dreger/1000-nights

📖 My attempt to document and complete Ray Bradbury's 1,000 Nights.

✌️ Hi, I'm KQD and I like computers.

🇺🇸 patriotsoftware.com

🌎 dreger.me

👥 linkedin.com/in/dreger

1000-nights's Issues

Rap is a sub-genre of poetry

With 1000 poems several modern lyrical masterpieces could be included for versatile experiences with some music. Looking at artists with more poetic styles and less violent language, word-hacks and street slang I would list Aesop Rock, Atmosphere and Sage Francis. Maybe also 2Pac, Immortal Technique, Gangstarr, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, MF-Doom, KRS-One, Common and older works of Nas, though they may not look as good when only read for different reasons. Listing a few songs to consider:

• Aesop Rock- No Regrets
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sClhmDN5Fcs
• Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass
  • layered symbolism with playful delivery
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkS5rfptd3M
• Sage Francis - The Best Of Times
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIMVrEsYygU
• R.A. the Rugged Man - Uncommon Valor
  • one of the best wordplays, based on authors fathers experiences in Vietnam
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGZsGX3B_BY
  • http://lyriki.com/index.php?title=Jedi_Mind_Tricks:Uncommon_Valor:_A_Vietnam_Story
• Immortal Technique - Dance With the Devil
  • dirty use of words but quite powerful storytelling
  • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qggxTtnKTMo
  • http://lyriki.com/Immortal_Technique:Dance_With_the_Devil

If the idea is to your liking I will gladly look for more or replace some.

Also, please mix styles and authors, don't have Shakespeare several days in a row.

Sources for poems/essays

You can mine UbuWeb for far longer than 1000 days for essays and poems:

http://www.ubuweb.com/

Also, pennsound has loads of recorded poems (recorded by the author):

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/

These anthologies are also pretty awesome:

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520072275
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520208643

I'll go through later and select some, but I thought it would be helpful to post some potential sources for others to comb through.

Further Design Discussion

Looks like there's decent interest in this. Some ideas for building it out further:

• calendar/schedule view of upcoming triads (poem, story, essay)
• ability to generate/modify a schedule at user initialization
• and then name that schedule
• and share it with others, so you can have

• multiple people progressing through the oeuvre in sync
  

After that you can add group tracking features to share/discuss the current reading, see who else is on the same track as you, and join tracks currently in progress.

• user ratings/comments on a work
• ability to add SO community-wiki-like summaries to each work
• along with topic tagging:

•    eg. "Topics: politics, philosophy. Difficulty: (1-5 stars). Intensity: perhaps... emotional impact"
  

Eventually this will let people be more selective about the works on their list. A generation system could be configured with minimum rating, and constrained by topic, author, time period, etc.

Looking at this, it seems I'm describing a collaborative lifelong-reading system with social enhancements. Viva la future.

From HN

Short stories – Flannery O'Connor
Poems – Edward Thomas
Essays – George Orwell

Isaac Asimov short stories

http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/short_fiction_sf_f_index.html

One of my favorite all-time writers. His short stories are philosophical, thought provoking, and fun. Fits this project's ethos well.

The Dead Past
http://readanybooks.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html

The Last Question
http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

The Feeling of Power
https://archive.org/stream/TheFeelingOfPower/The%20Feeling%20of%20Power_djvu.txt

Nightfall
http://www.astro.sunysb.edu/fwalter/AST389/TEXTS/Nightfall.htm

Evidence
http://readanybooks.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov33/27221.html

Nice idea, but lack of structure makes collaboration difficult

Hi,

I really like this idea, Bradbury's idea is wonderful, but I think maybe you could structure this project in a better way to encourage collaboration - it's difficult to know how to make suggestions / pull requests at the moment.

Maybe a folder structure would help? Possibly something which separates each of the days' study out into separate files like:

• index
• suggestions
• - poems
• - - // index by author surname
• - - a
• - - b
• - - ...
• - - z
• - stories
• - - // index by surname
• - essays
• • - // ... likewise
• nights
• - Week 1
• - - 1
• - - 2
• - - ...
• - - 7
• - Week 2
• - ...
• - Week 143

Obviously this would lead to a lot of manual duplication - you'd need to manually maintain the index and study materials - but it's better than nothing.

