(boing!) Cnoocy Mosque O'Witz

My NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) project for 2023 is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII , and the novel itself is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII/blob/main/novel.txt

This text is a myriad of epic nonsense.

That is to say, this is 10,006 lines of Latin dactylic hexameter, which is syntactically and metrically valid, but which makes semantic sense only accidentally. From Lȳsidamus spatham honōret holarcticus almam (May Lysidamus from near the North Pole honor his nourishing sword) to Arachnae ballia depsant, (Arachnes knead custodies) this has been composed by a program that makes use of a lexicon extracted from the Latin entries in Wiktionary, and assembles them like Mad-Libs into different sentence structures within the constraints of dactylic hexameter. There is no narrative and a very limited set of sentence structures, but it was an interesting exercise to build (and does not contain any machine learning) and I hope it is enjoyable, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to read any large part of it.

More info and code at the link above!

Every December, I participate in a fanfiction exchange called Yuletide, in which people request fanfiction for artworks and other fandoms that do not have significant amounts of fanfiction written for them.

This year, there was a request for fanfiction for the poem "The Tay Bridge Disaster" by William McGonnagal. This is one of McGonnagal's best-known poems, and he is known for being among the worst poets ever to write in English. So of course I am a fan. When all I knew was that someone had requested the poem as a fandom, I was already interested in writing something for them. But then I saw the letter, in which one of the suggestions was "Retell it in Virgilian hexameters."

Here's the thing. I had already written the first line as a Virgilian hexameter. About a year earlier, I had seen in a listing of Latin placenames for locations in Britain that the Scottish river Tay is Tavus, and had translated McGonagall's "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!" as "Trāminis ō pulcher pons tū Tāvī radiantis!" So I had to write more. It was a moral imperative.

As it turned out, I wasn't able to get the whole poem translated by the Yuletide deadline. I did get the opening and closing stanzas, which are perhaps among the best-known parts of the poem. So I put a frame story onto it of discovering the two fragments, which gave me the chance to use some MLA citations. The selection by Colin S.K. Walker is real, and very recommended.

De Tavi Pontis Clade Carminis Fragmenta: Newly Discovered Fragments (543 words) by cnoocy
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tay Bridge Disaster - William McGonagall
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Academia, scholarship, Hexameter
Summary:

The opening and closing of Gulielmus McGonagall's De Tavi Pontis Clade, newly discovered in the original Latin.

 My rubber-soled boots
Make a sound like wooden clogs
On the frozen ground

Hi! This is my first Yuletide, after being inspired during Madness with Revolver last year. Thank you for writing a story for me!

( specific Yuletide Writer info )

Not reference books about zombies, reference books that are back from the dead. I now own a newly-printed copy of a type of reference book that's been out of print for more than a century.
( The full story )

This is the Rikchik sonnet about lumpybeast I mentioned recently.
( Read more... )
There is another post in the Rikchik Language Institute community that deals with more of the language side of the sonnet.

I have mail in my mailbox with the subject line "New black Chinese radicals".

This is an entirely legitimate work e-mail that does in fact contain new black Chinese radicals.

1. Found an equation that will cause my cell phone's calculator to freeze and reboot the entire phone (Samsung Stripe, (2^1024)^1.5)
2. Taught Jeffrey Rowland the word "zarf"

Apparently Ray Bradbury has been saying that Fahrenheit 451 is not a book about censorship, but one about television. And everyone is up in arms about it trying to prove that he once said different.

Can I just say it doesn't matter? If there was ever a clear piece of evidence that the author is not the ultimate authority on a work, it's right here. Stop paying attention to Bradbury and talk about the book. Talk about the book as an anti-censorship work. Don't rebut Bradbury in terms of his brain. It's kind of his turf, so it's not going to go well for you.

I notice that a lot of the people commenting on this are themselves authors, so maybe they have trouble letting go of their own, um, authority. If you're an author, learn to be one of many readers of the book you've written. Find and read Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's "Pharaoh's Daughter" because she's an author who gets it.

Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle is a very good book, with an interesting premise and an engaging plot. It is a book you should go out, buy, and read.

Unless you're me.

In which case it's the best book ever.