Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is a short fiction by J. R. Carpenter about her adventures with Montreal-based artist Ingrid Bachmann's hermit crab Pookie during the month June of 2009. Pookie's website is: http://digitalhermit.ca/ Pookie is also known as Pookie 14.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is generated by a Python script adapted (with permission) from a 1k story generator written by Nick Montfort. In July 2009, in a blog post, Nick Montfort wrote: "J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what's been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is."

In July 2009, NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar ported the Python script into Javascript to create a web browser friendly version of the Chronicles of Pookie & JR. http://luckysoap.com/pookieandjr/

In December 2010, Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR and three other generators adapted from scripts by Nick Montfort appeared in a print book called GENERATION[S] published by Vienna-based TRAUMAWIEN.

In November 2011, Laura Borràs Castanyer translated Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR into Spanish and Catalan.