You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2009.
Major updates, revisions and extensions have been made to my Mchain blog, now entitled Markovian Parallax Generate. Some of the most important changes were made to better promote the distribution and use of two of the digital writing programs that I have been using for several years, Mchain and Gnoetry 0.2.
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 the blog. Feedback is welcomed and encouraged, especially from new users. Drop a comment there to 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 too.
New and Updated Pages:
Less than a week left in St. Lucia now. It’s been a nice visit. I’ve suffered some from headaches and the usual mood swings, but you can’t take a vacation from everything, can you. I’ve been to the beach several more times now, and into and around Castries some more, too. I’m developing a decent tan.
Just last week I really started to settle into things on the island, but I am looking forward to returning to my own space and my own place in the U.S. I think I could live here just fine if things turn out that way. “White Bwoi” could get used to this place.
Now, the pics:
Kay's Parents, Patricia and George Goddard Jr., and I having breakfast.
Having a Piton beer at the Lime on the Bay at Rodney Bay.
The pile of puppies underneath the house. They were born just before we arrived.
Face, the proud mother, watching as the puppies are bathed.
Students assembled in the hot sun at Ave Marie Primary / Infant School where Avril teaches.
A great beach, the Ramp at Rodney Bay.
I lumber towards the sea.
A sand crab.
Posing in the shade by the beach.
Kay looking lovely in the shade.
UFO's are so common in St. Lucia, they have their own signs. Watch out!
Horses grazing near Pigeon Point. Tourists were riding them in the sea nearby. I don't get it.
The howto that I’ve been getting ready and testing for a month now is posted at my digital writing blog, recently redubbed Markovian Parallax Generate.
Howto: Installing Gnoetry 0.2 On Any Platform will guide any of you who are interested in doing just that: downloading and getting Gnoetry 0.2 working on a computer that runs on the Windows, Max OS X or Ubuntu Linux platforms.
I’d love to see as many people using Gnoetry as possible, which is why I’ve made this howto. Whether you think you’re a poet or not, it doesn’t matter. You can think of it as a game, if you like, and the way you play the game is to interact with and enjoy language on any and every possible level. It’s all about the word play – literally.
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.
For my family and friends back in the States, here are some pics. I’m sure there will be some more to come.
Me on the laptop, writing or surfing the internet. Nothing new here.
The beach near the airport just north of Castries.
The view from the Morne overlooking Castries.
Sun on water.
Me, still chubby from the thesis year, after bathing in the sea.
Kay and Avril talking under an almond tree.
Kay smiling.
I’ll be back in St. Lucia again this year, this time for a month. We won’t be staying in Castries this time, but at Kay’s parent’s house in Monier, about 10 minutes outside of the city. There have been a few issues getting our flight confirmed, but if all goes now as planned, we’ll be in St. Lucia at 2:30 or so tomorrow afternoon.
I might post some while I’m there, but don’t count on it. I’m working on a howto for installing gnoetry on Windows and Mac systems using Wubi and/or VMWare with Ubuntu 9.04. I’ll definitely put that up after its tested successfully.
