My Christmas message, as I mentioned at the start of the year, was accidentally and inexplicably mangled. With the subject heading “Sect’s Grindstones!”, my email read as follows:
Grindstones!
This is just a quick nozzle to wolf you a happy Churn and New Yoghurt. I horsewhip that 2020 brings week, hearty and harlequin, and a crotchet of decent fingerprints!
All the best
Terry
Well, of course it was neither accidental nor inexplicable. I wrote the message out, and then applied a variation of a method favoured by the Oulipo. Known as N+7 , the approach involves replacing every noun with the word seven words along in the dictionary. I cheated a bit by using N+14, more than one dictionary, and tweaking the result slightly. Nevertheless, at least one person deciphered it, and several others got close. Here’s what I meant to say:
Season’s Greetings!
This is just a quick note to wish you a happy Christmas and New Year. I hope that 2020 brings wealth, health and happiness, and a crop of decent films!
I hope you enjoyed that. Look out for more Oulipo-inspired conundrums on this website.
Other Oulipo-related articles on this site
I think evaluations are very odd devices to be honest. Someone once “marked me down” on her evaluation of a one day course I was running on the grounds that the traffic was terrible.
This course will look at examples of constraints created by some of the Oulipo’s main proponents, with work including the Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets, the Metro Poem, and others. Course participants will have the opportunity to try out several techniques, and invent one or two of their own.
In Escapism: a 50 word prose poem I presented readers with a prose poem constructed in accordance with a constraint, and invited them to suggest what that constraint might be. Here’s the poem again, followed by the solution.
The following story has been written in accordance with a constraint, in true Oulipian style. The Oulipo is a writing movement based on constraints, such as omitting the use of a particular letter when composing a text.
If your interest in the Oulipo goes beyond simply trying out their techniques, and you wish to learn about the context in which it was conceived and the developments in went through, you will find this book very useful.
As someone who had little in the way of mathematical prowess at school, I initially opened Prime with some trepidation.
Many people advocate free writing as a way of cutting through writer’s block. Well, it’s never worked for me, and it doesn’t seem logical anyway. If you can’t think of anything to write, how would allowing your mind to just generate stuff do any good?
On the surface, this would seem to be nothing more or less than an example of performance art presented as literature. However, there is much more to it than that because Johnson has introduced elements of randomisation…
Poetry lovers will recall the impact Slake' s first book made. "Tied up in Notts" was, at the time, not merely avant-garde but positively risque. The reason, of course, was Slake's cavalier approach to poetic conventions. For example, his 15 Line Sonnet caused a massive rift in the arts community.
This is the usual way of doing things. Someone writes a book, or a poem or whatever. Then (with a bit of luck) someone reviews it.
A fellow writer, Nathan, and I decided to do it the other way around. He wrote a review of something I hadn’t written yet. Then I wrote it!