The Writhing Society

Paradisatina

2010-09-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago the Writhing Society composed a collaborative poem. Before we go into how that worked, here it is:

Paradisatina
1.
I wish my life were more like the plot of a novel.
I wish the novel I am reading were my actual life,
that the story would lead to always
a place where the horizon met a large sky, under which I wander;
that the pages would fold there and liberate
and swirl and combine and disconnect and combine again in a perfect Jimi Hendrix sky of absolute possibility
I also wish that it were easier to imagine
a novel which reached so widely
that it would hold in its pages all camaraderie.

2.
Is it possible to have too much camaraderie?
When my room-mate talks, I stick my nose in a novel,
but her woes trail me so widely
I can’t help preferring literature to life.
Fictions are so much easier to imagine,
most often, but not always,
and illuminate the dense shadows with the cool effervescent glow of possibility.
The chords enlarge sound under a large sky, shimmer and wander
and liberate.

3.
Not the way the old and oily chiaroscuro started to liberate
light from dark, that most ancient form of camaraderie
unknown to me. Confined within myself, lost to paradise, I forwander,
looking for something novel,
less real estate than possibility —
a grand diversion which could fling my troubles, shooting widely,
knowing there will be Facebook. Always!
Although Facebook is hardly a substitute for life
and life can’t keep up with what I imagine.

4.
They tell me paradise is lost. So then imagine
Adam and Eve and their horned beasts themselves come to liberate
those lost in the compromised heaven of everyday life,
foundering in earnest committees and corporate camaraderie,
making profit under the guise of improvement. But not always
does Eve find salvation’s tedium sufficient. The same instinct that challenged ignorance leads her to outwander.
What to do when bliss is felt so widely
life feels like a twice-read novel
foreclosing possibility?

5.
But Eve and I are in this game for possibility.
She’s let me know she’s trying to imagine
I’m writing a “novel”
behind those gates too narrow to liberate.
Even emotions can grow outmoded when emoted widely
in the tumbledown garden of Eve’s allegorical life.
She cannot be inerrant. She must move within a constant question. To wander
as her mirrored image in my parallel Eden, I have left behind all camaraderie.
(I wasn’t a confessional guy always.)

6.
To water your lawn you need a garden hose, but not always.
A hose just points one way, but a sprinkler, ah, that creates a possibility
that when liquid life uncoils its length along the grass to sprawl in many-bladed camaraderie
it spreads many-minded Eve in ways not easy to imagine.
Like the way-faring stranger, her constant overwander
trespasses into my novel
muddling of the border between lousy writing and life,
while those who fear trespasses claim mere wandering would liberate:
“Better to find your own paradise than to surrender to the vision which is accepted widely.”

7.
How many on this earth are blind to life's folly? If only the remedy weren't agreed upon widely.
It’s a bad time for poetry, always
either too quick to condemn or too deliberate;
since repeating what’s been done seems the only possibility,
why not cover the bases by leading a multiple life?
yet how isolate, this camaraderie,
like everyone on the train reading the same bestselling novel,
frozen in fiction. This picture forbids Eve to imagine
to find an emptiness large enough within which her question can wander.

8.
Fierce. Acknowledging that death will stop her wander.
Yet death will freeze many things, and widely
clamp on our wriggle, and will it suffice to imagine
open doors before entering? But not always
announcing yourself is a novel
form of social silence: you may as well liberate
your hat from the coatrack, Jack; but, hey, what’s your hurry – isn’t camaraderie
among strangers the last best possibility
in this, the best of all possible sentences, life?

9.
Eve made this or that out of life
through the range of necessity. Her wander
brings ours into the domain of possibility.
Be kind to others; make it a trait that becomes coveted widely
enough to communicate a shape-shifting tale of camaraderie
moving at last to imagine
those blind to Eden, the sweetfool nostalgics who still berate.
“Have at least some scrap paper and a pencil stub on you, always.”
“Write what is beautiful and sad and put it in your novel.”

Envoi
Always wander widely
Liberate novel possibility
Imagine life, camaraderie

This is, as you may have guessed, a mutant sestina. Sestinas normally have six lines per stanza, each ending with a different non-rhyming word, and they run through six stanzas in which those end-words are recombined six ways, according to an algorithm. If the original order of end-words is 123456, the recombined order will be 615243. Then that order is recombined in the same way (so 364125), until every word has occupied every position in the stanza. The seventh repetition would reproduce the order of the first, but in place of a seventh stanza there is normally a three-line envoi where the six words reappear in both medial and final positions in each line.

The pleasure of this form lies in hearing the same words repeating in different positions, metrically and syntactically, and sometimes with different meanings, since words can function as more than one part of speech. For instance, "novel" in the Paradisatina can mean a book or the adjective meaning "new," and "wander" has been used as a verb and a noun and with various prefixes. In a rhyming poem, as soon as you get the scheme, you start to anticipate sound-repetitions, and a sense of order grows from the fulfillment of those successive expectations. A sestina, just as orderly, is a little harder to anticipate. You understand soon enough that the same words are cycling in a rigorous pattern, but the result is different in each stanza, and the repetition that really catches your attention is not of sound but of the words themselves, surrounded by all their meanings and connotations. The word that ends the last line of any stanza also ends the first line of the next stanza, as you will have noticed above.

"Paradisatina" is actually a nonina, nine nine-line stanzas. It is also a quenina, an oulipian term, since Raymond Queneau worked out that certain numbers will produce poems where x stanzas of x lines exhausts the algorithm. 9 is one such number, and the night the Writhing Society took up the form there were, by good luck, nine of us.

Our method: we each thought of three or four words, including a noun, a verb, an adjective and/or adverb (or any other part of speech) that suggested "paradise" to us. (Paradise is the theme of this year's show at Proteus Gowanus, where we meet.) We wrote them out on slips of paper and threw them into my old grey fedora. I shuffled them thoroughly and then went around the table, hat in hand, and each writher took a slip. The word on it was his or her word for that evening.

We each began a nonina. We wrote the first line, which ended in the word we had drawn, and then passed the paper to the person on our right. That person composed the next line, which had to end with the word he or she had drawn, and passed it again. Nine pieces of paper with nine developing noninas were traveling around.

The first stanza was easy. For the second we had to recombine according to the algorithm 918273645. What made this hard was that we were still passing pieces of paper to our right. Our order stayed the same, while the order of the words we had to use kept changing. If I had written the last line of the first stanza, I would write the first line of the second and pass it; easy enough. If, on the other hand, I had written the second line of the first stanza, my line would come as the fourth of the second stanza (you'll see 2 in the fourth position of the algorithm above), and I would have to place it there even though the first three lines (ending in words 9, 1, and 8) had not yet been written. So as this progressed — and it progressed slowly, we completed only two stanzas that evening, and left with headaches at all the math we had to do — we were filling in around what others had already written or else laying down lines that would have to serve others as directions for what they could write. That was the really interesting part and involved the fullest collaboration.

Then we decided to choose one of the nine emerging noninas and finish it so that we could read it at the "Poetry from Paradise" event at Proteus Gowanus. We decided to complete the composition by email. One of the original writhers could not participate, so another, who had not been present that first evening, stepped in. Another had to drop out soon afterwards, so one of us finished his lines for him. The document we passed began with the two stanzas completed, and it went on to give all the end-words in their proper places in the succeeding stanzas, so that people could find where their next line should go and put it in.

At first we passed following the order of the poem; we were each adding next lines that actually followed last lines. But time grew short, and around the beginning of stanza five participants were asked to add all their remaining lines, that is all the lines ending with their word. As before, where nothing else had been written, we were writing lines that fell where they fell. without knowing what came before or after them, or we were having to create a next line or a previous line to one someone else had already placed. I was in the clean-up position, placing lines in between other lines already written.

The result was what you see, including an envoi simply composed of our nine words. On Saturday, September 18th, we led off the "Poetry from Paradise" event. Each of us stood at a station around the perimeter of an audience seated in concentric circles, and each of us read his or her lines as they occurred. (We rehearsed.) The audience thus heard nine voices traveling from nine directions, carrying the poem forward in different timbres and rhythms, while the pattern of end-words slowly evolved through all its permutations.

The writers were: Corina Bardoff, Jacqueline Cantwell, Carrie Cooperider, Tom La Farge, Jennifer Nelson, Angelo Pastormerlo, Erik Schurink, Maria Schurr, and Wendy Walker. The readers were the same except that Janice Everett replaced Jennifer Nelson.

There are plans to record "Paradisatina" and post it on the Proteus Gowanus website.

The Manivelle

2010-06-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

A manivelle is a hand-crank. I took the name for this constraint from an item described by Georges Perec in his short novel Un cabinet d’amateur (1979), translated by Ian Monk as “A Gallery Portrait” in Three By Perec (Godine/Verba Mundi, 2004). Before I come to the constraint, a little more about this book.

