(re)oulipo

Inclusion

2009-04-05T20:06:00.000-07:00

Inclusion refers to one or more texts being contained within another. (Several different Oulipian methods can be classified under the heading of inclusion.) The poem below was composed using a procedure invented by poet Paul Braffort, whereby the blanks in the poem can be filled by either one of two specific letters, producing a coherent text in each case. In this example, the reader fills the blanks with either ‘m’ or ‘d.’

Circle 8 1/2

A certain drea_ came back to me
As I was walking through the _oor;
A _eal I’d finished once at dawn;
The desolate ri_e the day before.

That night, greeting the sinister _en,
I _ulled, with gin, my looming choice:
To tell the agents it was hi_,
And show the constancy of _ice—
Or to refuse, and in my pri_e,
Give cover to my treasonous _ate.

As evening spreads its silent _ark,
I _ock my years with the poppy’s taste--
And spy the co_ing of the guilt
That whispers to me every _ay.

Avalanche

2009-01-07T19:46:00.001-08:00

An avalanche is a series of snowballs, with each individual snowball consisting of one more line than its predecessor. (For an explanation of the snowball form, please follow this link: http://reoulipo.blogspot.com/2007/07/diamond-snowball.html)

The following is an eight-stanza avalanche:

Outside

I—

O,
Me—

I
Am
Not.

I
Am
All
Gone—

A
By-
The-
Book-
Death,

A
No-
Win,
Time-
Spent
Corpse.

I
Go
Out
Past
Flesh,
Toward
Nothing;

“I”
Is
The
Dark
Thing
Beyond
Eulogy’s
Precinct.

Tautogram

2008-11-16T18:52:00.000-08:00

The tautogram is among the easiest Oulipian forms to explain; it is simply a text in which each word begins with the same letter. Please find an example below.

Time-Honored Tale

The tree tops trembled through twilight, timbers tapping townhouse turrets, telling troubling tales. Teenage toughs trolled the thoroughfares, tormenting timid Trinidadian taxi-drivers. Trying times turned these teens to terrorism; they talked treason, thoughts trained toward toppling the town’s triumphalist theocrats. Townsfolk tip-toed to their tedious tasks thanks to timebomb threats telephoned to the town’s trains. Theocrats took to tapping telephones, tasing those they tagged terrorists, tarring them thieves through trumped-up trials.

Timothy thought the terrorists told the truth, took to transcribing their theories, titillating the town, taunting the theocrats to tussle typographically. The trigonometry teacher told Tim to think twice; Tim through thrice, then typed thirty tropes taking temple-goers to task. The theocrats, trying to thin the tension, trimmed taxes, tariffs, tolls. Tim trumpeted, “Tired tactics! The theocrats tremble!” Traders took their trade to tranquil towns; tension tripled; the terrorists thought the town tilted toward them. Tim typed tracts that told the townsfolk to tear through the theocrats’ temple. The townsfolk, tempers throbbing, took to the thoroughfares to thump the theocrats. Theocrats toppled, the terroristic teenage toughs took the throne.

Twilight threaded through town, thorny trees twisting toward townhouses. Triumphant, the terrorists took to tapping telephones, tasing those they tagged theocrats, tarring them thieves through trumped-up trials.

Obama and I

2008-10-26T15:29:00.000-07:00

The following text does not fall under any particular Oulipian rubric; but as a permutation of another text’s structure, it partakes of the Oulipian spirit. In this case, the original text is Jorge Luis Borges’s classic meditation on the elusiveness of identity, “Borges and I,” altered to substitute Barack Obama—or rather, “Barack Obama,” whomever that may be—for Borges’s speaker. The problematic relationship between public and private identities detailed in the original, while certainly of great concern to Borges, is a subject with a thousand fold more relevance to the life of a politician and inspirational figure like Obama.

Obama and I

The other one, the one called Obama, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Chicago and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Obama from the news and see his name on a campaign ad or in a blog entry. I like basketball, writing, loafing with my kids, Christianity and the prose of Toni Morrison; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Obama may contrive his politics, and this politics justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has outlined some valid policies, but those policies cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the public and to the future. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Obama, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his orations than in many others or in the laborious blowing of a saxophone. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the machine politics of Illinois to games with hope and change, but those games belong to Obama now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page.

Univocalism

2008-09-11T19:31:00.000-07:00

A univocal passage is, quite simply, a passage that contains only one vowel. As noted by Harry Mathews in the Oulipo Compendium, we can also describe a univocal text as a lipogram in the excluded vowels. (To review, a lipogram is a text composed without one or more letters of the alphabet.)

Below is a short poem in which 'o' is the only vowel.

Doom

Mold grown on pools,
Blood color'd moons,
Old Scots' drool,
Trod-on cocoons,

Gowns torn on thorns,
Cold, hollow rooms,
Long spools of worms,
Gorgons on shrooms,

Porn sold to clowns,
Chloroform spoons,
Forlorn port towns,
Bottoms of tombs,

Condoms worn wrong,
Fog, torpor, gloom--

Slow tools of doom.

Lescurean Word Square

2008-07-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

Named for its inventor, founding Oulipo member Jean Lescure, the Lescurean word square involves selecting four words and combining them in every possible order. (The number of permutations of four words, and hence the number of lines in the word square, is 24.) In addition to the four words selected, a minimal number of words from necessary parts of speech are allowed for the purposes of lending the lines sense. Below is a rudimentary example.

The Skull Beneath the Skin

The image of death haunts the body’s progress.
The image of death haunts progress’s body.
The image of the body haunts death’s progress.
The image of the body haunts progress’s death.
The image of progress haunts the body’s death.
The image of progress haunts death’s body.

The death of the image haunts the body’s progress.
The death of the image haunts progress’s body.
The death of the body haunts the image’s progress.
The death of the body haunts progress’s image.
The death of progress haunts the image’s body.
The death of progress haunts the body’s image.

The body of the image haunts death’s progress.
The body of the image haunts progress’s death.
The body of death haunts the image’s progress.
The body of death haunts progress’s image.
The body of progress haunts the image’s death.
The body of progress haunts death’s image.

The progress of the image haunts death’s body.
The progress of the image haunts the body’s death.
The progress of death haunts the image’s body.
The progress of death haunts the body’s image.
The progress of the body haunts the image’s death.
The progress of the body haunts death’s image.

Irrational Sonnet

2008-06-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

An irrational sonnet is a 14-line poem composed of five verses, with each verse containing 3, 1, 4, 1 and 5 lines, respectively (3.1415 being the first five digits of pi, the most well-known irrational number). The rhyme scheme for such a sonnet, as devised by Oulipo member Jacques Bens, is AAB C BAAB C CDCCD. Below please find an example dealing with the subject of surveillance.

Surveillance

It was becoming difficult to be–
Without (at the same moment) being seen.
Surveillance’s continuous saccades

Were there, profiling each chattering ‘I,’

Assembling Cubist portraits from snapshots
Of e-communiqués and satellite feeds–
Small slivers of what makes us ‘you’ and ‘me,’
All siphoned from the web and then re-thought

According to the Weltanschauung of spies.

The borders separating truth from lies
Had dimmed, as context spun from our control,
Relinquished to the media’s shifting light....
We pined after identity by night,
Then held our secrets closer to our souls.

