facebook for the characters of 19th century fiction

there are few occasions when the computer science wing of a university gets together with the english department. don’t get me wrong, the english department is an insecure scrounger all too eager to take over bits and pieces from every other discipline. marxism? sure! gender studies? why not? semiotics? gimme gimme! but one thing that english has yet to grab up is compsci.

and yet this paper manages to unify both fields in one amazing topic: using computers to extract social networks from 19th century literary fiction. from the abstract:

We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes. 

using the data presented in this paper, i mapped out the conversation network of the principal characters of jane austen’s mansfield park. the size of the oval is proportional to how often a character is mentioned (ie. their tumblarity) and the connection line weight is proportional to the conversation length. among other items, we can clearly see that edmund, despite fewer mentions, is clearly the central character of the book.

as i always feared, it was only a matter of time before our humanities professors were squeezed out of a job by a bad boy gang of robot scholars. 

the continuing adventures of gabriel garcía márquez

one novel that’s not a künstlerroman is garcía márquez’s living to tell the tale because it’s not a novel—it’s a memoir. but who cares? what we really want to know is how did garcía márquez become garcía márquez? here’s the definitive answer:

Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me. My best sources of inspiration were the conversations older people had in my presence because they thought I did not understand them, or the ones in intentional code in order to prevent my understanding them. Just the opposite was true: I soaked them up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.

At times I did not know what to do with my thoughts and I tried to hide them with rapid blinking. This happened so often that some rationalist in the family decided I should be seen by an eye doctor, who attributed my blinking to a problem with my tonsils and prescribed a syrup of iodized radish that worked very well to assuage the adults.

and this, i think, is the solution to how to become the next garcía márquez: iodized radish syrup.

evelyn waugh was [spoiler alert] kind of a dick

if evelyn waugh reigns as one of the divine beings of your literary pantheon, you might not want to read this anecdote about his relative dickness.

maybe we need to have heroes. maybe we need to have villains. or maybe we need to see that those we exalt or those we condemn can act just like us, that our villains can be heroic and our heroes…well, our heroes can do something unthinkable with a banana right in front of our anguished eyes.

the following reflection is from evelyn’s son’s 1991 memoir. 

On one occasion, just after the war, the first consignment of bananas reached Britain. Neither I, my sister Teresa nor my sister Margaret had ever eaten a banana throughout the war, when they were unprocurable, but we had heard all about them as the most delicious taste in the world.

When this first consignment arrived, the socialist government decided that every child in the country should be allowed one banana. An army of civil servants issued a library of special banana coupons, and the great day arrived when my mother came home with three bananas. All three were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three.

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source: will this do?, by auberon waugh (1991).

languages are you

just as the family in the swiss family robinson was not named robinson in the book, the 7 dwarfs from snow white and the 7 dwarfs also had no names until disney got involved. these now iconic dwarf aptronyms have since been translated into every language in which disney has found a market and i have made it my morning’s duty to translate them back.

i was reading an old book once that had the very curious phrase “translated out of german” on its title page. i assumed “out of” was just a colloquialism for the much more standard “from” but it wasn’t until i was discussing it with a friend that i learned what it actually meant. apparently the original text was written in latin, then translated into german, and the book i was reading was a translation out of it [into english]. it was the whisper-down-the-lane method of literature!

this dwarf chart is thus a translation out of various languages back to english.

ie. dopey (english) > cucciolo (italian) > puppy (english)

i used google translate for all the terms and was pleased at the proficiency of its engine. when i entered the list of 7 names, it would immediately recognise them as disney’s dwarfs and give me a perfect translation. entering each name separately, without context was the only way to get google to stumble.

you wonder how the utopian present leads to the dystopian future? i’m not totally certain, however it probably has something to do with google robots trying to foil my understanding of forest dwarfs and their associated personalities.

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i used this list and other online discussions to determine the dwarf names in other languages. obviously, the lists and my chosen translation service are not without error.

bookups

people is always accosting me at the mall (usually when i’m getting my hollister on) and axing me how i got my abz to be so 3d. “anyone can get length-width definition,” they intimate, but what exercise was i rockin’ to pop each sixth pack in the field of depth?

in situations like these, i usually pretend to receive an urgent phone call from the acting town fire chief (a passing acquaintance) and slip into a changing room to try on some pastel pocket t’s while my interrupters find someone else’s muscles to admire (as if).

but now, because i am so sick of people rubbing my abs unsolicitously like i’m some teenager who is pregnant with twin babies, i will reveal one of my trade secrets—bookups.

