Follow Harpo's epicurean journey via snippets of his autobiography and the NYPL menu collection!

Harpo Eats! is a program to computer-generate a novel of ~50,000 words, in the spirit of NaNoGenMo. Taking excerpts to do with food from Harpo Marx's autobiography Harpo Speaks! (Marx, Harpo. Harpo Speaks! New York: Limelight, 1985.), it arbitrarily replaces mentions of dishes, restaurants and eating places, and meal and dish costs—in various period-appropriate formats—with corresponding items arbitrarily selected from the New York Public Library's collection of menus (What's on the Menu?). The number of dishes Harpo orders and consumes increase exponentially as we follow the very abridged narrative of his life (in sequential order). The program further makes use of OpenAI's DALL·E 2 to computer generate the originally lacking illustrations. By exponentially increasing Harpo's food orders and food consumption (and presumably digestive abilities), Harpo Eats! thereby increases the already international, translingual, and transcultural nature of food to match the supremely international, translingual, and transcultural nature of the best Marx brother.

Harpo Eats! requires a few python packages, most you will already have installed. These two maybe not: openai, and reportlab. It also runs on python 3. To install these two packages:
pip3 install openai
pip3 install reportlab
Lastly, in the directory housing the other two necessary files from this repo (harpos_menu.pkl, excerpts.txt), run python3 halff_wmd_4.0.py. It will ask you for a OpenAI organization code and API token, which you can get here, after making an account or signing in. The program will run and produce a PDF of Harpo Eats!.