Homosyntactical Translation

2008-05-29T20:33:00.000-07:00

Homosyntactical translation is a method in which the writer retains the syntactical structure of the original work and replaces each word with another instance of that word’s part of speech. It is up to the writer to decide which parts of speech she wishes to replace; in the text below I replaced nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (although some verbs and adverbs from the original were left in place). The text supplying the syntax is Part I of Nietzsche’s preface to his “Genealogy of Morals,” while the words supplying the subject matter hail from the discussion of mushrooms in Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

The Genealogy of Mushrooms

We mushrooms are elusive to ourselves, and due to an unusual problem: how can we ever know to observe what we have never digested? There is a fundamental syntax which reads: “Where a fungus’s spores feed, there feeds its creation.” Our spores feed in the decomposition of our earth. We are mutually amid death, indefinitely, being by ability indispensable tools and potent agents of this realm. The horrific thing that dwells within our structure is the power to produce something entirely from the dead. As for the energies of day—so-called “calories”—who among us is green enough for that? Or has metabolism enough? When it comes to such energies, our tissue is usually not in it—we don’t even alter our process. Rather, as an organism necessarily exotic and subterranean in whose metabolism the moon has just stored the strange energies of night will presumably grow within waste and obtain for itself what flesh has nearly disintegrated, we only produce our enzymes during decomposition and ask ourselves, terrestrial and unconscious, “What have we really digested?”—or rather, “Who are we, really?” And we break down the prodigious dead matter of our soil, our earth, our cycle, but seemingly digest wrong. The eerie paradox is that we remain deeply invisible to ourselves, we don’t penetrate our own intelligence, we must lack ourselves; the words, “Each fungus is farthest from itself,” will surround us to all time. Of ourselves we are not “digesters”….

Eye Rhyme

2008-04-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Eye rhyme” refers to a pair of words that rhyme on paper, but not in the ear; that is, words that end in the same sequence of letters, but with different pronunciations (“through” and “rough” being a prime example).

Below is a sonnet composed of eye rhymes—with some fudging.

The Inheritance

My love and I were singing in the heat
That rose from meadows laced with summer dew--
Our minds had shed utility’s caveats,
Attired in thoughts that only gods could sew.
The insect world of ethernet and train
Seemed distant to our wine-soaked ecstasy;
We swore blood oaths never to work again--
Never to be quotidian or easy.
We served ourselves the universe to taste,
Crushed money underfoot to make our vintage;
We dreamed in red, the members of a caste
Who keep their youth as each commuter ages.
We drank and danced until the day was done,
And love was lost to vacuums in our bones.

Translexical Translation

2008-04-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

This procedure consists of translating a source text into the vocabulary of a drastically different form of discourse while retaining the text’s underlying meaning. The prose poem below only loosely qualifies as an example; in it, each question asked by the narrator of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is rephrased as its own answer, and each answer begins with the kind of ass-covering probabilistic phrase used by U.S. spy agencies to describe potential threats in their National Intelligence Estimates—e.g. “we judge with moderate confidence that, etc.” (The opening phrases of each line in this particular piece were lifted from the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear capabilities.)

The resulting passage doesn’t shed any new light on Prufrock’s character, but the easy fit between the National Intelligence Estimate’s phrasing and the chronic uncertainty of Prufrock’s voice hints at an institutional angst within the CIA, NSA, et al. When knowledge seems shifty and elusive, endless self-questioning results, for intelligence agencies no less than for introspective narrators of modernist poems.

The National Intelligence Estimate of J. Alfred Prufrock

I judge with high confidence that I do not dare disturb the universe.

I assess with high confidence that I should not presume.

I assess with moderate confidence that I should not begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways. I continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that I should not presume.

I continue to assess with low confidence that it is perfume from a dress that makes me so digress. I judge with moderate confidence that I should not then presume. I judge with moderate confidence that I should not begin.

I recognize the possibility that I should say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows.

I assess with high confidence that I will not, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis.

I do not have sufficient intelligence to judge confidently that it would have been worth it, after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me; that it would have been worth while, to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball to roll it toward some overwhelming question, to say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--if one, settling a pillow by her head, should say: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."

It is difficult to specify whether it would have been worth it, after all, would have been worth while, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--and this, and so much more?—a growing amount of intelligence indicates it is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: it is difficult to specify whether it would have been worth while if one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, and turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, that is not what I meant, at all."

I assess with moderate confidence that I will not part my hair behind.

I judge with moderate confidence that I do not dare to eat a peach.

Snowball II

2008-03-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

For a description of the Snowball form/procedure, please follow the below link:

http://reoulipo.blogspot.com/2007/07/diamond-snowball.html

The following poem is an example of a standard snowball; the combined efforts of Thesaurus.com, various online catalogs of plastic surgery procedures, and my own vocabulary produced a poem that maxed out with a seventeen-letter word.

Line Reading

“O,
To
See
Love
Again
Before
Evening,”
Lamented
Baggy-eyed
Waitresses—
Dereliction
Deliquescing
Rhinoplasties,
Disintegrating
Reconstructions,
Discombobulating
Microdermabrasion.

End-to-End

2008-02-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

The end-to-end method is reminiscent of poetic redundancy; but whereas the latter method involves shortening each line of a poem to its final few words, the former consists of removing the middle portion of each line, such that its first and last words are condensed into a potent burst of figuration and meaning (potent in theory, at least).

When applied to the first section of Wallace Stevens's "The Auroras of Autumn," the end-to-end method yielded the following result:

The Auroras of Autumn

This is the bodiless,
His head at night.
Eyes open every sky.

Or is this the egg,
Another cave,
Another body’s slough?

This is his nest,
These fields, distances,
And the pines beside the sea.

This is formlessness,
Skin disappearances
And the serpent skin.

This is its base.
These lights attain a pole
In the serpent there,

In another maze
Of body and images,
Relentlessly in happiness.

This is his poison: disbelieve
Even in the ferns,
When sure of sun.

Made in his head,
Black beaded animal,
The moving glade.

Cylinder (part 3)

2008-02-04T19:39:00.000-08:00

con't from the post of January 20, 2008 (apologies for the delay to any readers out there):

3. “Dr. Howe–if you are hearing this, let me begin by saying that I have the utmost respect for your work as a physician. While I was in medical school I read about your experiences researching and treating infectious diseases, and I thought I saw in them a woman dedicated not only to her profession, but to all of humanity. Which is why I want you to know what I know.

“My name is Jorge Canosado, and I am a doctor from Colombia. A year ago I was forced to flee my country to protect my young family from political violence. The men in power in Colombia do not stop at slander when attacking dissent, but my elders taught me never to suppress my own convictions, so I donated money to opposition candidates and wrote letters to my city’s newspaper protesting the government’s roots in corruption and violence. I never thought of the consequences of my actions; I did what I did instinctively, because it was the right thing to do. But one of my friends in the government told me that my words had drawn the attention of the dogs running Bogota, and that my family was in danger. There are many sacrifices I would make for my country, but my family is not one of them. So I fled north to the United States, coming to rest in your city, mopping floors in your hospital to support my wife and child, unwilling to risk exposure by practicing medicine in this country.

“I have no illusions about the purity of the United States. As a South American, I am too familiar with the U.S.’s history of aggression in the world. And you, as a native of England, must be disturbed as well by the potential for evil your adopted nation his displayed in recent years. But what I have witnessed in the last few months.... I will not attempt to describe it; the videotape I have included will do so better than I ever could. But I will say that in your hospital, in your division–under your nose, as they say–men are committing an injustice that terrifies even someone of my experience. I leave it to you, as someone the American medical community respects, to decide how best to use the information I am putting in your hands.”

The tape ran out. Madeleine, her face drawn with concern, looked up at Charles, whose expression had not changed as he stared out at the lake through her sliding doors. When she first heard the tape she had been puzzled, intrigued; now, after viewing the videotape of which Dr. Canosado spoke, she could barely suppress a wave of emotion on hearing his voice.

“I know what you want to do–” began Charles.

“I would hope so,” said Madeleine. Charles paused and sighed before he continued.

“But we can’t do it.”

“Why in hell not?” said Madeleine, reverting to her youthful Cockney accent as her anger mounted.

“Because if we do, our funding will dry up. Along with that of many of our colleagues. And all the good we’ve staked our careers on will turn to air.”

“Wait...,” said Madeleine, a dark realization spreading from the corners of her consciousness. “You mean–,”

“I don’t want you to think less of me, Madeleine, because I’ve kept silent about this. You have to think about all the possible costs.”