you start by crunching your shorty books (think: the old man and the sea and heart of darkness). you then work your way up to the lesser dickens and d.h. lawrence. most people tap out when they get to pynchon level or anything michener, but raynor ganan is not most people. i am proud to admit that i have been camera-phoned crunching the ten volume kathasaritsagara, an 11th century indian fairy tale that contains 20,000+ sanskrit verses.

so now you know my trade secret but there is one final thing that…hold on, i’m getting an urgent call from the acting town fire chief who is a personal friend. i need to take this…

moms in delirium

i don’t use the word handsome to describe other people that often. so when i do use that particular adjective to describe someone who isn’t me, you know that i am serious for once, or at least pretending to be serious. right now is one of those times, because right now, i’d like to announce to everyone who has read all the way to this typographical symbol (⁂) that my handsome friend, riaz moola, has just released his new novel liminoid summer.

says my handsome friend riaz:

It’s short as long stories go. I don’t think it quite hits the 50,000 word mark but I’ve forgotten the exact number now. It’s about teenagers.

You can buy a physical copy, or pay a buck to download a zip with HTML and ePub versions which should load on pretty much all e-readers. It’s in the Kindle store too, though I’d recommend downloading the ePub version instead. 

i have not read liminoid summer yet, though if it’s anything like my handsome friend riaz and his previous writings, then i am sure we can expect it to be dripping with cynicism, powdered with wit, and served with a side of of sweet potato fries (which symbolise the threshold between solstices). please consider joining me in ordering up this strange new taste.

bang the librarian hard

if you or one of your two dozen sex partners has a “thing” for sweaty, moany library intercourse (or sweaty, moany intercourse with sweaty, moany librarians) then you may enjoy dan and gail lester’s the image of librarians in pornography website a little too much. this page catalogues pulp novels published between 1978 and 1988 in the little-studied sub-genre of librarian kink.

here are a few stereotypes that you can expect to encounter in this odd genre: 

• a frigid old librarian who just needs to be turned on
• a virgin young librarian who is not interested in sex, but has an orgasm and is interested in more sex
• a nymphomaniacal young female librarian
• a virgin male head librarian who is seduced

also amusing is how dan and gail make semi-academic notes about the library-ness of each book 

• Most of the library and librarian descriptions are reasonable, except for the number of books on a book cart.
• There is much more privacy and isolation than typical in a school library.

finally, if you are not sure what to read on the ski lift or between triple salchow jumps at the local skating rink, here are a few titles that might restore your vigor:

• Eager Beaver Librarian
• Horny Balling Librarian
• Hot Mouth Librarian
• The Librarian Licks Big Ones
• The Librarian’s Hot Urges
• Line Up for the Librarian
• What a Librarian! 

the young visiters

In the long summer of 1890, a young lady decided to write her first novel. She wrote a chapter a day between breakfast and bath-time and delivered it to her parents in a stout twopenny exercise book exactly 12 days later. The young lady’s name was Daisy Ashford and she wrote it when she was 9 years old.

She called it, The Young Visiters; or Mr. Salteena’s Plan. After several years a publisher discovered it amongst her mother’s papers. To this day it has never been out of print.

i wrote a novel when i was nine called, raynor’s giant sandwich. without giving too much of the plot away, it was about a giant sandwich named franklin and how i went about eating him and the lessons that i subsequently learned after consuming my only friend in the world. my parents humored me by telling me that it was super-phat—but everyone else who read it said it smelled worse than asparagus urine.

but whatever: the young visiters is sublime. it doesn’t need to be contextualised in terms of the age of its author. it’s not juvenilia. unlike raynor’s giant sandwich or your roommate’s latest dream, it has a cohesive plot and interesting characters. and it’s world-view is absolutely captivating. here is how it starts:

Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking people to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr. Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. 

the published version (with an intro by j.m. barrie) retains miss ashford’s charming misspellings: brekfast, idiotick, bronkitis, &c, and is worth your perusal.

also: the novel was adapted into a beebeecee movie in 2003 and stars: harold zidler, house,  billy mack, and cleopatra. 

finally: i would be thoroughly scolded by my niece if i didn’t use this occasion to plug her novel called the great day. 

bibliofool

i came across this marvelous masthead in some dusty old book that i read begrudgingly while getting my brand new bieberstyle haircut. finally, my twenty year quest for a proper raynor ganan bookplate has come to an end!

check it out: that bibliofool has meth teeth just like me.