through the text, and at each pre-set punctuation mark, it “flips a coin” to determine whether or not to chop there or continue on. As the fragment gets longer, the probability to chop increases.

The first thing I learned about Georges Perec is that he’d written a novel without using the letter ‘e’. Talk about creative constraints!

Perec’s best-known work, Life: A User’s Manual, is divided into 99 chapters, which “move like a knight’s tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment [building], describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.”

He was a member of Oulipo, a literary group interested in creating constrained writing techniques.

Which vs. that. The basic rule: Use “which” plus commas to set off nonrestrictive clauses; use “that” to introduce a restrictive clause.

Instiki may be easy to install, but I wonder if it’s so easy to learn to use it to its full extent.

From the Literary Saloon: “A ‘book’ in five days. That’s what Mara Reinstein and Joey Bartolomeo — writers at Us Weekly — have done: 40,000 words (on Brad & ‘Jen’, who have apparently broken up, which is apparently of interest to someone out there) in less than a week.”

Stephen Johnson writes about how his note-taking system has changed the way he writes — and thinks. Sounds familiar. I had lofty goals for my personal CMS (which I use to publish this weblog) to do basically the same thing. Only my heap-of-code doesn’t have any of the contextual search features of DevonThink, which means my CMS does nothing like it.

Neil Stephenson interview at Slashdot. In his answer to the second question, Stephenson has a great explanation for why “commercial authors” aren’t respected by the literary scene.

...and the newest one, by Margaret Mauldon, is horrible. At least according to Clive James.

... Already, though, it is hard to suppress a suspicion that in the matter of historical fidelity things are out of kilter, and the suspicion intensifies once the book is opened. Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178 [end of chapter 12, in part 2], on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."

Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la d�pense � Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela e�t �t� trop b�te!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly. The awful possibility arises that Mauldon has never paid much attention to English idioms like that. Instead she thinks "No way!" is perfectly ordinary. We can take it for granted that she knows the French language of Flaubert's era inside out. (She has already translated, for the same series of Oxford World's Classics, works by Zola, Stendhal, Huysmans, Constant, and Maupassant.) But she has a crucially weaker knowledge of how the English language of her own era has been corrupted. You might say that English has always advanced through corruption, but "No way!" is an idiom so closely tied to the present that it can hardly fail to weaken any attempt to summon up the past. In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.

Looking at this online version of Madame Bovary, I can’t find see who the translator is. A little investigation, based on James’s comparisons, proved inconclusive. The last sentence of part 2, chapter 12 is interesting. It reads: “And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.” Just as James recommends.

Citypages’s story on Plain Layne, including an interview with Odin Soli, fills in some gaps in the story.

“People have asked at what point readers began to suspect that Plain Layne was make-believe, and the answer is, from the very beginning.”

This morning I woke up thinking about an aggressively auto-completing word processor. Read more

Interview of Douglas Coupland in The Morning News. And another one in Guardian. I just recently discovered author interviews on the Web. They’re more interesting if you’ve read the author’s works. Powell’s collection is great. I especially enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s interview.

It’s funny to see so many interviews conducted in Q&A format. A journalism teacher of mine once said to me that the Q&A format is garbage. That anyone can do it and that it’s pretentious. Journalists shouldn’t write themselves into their stories, she said. Not unless they’re Hunter S. Thompson.

Reading up on William Gibson’s blog archives—I haven’t been following any blogs and only just today heard (well, read) that he’s kicking the habit to (be able to) begin real work—I chuckled at Orwell’s rules. Very strict. I wonder what Orwell meant by “sounding outright barbarous.” Is he talking about four-letter words or everything that sounds inane? His rules remind me of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

Some links to outliners and two others, totally unrelated. Read more

Says George R.R. Martin in Infinty’s interview: “Jack Vance is the greatest living SF writer, in my opinion, and one of the few who is also a master of Fantasy. His The Dying Earth (1950) was one of the seminal books in the history of modern Fantasy, and I would rank him right up there with Tolkien, Dunsany, Leiber, and T.H. White as one of the fathers of the genre.”

Reading this other, better, interview, you can really see how interviews are written. An how similar they always are.

Amazon’s interview with Robert Jordan also has quite a few recommendations. All nicely linked to their own pages.

How to make a photo gallery, on Webmonkey. Note, this link is mainly for my own further reference. I still have to come up with a decent system to manage links and other notes. I want them to be easy to use, accessable fast and on the web so that I can reach it from many computers. Why, oh why, did Deepleap have to go under?

I'm writing an essay this morning on Machiavelli's The Prince. There's a lot of stuff on the net, but so far it seems I'll still have to write the paper myself. Damn those sites that offer free essays and college term papers! I wouldn't mind using one, but they're all so damn lousy. And Blogger is messing with my mind.

Our history presentation on the Finnish language went well. I wasn’t prepared at all, but when sitting on the teacher’s desk on Friday at two o’clock, winging a presentation is not a problem. As to our Finnish class (actually called “mother tongue”) presentation on Moliére’s Misanthrope, it was bumped to Monday — today! I also have to hand in a paper analyzing the French comedy. That’s why I am now trolling the Web frantically for pointers on how to pull something together.

I'm a great writer and an awful writer. And like many great and absurd projects, I'm starting this project to learn, both about myself and about the world around me. To start off, I want to say that I make no guarantees of quality of my posts, nor of the frequency of them. Great way to start a weblog, huh? Well, we'll see where this leads.

I also run... er, participate in a Finnish language weblog, Suodatin. Suodatin has had its ups and downs since the its inception in the beginning of this year. Suodatin's biggest hindrance is that I haven't told anyone about it. To my knowledge, it's the first Finnish blog ever. I like the notion of entering uncharted waters, but being the first also creates some problems. For example, there's no community to turn to shout "hey, look at me, I started my own weblog!"

The real reason I haven't told anyone about Suodatin is that I'm scared to. I worry I won't want to keep blogging Suodatin. I'm afraid people won't like it and that it'll show my own ineptitude. I don't know. I know I'm just a big 'fraidycat. I know I shouldn't worry about any of that. I know that I should throw caution to the wind and take chances. I know all that. I just need to do it. So that's what this is also all about. Breaking personal barriers, expressing myself without worrying it'll jeopardize my career. This is about a lot of stuff. I hope to see you on my journey.