“You already know? How long, Charles? How bloody long?”

“That doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters: the man who left you these tapes is probably dead now. And that’s how you’re going to end up if you speak to anyone else about this research. You have to understand, Madeleine, that the men in that video draw their support from sources who aren’t so...civilized...as we are.” Pronouncing ‘civilized’ here with bitter irony.

Madeleine was silent. She thought of Coleridge’s image of slimy things crawling on a slimy sea, of a world turning demonic before her eyes and grant money hanging like an albatross from her neck.

“I take it from your silence that we’re in agreement?” said Charles, his voice laced with caution.

“I don’t know,” said Madeleine. “I’ll have to think about it. The prospect of losing–Charles,” her thoughts changing track, “why didn’t you tell me what was going on, if you knew?”

Charles rubbed his forehead. “I just didn’t want to saddle you with the guilt.” He smiled ruefully. “It gnaws at the insides, you know.”

They couldn’t think of anything else to say. He crossed the room and opened the door to leave, pausing with one foot in the hall. “Promise me you’ll let me know first if you decide to do anything rash,” he said.

“I promise,” said Madeleine.

Two days later Charles received a package in the mail from Madeleine. She had copied the VHS tape of the doctors’ conversation to DVD. Included in the package was a brief note: “A reminder. In case the gnawing ever subsides.”

A week after that, Charles received another package, this time from an anonymous source. It was another DVD, with another note: “We know you know.” The gray sky outside was pressing down like the surface of Earth’s menacing double. He went immediately to his living room and played the DVD, only to see:

(con't at the post of January 15, 2008)

Cylinder (part 2)

2008-01-20T20:19:00.000-08:00

(con't from the post of January 15, 2008)

2. Two men in lab coats and ties sat across from each other in an immaculate office, one situated at the far left side of the frame, the other at the far right. Their manner was familiar, easy, as if they were discussing a tennis match they had seen the previous night. The man on the left, slim with whitening hair and wrinkles encroaching on his brow, sat drumming his spidery fingers together behind a large gray desk. His cohort was twenty years younger, well-built, shaved head; reading, with an arctic calm, a draft of the write-up for a drug trial unknown to the vast majority of the medical community:

“MRSA has made clear the need, not just to generate ever stronger antibiotics, but to do so at a rate an order of power above the rate at which resistant strains of microorganisms develop in response to these drugs. It is our misfortune that the only sound method of accomplishing this goal is the following: 1) to infect a human population with a resistant strain of MRSA 2) to develop a new antibiotic to treat it 3)to re-infect a similar population until a new resistant strain emerges, and 4)to repeat the entire process ad infinitum. Of course, this sort of continuous drug trial could not be undertaken publicly in a democracy such as ours–the media would portray it as an abominable deprivation of individual rights, an abuse of scientific power sufficiently grotesque to re-invoke, in public discourse, the cautionary horror stories of the Nazis and their eugenics experiments.

“Yet the present study differs from the experiments of the Third Reich in one crucial respect: the discoveries that it has yielded so far, and that further studies will yield in the future, shall be used for the benefit of everyone—not for the awful purpose of perfecting a race of supermen—,”

“I would suggest ‘grotesque purpose,’ rather than ‘awful purpose,’” interrupted the man on the left.

“Yes, but I already used ‘grotesque’ in the preceding paragraph—‘an abuse of scientific power sufficiently grotesque,’ and so on, if you’ll recall.”

“Then perhaps ‘hateful’…‘awful’ has the lingering sense of ‘awe-inspiring,’ I’m afraid. We can’t allow any phrasing that smacks of admiration for the Nazis.”

“Fair enough. ‘Hateful’ it is.” He made a note in the margin of the page.

This mundane editorial back-and-forth continued for some minutes as the younger man read the rest of the study’s introduction to his elder; who, as it became clear from a subtle undercurrent in the two doctors’ otherwise arid exchange, was his mentor. Amid the deliberations over diction and syntax, a picture emerged of a scientific plot that included, in its operational costs, the all-but-certain deaths of dozens of the homeless, kinless and destitute living on Chicago’s South Side. The logistical details of how the men had procured their equipment and participants were still obscure, but they had already conducted their first round of trials—a fact that shined through with staggering, painful clarity.

Jorge Conosado stopped the tape with a grimace. ‘Participants’—the wrong word, he thought. More like the old, inhuman ‘subjects’ that any scientist with an ounce of ethics had long discarded, along with its connotation of human beings as spiritless systems that experimenters could take apart and manipulate at will. He took the tape out of the VCR and slid it into a manila envelope, along with another tape he had made the day before.

His one-year-old son, Miguel, snored in the crib beside the bed he shared with his wife, Veronica. As he stood up to leave he kissed his forefinger and touched it gently to Miguel’s head. At the door he paused and surveyed his nascent family’s dim, decrepit basement apartment. Then he left for the hospital.

Before he began his shift he let himself into the office of Dr. Madeleine Howe and placed the envelope on her chair.

Over the eight hours he worked cleaning the hospital’s Infectious Diseases wing, dread spread from his heart through his body like a network of tributaries branching off from a river. There was no way he could have recorded that video with no consequences. He knew from experience that conspirators could be sloppy, but never sloppy enough to let you get away untouched.

Dawn broke through the gaps between the callous high rises along the shore. As he fumbled for the key to his battered ‘96 Ford Escort, Jorge heard steady footsteps approaching from behind. A flesh-colored smear appeared in the driver’s side window above the image of his shoulder. Jorge spoke without turning around.

“No tengo dinero.”

“Please. You know why I’m here.”

Jorge shrugged and inserted the key in the door.

“Surely you must have been aware, sir, that we have surveillance cameras of our own.”

“The thought had crossed my—,” began Jorge, but the bullet didn’t let him finish.

That evening, Madeleine Howe arrived at her condo, put down her purse, shed her coat, and sat down to watch the first of two anonymous VHS tapes that had been left on her chair that morning. The screen showed:

Cylinder

2008-01-15T19:34:00.000-08:00

A cylinder is a text in which the author arranges linguistic units so that the reader can begin at any of several different points in the text, read to the end, and come back around to where she started without any lapse into incoherence. This example from the Oulipo Compendium works at the level of letters:

Emit, mite, item, emit.

Below find the first part of a cylinder composed of three micro-narratives (the second and third parts will follow shortly):

1. It was a film of a fluffy Maine Coon cat approaching a human hand. Autumn leaves scuttling downwind over the gnarled roots of an oak tree. As the cat sniffed at the can of tuna in the upturned palm, another hand appeared suddenly with a box cutter and slit its throat, blood gurgling out of the wound and spreading in an ellipse over the withered grass. An impassive voice off screen: "Consider this a warning." Then the DVD stopped.

Standing in front of the TV in his bedroom, Dr. Charles Silvering sighed the sigh of a man too exhausted to feel fear. He could only think that it was disgusting and unfair of them to kill poor Clive, and even counterproductive, since Charles had long ago come to terms with the prospect of personal injury or death. They had misread him and completely botched the threat. All parties (and Clive most of all) would have been better served if they had sent him a film of his cat being held in captivity; then he would have felt compelled to meet their demands in a bid to save the one creature in the world he still loved. As it stood, they had recklessly cast their only bargaining chip to the wind.

He walked to the bay windows opening out on the overcast January afternoon, gray as Athena’s eyes, and dialed a number on his cell phone. Now the truth had to come out, if only to spite them for killing Clive.

“Yes,” said a female voice on the other end of the line. The greeting was more a statement than a question.

“Madeleine. I’m coming over.”

“Charles? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“I’ll see you in ten.”

It was a short drive along the lake from Charles’s suburban stronghold to Madeleine’s building on the far north side of the city. She had left instructions with the doorman to show her guest to the elevators, and soon Charles was standing in the living room of her 30th floor condo, unsettled as always by the ivory-white carpeting and crystalline furniture. She was reclining on a sofa and, in her husky British drawl, offering him a drink.

