He presses onward.Īll of this brought to his mind what Cornelius Tacitus had said about Ocriculum: What Cornelius Tacitus Once Said About Ocriculum By the gate of Ocriculum, these words were carved: Hermo(lai) Macrino et Cel/so co(n)s(ulibus) ex r(atione) Sextti(?) et Her(mae?). The journey is more tiring than you might expect. Virgil departed from Roma, intending to travel on a boat heading upstream to Ocriculum, about 64 miles away. \cleardoublepage Roma To Iader After Roma The book generator uses data from the Perseus Digital Library, the Pelagios Project, the Pleiades Project, and ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. This copy was generated November 30, 2015, with seeds of 7. V fontfamily:"DejaVu Serif" -V linestretch:1.2 \ V geometry:paperheight=9in -V geometry:margin=.9in \ variable lang="english" -V geometry:paperwidth=6in \ toc -o via_appia_novel.pdf -latex-engine=xelatex \ The source code for the NaNoGenMo version can be found at in a git repository. The book generator that produced this novel is a Python program that outputs a Markdown text file designed to be converted into PDF form via Pandoc. My own pseudo-Virgil is a humble tribute, a machine homunculus librarian of forgotten texts. Lastly, that tradition of magic lead the much-neglected Avram Davidson to pen a novel with Vergil Magus as the magician-protagonist. A magician-protagonist is entirely appropriate. And, as Jeff Howard has pointed out,^ programming is a form of magic. His memory is haunted by that touch of magic, a magic intimately linked with words and poetry. It was no accident that Dante chose Virgil to be his guide through the Inferno. And The Golden Ass by Apuleius, one of the earliest surviving novels, is closer in form to the travel tale that structures this generated novel.īut there was also a tradition that linked Virgil and his poetry with magic and prophecy. This would not be enough to recommend him on its own: there are other authors whose works were much closer to the kind of copying and summarizing going on here. His Aeneid builds on earlier traditions, recast in a founding epic for a new age: appropriate for a work themed around appropriation and reuse in this new information age. I chose Virgil as the protagonist for three reasons: first, his works are among the source texts in the Perseus Digital Library used for much of the text here. Rather than an exhaustive view of the forest, it picks out one or two trees you might have otherwise overlooked. Extracting the stories and arranging them in a new pattern presents a new angle. The serendipity of browsing through a library is lost. Search engines can find anything you ask for but, like a fairy-tale mirror, can only answer the questions you know enough to ask in the first place. Unlike an age of precious codices, the information age is a time of entirely too much to read. In this work, that deliberate borrowing is the intent. Still, that's no reason to neglect giving credit, so this book attempts to cite the sources for the texts it borrows. But there is an undeniable strand of appropriation as we teach our machines to imitate their human creators. NaNoGenMo has included other approaches, such as the concrete poetry in thricedotted's The Seeker, or the way structurally-plotted works like Hannah and The Twelve-Disk Tower of Hanoi evoke the chessboard constraints of Life a User's Manual or Through the Looking Glass. Kathryn Hume has suggested that technical constraints have lead NaNoGenMo to "align itself with poetics of recontextualization and reassembly."^ ![]() The closest literary antecedents of NaNoGenMo-Dada and Oulipo-have often explored similar sampling approaches. ![]() Some works survive in epitome, distilled versions that summarized the text for others we have fragments that later writers quoted or abridged as they wrote their compilations.Īrtists, of course, have been far looser with their borrowings than writers of mere facts, placing the present work solidly within a long tradition. In a way, this reuse is fortunate: many texts from the Classical period only exist in fragments quoted in other documents. Indeed, some authors committed a kind of reverse plagiarism, pseudepigraphically attributing their work to an earlier, more famous author. Quotes could be paraphrased and rather vague citations were the norm. Lacking the modern concept of plagiarism (and our post-printing-press system of uniform citations) writers sometimes come off as careless to modern sensibilities. These texts were not always attributed to the original source. We have many surviving examples from the Roman Empire, such as Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights. Indeed, many commonplace books consist of nothing but quotations and similar notes. It has long been a common practice to incorporate the works of earlier writers into new books.
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