NaNoGenMo2015 entry
My first NaNoGenMo entry, a Perl script now called finnegansways, was initially a mere proof of concept. It only had the --vico option below. I've since added a second command-line option, --poetry.
People who've read, or even started, Finnegans Wake know that the last sentence of the book is broken in half, and wraps around to become the first sentence, beginning with the word "riverrun". The entire book is an endless cycle. Joyce based it partly on the theories of history developed by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico.
The --vico option takes as input a slightly modified version of the Wake
called fwin.txt. (The modification is that the last two words of the original book are inserted
at the beginning, before "riverrun", where they belong.) Then the script picks a random line of the
etext file, and reads until the end. It continues reading from the first line of the etext,
up until but not including the randomly-selected line. It then dumps this rotated version of the
text to a new file called fwout.txt.
The --poetry option, based on an algorithm by Robert Amos, as implemented in a script by Charles Cave (which I use as a preprocessor), breaks the lines of the book in poetically appropriate places. That is, it makes the Wake look like poetry even more than it already does.
Of course, you can combine the two options for Wakean poetry in a Viconian cycle, or omit them both for something approximating the original text. These are the four "ways" (at present) of finnegansways.
Further fun: start reading from the first line of the "new edition" you generate and try to suss out where in the plot/cycle of the Wake they are -- how does the Wake feel different, starting from a new point in the cycle? Also, search for the word "riverrun" and regard how the end and beginning of the original book join seamlessly into what is "just another" page in the new edition.
The tenth anniversary meeting of my Finnegans Wake reading group, Allforabit Funferall, occurred the day before the NaNoGenMo 2015 deadline. I generated random versions (with the Vico option) of the Wake for all eight of us attending. Those editions are included in this repo.