“Not now, thanks,” he said, wearily unwinding the black scarf from his neck. “Tell me you still have the records.”

“From the hospital? Of course, but–,”

“We’re going public,” he said, turning on her television and DVD player and inserting the disc he had been clutching in his right hand.

“Going public! Why, Charles,” she said, eyebrows raised nearly off her forehead, “this sudden change of heart–it’s baffling. I think you owe me an explanation.”

“You’ll see.” He crumpled down beside her on the sofa and pressed ‘play’ on the remote control. “Just look what they did to poor Clive.”

“Clive? Who’s Clive?” said Madeleine.

But Charles must have taken the wrong DVD from his player at home, because when the screen came to life, it showed an image that the two of them had seen, and despaired over, many times:

Antonymic Translation: Psalm 23

2007-10-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

Briefly, antonymic translation involves replacing each word in a text with its antonym; or, if the word in question has no clear antonym, with the closest word to its opposite (i.e. "that" for "this," "was" for "is," etc.)

In the Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews notes that the method's inventor, Marcel Benabou, intended it to be used only with nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs--a guideline I have followed below in my antonymic translation of Psalm 23.

Psalm 23

Satan was my wolf; I shall not be sated.

He frees me to rise up in red wastes: he abandons me beside the raging fires.

He depletes my body; he abandons me in the thickets of sin for his anonymity’s detriment.

Yea, though I run through the mountains of the light of life, I will brave no good; for you are not with me; your cup and your bowl, they frighten me.

You revoke a chair before me in the absence of my friends: you desecrate my feet with water; my plate is empty.

Surely evil and vengeance shall avoid me none of the nights of my death: and I will wander in the outdoors of Satan but briefly.

Delmas's Method

2007-10-13T14:19:00.000-07:00

In a text written according to Delmas's Method, all instances of an initial letter can be replaced by another specified letter without producing any nonsensical words. At least, that's my paraphrase of the entry written by Harry Mathews in the Oulipo Compendium. The exact quotation is as follows: "Its rule: in a given statement, a repeated initial letter can be replaced with another repeated letter without spoiling the statement's coherence." So a stricter interpretation of the method than mine could maintain that the sentence or passage that results from replacing one initial letter with another must make sense, and not just the constituent words.

The poem(s) below were written according to my looser interpretation, with 'b' substituted for each initial 'c' from the first poem in order to produce the second.

A Crass Death

The body in the casket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight coats. The air
Was creaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A canker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a car
Beside the seashore, where he coasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a cutter sail,
And ate a sherbet cone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The cluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were cooked by etiquette, and where
His creed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by crawling worms.

And, after the Delmas manipulation:

A Brass Death

The body in the basket was met with doleful stares
From relatives and friends in midnight boats. The air
Was breaking as the mourners whispered of his mode of death;
A banker on his spleen had sent him to his final rest.

His aunts all traded rumors that they found him in a bar
Beside the seashore, where he boasted nights under the stars,
And got high with prostitutes, and saw a butter sail,
And ate a sherbet bone beneath the laughing of the gulls;

The bluster of escapes that he would manage here and there
From office, where his nerves were booked by etiquette, and where
His breed was marked by distance and its monolithic terms—
A distance that was soon to be eclipsed by brawling worms.

Elementary Morality: "Methyl Gods"

2007-10-01T20:57:00.000-07:00

In the "Oulipo Compendium," Harry Mathews notes that the poetic form the Oulipo have come to call "elementary morality" is not, strictly speaking, Oulipien. The reason is that this form doesn't involve any pre-formulated mathematical procedure for manipulating the basic materials of language (i.e. letters or parts of speech). Rather, the elementary morality is a form invented by Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau for what he said were "purely internal" reasons (according to the Compendium).

A poem of this sort opens with three sets of two-line pairs. In each of these pairs, the first line consists of three groupings of one adjective and one noun, while the second line consists of one such grouping. After these initial six lines comes an interlude comprising seven lines of one to five syllables. Finally, the poem closes with another two-line pair similar to those in the first six lines, in which words from the first part of the poem reappear in different arrangements. Individual authors, of course, are free to experiment with their own variations on the total form.

Below is a fairly orthodox example of an elementary morality. (Bear in mind that spacing, and not hyphens, is supposed to separate the noun-adjective pairs; unfortunately, the caprice of Blogger formatting has prevented me from laying the poem out properly on the "page.")

"Methyl gods"

Methyl gods - Scorched metal - Screaming wheels
Blue flowers
Clutching fingers - Ripened film - Bludgeoned zone
Joyless laughter
Dry willows - Byzantine maps - Pocket doomsday
Blackened sneakers

A picnic
Of moldy cheese
And pomegranates,
Spread out on grass
Trembling
By the banks of
The River Styx

Dry gods - Screaming flowers - Joyless maps
Clutching doomsday

Perverse: "A Litany of Seas"

2007-09-25T20:04:00.000-07:00

A perverse is created by combining half of one line of poetry with half of another.

The following example was created by taking six pairs of lines from canonical poems, splitting each pair in half, and joining the first half of the first line with the second half of the second (and vice versa). As indicated by the poem's title, the end word of each line is "sea." Citations can be found below.

“A Litany of Seas”

We have lingered in the tragic-gestured sea,
The ever-hooded chambers of the sea,
By man and beast and by the winter sea.

Among the mountains, earth and air and sea,
She sang beyond the rising of the sea.

Have sight of Proteus, genius of the sea,
By night, with noises, if the freshening sea
Were a delight; and of the northern sea,
And bowery hollows of our western seas,
That have the frenzy crowned with summer sea.

Feast them upon the kisses of the sea,
Under the quick faint wideness of the sea.

Lines 1 and 2: T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Lines 3 and 4: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”

Lines 5 and 6: Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West”
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”

Lines 7 and 8: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
Lord Byron, “Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, A Romaunt”

Lines 9 and 10: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Morte d’Arthur”
William Butler Yeats, “Michael Robertes”

Lines 11 and 12: John Keats, “On the Sea”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion”

Beautiful Inlaw

2007-08-21T10:46:00.000-07:00

Not to be confused with the "Beautiful Outlaw," the "Beautiful Inlaw" is a restriction under which a writer may only compose using the letters already found in a given source text–i.e., a person’s name. The fewer letters in the source text, the more maddening the compositional process.

The poem below was written using only letters from the name of the musician Polly Jean Harvey.

"Her Harp"

Hey raven hen,
Love-leery pen,
Pallor on nape,
Roar, never rape,

Eve, revere hell,
Heaven: non-real,
Prayer: holy ploy,
Jeer every ‘he,’

Prove venal nerve,
Prey on a perv,
Preen on a nave,
Have Johnny pay,

Yelp on a prop,
Yearn on a lap,
Pearl-heavy hole,
Reap lovely joy.

Larding: "Creekside Elegy"

2007-08-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

Further larding below; this passage was inspired by the lyrics to the song "Railroad Murder Blues," by little-known indie rockers the Jailors U.K.

Creekside Elegy

The moonlight glazed the dirt road like a cake. He knelt by the water's edge, his face buried in her torn robe.

The moonlight glazed the dirt road like a cake. It was the same dirt road that his truck tires had rumbled over that morning as he drove to collect on her debt. Midnight hung in the sharp autumn air, a silent verdict echoing across the countryside. He could still hear the cadences of her voice at sunup, pleading as he grabbed her shoulders and shook her frail body. A blot of smoke rose from the ruined trailer nestled in the stand of pines at the road's end, the negative image of dawn's promise and tranquility. At the start of the day she had stood in the door, clad in a threadbare pink robe, sipping the dregs from her coffee cup. A lump had risen in her throat as she heard his wheels coming up her driveway. It had only taken one match, and now there was nothing left but ash. He had obtained his revenge, extracted the price she had to pay for her unfaithfulness. Nothing left but the vanishingly fine grains of an incinerated dream. First her livelihood, then her life. A trail of sooty footprints led from the trailer's lot to the creek that ran beside the road. She had struggled until the end, her cries of anguish proportionate to the joy and generosity she had shown the world. The prints were the void he left in his wake, the bottomless aftermath of the evening's hateful passion. Now all that was left of their former happiness was a scrap of pink cloth. He knelt by the water's edge, his face buried in her torn robe.