Un cabinet d’amateur uses the “gallery” constraint I described in Administrative Assemblages (Proteotypes, 2009). A picture gallery is organized as a sequence or an array of pictures, and a written gallery (what the French used to call a “salon,” a recognized literary form) is a sequence (hard to do salon hanging in writing) of descriptions or analyses of or responses to those pictures. The sequence in which the pictures are “hung” may or may not create a narrative, but a “gallery” will certainly create a sequence and use it to comment on the nature and use of the art image. Perec has used the form in a nearly exhaustive variety of ways: first, description as in a catalogue of an exhibition (the collection of the German-American brewer Hermann Raffke is being shown at the 1913 Pittsburgh celebration of the anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s accession); thereafter a detailed description of one painting, Un cabinet d’amateur, by the German-born Heinrich Kürz, which represents a gallery in the manner of Willem van Haecht’s Art Cabinet of 1628

or Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1832-3), or a number of others, all known to Perec and listed by him.

The “cabinet” Kürz paints is that of his patron Raffke, and includes all the paintings shown in Pittsburgh, which hung alongside his and were therefore already present twice in the exhibition. Like his predecessors, Kürz puts human figures into the gallery, or rather he includes one figure, Raffke’s, in the clothes, the chair, and the very posture in which, some years later, when dead, Raffke has himself stuffed and buried in a sealed vault with his collection, all disposed as in Kürz’s painting and including that painting. The Borgesian theme of infinite regression further appears in Kürz’s including his own painting in his painting of Raffke’s collection, and so visitors to the show in Pittsburgh saw the entire collection a third time, still including his own painting, and so the entire collection a fourth time … Perec has fun with this.

But the novel continues after the exhibition closes. Perec summarizes art-historical analysis, the contents of an auction catalogue from the first sale of work from Raffke’s collection and the prices realized, Raffke’s autobiography including his account of building his collection, a book on Kürz’s painting, in the course of which the author produces evidence authenticating every painting in the collection represented in Kürz’s great work; finally, we are given an account of a second sale of the Raffke collection, all its treasures, and the prices realized, and a final shocking revelation. Perec continues to have fun, largely at the expense of a connoisseurship too focused on the extraordinary images of art, and on its authenticity as established by provenance-stemmas, and too prone to set a value in dollars. At any of a score of places in this novel, stories far more interesting than the one being told start to take form around a suggestive structural element, such as one of those provenance-summaries that list how a work of art passed from one hand to another, or around the excited spectators advancing with their loupes to examine the third-generation copies of masterworks in the painting nesting inside the painting nesting inside Kürz's painting. Perec does not allow any of those stories to develop; he sticks close to his matter-of-fact descriptive account.

In the first sale, one of the items sold is a “paysage à manivelle” — a long scroll-like canvas painted with a mostly continuous landscape, and wrapped around a pair of standing rollers turned by hand-cranks. (Presumably some sort of frame supports rollers and canvas.) Perec’s commentator speculates that it was used as the back-drop in a marionette theater, the scene being changed by a sufficient number of turns of the crank. Where the landscape is continuous, the scene changes gradually, and one imagines the characters in motion, a displacement that is already more novelistic than dramatic. Yet at certain points there are vertical bands of canvas, termini at which the scene changes abruptly and completely. What there is no record of at all is the theater or the play for which this scenery was created. All Perec gives us is the flat description, which moves from the banks of a canal past a lock, past fishers, into a forest and out onto a lane that gradually becomes a city street, which becomes a road leading into “hot country,” passing an oasis with a painted Arab, then finding the sea and a port, before the scene jumps to a carpenter’s shop and carries on. We are left to imagine the story that was enacted before this backdrop and the characters that enacted it.

So the “manivelle” constraint, I infer, consists in reducing a narrative to its setting; in creating a spatial narrative attentive to scenes and objects, but not people, where the time-dimension is present purely as sequence, perhaps of rate as well. Time passes as the crank is turned, and places change but what took place is not represented. The causal sequences of plot must be imagined. We are left some latitude for such imagining by the absence of many very marked features that might suggest actions. The places that Perec describes are not extraordinary, like the works of art collected by Hermann Raffke, and this particular piece is “more a curiosity than a work of art.” The scene represented is, in Perec’s word, “infra-ordinary.” It is an unframed landscape, at least on the sides; nothing is foregrounded because it is entirely a background, but it multiplies the banal realities of every day, which might include an orientalist cliché like the oasis and Arab. If the crank stopped turning, some element could become important by receiving sustained attention, but of course it would depend on just where the crank ceased to turn. For Perec the importance of the infra-ordinary was just the noticing of what we habitually overlook because it is the continuous, hardly varying backdrop of our lives. He wants us to question the habitual, and to give a tongue to common things, which will articulate an anthropology of our own everyday life, what Perec calls the “endotic,” the anti-exotic.

Perec would, I think, have enjoyed the “myriorama” discussed a few posts ago: also a landscape framed between two horizons, but sliced into strips that can be recombined.

The first practice for the manivelle constraint, then, is to create as nearly endless a continuous description of setting as is possible. It could be your own creation, this linear world, or you could abstract it from someone else’s story or even a folk tale or Arthurian legend or the Bible or Odyssey. Such a setting should change at a steady rate, so that some limit must be enforced upon amplifications, which will slow things down, and on cursory listing, which will speed them up. Metaphor and other figurative language must be rigorously excluded; this is to be a literal description, and numerical measurements and compass directions have their place in it. The setting should contain objects in such numbers and describe them in such detail as one might notice while walking past them without stopping.

In short, this writhing exercise is a different from one I used to assign, the description of a room in which a murder or some other calamity was about to happen. For that assignment I actively encouraged adding attention-value beyond what the infra-ordinary contents of the room would normally call for, stressing that moods are not created by naming them but by the intensity and color of the description. The manivelle landscape should not project a mood at all. It should foreground nothing. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, but a story set within this landscape must choose where it begins and where it ends, and where in the middle it comes to a boil; and that will be the work of the reader.

So then a second stage would be to pass one’s manivelle to a reader and have that person write a story without adding any description of setting, using only what occurs between some starting point and some ending, but adding characters and actions. It would be interesting, for that second writer, to choose at random a place to start a story and a place to end it.

A “gallery” would lend itself to a similar exercise. Create a series of descriptions of pictures, which could be landscapes, portraits, history-paintings, still lives, abstractions — but your job is limited to description. Then give what you wrote to someone else to create a story from it. You can come to an agreement whether the “pictures” should be used in the order given or may be rearranged. When we practiced the manivelle in the last meeting of the Writhing Society, one writher, Angelo Pastormerlo, created a written storyboard, drawn from Howard Hawks’ movie The Big Sleep. The story that Casey Soloff derived from it was quite interestingly different, though it shared an atmosphere with the original, perhaps because Angelo had left some dead bodies and suicide notes in the description.

Here is what Jacqueline Cantwell produced by way of description, followed by my narratization of it. Both were written without revision in a space of two hours.

The wave’s edges cast shadows. The lines, shadows of dense water, move across the sandy shore, inches below the water. The shadows are edges, borders in the littoral zone. The shadowlines are shaped in ripples and rhomboids. Glare spots fall on the bottom — question — are the lines reflections from the water’s surface or do the lines also repeat in the actual water? — does the water between the surface and bottom contain changes in density equal to waves on the surface? How much does the edge influence the whole? How is the edge between water and air measured?

Edges and an edge. Always looking from edge — living on the edge, falling off the edge, needing an edge —

The undertow of the world pulling me toward an edge — Living on the edge without a net. Edges and borders require sharp observation. Reports of rain and storms so fierce that the sea’s surface merges into the rain. Swamped — where you can’t see the edge of the sky — A border without a horizon. Not my place — must always see the way out.

The horizon is an edge — the border between sky and water. Land doesn’t count unless it is empty. Space needs to be empty and clear.

The edge is it repeated against the sky just as waves repeat on a shore. The wind moves over the water’s surface and interacts on the edge — How far down does wind stir water — How deep is a surface — The underside of water

The surface is an edge — boundary — like reflections —

The surface — edge — boundary — reflection — spaces of intersection, mingling, ambiguity. The space between the horizon and truck a type of trick — balancing on the edge — because anything big enough to be interesting will overpower the onlooker. Nothing says you get to live. No contract for your life — quite the opposite. Winnding by how gracefully you fail when you get too far out.

Select the most productive edges — edges with swirls and loops and drapery and cures — edges that lead into a freedom — Avoid edges that limit and harm, that turn into cruelty.

Seeing this as a meditation on edges, I followed the directions in the last section.

Jacob and Anna walked along the beach. Each to each was still a silhouette, since they had just met. When he said they were in the zone between the high-tide mark and the low-tide mark, where some species of shellfish and crabs live out their entire lives, she saw beyond the remark to a life of science, unspeakably dull to her, and asked, “Are you studying marine life?” A flatness in her voice marked a limit he thought to turn aside from but then boldly attacked. “I am a crab man,” he said, and his words, the tone of them, the little flash of humor, sank into her soul, but whether she enjoyed them or loathed them was not clear, and his silhouette began to fill, but with two different aspects, one appetizing, one merely there, a generic man. “I cook them,” she replied, as a test, having rejected the much stronger test of telling him how she had caught a bad case of crabs once from a student. That she had suppressed that response led Anna to the realization that too bold a challenge always contains a sexual dimension, and she was wondering how he would have reacted. He noticed she was playing with a button on her shirt as she frowned, and, uncertain what this combination of gestures might mean, did not answer her, did not change his expression, but picked up a stick and walked to a tidal pool where he thought a crab might lurk, left behind by the receding ocean. She watched him wave the stick and wondered if he thought he was casting a spell or what the hell he was doing, when a claw sprang from the pool and gripped the stick. Jacob raised the crab into the air, turned, and moved toward Anna, across whose face amazement moved from the forehead down, chasing irony from the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth and the set of the jaw — it was as if he could see the terminator advance.

