Someone on Twitter has created Markov Bible.
We’ve had fun with Markov chains on the blog before. They’re really quite simple: just take a big file full of text, and pick any two adjacent words at random (let’s say it’s ‘in the’). Then, find every occurrence of the words ‘in the’, and make a list of every word that occurs right after them. Pick one of those at random, and that’s word number 3. Now repeat with your word number 2 and 3 to get a word 4, and so on for as long as you want.
It’s fun to mess around with the Bible, but my favourite thing is to do mashups. Here’s the Bible combined with George Orwell’s 1984.
They say unto you, Ye shall worship at his saying, and nipped off to Canada like cattle. They could do nothing against the children of the same: but the one end of three years old when he would have cast upon a pole, and it was too late–no such thought occurred to me, and on the north corner, he made windows of agates, and thy master’s son? And Ziba said unto Onan, Go in this book.
That last part is funnier if you know who Onan is.
And here’s some of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, mixed in with Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony.
CHAPTER XI Who Stole the Tarts? The King laid his head and, feeling behind him with his face to the Bed. First, I’ll describe the apparatus to you.” The Traveller acted as if a dish or kettle had been asked to attend the execution of a bottle. They all came different!’ the Mock Turtle replied; ‘and then the execution is a very grave voice, ‘until all the players, except the King, who had been sleeping on duty. For his task is to give the prizes?’ quite a chorus of ‘There goes Bill!’ then the other, and making quite a long time together.’ ‘Which is just the case might be, if he had neglected to look down and appeared peaceful. The Soldier showed the Traveller and laid his head sadly. ‘Do I look like one, but it is.’
The longer the sentence, the less likely it is to be coherent, since Markov chaining doesn’t preserve the long-range structure of a sentence. But still, it’s surprising when it works.
3 September 2011 at 12:12 am
"And Ziba said unto Onan, Go in this book."
Lol
3 September 2011 at 1:58 am
I've been engaged in a similar exercise with Joyce's Ulysses, wherein I take one page and use it as the lexicon for one, four line verse (eventually I'll have around 700 verses). Example:
stir the flurried earth
& sluggish nymphs, naked
before the angry smoke
hair down, inhaling the metempsychosis.
the poor little present sings at fifteen
helped into the well of scrap evenings
raising beef & gravy, bread & cream.
twice nothing; twice nothing postscript.
vain affection pinching down his backbone
stalking his soft, useless trousers.
torn away from the damned fire
he fidgets thunder; gentle, electric thunder