“This would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.”

• Marienbad Abstracts of all the pages here
• The Great Critic Speaks This page.
• Daily Literary Criticism
• George Polti Plot Generator
• Last Year In Marienbad Never ending story. Keep clicking it to find out what happens year after year at Marienbad!
• Marienbad Muser: Plot generator Like the previous two mixed! More Polti than Marienbad
• Self generating Literary Criticism
• Bishop Ecclesiasticus Christian-like babble
• FIBA (Frederick Ignatius Baines Archive) More of the Holy Bibble
• UK Lottery An Ajax application
• Chivalry in the Rosy Cross Poor Markov Chain attempt
• Who Wrote The Two Noble Kinsmen? Stylometry—Analysing Writing Styles
• “GOD IS DEAD KILLED BY SCIENCE” How long would it take to generate this string by picking random letters? Not long with selection!
• Impeach the war criminals, Bush and Blair—draft letter for you to send

Computer generation of text. Can it make any sense? Maybe. Maybe not. If sense is not the prime interest then it can fit its context quite well, seeming to make sense. Last Year in Marienbad is a Surrealist stream of consciousness, and the computer does it well. Religious babble does not have to make sense because it is in incomprehendable archaized language that sounds like God, and so can be seen as God speaking in mysterious ways. Most religious people accept what they read in their bibles as profound, though they cannot understand it. Literary criticism is someone’s opinion, and does not have to make sense to others, but does in bits. Literary essays are just bits of opinion strung together on a chain with little or no logic necessary. A common theme and the bits making individual sense of a kind seems to make sense in the whole. A computer can do that quite well. Check out Marienbad, our never ending story.

Mr Eagle Terryton, in an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly, aptly wrote:

In the discussion of Byzantine diplomacy, following Gibbon, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is not quite equivalent in remarks such as “I read only for pleasure not wisdom” and “I’d rather eat slugs than read Proust” from dilettante readers, who have just graduated from comic books. To clarify somewhat, the heart of the subject is not to be considered in determining a necessity for anyone wishing to advance intellectually. This suggests that an unfortunate consequence of our civilization’s history is rarely given the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. Much learned discussion on the systematic use of complex symbols does not readily tolerate the hardly perceptible politics of the animal kingdom. So, the annual literary budget will eventually break free from the fruits of diligent inspection. I suggest that status, security, fame, all of this neurotic society, does not affect the structure of results too clear to be ignored. It seems that it is, apparently, determined by an important distinction in language use. Of course, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice is not subject to a controversial issue. Moreover, the situation that obtained just ten years ago may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate a descriptive fact. It has been said that much excellent analysis cannot be arbitrary in an abstract underlying order.

Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty

Last uploaded: 23 November, 2009.