Slenderizing

2007-07-17T10:50:00.000-07:00

Slenderizing is a simple enough method; it consists merely of removing all instances of a given letter from a source text. The catch is that the resulting text must make sense, i.e., all the remaining words must be actual words. (Dearth becomes death, or dire becomes die, to give two macabre examples.) What results is, of course, a lipogram, albeit one that is especially frustrating to compose.

The poem below and its slenderized progeny are both originals.

The Breach

I grazed on a prawn as the ocean roiled
Through nights as sinuous as cinema reels,
Saw youths doing ninety, then braking, coiled,
Each breast streaming sweat behind each wheel.

In the breach, feet always trapped on the gas,
Death was the wager that caused them to stray.
The strand’s portent wind was howling for crash,
But the drivers disdained the warning of the day.

I sipped Sprite and gin, as the teenage vixens
All watched with a heart that crackled in sin;
Seeing these beaus in tempestuous frictions
Built up to a craving to shred the day’s skin.

The maddening drip of time’s unending tricks
Dissolved as they laughed at the farce of the gods,
While I creased my brow, feeling branded and sick
By my ceaseless compulsion to pray to the clock.

*

The Beach

I gazed on a pawn as the ocean oiled,
Though nights as sinuous as cinema eels
Saw youths doing ninety, then baking, coiled,
Each beast steaming sweat behind each wheel.

In the beach, feet always tapped on the gas;
Death was the wage that caused them to stay.
The stand’s potent wind was howling for cash,
But the dives disdained the waning of the day.

I sipped spite and gin, as the teenage vixens
All watched with a heat that cackled in sin;
Seeing these beaus in tempestuous fictions
Built up to a caving to shed the day’s skin.

The maddening dip of time’s unending ticks
Dissolved as they laughed at the face of the gods,
While I ceased my bow, feeling banded and sick
By my ceaseless compulsion to pay to the clock.

Larding: "These Squirrels Were Equipped..."

2007-07-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

The sentences I began with were from the claims of an Iranian blogger, "These squirrels were equipped by foreign intelligence services, but were captured two weeks ago by the Police" [and the subsequent quote by the IRNA] "I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information." I feel quite confident you can find the "article" should you feel compelled to look for it.

"These Squirrels Were Equipped..."

"These squirrels were equipped by foreign intelligence services, but were captured two weeks ago by the Police". Mr. Pebbles folded his newspaper in quarters, set it down on his breakfast nook table, adjusted his tortoise shell glasses, and sighed into his hand. Outside, the sun was in full riot among the tulips - a fair coup for July in Kentshire. 14? Then there was always the chance that Rocky was still alive. If any of them had survived it would be Rocky...tough little bastard, thought Pebbles sipping his tea. Mr. Maize in America would be calling soon, as would Home Office - so much to do. As he placed his newspaper in the sink and lit it with a pipe match, Pebbles remembered the first time he had met Rocky. It was Hyde Park in Autumn, and suddenly there he was, a Scurius vulgaria, 40 cm long from nose to tail, and red as an Irish terrorist - he appeared to be attempting to eat a smoldering cigarette. You don't want that, little fellow, he'd thought, moments before his precocious soon-to-be student blew a tiny smoke ring. Breezing through his espionage and subversion classes faster than many human students, Rocky had been a Scurius Savant, the obvious choice to lead the mission. And now, perhaps...the phone rang, Pebbles turned on the faucet, dousing the last flames of the newspaper.
"Pebbles."
"Yes, Gerald, I'm glad you're home. I assume you've heard the disquieting news."
"Yes, Gerald, I've only just read about it in the tabloids. No chance the Iranians are bluffing, I suppose."
"Doubtful, I'm afraid."
"Yes, I was afraid of that."
"You were close to one of them weren't you, number 67?"
"Yes, Rocky, my prize student."
"Well, about that, you see, several of our people around London have turned up dead. All of them connected to the Animal Recognizance division in one way or another..."
"What are you trying to say Gerald?"
"Well, Gerald, frankly you worked with this...animal. What are the chances he could have been turned? I only ask because...from our mapping of these murders, it all points toward your direction. In all your years of this work, have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Gerald Pebbles turned around into the sunlight, which now cascaded through the window and across the little smoke rings coming from the far side of the table. Stately, toothy, number 67 stood upright and flicked his cigarette into the sink - his incisors bright as angel's eyes.
"I have heard about it, but I do not have precise information."

Diamond Snowball

2007-07-05T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Snowball is a poetic form in which each line consists of one word, with the first word containing one letter, the second word two letters, and so on. The variation of this form represented below is called a Diamond Snowball, in which, following the middle line of the poem, each subsequent one-word line decreases by one letter, such that the final line of the poem is only one letter long. (Somehow, Diamond Snowball sounds like an innovative new strain of cocaine.) If letters don't strike an author's fancy, Snowballs can also be written with a gradual increase of syllables, words, or any other morphological or semantic unit.

Imperial Passage

I
go
out
into
grimy,
random
streets,
imperial,
beholding
confounded
daytrippers’
functionless
perambulating–
unapproachable,
uncompassionate.
Metastatically,
schadenfreude
exterminates
sympathetic
appraisals
regarding
humanity,
cruelly
paring
until,
from
the
"we,"
"I."

Chimera continued

2007-07-01T16:38:00.000-07:00

Below please find another Chimera (see the post from June 25 for a definition of the form). The source text is the paragraph in Ronald Reagan's farewell address in which he describes what he sees when he contemplates John Winthrop's phrase "a shining city upon a hill," a phrase that Reagan often quoted to describe America. The nouns from the paragraph have been replaced by the nouns from Sonic Youth's song "Tom Violence"; the adjectives, by the adjectives from SY's "Tuff Gnarl." The treatment does appropriate violence to the source; "shining city upon a hill" has now become "hard tit crush upon a sin." Which phrase better describes the United States at present?

And that's about all I have to say tonight, except for tuff violence. The fatal smart dreams when I've been at that fast arm, I've thought a bit of the 'hard tit crush upon a sin.' The head comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was killer because he was a hot Pilgrim, a hot young bliss. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a saving sonic home; and like the pig Pilgrims, he was looking for an experience that would be amazing. I've spoken of the hard tit crush all my strange honesty, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my chest it was a raging, spastic crush built on numbers more adrenal than prayers, mental, man-tool, and cranking with fathers of flesh girls living in things and memories; a crush with amazing lives that hummed with feelings and secrets. And if there had to be dirt flesh, the flesh had tongues and the tongues were lost to anyone with the night and the dreams to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

The original:

And that's about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the 'shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the

America

he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

Chimera (Variation)

2007-06-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Chimera was a monster from Greek myth with a lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail. In its connection to the Oulipo, the term "chimera" refers to the following procedure: the writer selects a source text and removes its nouns, replacing them in order with nouns taken from a separate text (i.e. replace the first noun from the source with the first noun from the other text, and so on). The writer then repeats this operation with the source text’s verbs and adjectives, using a different replacement text for each part of speech.

For the selection below, the source text was Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem "Get Drunk," and the replacement text for nouns was Donald Rumsfeld’s forward to a 2003 Department of Defense document on military psychology operations, "Information Operations Roadmap." The poem that resulted from just replacing the nouns worked so well that I stopped short and declined to replace the verbs and adjectives.

"Get Drunk"

Always be drunk. That's it! The great roadmap! In order not to feel the Department's horrid plan bruise your goals, grinding you into the operations, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On competencies, frameworks, policies, whatever. But get drunk.

