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This bot is “brute-forcing an episode from [Thomas Pynchon’s novel] Gravity’s Rainbow” by tweeting the words “you never did the Kenosha kid” with different punctuation every two hours. The bot description links to a Language Log entry that explains the episode– basically about a man who, under the effects of sodium amytal, goes on “an obsessive meditation on alternative possible analyses of the six-word sequence ‘you never did the kenosha kid.'” Inspired by the algorithm described here, Darius Kazemi created a bot that seeks all the possible combinations of that word sequence with punctuation (and appropriate capitalization). The result is a tour-de-brute-force of different syntactic structures and meanings that can emerge from this simple string of words. Try reading the following tweets out loud.
You! Never, did the Kenosha Kid…
— Kenosha Kid (@YouNeverDidThe) June 10, 2014
You—never did the Kenosha kid!
— Kenosha Kid (@YouNeverDidThe) June 10, 2014
You! Never did the Kenosha Kid?
— Kenosha Kid (@YouNeverDidThe) June 9, 2014
And it goes on. Some versions are more grammatically correct than others, but even when the punctuation doesn’t make grammatical sense, it can prompt a unique reading performance from a reader. Reading these lines aloud reminds us of how, like programming, language and punctuation can be executable when treated as a score or notation to produce a vocal performance. Writing doesn’t always render phonetic results, of course, as can be seen in Kazemi’s witty use of the bot’s name and Twitter handle.
Conceptually, this bot is akin to other generative works, such as the recently reviewed @BabellingBorges, @DiGRAthemes, and @PERMUTANT. The amount of possible combinations of punctuation is astronomical, enough to last many years of tweets, and that is with a conservative set of punctuation marks. Imagine the possibilities for even greater diversity if the bot expanded its repertoire to include line breaks or some of the new rhetorical punctuation marks generated by @SketchCharacter. Scanning through the tweets reveals some repetition (see this tweet and this earlier one), which suggests that we have a randomly generated process which doesn’t try to avoid repetition– which is fine, but it indicates that even if you read every tweet, you will never see the bot completely “do” all the combinations of the “Kenosha kid” phrase.
Coda: When searching GitHub to see if Kazemi had published the code, I found an empty repository named kenoshakid. There’s no information about who created the account, so I’ll just take the opportunity to publicly ask Kazemi (or whoever created it) a quick question: You never did the kenoshakid?
Update: Darius Kazemi’s brilliant response when I posed the question on Twitter:
> "You?"
Never did the kenoshakid.
— Darius Kazemi (@tinysubversions) June 11, 2014
Featured in Genre: Bot