What I'd like to do here

This blog is all about writing with constraints. It's a topic I want to approach dialogically and not ideologically. I like conversation. My taste for arbitrary invented rules does not extend to prescriptions from aesthetic dictators. I want to explore constrained writing practices, about which I still don't know as much as I'd like, and I want to know what interesting procedures people use in their writing — or their compositions in other media — the ones they've discovered and the ones they've invented. I want to share some of what I know about the procedures invented or collected by Oulipo, and some of what I know about yet other procedures that I have learned about. I may post some of the constrained writing that I do or that the people who attend the Writhing Society meeting do (with their permission, of course). I'll certainly be spreading the words about interesting books, websites, events, and whatever else might interest people who can see the point of this sort of experimentation.

For me the point of it is to escape from the invisible rules and prescriptions of Normal Art, the art produced under the currently dominant paradigm. I want my work to move readers and writers towards a new paradigm. (For more on Normal Art, see the home page of my website, www.tomlafarge.com.) Constrained writing is a means of escaping from old, ingrained, unexamined habits and assumptions. It's a way of escaping the prison of One's Voice, that very voice that writing programs spend so much effort in helping us to find. Raymond Queneau, the co-founder of Oulipo, described the members of that group as "rats who must build the maze from which they intend to escape," and that seems a good place to leave my mission statement for now.