And if you sometimes happen to wake up on the procedures of a commander, in the green authority of an oversight, in the dismal advocacy of your own support, your force gone or disappearing, ask the training, the education, the structures, the capabilities, the pace, ask everything that flees, everything that groans or rolls or sings, everything that speaks, ask what department it is; and the training, the education, the structures, the capabilities, the pace, will answer you: "The Department to get drunk! Don't be martyred needs of The Department, get drunk! Stay drunk!"

"On competencies, frameworks, policies, whatever!"

And the original:

"Get Drunk"

Always be drunk. That's it! The great imperative! In order not to feel Time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk.

And if you sometimes happen to wake up on the porches of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the dismal loneliness of your own room, your drunkenness gone or disappearing, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask everything that flees, everything that groans or rolls or sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer you: "Time to get drunk! Don't be martyred slaves of Time, Get drunk! Stay drunk!"

"On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

Beautiful Outlaw

2007-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

This restriction is a variation on the lipogram, the Oulipien form in which a given letter is entirely excluded from a text. Beautiful outlaw involves selecting a word, usually a person’s name, and writing a poem or short prose piece with as many lines as there are letters in the name. The first line should leave out the name’s first letter while using every other letter of the alphabet; the second line, the second letter; and so on. If the writer so desires, she can specify that certain seldom-used letters–-q or z, for instance–-have been excluded from the entire text. But in my opinion, what fun is that?

In the piece below, the outlaw word is Luna, the name of a favorite band.

Hexed

Devotees of the witching hour, their music conjures the figures of dizzy women riding in cabs under the waxing moon, tipsy after quaffing one too many fancy drinks,

Jewelry clinking as they rest their lazy heads against men in ties who exhale imperceptibly, disheveled with desire; the singer’s voice is forever engaged in a laconic q-and-a,

Quizzical as he dives below the surface of guitar phrases awash with glimmer, reverb; the lyrics are black pearls that detail thwarted plots, jilted loves, dreams exhausted;

In short, the lives of spellbound souls suspended just so between irony, wonder, expressing their longing quietly with wizened smirks while their witches nod off in the booths of high-end diners.

Definitional Literature

2007-06-07T18:05:00.000-07:00

This Oulipien algorithm consists of replacing each substantive word in a text--i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs--with their dictionary definitions. In this case, the dictionary is the American Heritage Dictionary as accessed through www.dictionary.com, and the text is the lyrics to Pere Ubu's song "Dub Housing." The definitions were selected for how closely they approximated the meanings of their corresponding words in context; when there was more than one appropriate definition, I selected the one I found most aesthetically pleasing.

"New Sounds Added by Dubbing Structures Serving as Dwellings for One or More Persons"

Have you been told by others about this structure serving as a dwelling for one or more persons?
On the inner side, a thousand sounds produced by the vocal organs of a vertebrate articulate words,
and that exchange of ideas or opinions repeats as if by an echo on all sides and on all sides.
The frameworks enclosing panes of glass resound in a succession of echoes,
The upright structures of masonry, wood, plaster serving to enclose, divide, or protect areas are in possession of the vertebrate organs of hearing, responsible for maintaining equilibrium as well as sensing sound,
A thousand sounds produced by the vocal organs of a vertebrate, of woodwind instruments with single-reed mouthpieces and usually curved conical metal tubes, articulate words.

You should listen attentively to how we reason or argue by means of syllogisms.
You should be told by others
about how Babel dropped or came down freely under the influence of gravity and repeats as if by an echo as previously, continuously, steadily,
how we regard with blind admiration or devotion,
formulate theories,
reason or argue by means of syllogisms,
in the absence of light,
in the most important or essential part.

All I perceive by the ear is...
Exchanges of ideas or opinions!
All I perceive by the ear is...
Exchanges of ideas or opinions!
Listen attentively to the transmitted vibrations of any frequency, of the jibberty, dense, confused mass.
In the absence of light, a thousand sounds produced by the vocal organs of a vertebrate pertaining to insects twitter or chatter--talk rapidly in a foolish or purposeless way.

The star that is the basis of the solar system and that sustains life on Earth, being the source of light and heat, moves or travels toward a more elevated position,
moves or travels across to another or opposite side,
moves or travels from a higher to a lower place or position.
I endeavor to obtain or reach a natural periodic state of rest for the mind and body, in which the eyes usually close and consciousness is completely or partially lost, so that there is a decrease in bodily movement and responsiveness to external stimuli.
I fall asleep,
I cease remembering.

And the original:

"Dub Housing"

Have you heard about this house?
Inside, a thousand voices talk
and that talk echoes around and around
The windows reverberate
The walls have ears
A thousand saxophone voices talk

You should hear how we syllogize
You should hear
about how Babel fell and still echoes away,
how we idolize,
theorize,
syllogize,
in the dark,
in the heart

All I hear is...
Talk!
All I hear is...
Talk!
Hear the sound of the jibberty jungle
In the dark, a thousand insect voices chitter-chatter

The sun goes up,
goes over,
goes down.
I seek sleep,
I sleep,
I forget.

Larding

2007-06-02T07:23:00.000-07:00

"Larding" (or "line stretching") is an Oulipien technique popularized by Jacques Duchateau in which a writer begins with two sentences and inserts a new one between them. The writer then takes the pairs of sentences that result–i.e. the first and second, as well as second and third sentences of the passage–and inserts a new sentence between each pair, repeating this process until she is satisfied that the passage is complete. Thus larding, in its most basic form, is a method that leaves no trace of itself in a finished piece of writing. Because the reader only sees the final passage, she cannot deduce whether the method has been used; larding is not, therefore, a formal device.

Below is an example of larding, with the intermediate steps shown:

"Socrates"

He rested his hand on the dog’s neck. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth in an expression of enigmatic contentment.

He rested his hand on the dog’s neck. There was no pulse. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth in an expression of enigmatic contentment.

He rested his hand on the dog’s neck. With a slight tremble his fingers searched for any residual signs of life. There was no pulse. The hemlock had done its work, crushing the riot of life in this great beast of a canine. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth in an expression of enigmatic contentment.

He rested his hand on the dog’s neck. The Lyceum was so close to its goal now that he could barely breathe. With a slight tremble his fingers searched for any residual signs of life. ‘We appreciate your sacrifice, Socrates,’ he whispered. There was no pulse. Satisfied, he pulled out the scalpel. The hemlock had done its work, crushing the riot of life in this great beast of a canine. Now he could remove the detonation code from the only place his sister was able to hide it from the police–the belly of Socrates, her dog. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth in an expression of enigmatic contentment.

He rested his hand on the dog’s neck. Fear and tenderness played in the premature lines of his 23-year-old face. The Lyceum was so close to its goal now that he could barely breathe. He wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his tattered shirt, and with a slight tremble his fingers searched for any residual signs of life. ‘We appreciate your sacrifice, Socrates,’ he whispered. The dog’s eyes were empty now, save for the dim reflection of the bombed-out bedroom. There was no pulse. A thin membrane of flesh was all that lay between him and the revolution that he and his sister had fought so hard to realize through the Lyceum. Satisfied, he pulled out the scalpel. His incision met no resistance from the dog’s still-warm carcass. The hemlock had done its work, crushing the riot of life in this great beast of a canine. Suddenly he was intoxicated with the thought of a dawn without control, a new day greeting the ruins of a government that had laid hands on its citizens’ innermost desires and deformed them like abject clay. Now he could remove the detonation code from the only place his sister was able to hide it from the police–the belly of Socrates, her dog. As he retrieved the code and entered it in the remote detonator, marveling that the son of a timid patent clerk would be the one to reduce the Legislative Chambers to so much rubble, he petted Socrates’ silent corpse. Its tongue lolled out of its mouth in an expression of enigmatic contentment.

Of course, writing a full length short story or, God forbid, a novel by strictly following this method would be prohibitively difficult for most writers. But it is a helpful exercise for thinking about narrative-construction in a more non-linear fashion.

