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#novels

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kennychaffin@diasp.org
Kenny Chaffin

TODAY: In 1914, James Joyce’s Dubliners is published, in a run of 1,250 copies. Though it debuted to generally positive reviews, in its first year, the book sold only 499 copies—one short of Joyce being able to contractually profit from it.

I've read this one a couple of times....the only Joyce I can stomach for the most part.

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#literature #books #stories #novels

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kennychaffin@diasp.org
Kenny Chaffin

Yes, very much this

Robert Macfarlane: ‘He listened harder to prose than anyone since Melville’
British writer and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Among the thousand things I could praise in McCarthy’s astonishing body of work – written over 60 years – I want to speak of his prose rhythms. His books proclaimed themselves in the mind’s ear, setting it thrumming and rumbling, piercing it with cries. He listened harder to prose, and thought more about its prosody, than anyone since Melville. He first outgrew, then radically exceeded, the dying falls of Faulkner’s cadences. His phrasing could be great page-long peals of thunder (the attack of the Comanches in the fourth chapter of Blood Meridian, say), wire-bright flashes of lightning (“The stars burned with a lidless fixity”), anaphoras that came to act as refrains across whole books (“They rode on”; “They walked on”), right down to the tender “OK” which is passed back and forth between father and son in The Road. The most important word in McCarthy’s lexicon was perhaps the least conspicuous: “and”. That little conjunction paratactically strung together the atrocious and the mundane, the ultra-violent and the kind. Morally, it had a similar power to the desert light that McCarthy describes as falling with “strange equality” upon “all phenomena”. Historiographically, it enacted McCarthy’s bleak view of human history: repetition, recursion, the illusion of progress, the endless beats of a death-drum sounded in the dark backward and abysm of time.

Cormac McCarthy remembered: ‘His work will sing down the centuries’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/14/cormac-mccarthy-remembered-his-work-will-sing-down-the-centuries

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#books #literature #authors #novels

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waynerad@diasp.org
Wayne Radinsky

"Automuse: A system for generating fiction novels".

The system combines something called Plotto, a system of plot formulas, with GPT-4. They've also made an "eBook publication pipeline", so you can get the novels you generate onto your e-book reader.

"Plotto is a collection of 1,462 generic plot conflicts that can be chained together into a 'masterplot' that forms the core plot structure for the story. The rules for chaining the plot conflicts together is called the "algebra for stories".

It was originally published in -- get this 1928. By William Wallace Cook. This "algebra for stories" got encoded into software by a project called Plottoriffic.

This project, Automuse, adds the final piece by adding GPT-4.

"It's worth noting that Plotto is very much a product of its time. Plotto was written in the late 1920's and as such the information it generates is very dated and can sometimes generate things that are seen as problematic in modern sensibilities. Luckily, ChatGPT seems to sand away this roughness and is able to fabricate a better premise."

Plotto determines the premise of a novel, the major actors and their functions, the overall motivations, and the end result of the story. ChatGPT turns this into a plot summary for the novel. ChatGPT next creates a list of chapters for the novel with a high level summary of the events that happen in them. In actually writing the chapters, they have a technique for feeding proceeding text back in to maintain continuity, although it doesn't always maintain continuity.

"The outputs of the program have been described as 'hilarious', 'partially nonsensical', and overall they have left readers wanting more somehow."

Stable Diffusion is used to generate cover art, and a tool called Pandoc stitches everything together into an e-book.

Automuse: A system for generating fiction novels

#solidstatelife #ai #genai #lmms #gpt #rlhf #fiction #novels

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