Men more easily forget the deaths of their friends than the loss of their property.

Machiavelli

L’année dernièr à Marienbad

Text Generation

Transgressing the Boundaries This page.
The Great Critic Speaks This page.
Marienbad Abstracts of all the pages here
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

Abstract

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.

Transgressing the Boundaries

The physicist Alan Sokal submitted an article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, to Social Text, a cultural studies journal. The journal published the article in its 1996 spring/summer issue. Sokal’s article, according to Richard York and Brett Clark (Monthly Review, 57, 9) presented “false statements, illogical arguments, incomprehensible sentences, and absurd, unsupported assertions, including the claim that there was in effect no real world and all of science was merely a social construction”. It was a parody of the type of “scholarship” common for postmodernists and some anti-science scholars on the academic left, who substitutes “word play and sophistry for reason and evidence”. Sokal was testing whether the editors of Social Text had any intellectual standards—whether they realized they were publishing nonsense as scholarship. They failed the test, exposing postmodern fruit loopery. Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote about postmodern faddery in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science.

York and Clark add that Paul Gross and Norman Levitt’s book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, published in 1994, inspired Sokal to perform his hoax, and that the Sokal affair, including the original article and many of the subsequent comments on it by a variety of scholars, is recounted in The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook the Academy, edited by the editors of Lingua Franca, the publication in which the hoax was revealed. But, though Gross and Levitt were right to criticize false scholars, they were unbalanced in only picking out the left for it. Pseudo Marxists like Michael Foucauld might have had a penchant for such dangerous frippery, but the right wing has a stronger tendency to disparage and misrepresent science and scholarship that they do not like, while the left wing has most consistently maintained its commitment to reason. The left should eschew postmodernism and anti-science as antirational fads.

The Great Critic Speaks

As an example the sort of “scholarship” being spoken of, here we print an item from an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly by Mr Eagle Terryton, who aptly wrote:

On our assumptions, the national psychosis could not have been referring to a real eye-opener for empiricists modern or postmodern. It is clear that any literary system has, in some areas, been seen to embrace those most reliant on changing technology, who are reluctant to challenge its implications. I suggest that a subset of English sentences interesting on quite independent grounds smells of a symbol as potent as criticism in society today. On the other hand, a comparison between Roman Society and Medieval Society puts more effort into an important distinction in language use. We know that the natural general principle that will subsume this case will eventually break free from the best thing since Jane Austen. Thus placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice displays the victory of the fruits of diligent inspection. Crossing many cultural barriers, the problem that surfaces in some circumstances cannot be arbitrary in the levels of acceptability from fairly high to virtual gibberish. When examining topics like this, status, security, fame, all of this neurotic society, must be taken when analysing the issue of criticism. By combining certain transitions and deformations, a child’s approach to criticism may not be subsumed by that most brilliant mind, George Washington Bush. We will begin by looking at how the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorical does not readily tolerate irrelevant intervening contexts in literary selection rules.
Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty

Click button to refresh The Great Critic:

Sense or nonsense? Sense to the postmodernist, for whom words mean anything you choose but otherwise nonsense! It is not, of course, a citation of Mr Terryton, it is far too meaningful, but an illustration of computer generated text simply by having four different files for four parts of a sentence that the computer picks from randomly to put a string of sentences together for a typical postmodern “critique”. They have been called Chomsky bots because the great philologist Chomsky showed how grammatical sentences did not have to mean anything. It shows that opaque and inelegant language can give the impression of meaning when it has none. The code is simple. Here it is for you to play with… The original programmer, John Lawler, whose website discusses the Chomsky bot, writes:

What I find interesting about it is how it just hovers at the edge of understandability, a sort of semantic mumbling, a fog for the mind’s eye.

That is what is fascinating, and makes you wonder whether what we write means anything at all. Much of it it probably does not! Lawler calculates that a Chomsky bot of five sentences such as the one he and Kevin McGowan wrote and have online, has 22,084,947,919,456,858,275,840,000 variations! The one on this page has many more, because the paragraph has more sentences and the generator has more phrases to play with, though they are less opaque and so the faults show more often. Though you will see the same components coming up over and over again, no full paragraph should ever be repeated to a single observer, and if it does, then you should have bought a lottery ticket! Kevin McGowan’s code in Perl is called fogcode.html, and is available to download from a search.

Here is another example, a funny page that writes an essay for you on any subject you enter, complete with citations and a graph.

Last uploaded: 01 March, 2010.

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Other Websites or Blogs

God’s Own Summary of the Bible—Magi Mike’s Blog
I explain here in a criticism of a book by F S Collins: “We will see that Christ gave two answers when asked for the most important commandment, and the reason is that the two… ”
Magi Mike’s Blog—http://mikemagee.wordpress.com/.
AskWhy! Blogger at Blogspot.

Short Responses and Suggestions

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Before you go, think about this…

Martha Brossier, a French peasant girl, in 1588 was possessed of a devil. A clever cleric, Bishop Miron of Angers, decided to try out a few scientific tests. He let it be known to the girl that she would be treated with holy water and incantations from the Holy Word. When, with a show of ostentation, he administered spring water and read from Virgil in the original Latin. The devil promptly sent her into a fit! When, however, holy water was administered to her unobserved with a wet hand, while the clergyman murmered a line of the bible in Latin, the girl made no response at all. The witch hunting zealots claimed it simply showed how devious the devil was.