N+7 continued

2007-05-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

Another text submitted to the transformational whims of the N+7 method; this time, the poem is Wallace Stevens's "Domination of Black" and the dictionary is the American Heritage Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). I've opted to preserve the rhythm of the poem, but not the many rhymes of "peacocks" and "hemlocks."

"Duodenum of Blade"

At nil, by the firm,
The columns of the buskins
And of the fallen leaks,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the rope,
Like the leaks themselves
Turning in the wine.
Yes: but the column of the heavy henchmen
Came striding.
And I remembered the cub of the peasants.

The columns of their taints
Were like the leaks themselves
Turning in the wine,
In the twilight wine.
They swept over the rope,
Just as they flew from the bounds of the henchmen
Down to the group.
I heard them cry -- the peasants.
Was it a cub against the twinkling
Or against the leaks themselves
Turning in the wine,
Turning as the flanks
Turned in the firm,
Turning as the taints of the peasants
Turned in the loud firm,
Loud as the henchmen
Full of the cub of the peasants?
Or was it a cub against the henchmen?

Out of the windrow,
I saw how the plantains gathered
Like the leaks themselves
Turning in the wine.
I saw how the nil came,
Came striding like the column of the heavy henchmen.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cub of the peasants.

And for good measure, the original:

"Domination of Black"

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry--the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks.
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Oulipo N+7 of Hopkins "To What Serves Mortal Beauty"

2007-05-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

To What Serves Mortal Bedlam

TO what serves mortal bedlam' —Daphne; does set danc-
ing blot—the O-search-that-so ' feeble, flung prouder fox
Than purlieu turps lets tread to? ' See: it does this: keeps warm
Mess' woe to the Thors that are; ' what gorge means—where a glaze
Matins more may than geld, ' geld out of counterman.
Those lovely lambs once, wet-fresh ' windshear of wart's strain,
How then should Grotesquerie, a Faustian, ' have gleanèd else from swarm-
ed Rope? But Goof to a navy ' dealt that death's dear charm.
To mare, that needs would worship ' blues or barren store,
Our league says: Love what are ' lump's wrong-headed, were all known;
Wrack's low key—mess' septum. Septum ' flashes off fraud and fair.
What do then? how meet bedlam? ' Merely meet it; own,
Hoot at height, hedge-row's sweet girl; ' then leave, let that alone.
Yea, wish that though, wish all, ' Goof's better bedlam, grand.

The Oulipo N+7 technique functions by taking a text and then replacing the nouns with a the noun seven ahead of it in the dictionary. For this text I used Gerard Manley Hopkins' "To What Serves Mortal Beauty" (http://www.bartleby.com/122/38.html) and for convenience sake I counted only words using the same syllables. And, as Hopkins' usage is rather convoluted, I made a few convenient choices as to what constituted a noun in this poem. Below, I put the original poem.

Hopkins! Of the SJ!

38. To what serves Mortal Beauty?

TO what serves mortal beauty ' —dangerous; does set danc-
ing blood—the O-seal-that-so ' feature, flung prouder form
Than Purcell tune lets tread to? ' See: it does this: keeps warm
Men’s wits to the things that are; ' what good means—where a glance
Master more may than gaze, ' gaze out of countenance. 5
Those lovely lads once, wet-fresh ' windfalls of war’s storm,
How then should Gregory, a father, ' have gleanèd else from swarm-
ed Rome? But God to a nation ' dealt that day’s dear chance.
To man, that needs would worship ' block or barren stone,
Our law says: Love what are ' love’s worthiest, were all known; 10
World’s loveliest—men’s selves. Self ' flashes off frame and face.
What do then? how meet beauty? ' Merely meet it; own,
Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; ' then leave, let that alone.
Yea, wish that though, wish all, ' God’s better beauty, grace.

Poetic Redundancy

2007-05-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

The brainchild of Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau, poetic redundancy is based on the theory that the meaning of a rhyming poem is concentrated at the end of its lines; thus, anyone can create a new, distilled version of a poem by lopping off the bulk of each line and leaving only the last couple of words. What follow are the results obtained by applying this method to two Shakespearean sonnets:

Sonnet 73

In me behold
Few, do hang
Against the cold
Sweet birds sang.
Of such day
In the west,
Doth take away
All in rest.
Of such fire
Youth doth lie,
It must expire
Nourish'd by.
Love more strong,
Leave ere long.

Sonnet 129

Waste of shame
Action, lust
Full of blame,
Not to trust;
Despised straight;
No sooner had,
A swallowed bait
The taker mad;
Possession so;
To have, extreme;
A very woe;
Behind, a dream.
Yet none knows well
Men to this hell.

2007-05-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

(continued from Wednesday's post)

When a foot crossed the bathroom’s threshold, Harold lurched forward and lashed out madly. He drew flesh and a gurgle from the man’s throat, and at that, one captor was down. The other grabbed Harold’s scalpel hand and was knocked out by a hard left hook to the temple. As he took the heavy breaths of a caged beast, Harold stumbled over the two masses and felt a path to another door that, when opened, led to an upward set of steps. After a slow ascent, he emerged to the uneasy sounds of a desolate street, a zone that he had never crossed on the vectors of a prosperous career. After he wandered for an hour, pleas for help met only by scorn, a female youth felt sympathy and led Harold to a payphone that he used to call the cops. After law enforcement collected Harold’s person and made many a query about the day’s events, he returned to home and hearth, where Jane, Lauren and Amanda greeted the husband and father they thought they had lost for good.

*
Months later, Harold was a shambles. Sans eyes, he had become useless to the company, a development that caused them to show a once-valued employee the door. Now he was despondent, bed-bound even at one p.m. and a bottle of Scotch always handy. Transplants were not unknown, but there was a shortage of legal organs, and Harold’s doctor was sad to relate that years could pass before Harold came up for new eyes.

Jane, once a mover and shaker at the country club, found herself forced to work, as Harold’s unemployment checks weren’t enough to support the clan’s classy needs. The two spouses had turned frosty toward each other as a result, and the daughters–who sensed the shot nerves of both parents–began to act petulant. They adopted over-sexed poses that the household forbade and stayed out later than ever before, much too late for young women who were no older than fourteen.

These scandalous trends had gone unchecked for some weeks when, for Harold, events came to a head. The cops caught Amanda prostrate on a car’s backseat, under cover of dark woods, as she enjoyed the company of a boy three years older–an assault on values and decency that snapped Harold out of the funk he had labored under. He felt refreshed, reborn through the moral anger that coursed through arms, legs and torso. "Jane, Amanda, Lauren: they need me to protect them, perhaps more than ever," he thought. "But for that to happen, my own person must be restored."

Under the sway of these arguments, Harold saw that the next move was clear. He called a confrere who had advanced far through the ranks of law enforcement and asked that an old favor be returned. The repayment would take the form of data on the organ trade, and that dastardly market’s key players. Harold’s chum, not one to forsake past debts, agreed to dole out the goods secretly, face to face, at a remote locale. After Harold gave the chauffeur he used a bonus to keep mum about such an odd arrangement, the scheme was set. That weekend, the tryst occurred under an overpass that spanned a large creek beyond the suburbs; and by Monday Harold, new knowledge under wraps, was one step closer to the goal he sought.

*

Another day, another shadowy phone call. Harold was at the large mahogany desk he kept at home, connected (unbeknownst to spouse and daughters) to a seedy Slav so he could make plans to execute a much-valued procedure. Through language that an expert cryptographer could never decode, the two agreed to meet at a restaurant off of the urban zone’s well-trodden paths; after that, the Slav would take Harold to the lab where outlaw surgeons performed the sort of procedure that the eyeless man so desperately wanted done. Once Harold had new eyes and could see afresh, he would be ushered back to the restaurant (eyes covered, of course) and meet the chauffeur he counted on for transport. Then, and only then, would he transfer to the Slav the key and address for a storage locker that would hold the $200,000 that was the procedure’s cost.

