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Lines of Questioning #23

@zachwhalen

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@zachwhalen

Well, here we are. It's the end of November, and I have a last minute NaNoGenMo entry to share. As usual, I had more ideas than I had time, and I got one idea mostly working but just didn't like the output. The idea was to use Allison Parrish's Gutenberg Poetry corpus with a "diastic" method for stepping through and selecting lines. It worked, but it just felt like a random jumble of sentences, and not in an interesting way.

I don't know if my fallback idea is much better, but since I need to share something, I present:

Lines of Questioning

... A book of poetic inquiries derived from the the Gutenberg Poetry corpus. I found each sentence in that corpus that ends in a ? and generated chapters by finding sentences of lengths corresponding to the first 10 integers in a Fibonacci sequence.

Sample:

Chapter 15
Swearing? Medicine? A god? What their parentage? Is not Freiligrath a bard? And they who lead, who hold the van? Who, therein, would not consume his soul to ash-heaps in that rich perfume? Is it a clan drinking, or a wedding feast, for here we have no banquet where each man brings his share? O Hand divine that for a sign didst bend the rose-red bow, betokening wrath was no more Thine with mans Cain-branded brow-- what now, O Lord, shouldst Thou accord to such a shameful brood? And seest thou not how in the very earth sulphur is gendered and bitumen thickens with noisome stench?--What direful stenches, too, scaptensula out-breathes from down below, when men pursue the veins of silver and gold, with pick-axe probing round the hidden realms deep in the earth?--Or what of deadly bane the mines of gold exhale?

Code

This was all done in a messy Colab notebook, so I don't have a clean, self-contained version. This gist has most of the important parts, I think.

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