The benefit to having different files for each day of the project is that you can then include the texts themselves directly in the project (where copyright allows) without cluttering up the project. In fact, it might be interesting to try to do this project entirely with public domain texts - using sites such as Project Gutenberg for example.

Anyway, nice idea :-)

Some text suggestions.

I have a few suggestions for texts / authors you might like to consider. These are just off the top of my head, so apologies for spelling errors / mistakes. Many of them are probably available freely online. I have tried to focus on genuine "classics".

Essayists:

• George Orwell. maybe try, "Politics and the English Language" first.
• Stefan Zweig, "The Conquest of Byzantium" from "Decisive Moments in History" (German: "Sternstunden Der Menschheit").
• Thomas Browne, "On Dreams".

Short stories:

• Hemingway, "The End of Something" or "The Snows of Kilimanjaro".
• Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener" (this is in two parts).
• Conan Doyle, maybe start with something from "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes".
• Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel", or anything else from "Labyrinths".

Poems:

• John Donne, "Meditation XVII" from "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions".
• Louis MacNeice, "Snow".
• W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming".
• Goethe, "Marienbad Elegy".
• Pushkin, "Eugene Onegin".
• Pasternak, "Marburg".
• Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

Edgar Allen Poe - Short Stories, Poems

Project Gutenberg is a Poe goldmine. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/481

Short Story Additions: Ted Chiang

Everything Ted Chiang writes is absolutely first rate. His stories always make you think, and are relevant to the now. Here are 7 stories: http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Ted_Chiang.html

Author Suggestions

• Kafka (The Complete Stories available here)
• Salinger (Nine Stories available here)

Essay suggestions: "Uncensored" ebook

This ebook contains hundreds of essays from dozens of authors. The ebook itself is $5, but I think most of the essays are available online.

If I have time in the next few days, I'll try to go through and add links for the essays.

https://leanpub.com/uncensored

Short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

Complete bibliography of his short stories: http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~tdlarson/fsf/ssbib.htm

Head and Shoulders (Feb 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/head/index.html
Myra Meets His Family (Mar 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/myra/index.html
The Camel's Back (Apr 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/camel/index.html
Bernice Bobs Her Hair (May 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/bernice/index.html
The Ice Palace (May 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/icepalace/index.html
The Offshore Pirate (May 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/pirate/index.html
The Jelly-Bean (Oct 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/jellybean/index.html
May Day (Jul 1920): http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/mayday/index.html

From HN pt 2

• David Foster Wallace's great essays fill 25 nights: http://tetw.org/David_Foster_Wallace
• Billy Collins was on Stephen Colbert not too long ago, and when I looked him up, it turns out his poetry is awesome: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/flames/
• I like Bukowski the poet. (Bukowski the person is kind of an asshole) http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-aliens/
• I like to find new essays daily at Longform. This could probably sustain you forever. http://longform.org/

Ernest Hemingway short stories

The Old Man at the Bridge
http://biblioklept.org/2012/07/06/read-the-old-man-at-the-bridge-a-short-story-by-ernest-hemingway/

The end of something
http://biblioklept.org/2013/03/03/the-end-of-something-ernest-hemingway/

A very short story
http://biblioklept.org/2012/07/24/a-very-short-story-ernest-hemingway/

Short Story Suggestions: Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor

Short Stories Suggestions: Borges, Jarry

Borges is a king of short stories and metaphors. A must read in my opinion. Anything by Borges. Although I understand that finding the works online might be hard. Same with Jarry. Sorry!
Just my two cents.

Borges

Wikipedia link here.

• A list of works at the Open Library
• Another list of works at Modernworld.com

Jarry

Wikipedia link here

• "The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race" link

100 nights worth of content

• Finish exam week so I can get back to working on this project (Dec 13th)
• Figure out a way to avoid reusing content from night-to-night
• Buy a domain
• Set up GitHub pages or similar