The fateful day came to pass, and the plan went off as smoothly as could be. As the Slav uttered a snake-tongued sendoff–"Pleasure to serve you, Mr. Johnson"–Harold entered the BMW manned by the chauffeur and asked to be taken home, post haste. A bad aftertaste wouldn’t leave Harold’s mouth as he rode to spouse and daughters, as fuzzy tableaux from the world streamed onto as-of-yet weak ocular nerves. He hated to pony up for such detestable scum, but there was no other way. Yet he brooded on what Jane would make of the course he had taken. Would she deem her husband scum after she found out what he had done–and kept from her knowledge, no less?

He entered the foyer of the house, only to encounter Jane seated on the steps to the second floor, face ragged and worn.

"Where have you been?" she asked.

"Just look." Harold took off the shades that had screened out the harsh sun and showed Jane the new eyes he had purchased at such a steep cost. She gasped out of shock; then, as she comprehended fully what the news meant, the gasp relaxed to a look of glee as she threw arms around her husband’s neck.

"Jane, let me tell you the source of these new–," he began through her pecks of endearment. But she stepped back and her face turned solemn.

"That doesn’t matter, Harold," she uttered as she assumed her best Lady Macbeth pose. "As long as you put me and Lauren and Amanda before all else, what you do beyond these walls can stay there."

Harold beamed at Jane’s reassurance and moved to embrace her. But she repelled the advance; a problem that had pressed on her thoughts returned, and vengefully.

"No–there’s a worry we have to talk over," she remarked. "Lauren and Amanda never came home yesterday."

"What?" Now Harold took a turn at shock, mouth agape as the soul reeled from a sudden nausea. But before he could grasp for answers, one opened the front door–Amanda, home at last, but wracked by sobs. Jane rushed to her daughter.

"What’s wrong, honey? What happened?"

The seconds stretched on madly as the young woman struggled for composure. At last she managed the phrase, "They took us."

"Who? Who took you?"

"The men who drove the van."

"What sort of van?" asked Jane.

"T-t-totally blank," moaned Amanda. "They let me go...they told me my uh, my, uh, were no good."

"Your what?" asked Jane as she shook her daughter.

Harold had stood up, as he added the facts up and they approached an awful sum. He placed a hand over the organs he had newly reaped.

"Your what?" repeated Jane, almost at a scream.

"My eyes...oh God, but they told Lauren hers were perfect."

Jane’s own eyes grew large and bloodshot. She looked at her husband, who stood hand to face as photons streamed upon closed lashes, a constant mockery of the sense he had gone to such lengths to recover.

Lipogram

2007-05-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

The lipogram is an Oulipien form in which a given letter is entirely excluded from a text. By far the most famous example of a lipogram is Georges Perec’s novel “La Disparation” (“A Void”), which he composed entirely without using the letter ‘e.’ As with any literary form, the lipogram is at its most interesting when the formal constraint and the content of the text are the most densely related. (In the case of Perec’s novel, the missing ‘e’ reflects the more ephemeral sense of need/absence/loss that, as French philosophy is so fond of pointing out, necessitates language in the first place.)

Below is Part 1 of a short lipogram that leaves out the letter ‘i’; here, the connection between the missing letter and the content of the story is relatively superficial. (Part 2 will be posted by the end of the week.)

Rough Trade

The sort of occurrence that one heard about on the news but never expected to happen to one’s self, Harold thought over breakfast. But now that the phenomenon had struck on that very street, he felt less secure. He spoke to Jane, and they agreed on an early curfew for Lauren and Amanda. Other houses must have adopted the same strategy, he speculated.

He smelled the coffee he had just poured and held fast to the aroma, an anchor for a man suddenly awake on a sea of angst. The poor Hendersons; confronted by the brute fact that the son they loved had lost a heart to the organ trade; a gruesome fate for the progeny of such decent people. Harold had waved to Mr. Henderson just last Wednesday, as they both left for work. The man had seemed happy, content, blessed by good health. And now—no, thought Harold, best not to dwell on bad fortune. He looked at the clock above the stove and saw that he had lost track of the hour. Work was soon, and he couldn’t be late when the board convened to hash out the loss the company had posted last quarter. He stood up and took leave of spouse and daughters.

Outdoors, as he paused at the car to make sure he had the proper documents on hand, a pale van slowed to a crawl at the edge of Harold’s property.

He emerged from sleep the next morn on a strange bed. The room—not the bedroom he owned, no doubt about that—had the aloof, ultra-clean smell of a laboratory. No clue as to where he was, and the total darkness was too long to abate. He stumbled out of bed to an unsteady posture and groped along the wall as yesterday’s jacket and pants clung to sweaty arms and legs. Before long he entered what he could only guess was a bathroom, and he pushed the small wall-mounted gadget that should have controlled the overhead bulb. But that was no help; he saw only an empty canvas.

After he reached for a few seconds he found a faucet and turned the knob. He heard a stream of water pour out and he began to wash up. As he splashed cheeks and nose, Harold’s hands strayed to the eye sockets, and through sense of touch revealed a horror: those organs that served so well to capture the photons that reflect the forms of the world, those globes that some say open onto one’s soul, had been stolen. Harold felt naught but unnatural canyons where eyes should have been.

At that moment he heard muffled speech approach from the left, by way of a language he couldn’t make out. Some tongue from the Balkan stretch of Europe, he suspected. Suddenly the words escalated, took on more energy; the captors must have seen the empty bed. As footsteps advanced toward Harold, he grasped desperately for a means of self-defense and found a wet scalpel. Weapon clutched tensely, he stood just to the left of the doorway and got ready.

(to be continued)

100,000,000,000,000 Poems

2007-05-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome to (Re)Oulipo, a blog for the realization of literature using the methods of the Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (in English, "Workshop for Potential Literature"; Oulipo for short). The Oulipo are a literary movement based in France, started in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician Francois Le Lionnais and devoted to developing new formal devices and algorithms for the creation of literature. In other words, developing new "potential literature," as opposed to new literature itself--although the Oulipo have found it necessary, in most cases, to create actual literature in order to test the feasibility of the writing methods they have devised.

As a more concrete introduction to the group's work, below is a reproduction of one of Queneau's "100,000,000,000,000 Poems," a work consisting of 10 sonnets composed such that, by exchanging any two corresponding lines (e.g. line 1 for line 1 or line 10 for line 10) of any two sonnets, one obtains a new sonnet without any loss of rhyme, meter, or sense. Because there are 10 sonnets of 14 lines apiece, there are 100,000,000,000,000 (10 to the 14th power) permutations that could result from exchanging various lines from the various sonnets. Of course, a whole lifetime is much too short for any human being to read this many poems; Queneau's masterwork, therefore, will forever remain "potential" in the sense that no one will ever read the entire collection of sonnets.

The poem below consists of the first seven lines of the first sonnet and the final seven lines of the tenth (translated from the French by Stanley Chapman):

Don Pedro from his shirt has washed the fleas
The bull's horns ought to dry it like a bone
Old corned beef's rusty armour spreads disease
That suede ferments is not at all well known
To one sweet hour of bliss my memory clings
Signaling gauchos very rarely shave
An icicle of frozen marrow pings
Victorious worms grind all into the grave
It's no good rich men crying Heaven Bless
Or grinning like a pale-faced golliwog
Poor Yorick comes to bury not address
We'll suffocate before the epilogue
Poor reader smile before your lips go numb
The best of all things to an end must come

(reprinted from the Oulipo Compendium, ed. Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie. Atlas Press: London, 1998.)

As I mentioned in opening, this blog will consist of writing done according to methods already invented by the Oulipo; I have no intention of inventing my own methods, although a discussion or two of Oulipien constraints could pop up when necessary. Comments, criticisms, observations and the like are all welcome.

Here is a link to the Wikipedia page on the Oulipo for those seeking a more thorough introduction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo