SCRIPTING:

Shalom Harlow
YOUR FINNEGANS WAKE: JAVASCRIPTS TO PRODUCE INSPIRATIONAL POETRY, EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVE, CREATIVE WRITING, ACTIVE IMAGINATION, AND FANTASY WORD SPELLING
Do you know that there are techniques to stimulate your artistic fantasy, and that it is possible to produce javascripts for public use meant to implement these techniques? Maybe C. G. Jung called them Active Imagination.
Here you find tools for the production of random words which if considered without prejudice can greatly enhance your literary fantasy, and for the manipulation of sensible classical sentences to see whether by reshuffling them new unexpected meanings or noun/adjective pairs may arise, like with poetry happens.
January 2005
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The model above is Courtney Cox
LOADS OF COURTNEY COX ON THE NET


PRODUCE FANTASY WORDS
The first set of tools provides you with ways to produce random words of pure invention: this is a great way to stimulate fantasy if you take time to consider the yielded words without prejudice as if you'd listen to a piece of music.

Ernest Hemingway signature
Ernest Hemingway's signature
This file provides you with Javascripts meant to produce poetry and narrative. Given a tradition like that of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake or approaches like that of the so called Active Imagination by C.G.Jung, as long as you are a creative person and you have some real interest either in literature or in creative writing (for of course if you have no interest whatsoever in these subjects, it is probably useless for you to use this file at all), the tools you can find here will help you develop this creativity of yours.

Have you ever noticed new unexpected combinations of adjectives and names, that you never thought about before, and that startle you when you read or find them?
With these javascripts you can intentionally probe and produce thousands if not millions of such combinations and verify which ones you like best: a few of such random combinations may stand indeed as remarkably beautiful poetic lines worth of the best among our poets.
You are to discover with just a few attempts that there is a whole world of potential hidden meanings in whatever language - though of course this file is written in english, which is not my native tongue and yet is the most widespread and understood language.

You will also be able to produce entirely meaningless words, though with specific bounds such as that a determined amount of vowels must be present in every word or that no consecutive identical chars should appear in a word, and many other similar constraints to meet your requirements; even producing meaningless words is less trivial an approach to creativity than you may suspect because also by reading apparently meaningless words you can greatly stimulate your literary fantasy and get sudden inspiration by new strange words (after all reading a Bible book like the Numbers provides you with tons of such apparently meaningless names, and yet they all seem evocative in an eerie way).

But, as said, this file provides you also with tools to shuffle meaningful words and adjectives so to yield new unexpected and poetical combinations resounding with arcane or profound new meanings.
You can use for such purpose either texts provided by yourself, or you can extract from this very same file, via javascript, poetry from Shakespeare's sonnets and/or from the Psalms and shuffle their words so to see what fascinating new combinations can derive from the process of blending and stirring them together as a barman would shaker a drink of words to produce appetizers of poetry.

The first section deals with producing random words, the second section at bottom with producing shuffled meaningful terms.

Enjoy yourself with these javascripts, and unleash your creativity by seeing what immense a world of hidden meanings and poetry is out there in the words you use every day (wasn't J.P. Sartre who even titled one of his books «Words»?), or under the surface of our ordinary lexicons, if you only start reading things with an unconventional perspective and you get less afraid of experimenting.
Not that I deem experimentalism as particularly worth, but if you try to mix Shakespeare's sonnets with the Psalms, and then suffle all the aligned words, you'll soon realize what I mean - and that several amazing combinations are clearly well beyond mere or fruitless experimentalism: they radiate truly poetic sense.

Thus, this file may even help you develop a keener sensitivity for words and the potential poetry which is in them - which, after all, is a path to that enlightenment that Buddhists dubbed: awakening, for it will make you more aware about the hidden metaphors that endlessly spring within our souls, because after all words and their combinations assume meanings only insofar we ourselves are able to provide the former with the latter.
Plato was right: we have living myths within.

PRODUCE RANDOM FANTASY WORDS WITH CONSTRAINTS
james joyce
James Joyce in a very beautiful and original Barrie Maguire Painting (website)
default alphabet:
default vowels or chars considered special:
How many words?
Minimal length of a word: chars
Max length of a word: chars
Max identical consecutive chars per word (0=no limit):
Minimal percentage of vowels (or special chars) per word:
Esoteric fun: all words and make them palindromes:
Rejoin output by:
Sort output alphabetically?
Output to uppercase?



MANIPULATE YOUR WORDS OR CLASSIC WORDS
Provided your input text or random selections from either Shakespeare or the Psalms, these javascripts will maniuplate the returned terms so to see whether you can find unexpected and stimulating new combination and/or sudden unexpected meanings

John Steinbeck signature
John Steinbeck's signature

T You can use the next form in the following manners:
  • Paste in the textarea the texts you prefer, or directly type in it them, and then use the form to manipulate them.
  • Load in the textarea excerpts from Shakespeare's sonnets.
    • Extract and load one whole sonnet providing its number, and then manipulate it.
    • Extract and load random whole lines from random sonnets, and then manipulate them.
    • Extract and load random words from random sonnets, and then manipulate them.
  • Load in the textarea excerpts from the Psalms.
    • Extract and load one whole Psalm providing its number, and then manipulate it.
    • Extract and load random whole lines from random Psalms, and then manipulate them.
    • Extract and load random words from random Psalms, and then manipulate them.
  • Mix the above combinations thus yielding a random text extracted from Shakespeare's sonnets and the Psalms both.

    By the way, if you want to read the whole sonnets or Psalms in standalone windows, here are their addresses: Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Psalms.


MANIPULATE IN A CREATIVE WAY WORDS FROM THE PSALMS OR FROM SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS
MANIPULATE SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS: FIRST PICK YOUR PREFERRED OPTIONS
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett in a very beautiful and original Barrie Maguire Painting (website)
Load one sonnet:
[Sonnet Number: ]
Load whole random lines from random sonnets:
Load random words from random sonnets:
MANIPULATE THE PSALMS: FIRST PICK YOUR PREFERRED OPTIONS
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats in a very beautiful and original Barrie Maguire Painting (website)
Load one Psalm:
[Psalm Number: ]
Load whole random lines from random Psalms:
Load random words from random Psalms:
Second Step: Run Your Picked Options:
Click A Button Below
[ third and last step after the textarea ]
or
or



Third Step: Manipulate Generated Text And Produce Weird Poetry:
Click A Button Below







An example of how a simple and yet deeply suggestive poem, full of eerie echoes, or even sort of a buddhist koan, can be produced using and elaborating a bit on your own with these javascript instruments by refining yourself the outputs, can be:

You Who March
With The Tongues
Of Dead Lovers:
Gaudy Thy Days
When Thou Shall,
No Longer Resigned,
Like A Glutton In True Abundance,
With Riper Eyes
Along Mightier Congregation
And Graver Counsel,
Humbled Come To
Those Unfettered Rivers
Whose Unanswered Flow
Shall Not Perish
Before Spring Arrives.
Mmmh. Somewhat interesting indeed, isn 't it?
Poetry is reception.
If you want, by the way, click the next link see how surfers may have fun with this tool, and at the same time produce strangely fascinating poetic lines: The Poets of Chaos

Francis Scott Fitzgerald signature
Francis Scott Fitzgerald's signature