First Line Indications

2010-04-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I was sent a pamphlet, Indices, by Daniel Levin Becker. Levin Becker is the youngest (though not the newest) member of Oulipo. He was elected after a Fulbright year spent organizing and indexing that group’s archives, and Indices became at the moment of its publication the latest item in that archive. It is No. 180 of La Bibliothèque Oulipienne, the library of similar pamphlets disseminated mainly within the group and recording new constraints, or new results from old ones, or thinking about particular constraints, which members present at the monthly meetings. This library is still next thing to unavailable, though several volumes of collected pamphlets are in print in French from Le Castor Astral and can be ordered here. Atlas in the UK, publisher of Oulipo Compendium, had plans to bring them out in English, but those plans seem to have lapsed. All the pamphlets are listed on the Oulipo website, but when clicked on and opened they yield only the opening sentence or two, if that. One hopes that will change soon. In the meanwhile Indices was, for me, a fascinating rarity.

Indices means “indexes” and “indications.” Levin Becker’s pamphlet considers book-indexes, specifically the table of contents and the first-line index for a book of poems. Poems are very specific indications of meaning, the most fully intentional kind of writing, while the index of a book is a text not intended to be read in the same way as the text it indexes; not intended to be read at all. It is “apparatus” — a tool like the notes, the bibliography, the table of contents, the running titles, and in some scholarly works those pages that explain what various abbreviations and acronyms stand for: manuscript collections or journals or reference works. Like those other tools, the index is consulted at need. But it is printed on pages like other text and bound into the same codex as other text; it could be read. Levin Becker, like J. G. Ballard before him (see his “The Index” in War Fever), considers the ways of reading by which indexes can be made fully suggestive, if not indicative. By “ways of reading” I am of course saying “constraints for writing.”

Following the title page one opens to a “Table des matières,” or table of contents. The first five items:

5. Lenteur de l’araignée [the slowness of the spider]

6. Préhistoire de l’amour [the prehistory of love]

7. Acharnements [instances of single-minded energy]

8. Soucis inédits [unpublished anxieties]

10. Bribes du sondage isoloir [fragments from isolation-booth soundings]

These are the titles of poems, and there are 64 of them. (My copy is No. 064, and it was mailed to me at Calle del Espiritu Santo 64.) But here another question rises, since this saddle-stitched pamphlet is only 28 pages long — seven sheets printed on both sides, two pages to a side. And it might be at this moment that you remember where the table of contents normally comes in a French book — after the matter it indexes — and notice that the page numbers run from 89 to 108. Where are the poems?

The table des matières is immediately followed by a second index, “Index des premiers vers” or index of first lines (vers meaning line and not verse in French). Such an index would come at the end of an English book of poems, such as the excellent anthology Lovers, Rakes, and Rogues. A new garner of love-songs and merry verses, 1580-1830, ed. John Wardroper (London: Shelfmark, 1997), to which we shall return in due course.

Following that index Levin Becker, on “p. 95,” raises the possibility that the poems named in the table of contents and first-line different exercise may not be found in this book, may have gone astray in the layout process, may even never have troubled to get themselves written. I should add that these are not found titles and first lines but were composed for the occasion by Levin Becker himself; nonce-titles and nonce-incipits.

And it’s interesting to pause here and think about the sort of poetry collections with first-line indexes. That piece of apparatus implies a use of poems that is no longer universal, namely memorizing them. If you’re going to look up a poem that begins with a certain line, you must already know that line. That implies study, or at least more than one reading, which in turn implies that the poem came to you with a certain charge of value on it, a compelling demand for attention to which you acceded. With much contemporary poetry, in English anyway, poetry is consumed as a performance primarily, a text secondarily. I looked in Eliot Weinberger’s Innovators and Outsiders. American Poetry Since 1950 (NY: Marsilio: 1993). No first-line index. Gross and Quasha’s Open Poetry (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1973) doesn’t have one either. When I went to try out Levin Becker’s suggested reading methods, I did not find a collection with a first-line index later than Wallace Stevens’ The Palm At the End Of the Mind (NY: Vintage, 1967). Wallace Stevens is literature; I don’t understand why Louis Zukofsky is not, in the eyes of publishers, but so it is. The French are less shy about placing their work in a literary context, and of course littérature is the li in Oulipo.

Back to Indices, this collection that is nothing but a table of contents and a first-line index. “Que faire?” asks Daniel Levin Becker. What do we do now? He proceeds to make several suggestions for how to use this gutted collection of poems. He begins with the first-line index, “something that can be read, potentially self-sufficient. Beneath its ostensible utilitarian servility it proposes a number of ways to read it” (my translation). He proposes four ways.

A. Ordinally. Read the "first lines" in the sequence of the pages on which they are listed. Here are the first lines for pages 10-12: "Vous a-t-on déjà dit/ La vous qui devint toi/ L'effet de votre toux" [Did anyone ever tell you,/ the You who became just you/ What the effect of your cough is."

B. In index-order. Moving through the index, which is of course alphabetical, select lines as you go that when sequenced in the order in which you found them make a poem.

C. By sound-value. Find lines that, regardless of length, rhyme. “Faute de lumière/ Tu fais le signet dans mon dictionnaire” [For lack of light/ You become the ribbon in my dictionary].

D. By length. Here Levin Becker profits from the regularity of French prosody, more syllabic than accentual. He is able to compose poems whose lines have six, eight, ten, or twelve syllables. Anglophone practitioners will either need to think about matching lengths and meters or about creating freer forms by mixing up a variety of lengths. What we get in each case is a constrained cento, limited only to opening lines.

After this Levin Becker moves on to the titles from the table of contents.

E. Since these can be read sequentially in the order in which they are listed, select pairs of titles or longer units that make a pleasing statement. I tried this with Wallace Stevens but the index of titles was alphabetized (see next). John Berryman’s Delusions, Etc. (NY: Farrar, Straus Girous, 1969) had an ordinal table of contents:

Your birthday in Wisconsin you are 140
Drugs alcohol little sister
In Memoriam (1914-1953)

F. Alphabetically. Stevens works here:

Anything is beautiful if you say it is

Another weeping woman

A pastoral nun

Or:

Arrival at the Waldorf

Banal sojourn

Chaos in motion and not in motion

Dance of the macabre mice

Esthétique du mal

G. By sound, using titles that rhyme. Still Stevens:

The pure good of theory:

World without peculiarity

This is harder with found poetry. You could try this with a variation that allows slant-rhyme or simply repeats a sound from one line to the next, then a second from that to a third, or pursues a single word through several titles.

The prejudice against the past

The plot against the giant

H. By length, as for D, and presenting the same problems. I have converted to lines roughly in iambic pentameter:

Disillusionment of ten o’clock —

So-and-so reclining on her couch

Less and less human, O savage Spirit!

The bird with the coppery, keen claws;

A rabbit as the king of ghosts.

I. “Ready-made elementary moralities.” The morale élémentaire was a form invented by Raymond Queneau. It uses a number of adjective-noun phrases in a particular arrangement, together with a section of freer lines. Levin Becker proposes drawing all of these from the titles. Some day I will give this form some sustained thought; at present I don’t completely get it.

J. Freestyle. Simply construct a poem by making an unconstrained selection from the titles, in short a cento.

K. Couplings. Join the titles with first lines, using any of the above methods.

It was very interesting applying some of Levin Becker’s proposals to Stevens. Hunting through these indexes in search of lines or titles that rhyme or have the same meter made me appreciate the skill, freedom, and originality with which Stevens puts words together. While his aesthetic and his ideas remain quite constant through his career, these act as center to the most particular and vivid speech-creatures describing the most gracefully wild trajectories through his gravitational field.

Before looking at what the Writhing Society made of the first-line index to Lovers, Rakes and Rogues, we should think about some other kinds of apparatus that might lead to poetic results when abstracted from the work they adumbrate. A concordance lists all the verses (of the Bible) or lines (of Shakespeare) in which a given word or phrase occurs. If one went to such a concordance with a word in mind, then one could apply some of the Indices constraints to the verses/lines/sentences in which that word occurs.

The Writhing Society worked with either Lovers, Rakes and Rogues (this scanned page)

or another anthology. Since we were working within a time constraint, we opted first for the Freestyle procedure with first lines and then, using the Length procedure, we constructed “snowballs” (each line one syllable longer than the preceding one) and “melting snowballs” (each line one syllable shorter than the preceding. We discussed but did not put into practice an application of Marcel Bénabou’s “perverses” (his variation of Harry Mathews’ “perverbs”). To do this, you would go to a first-line index and choose some lines that please you. Then divide them in the middle, perhaps at the cesura. Then recombine the beginnings and endings. We had a very good time and were all grateful to Daniel Levin Becker for inspiring us. Here are some results.

A Freestyle poem by me from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:

What a’ devil ails our poets all?

Oh stop the mill, stop the mill, stop it I say!

Really wherever one passes

Through nations ranging, raking elements,

Though I sweep to and fro old iron to find,

Note of me was never took.

Oh mercury pills — those teasing pills.

Oh could I by any chimic art

To be a whore, despite of grace!

The landlord he looks very big —

Was ever mortal man like me?

Prithee die and set me free.

What is beauty but a breath?

Oh smother me to death!

A brief application of the sound constraint (C) at the end. Erik Schurink FWS used The Best Loved Poems of the American People. He changed the lineation in places.

A stranger came one night

 to Yussouf’s tent. A cloud  

possessed the hollow field far out

beyond the city’s lights,  

away from the din and roar

I cannot say, and I will not say

When I have a house—as I sometime may

I cannot say, and I will not say; ‘Roof-tops,  

roof-tops, what do you cover?’

Drop the pebble in the water:  

Just a splash and it’s gone

Does the road wind up-hill  

all the way? I cannot say,  

and I will not say

I cannot say, and I will not say

When a feller hasn’t got a cent, what’s  

hallowed ground? Has earth a clod, have you

 ever sat by the railroad track? Gone is

the city, gone is the day.

A builder builded a temple. I wander’d

lonely as a cloud. The sea is calm  tonight.

My snowball from Lovers, Rakes and Rogues:

Thirsis to die desired

Walking in a meadow green.

She was so exquisite a whore,

Pillycock came to my lady’s toe.

What a thin, fine, cool, airy love at first!

The sun was just setting, the reaping was done;

The old wife she sent to the miller her daughter —

There was a buxom lass and she had a velvet ass.

Erik’s snowball + melting snowball from his anthology:

Give us Men!

A simple child

There was an old fox

No coward soul is mine

Two brown heads with tossing curls

Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest

I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines

Is it true, O Christ in Heaven

O good painter, tell me true

Miss you, miss you, miss you

The woman I am

The parish priest

I love you

Kleiser-Cooperider Rhetorical Readymades

2010-04-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday the Writhing Society came out of hibernation and reconvened at Proteus Gowanus to take up a challenge posed by Carrie Cooperider FWS. She had found, in her collection of odd books, Grenville Kleiser’s 15,000 Useful Phrases, a self-help compendium from 1919. 15,000 Useful Phrases provides a set of readymade locutions, some as simple as an adjective-noun combination, some more elaborate, but all meant to be useful to a person lacking the Harvard vocabulary but interested in raising his or her station in life. Kleiser combed through the literature of the period to come up with — besides merely useful phrases — significant phrases, felicitous phrases, impressive phrases, prepositional phrases, business phrases, literary expressions, striking similes, public speaking phrases, and miscellaneous phrases.

Just this table of contents proposes a constraint, to extend the list in a sort of Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia entry (cf. “John Wilkins’ Analytic Language” in Other Inquisitions): phrases found on tombstones, phrases most often garbled by actors, phrases that sound like Finnish vulgarities, phrases popular with parrots, phrases with too many d’s in them, phrases that raise the dead, private speaking phrases, and so on.

You can download the entire text of Kleiser for nothing from: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18362. The page reproduced above gives you the flavor of his enterprise. The young Jay Gatz, on his way to becoming Gatsby, surely memorized a dozen of these every day. They bespeak that interesting moment in American history when working-class men and women who had been through the wars, either in Europe or in the battle for suffrage, who had been doing some reading and hearing some speakers, decided to challenge the oligarchy by appropriating their speech. (For a look into the same process among immigrants, in this case Jews, see Leo Rosten’s immortal The Education of Hyman Kaplan, in print from Prion Books.)

Carrie proposed a couple of ways in which Kleiser’s readymades might be used. The first, which we didn’t try but which we sense would be fruitful, was to take a published interview (and here I’d like to put in a plug for BOMB magazine, where artists interview other artists) and replace all the answers with phrases from Kleiser. The second requires the writer to fill in if… /then… constructions with phrases. Some results follow, after we note that other similar correlative constructions are equally attractive: neither… /nor…; not only… /but also…; on the one hand… /on the other hand…; there was a time when… / but now… ; shading into the oulipian Marcel Bénabou’s list of antitheses: “Maybe you [do or think or like something]; not me [followed by details].”

If/Then

If the adroit flatterer is the precursor of love, is the ambiguous grimace its apotheosis? (George Spencer)

If familiar sacredness, then air, woodland, water. (Jocelyn Hoshauer)

If each like a corpse within its grave then eyes like a very dark topaz. (Erik Schurink)

If exquisite tact, then a mind very like a bookcase. (Wendy Walker)

If enforced silence, then explosive violence. (Jonah Bloch-Johnson)

If lacerated feelings, then she permitted herself a delicate little smile. (Tom La Farge)

If pelted with an interminable torrent of words, then equitably governed. (Corina Bardoff)

A couple of further procedures were proposed by Jonah Bloch-Johnson, whom we knew in a former life and who here made his entry into the Writhing Society with great fanfare (he is a musician). Jonah began by identifying Kleiser’s phrases as consisting of clichés. Many of them are, certainly, though not many are current. Clichés, Jonah argued, point to some sort of concept in our minds or some sort of experience that many people have had. Flann O’Brien would agree: "A cliché is a phrase that has become fossilized, its component words deprived of their intrinsic light and meaning by incessant usage. Thus it appears that clichés reflect somewhat the frequency of the same situations in life. If this be so, a sociological commentary could be compiled from these items of mortified language." Writing as “Myles na gCopaleen” he compiled a catechism of cliché in his Cruiskeen Lawn column in the Irish Times. A sample:

When things are few, what also are they?  Far between.  

What are stocks of fuel doing when they are low?  Running.  

How low are they running?  Dangerously.
What does one do with a suggestion?  One throws it out.  

For what does one throw a suggestion out?  For what it may be worth.  

What else can be thrown out?  A hint.  

In addition to hurling a hint on such lateral trajectory, what other not unviolent action can be taken with it?  It can be dropped.  

What else is sometimes dropped?  The subject.

For more like this, go to: http://grammar.about.com/b/2008/10/01/the-myles-na-gopaleen-catechism-of-cliche.htm

As a first step, then, at Jonah’s orders, we were to choose a phrase, or more than one, and then for each phrase chosen write two or three short descriptions of situations that the phrase could be used to indicate, the descriptions to be two or three sentences long “and include some detail.” He left it to us to decide whether the activating phrase should be mentioned or suppressed. Then as a second step one would compose a narrative connecting all the descriptions of all the phrases.

The first of these steps could be practiced collaboratively. Each participant in a group could choose a phrase and begin by writing a single short description of the situation evoked by that phrase, and then, concealing that description, pass the phrase along to the next person, who would repeat the process. At the end of a round each participant would have a collection of situation-descriptions by various hands, and then could proceed to write the narrative connecting them.

What we actually did was another minor variation. We each chose two phrases from Kleiser. We then passed those choices to the person on our right. (If we were doing this again, I’d pass one to the right and the other to the left.) We performed Jonah’s first step for each phrase individually, but only describing a single situation. Then we wrote a longer description of the situation suggested by both phrases taken together. I was handed limpid twilight and shadowy vistas of sylvan beauty (both poetic phrases, as you can see). Too easy in combination; there wasn’t much tension between them.

Corina Bardoff took the phrase excretory secretion in the following direction:

There is always a longer way to say a thing, and longer causes a listener to stop paying attention midway through a statement, so the air feels delicate around the two of you. A conversation should be like a silk negligee - soft and almost imperceptible - a negligee that will rip obscenely if anyone says "shit!"

From faces pale with bliss, like evening stars Erik Schurink derived:

At the museum of clocks with fluorescent numbers, there were no visitors but one, enough for the motion sensor to shut off the light, to dissolve the walls and ceiling into Dali’s hereafter.

Here is how Jocelyn Hoshauer combined fatalistic belief and affected, pedantic, and vain:

For living a sinful life, I was condemned to hell in a lecture hall. Knowing I couldn’t do anything about it anyway, I learned what “sin” meant in every religion, first in practice on earth, and then in theory, in hell.

And Wendy Walker’s merger of erudite labors with engulfing waters:

She dove into books looking for she knew not what, and they swallowed her completely. She read each sentence so closely, and pursued it so far, that in the end she couldn’t find her way home. On she journeyed, each volume dropping her through a trap-door into the next, with a what then or why or could this be true, and if so, according to whom? Where was the proof? Where the final word? Down she dropped through the rustling tunnel, down, down, into the nethermost circle of ink.

If you have ideas for other constraints using Kleiser’s phrases, please post them as a comment or send them to me at tomlafarge@gmail.com. Also if you composed some pleasing piece of writing using the constraints mentioned above.

The Myriorama constraint applied

2010-03-13T17:21:00.000-08:00

[The following text, a collaboration by eight writers (listed in order at the end), puts the Myriorama constraint into practice, at least in one of its possible forms. That form requires the writer to begin and to end with the same sentence, in this case, “On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.” Borrowed from Geoffrey Hobhouse’s history of Oxford, opened at random, the sentence moves each account of Mr. Modd’s passion from one writer to the next. Some writers have chosen to add an additional constraint, and we may not be aware of all of them. But the author of the third has described hers: “I have about me at my desk a horizon of books, which I picked up in turn, bibliomantically selecting the sentence or words that straddled the pages I opened to, and incorporating them together from one sentence to another.” The author of the fourth appears, blasphemously, to have applied an N+6 constraint to a passage from the Gospel of Mark. And the author of the last has used each of the words in the base sentence (on, this, Mr., etc) successively as the first word of a sentence. We should emphasize that the order of passages was imposed by ourself and that it is not at all inevitable nor preferable. We encourage the reader to rearrange the pieces to see if Mr. Modd’s strange journey through the passions comes out differently.]

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. “I have personally traversed the Bible end to end no fewer than fifty times in the past twoscore years and have never found so much as a secret stairway, much less a passage to the Northwest Territories. Anyone who claims to have access to Greenland through the Scriptures is a lying, craven humbug and I should be very pleased to administer to such a moral degenerate, as thorough a bible belt-lashing as may be required to effect the decisive and immediate cessation of these outrageous attestations. Our women and children must be protected from these lunatic, evil fantasies!” In response to this outburst, there gathered an uncomfortable silence in the hall, and the musk of despondency was felt to permeate the turgid air. It seemed, alas, that there might truly be no way out of the frozen morass through the Good Book. Then, timidly, a sea-swell voice gathered courage and fell: “But, surely, the account of kayaking via Revelations to the Arctic Sea seems credible...that is, if one considers the source…”

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. On the incommensurability of free will and our inheritance of the original sin, perhaps; on the moral passivity incumbent upon the leprous, yes; on the ursine manifestations of divine vengeance, even, he was content to hold forth at some length, chapter and verse at the ready. On this point, however, no serpentine subtlety of reasoning, no exegetical legerdemain, no sinuous circularity would compel him. On no page in no translation of no gospel and no liturgy, he thundered, could the Lord have endorsed or condoned such wanton sport.

On the contrary, said Dr. Lyle calmly, running a papery finger along the gilt spines of the six or seven volumes prostrate at his side, the selfsame circularity was divinity itself: it was the very fluency of the scriptures, their effortless and perpetual passage from Lore to Lord to Word and back again, that piloted and sustained the human experiment.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. In regard to the concept of Being, a glance at the development and the original etymological meaning of “passage” and “passion” told him he was “Being” only in that he was violent. He was told to forward his doubts to Professor Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard, who wrote concerning the unfinished pyramid and the All-Seeing Eye which adorned the reverse of the seal, as follows: “Lucas Cranach the Elder, ‘Baptism,’ ‘Lord’s Supper,’ and ‘Confession,’ front center and side panels of the Wittenberg Altarpiece (upper triptych), 1547, oil on panels. Stadtkirche, Wittenberg.”

At least two of these things should, in fact, be parroted in the Bible, insofar as parrots seemed the most efficient and economical solution to what would be an otherwise dreary Sunday feast. Mr. Modd arose from his first passion and sat down to eat a “Heiligenvita,” with “gereihten Lebensphasen” on the side, which caused to flash before his eyes once more:

99 43. Elector Frederick: Wittenberg, October 15, 1519

Br 1, 108-112 48, 43-49 15, 390-393

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. To calm his storm he recited Marksman 4:35+6:

35 On that deacon’s bench, when evil had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other sideshow.”

36 And leaving the cruelty, they took him with them in the bobbin, just as he was. And other bobbins were with him.

37 And a great strainer of window arose, and the wayfarers beat into the bobbin, so that the bobbin was already filling.

38 But he was in the stew, asleep on the cutback; and they woke him and said to him, “Teamster, do you not care if we perish?"

39 And he awoke and rebuked the window, and said to the seahorse, “Peal! Be still!” And the window ceased, and there was a great camel.

40 He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no falsehood?”

41 And they were filled with aye, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even window and seahorse obey him?”

With delight, Mr. Modd used this opportunity to knight the seahorse and add him to the chessboard, to block the teamster’s most recent move, mating Modd’s king. However, the seahorse swam back to the farthest reaches of the 8x8 field, in an act of loyalty to the teamster’s rebuke.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible...To know a bad husband, look at his wife's countenance--Jest with an ass, and he will flap you in the face with his tail—He who remains in the mill grinds, not he who goes and comes--A house filled with guests is eaten up and ill spoken of—When the curate licks the knife, it must be bad for the clerk—A reconciled friend is a double enemy—Do on the hill as you would in the hall—He that makes himself a sheep shall be eaten by the wolves—A soldier, fire, and water, make room for themselves—When an ass is among monkeys, they all make faces at him—A wonder lasts but nine days, and then the puppy's eyes are open—He who has one foot in a brothel, has the other in the hospital—He that hath feathered his nest may flee when he likes...

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. Mere as it was, they were, two words, eroded from the original—mistranslated?—set apart from verbose verses, subjugating subtexts, centuries past and far hence, song of songs, lord of lords, king of kings—no. No, no. This was no holiest of holies but rather a folly, suckered from sadness over a body entombed to be exhumed through a sliver of a—what? A sentence? Was that what this was—as in, subject and verb; as in, punishment to be served; as in, life and death—enough to make those around him weep? (He no longer being Mr. Modd, but said person in said sentence.) “Jesus wept,” he read aloud (he being Mr. Modd), two words, amid versed verbs, subjected subjects, songs and kings and holy lords that he didn’t believe, paired down to those words: simply put. His fingers traced, before he paced. His heart raced—fluttering, muttering, stuttering—until he heard himself, weeping.

On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible. “Whose Bible?” But when his antagonist, Ms. Arkhayak, protested there is only one Bible in all of Christiandom, and that “you know that to be true; you also know in your heart that Bible itself is truth,” Mr. Modd took a reserved tone to reply that “at least part of the Bible to which you refer, Ms. Arkhayak, belongs as well to the Judaic world, yet nonetheless, you cannot claim the mantle of truth for any written object, truth is a concept which belongs to the world entire and the world entire holds that concept within the realm of its dignified and powerful silence.” “I see,” replied Ms. Arkhayak. You cannot hold your sacrilege in silence, and the Bible condemns you to eternal wrath.” With her body aroused into a storm, a vision struck Mr. Modd of Ms. Arkhayak disrobed, entirely naked. Transposing his laugh into another emotion, on this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.

On what grounds did he pronounce his opinion so vehemently? This, no kidding, is it. Mr. Fundamentalist had informed him that God didn’t say such things. Modd swallowed his ill-informed statement uncritically. Fell for Mr. Fundamentalist, he did, just like that! Into what paths may the feeble-minded stray! A good thing all of us here are Ivy League. Violent action might otherwise prove necessary. Passion shows no preference for great intellects, but often endows weak ones very generously. And you know what? Maintained by a dazzling and fervent speaker, any statement, no matter how dubious, will gain credit. That we all know but too well. It is time for lunch now, I think. Was that the bell? Utterly barbaric to delay a meal. Impossible to conduct business, or conversation, for that matter, on an empty stomach. That anyone should expect it is incredible. Any day now such oppression will be recognized and outlawed. Such abuse as the prophets railed against in chapter and verse. Passage after passage details the duress inflicted by God the Father upon those at table. Should a plentiful meal threaten to occur, some fearsome event never fails to interrupt it. Be quiet, won’t you, I am still eating! Found this succulent steak béarnaise on your plate. In what chapter does God command that you share all you have? The following verse: Thou shalt hold thy fork with thy little, ring and index finger, and never on pain of death touch it with thy thumb. Bible etiquette, the eleventh commandment, as I have interpreted it for all of you here present. On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible.

1. Carrie Cooperider

2. Daniel Levin Becker

3. Jennifer Nelson

4. Erik Schurink

5. Davis Schneiderman

6. Gretchen Henderson

7. Martin Nakell

8. Wendy Walker

Incessu patuit: revealing the gesture

2010-03-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

In this post we introduce a new constraint that I’ll call “Incessu Patuit” (explanation to follow). Like most new constraints, it’s a variation on old ones. In “Incessu Patuit” you choose a printed text — a page from a book or a poem or essay, something short to start with. Then copy the last two words on each line. In the case of hyphenated words, the strict writher will use only the part of the word that precedes the hyphen, as well as that mark itself, in order to create interesting new compounds. Or you can use the whole of the word that begins at line’s end. When you have a list of all the pairs of words and word-parts in order, create a new text by recombining them in a different order, keeping the pairs together.

Of course there are many ways to vary this constraint. Another that I have tried involves using the first word in the line plus as many other words (from that line and in order) as I need, and continuing to do the same in the next line, and so on. You could do the same with the final words. “Mesostics,” a technique used by John Cage, takes words from the middle of the line. Cage generated the text for Roaratorio, his circus-opera based on Finnegans Wake, by going through Joyce’s book line by line, using the successive letters in James Joyce’s name as a tool for selecting words. Thus he read till he found a word containing a j not followed by a and used that word and up to a set number of words to either side of it, then in the next line found an a not followed by an m and did the same.

“Haikuization,” a technique invented by the Oulipo for improving poetry, reduces long lines to short ones by using only the first and last words of the line. I once found a constraint called “La page rongée des rats” (the page gnawed by rats) in a French book called Petite fabrique de littérature by Alain Duchesne and Thierry Leguay (Paris: Magnard, 1999). The idea is that rats have been at the book you left in the attic and eaten part of every line; your job is to compose the part of the line they ate by extrapolation from what is left, so as to restore a coherent reading, which will probably vary considerably from the original.

The Writhing Society has practiced most of these methods at one time or another. What is interesting about them is that they all discover/uncover a secondary or derived text within the first or base text, and in so doing often uncover rhythms and even discourses latent in the base text. Thus in Sexual Stealing, her current project, Wendy Walker, by choosing one word from each line of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, has found within that classic Gothic text the discourse of “sexual stealing,” the violent appropriation of libidinal objects up to and including one’s own personal freedom, as practiced on the sugar plantations of the West Indies in the late eighteenth century — the same historical moment as the invention of the English Gothic novel.

What follows is an example of “Incessu patuit,” to illustrate how it works; but it’s a significant example for me. I have been working on a set of pieces of constrained writing based on Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, a title that will be familiar to anyone interested in natural history. The first edition was published in London in 1789, and the book consists of two sets of letters, to Thomas Pennant and to Daines Barrington, written over the course of a third of a century. In an era of widely read savants making sweeping claims about animals, their structure, their evolution, and their behavior, Gilbert White wrote anecdotally about his observations in the parish of Selborne, in Southamptonshire, where he had been born and served as the curate. The letter that I have used for this exercise is No. XLII to Daines Barrington. Dated from Selborne on August 7^th, 1778, the letter begins, “Dear Sir, A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape….” By “air” White means what modern bird-watchers call a bird’s “jizz” (which will strike readers of Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs as a really unfortunate word to choose). It means something like what a gardener calls a plant’s “habit,” (as in “a climbing habit,” “a spreading habit”), in other words a characteristic mode of movement and of carrying itself; the shape it makes in the world; what I would call its “gesture.”

Gesture was a key word in Bertolt Brecht’s description of what he found in Chinese theater and in Walter Benjamin’s description of the style of personantion practiced in Brecht’s own epic theater; it seems to me a element of all style, in writing or other composition. In looking at handwriting and calligraphy we are always conscious of the distinctive gestures made by the glyphs, letters or ideograms. My purpose in what follows was to see if some characteristic “air” or gesture of Gilbert White’s own writing style would emerge from my selection of words.

Here is a table that shows the pairs of words that end each successive line of Letter XLII to Daines Barrington, as printed in the first edition of 1789, which I found in Eighteenth Century Collections Online (a database published by Gale Publishing; many thanks to James Walsh for directing me to it). Words in blue have been used once, words in red twice, words in green three times.

cuique genere	and thus	goat-suckers
by their	tumble in	meteor; starlings
as well	their walks	and desultory
hand. For,	wings at	ground and
a manner	curves. All	quick evolu-
least, that	a support	moves with
judicious observer	hooked-clawed	birds fly
bird in	third foot	small birds
incessu patuit	the gallinae	legs alternately.
wings expand-	with dif-	woodlarks hang
that the	line. Mag-	curves, singing
the Saxon	no dispatch;	and gesticulations
peculiar mode	light bodies;	-kind waddle;
in aire	burdens, such	their tails;
while being	the sort	most wild-
of corn	one against	position. The
dog. Owls	variety called	are very
they seem	have move-	hooked appear-
ravens that	though strong	their legs
spend all	the wing	reason is
wing in	while breed-	center of
one place	wind-hover;	too backward.
croak, and	languishing and
gesture betides	dying bird;

And here is the piece I composed by recombining these word-groups, allowing myself to use some of them more than once but not to omit any. I have kept all original punctuation and capitalization; sometimes I have left additional spaces where I would want some punctuation. The Latin epigraph, incessu patuit, is from the Aeneid, Book 4, where it is said of Venus, who appears in disguise, that “by her air (or gait, or habit, or jizz) [the true goddess] is revealed.” It seems an apt name for all the constraints described in this post.

gesture betides light bodies

incessu patuit

birds fly their walks

they seem curves, singing curves. All meteor; starlings are very wing in wind-hover; quick evolu-wings expand-most wild-hooked appear-least, that while being in aire spend all burdens, such gesture betides light bodies; the Saxon hooked-clawed bird in one place have move-moves with with dif-wings at no dispatch; while breed-dying bird; reason is languishing and too backward.

the wing moves with a manner line. Mag-kind waddle; legs alternately. third foot a support one against ground and and desultory and gesticulations their legs though strong are very hand. For, while being their legs their legs are very too backward.

reason is position.

The ravens that croak, and tumble in cuique genere by their peculiar mode they seem their tails; goat-suckers the sort that the judicious observer variety called bird in dog. Owls while being woodlarks hang wings at center of light bodies; the gallinae small birds of corn spend all and thus dying bird; as well as well as well

Guagua and Punkwatrain results

2010-02-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

We’ve suggested three constraints in recent posts, La Guagua, the Punkwatrain, and the Myriorama; now we’d like to share some of the results we’ve received for the first two. The Myriorama has four sections to it now, and we’ll hope for a few more before we post that too.

This post’s featured writher is, as so often before, Erik Schurink FWS. His Guagua features the boroughs of New York. (A Guagua, you will remember, is a text in which the last sound of a word is repeated as the first sound of the next word: La Antigua Guatemala was the prototype. Short phrases invariably spoken as a unit, such as Staten Island or "tunnel vision," count as one word.)

New York orchestra

Manhattan tunnel-vision shuns unseen scenery
reaping ingrown ownership

Staten Island endolithic Icarus

usurping kingdom dominant anteroom

The Bronx unction, unsettling lingo gospel

pulses Española, La Habana, Nanjing Yankees

Queensborough’s Rosetta Stone astounds

Brooklyn lineages gestate States-wide ideologues

blogging ingeniously liberal role-models Dullsville vilifies

One was holding one’s breath to see how Erik would handle “The Bronx,” and I think you’ll agree that his solution is brilliant. “Bronx unction” has to be extreme.

The Punkwatrain, adapted from Robert Rapilly’s invention (in French), “le katrainbour,” is a quatrain that expands a single line which is a homophonic version (pun) of a name. I proposed “Gowanus Canal” as the name; so then the first stage of composition involves creating a line that sounds quite like “Gowanus Canal,” the second to create a quatrain that leads up to that line and that refers in some way to the Gowanus Canal. This was Erik’s first shot:

Punxsutawney Phil

Emptied himself from his hole

And said upon smelling Brooklyn’s spill

“Go one ass, come all”

Punxsutawney Phil is the groundhog whose response to his own shadow, on Groundhog Day, determines the duration of winter. Punxsutawney, besides being the name of a place in Pennsylvania where this observation takes place [I think], puns pleasantly on the first half of punkwatrain. Those not living near the Gowanus Canal may need to be reminded that it usually is emitting distinctively disagreeable smells.

In this next punkwatrain Erik adds on a second constraint by limiting himself to words from a poem by Galway Kinnell:

Remember the bud, the hand, the earthen snout, the fodder

and slops, and spine, and the spiritual curl of the tail

of the sow; and the saint, Maud and Fergus, and their mother—

wife of the long, perfect loveliness Galway S. Kinnell.

I’m ashamed to say that when I first read this, I didn’t see that “Galway S. Kinnell” is homophonic with Gowanus Canal. (The poet does not have or use that middle initial.) I loved the poem, more interesting, to my taste, than most of Kinnell’s own. But the quatrain did not allude to the Gowanus Canal. I wrote Erik about this, and he carried out this second version:

the long, perfect loveliness of Gowanus Canal

when your sewer smells like hogs in hell

think of it as the Sow, blessed by a Saint,

mirror it as thy Self, rich with constraint,

advises poet Galway S. Kinnell

Yes, that is about what Kinnell would say about the Gowanus, I think.

Finally I received from Robert Rapilly himself, a katrainbour in French:

Pour nettoyer son canoë

sous un déluge de nitrates,

le plus sûr conseil qu'a Noé

vient du livre aux Ours Écarlates.

Tome lave Arche

“To wash down your canoe,/ beneath a downpour of nitrates,/ the best advice that Noah has/ comes from the book The Crimson Bears.

“Tome washes Ark.”

The Crimson Bears was the first book I wrote, and "tome lave Arche" is my own name pronounced with French inflections (maybe a little Yiddish also). Highly gratifying; I feel as if I have been inducted into the Legion of On Oar, the galley-slaves of constrained writing. I wrote back with the following punkwatrain on "Robert Rapilly" (Rapilly runs a website called Zazie mode d’emploi, and he constributes regularly to a publication called Archimède, as well as to Drunken Boat, to which I did not allude.) To make things even more like galley-slaving, each line is an anagram of the others. That made rhyming impossible, of course.

Zazie can fish her jokes from any modern river,
jook¹-dance hazy if-mazes, never in mirror — fresh —

jazz Archimedes’ kin free from sorry nano-hive,

share fizzy Norman²-French over-jokes I admire.

“Robe air rapidly”

1. “Jook” (var. “juke”), de “jook joint,” avec la suggestion d’une forme de danse libre dans une espace contrainte. [“Jook joints” were small dance halls for African American laborers. Thus “jook” is being used to suggest free dance in a constrained space.]

2. Hommage à Queneau (et Breton) [both from Normandy].

Next post we'll get the Myriorama rolling, so please sit down and write one and send it in. The guidelines are in the last post before this one.

Myriorama

2010-02-01T16:08:00.000-08:00

The "myriorama," or tableau polyoptique, invented by Jean-Pierre Brès in Napoleonic France, is a variable landscape, a panorama whose elements can be interchanged to create an enormous number of different scenes. Often printed on cards, a myriorama consisting of 18 cards (and there are sets with as many as 26) will yield 18 to the 18th different combinations, many more than Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (a hundred thousand billion poems = 10 to the 14th combinations). This set of cards, "The Endless Landscape," a Christmas present from Wendy Walker, has 24 cards, which the publishers (Tobar Ltd. in the UK) reckon can be assembled in 1,686,553, 615, 927, 922, 354, 187, 720 ways.

Notice how several different horizons have been matched so that they will join whenever any two cards are placed side by side: the haze, the hills, the islands, the near bank, the road, the grass this side of the road. At first glance it may not seem as if changing the order of the cards will make any dramatic difference to the landscape as a whole. But if you wanted to make a narrative that read from left to right (or right to left), then the different elements in the cards — the obelisk, the balloon, the kite-flyers, the island with the gaping cave , the groups walking or riding in one direction or the other — suggest encounters, conversations, adventures that could all be changed by a reshuffling of the cards, which were created as a game for children.

But the images could be more emblematic and their sequence less rationalized.

Hiroshige, an electron microscope image of slimemolds, Francis Bacon, Jacques Callot, and Lyonel Feininger all contributed to this one, with one non-reassemblable horizon line.. A "pure" myriorama might never proceed to the stage of creating a text, narrative or otherwise. It would be fun to create images such that they match up when laid alongside. Besides landscapes it should be possible to make a composite portrait that way. Another famous 19th century game consisted of a book whose pages, each figuring a cartoonish character, were sliced across at the neck and the waist, so that the individual thirds of the pages could be turned separately. In that way the heads, upper bodies, and lower bodies can be recombined. I have never seen such a book with pages cut vertically, but it could be done.

A myriorama could be constructed of text alone. There would have to be a verbal "horizon," an element to link each section of text. This might consist of a phrase with which each segment would end: "… with the consequence that" would yield a very plotted story. Or it could return to the same time and/or place and relaunch from there. Or to an image. One can imagine musical myrioramas where the "horizon" might be, again, a phrase played in the same key at the same pitch and tempo, by the same instruments, a motif exactly repeated. If Wagner had composed in this way, we could reassemble his operas in all the combinations they would afford us. Wagner was perhaps not the man to yield control to listeners, but another composer could.

And of course all of this can be done collaboratively. Once the horizon line is established, from which each segment must begin and to which it must return, different composers can create the segments, and then the group can share the whole "deck" to make whatever combination is preferred, individually or collectively.

I reach for the nearest book to create a challenge. The book is Christopher Hobhouse's Oxford. As It Was and As It Is Today (London: B. T. Batsford, 1939). I open it at random to page 64. Using the following sentence as an opening and a closing, compose two hundred words and send them to tomlafarge@gmail.com:

"On this Mr. Modd fell into a violent passion, and maintained that it was utterly impossible that any such passage should be found in the Bible."

Or make up your own myriorama and send it to the same address.

[Erik Schurink FWS has recently posted a set of excellent images to Gretchen Henderson's collaborative blog, Galerie de Difformité. My own cut-up piece, "Vitellius' Violent Propensity, is a side-gallery in Exhibit O.]

Punkwatrain of the Gowanus Canal

2010-01-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

[Also in …celebration… of the Gowanus Canal, here is a fine visual-verbal example of the “guagua,” the last constraint we proposed, created by Erik Schurink, FWS]

One of the most consistently interesting para-oulipians in France is Robert Rapilly, teacher and painter, who annually, in October, proposes a constrained-writing project on his website, Zazie mode d’emploi. (The name conflates the titles of two books, Zazie dans le métro by Raymond Queneau, co-founder of Oulipo and La vie mode d’emploi [Life A User’s Manual] by Georges Perec, one of Oulipo’s most fertile minds and pens. Zazie and la vie are of course isovocalic.)

Last October Rapilly offered a passage by another oulipian, Paul Fournel, the current president, who spoke — largely to deaf ears — at the nOulipo conference organized by Christine Wertheimer and Mattias Viegener in Los Angeles in 2005. The passage presented a case for the proposition: "Le vélo est l'école du vent" ("The bicycle is a wind-school.") Responders were to transform that passage using any constraint they liked. If reasonably francophone, you can see the passage at http://blackbanzai.free.fr/, where you will also find, under “contraintes,” a number of other good writing ideas.

More recently Rapilly has proposed a constraint he calls the “katrainbour,” a cross between quatrain, the verse form, and calembour, the French word for pun. I’ve therefore called it, till someone comes up with a better name, “punkwatrain,” and I would like to launch this English version with an hommage to the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary collaborative gallery and reading room that houses the Writhing Society and in every way our mother-ship, stands near the oozy marge of that notorious punk para-waterway, itself one of the great amalgams or conflations of substances left in post-industrial New York and a icon of pollution that should probably be preserved as a hideous warning. Proteus Gowanus has recently opened its “Hall of the Gowanus,” a permanent installation of art, artifacts, and books relating to the Gowanus (www.proteusgowanus.com).

The punkwatrain, as described by Rapilly (I am paraphrasing his instructions), works like this: you start with a name: Gowanus Canal (or “the [or da] Gowanus Canal”). You translate it into its (roughly) homophonic equivalent: “Go on askin’, Al.” This new phrase will now serve as the “moral” of a short fable or riddle in a verse quatrain, within which some oblique reference must be made to the original phrase, in this case Gowanus Canal. The rhyme scheme and meter of the quatrain is left up to you.

Gore takes the global view: “Go Green!”
Well, fine, but there’s a spot
Of brown in Brooklyn Al’s not seen.
A waterway it’s not.
"Go on askin’, Al."
(Gowanus Canal)

The names of Paris subway stations has proved, for the francophone responders, a popular source of katrainbours for Rapilly’s French responders. Most metro stations are named for people or battles, and many consist of short phrases or hyphenations, making them more apt for this constraint that most stations in New York. The quatrains for Réaumur-Sébastopol, for example, must allude both to the French savant’s invention of the thermometer-scale that bears his name or to his studies in entomology, and as well to the Crimean city, home of the tsarist Black Sea fleet, besieged by the French (and British and Turks) in the Crimean War.

When so applied, katrainbours represent an elaboration of a famous public-works project carried out by Oulipo, the “Strasbourg tramway” (or “Troll de Tram,” a phrase that inflects the French phrase drôle de tram [odd tram] towards its German pronunciation, since Strasbourg is the capital of Alsace and has a large German-speaking population). While building a new system of tramways, Strasbourg commissioned a set of texts from the Oulipo, one for each of 32 stops coming and going on the A line, Hautepierre - Illkirch. This challenge was met in several different ways; the homophonic one involved taking the phrase le tramway de Strasbourg and translating it homophonically 32 times to produce 32 other phrases, each of which was then “explained” in a brief text. Texts and homophonic phrases were inscribed at the top of the column marking the spot and presumably are still to be read there today. The following phrases are some samples; the entire set may be read on:

http://membres.lycos.fr/dmasson/tramway-strasbourg/:

Les trois nuées aident ce Thrace gourd.

L'ogre a mué: deux grasses courges.

Le crin mouillé décrasse bourbe.

Les trames nouées de ces phrases: bourde.

Laide rame, où est Destin, se gourre.

Les drachmes loués terrassent Boers.

Loth rame. Ouais! Doxa se gourre.

All quite roughly homophonic with “le tramway de Strasbourg.” Here’s the full text of the homophonic inscription at the Etoile stop (going towards the Illkirch terminal), preceded by its explanation:

L'été dernier, sur l'Ill, avant de couler par le fond, une barque, occupée par un couple d'individus agités, avançait d'une façon aussi spectaculaire qu'anarchique.

Les deux ramaient dextre à rebours.

“Last summer on the river Ill, before it sank to the bottom, a rowboat occupied by a pair of agitated characters made its way in a manner no less striking than anarchic.

“The two rowed with their right hands moving in reverse.”

Some of the other stories that commuters in Strasbourg have been given to puzzle over involve Lot’s escape from Sodom by boat, contrary to received tradition; the scandal created in St. Petersburg by the fat calves of the Bulgarian tsar Dimitri XIV; the severely pursed lips of the guard at the entrance of the Villa d’Este in Rome; the shoals of sprats dancing in the harbor at the launching of an ocean liner. Some products of other constraints are described by David Fisher in English at http://www.terramedia.co.uk/fisherscircle/ask_me/oulipo_in_strasbourg.htm.

It would be possible to create a sort of linked tanka-like form of punkwatrains by finding or creating a series of names or short phrases, and then working Rapillian magic on each of them in sequence to create, perhaps, a narrative in quatrains, or a verse-and-response. If passed around, each new punkwatrain could be required to refer to and comment on the last.

If anyone wants to give this constraint a try and likes the results, please let us know the results. Send them to tomlafarge@gmail.com for potential posting.

La Guagua

2010-01-07T10:15:00.000-08:00

This constraint is not named for the Caribbean Spanish word for “bus,” in common use in New York and, oddly, the Canary Islands. In Guatemala, where we are now writhing remotely, the word for bus is “bus” (pronounced “booss” of course), and this town, La Antigua, is filled with colorfully painted buses doing a second term of service after retiring as school buses from districts in New Jersey, Colorado, almost everywhere but New York.

So we’re in La Antigua, Guatemala. To be more exact, we’re in La Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala, and if we were in the ancient district of town (not that there is one, the whole town is colonial), we would be in La Antigua Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala. Antigua Guatemala is a pleasing placename because the last syllable of the first word and the first syllable of the second are the same, giving the succession “guagua.”

This constraint accordingly requires every next word to begin with the syllable(s) that ended the last one. I am interpreting the term “syllable” a little loosely to mean a syllable-length cluster of sounds, or else one-syllable words would throw one into an endless cycle of repetitions. And it’s more important to get the sounds to echo than to worry about reproducing the spelling, so that one word might end in –tion and the next begin with shun-. In the following examples I have begun and ended with “Antigua Guatemala.” It may help to know that there is a sizeable though not overwhelming gringo community here, the core of which has been here for decades, is well-heeled, and is approaching ninety. You see them lunching sometimes, before they are wheeled off to the late-afternoon drinks rota. There are also a number of young men and women here to study Spanish or work for some NGO, of which there are hundreds, so that there is also an extremely active drinking and dating scene.

1. Antigua Guatemala laments encircling Klingon goners, ersatz tsarinas, a renascent centenarian Aryan auntie in Antigua, Guatemala.

2. Antigua Guatemala, mal-a-propos propositions unsettle you till you ululate. Atypical pickled kill-jar jargon-gonzo Zoloft off-track actors, or something, think incompetent attention-getting tingly-gleeful. Fulcrum rum-unbalanced, lance-dick stick-up hiccup upscale aliens inspire pirating in gallant Antigua Guatemala.

The next one is in Spanish and sent me to the dictionary.

3. Antigua Guatemala, tema la mala languidez destruyendo dondequieraque, aquella llaga gallardia, diablura rancia, ciatica, tic a cagar, gargujo, jodito todo, dolorido dominio, ion oneroso, soso solidaridad – dadiva divagada, adagio yo no se, no sea antigua, Antigua Guatemala.

[Glossary and notes: “tema” is imperative formal for temer, to fear. “Dondequieraque” means “wherever.” “Aquella” (“that one”) refers back to “languidez,” to which “diablura” (devil's-work), “ciatica,” “tic a cagar” (shitting-compulsion) and “gargujo” (phlegm) are all appositive. "Llagar" means to wound and "gallardia" gallantry. "Jodito" means "fucked." “Soso” means “tasteless.” “Yo no sé” (“I don’t know”) refers to a popular café in Antigua, and “yo” is normally pronounce “jo” in Guatemala. We trust this information is helpful.]

Cooperider's Expansion

2009-12-20T15:25:00.000-08:00

León Ferrari. Cuadro escrito (Written painting). December 17, 1964
Ink on paper
26 x 187／8" (66 x 48 cm)
Collection Eduardo F. Costantini, Buenos Aires
http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/153/1630

A few weeks ago the Society was invited to create a form of ekphrastic response: a piece of writing that responds to a visual work, or vice versa. The request came from our friends Joseph Starr and Alicita Rodriguez in their call for work for the next issue of Marginalia. Carrie Cooperider FWS came up with an expansion that somewhat resembles the oulipian procedure of "larding" (le tireur à la ligne),which amplifies a preexistent text by adding language internally, words between words or sentences between sentences. Larding is a fine collaborative procedure. In one session we each wrote two consecutive sentences, one at the top of a page and one at the bottom. Then we passed the page to our neighbor, who inserted a sentence between these two before passing to the next person, who had a choice of which pair of sentences to insert a sentence between; and so the page went round till it was full, the original sentences serving as beginning and ending of a now quite variegated and sometimes doubtfully continuous paragraph.

Cooperider's Expansion works a little differently. It is ekphrastic in that it responds to a painting recently shown in New York, Leon Ferrari's Cuadro escrito from the Tangled Alphabets show at MoMA.

The actual raw material for Carrie's piece was two sentences from the catalog of that show (Andrea Giunta, "León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody", in Luis Pérez-Oramas, León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: Tangled Alphabets [NY and São Paulo: The Museum of Modern Art and Cosac Naify, 2009], p. 51). Carrie broke the two sentences into groups of from one to five words, following the natural rhetorical pauses. She then turned each word-group into a full sentence that incorporated that word or those words.

Here are the original two sentences: "The Manuscritos series includes Cuadro escrito, a piece of writing, a conceptual operation that describes the painting Ferrari would make 'if I knew how to paint.' This is not, however, a cold list of portrait, landscape, or still life subjects to be described with the materials of painting ('marten hairs on the tip of a flexible stick of ash drenched and submerged in crimson oil'); it is instead a motley gathering featuring birds."

And here is the way they were broken down and expanded, the original words in boldface:

Once jutting forth with proud angular insistence, the letterforms in the Manuscritos
have been eroded, sanded into scattered particles that blow in susurrating clouds across the desert floor. In that series of doublecrosses with which history likes to mark its events in time and space, the exiled letters betray each other. Their sad display of exclusive self-interest includes several members of the alphabet – A springs to mind, or, shockingly, S– of whom one had thought better. Look: you can see them crowding together, jockeying for position as they vie for a place of prominence in the Cuadro escrito; there is P’s elbow jabbing into O’s soft pillow of surprised dismay, and there, F’s arms reach to menace Y’s slender twigged throat – and above that, M’s double plough shoves W dangerously close to the rim of the page’s white cliff. Despite everything, the letters somehow manage to arrange themselves into the portrait of a piece of writing. But their posturing is merely a conceptual operation, an idea whose time may be just beginning, or is already lost. Breaking away from the picture, a flock of words that describes the rise and fall of a hundred notions shimmers above a sentence’s long horizon before settling in uneasy syllables among the dusky branches of its letters. The painting, watching, waits for light. What Ferrari would make, if words were less treacherous and pictures less deceitful, are colorful nests of entwined letterstrokes where inscriptions could safely roost. If we were ever to meet, León Ferrari and I, – in a footnote, say, or at the end of an epilogue – he might ask me if I knew into which sacred grove the nests could be securely placed. And if we had come to a time when all sacred groves had been obliterated, I would try to remember how to paint one into vivid existence for him. At least, this is what I tell myself when, in dreams, fat correspondences drop ripely at my feet, their messages pleading for divination. Our meeting is not, however, likely to happen. If one were to draw a line in the sand, and on one side make a cold list of things likely to happen, and on the other, an equally chilly list of unlikely things, one side would stutter quickly into silence while the other would loudly riff on “what ifs” with baroque logorrheic flourishes. Let me ask you: do you think it is better to allow a portrait, landscape, or still life to dictate history than to give words permission to engrave the boundaries of our understanding? These, and other subjects worthy of discourse, are questions which I realize may be more usefully answered through gesticulated rather than articulated thought. Whether our experience is to be described with phrases that coil themselves into paragraphs upon a page or with paint-strokes that float images onto the surface of a canvas is a matter for fruitful debate. Perhaps the materials of painting, with their gorgeous color and sticky allure, are more suited to seduction than the drab, dry artifacts left behind in the wake of a pencil or pen can ever hope to be. Nonetheless, Ferrari understands that penstrokes, as fine as marten hairs, may assemble themselves into either word or image. Expression may be on the tip of one’s tongue or the tip of one’s fingers, or both. It may even be conveyed through the agency of a flexible stick, like a conductor’s baton ushering an orchestra through the corridors of a score toward music’s more spacious rooms of meaning. Within those chambers we find sadness, but also liberation, in the confirmation that we are only made of ash, which had begun to fly apart beneath the weight of our first breath. Though drenched and submerged in life’s generous juices, we burn white-hot. We may, in our interval between water and fire, anoint the pages of our lives with crimson oil whose stained presence then attempts to retell the past and augur the future. However, the story thus created can never speak a whole truth; it is instead a phantom record of mixed desire and delusion; falsehood and forgetfulness. But, listen – let’s not lose our way in a melancholy thicket of words, some motley gathering of marks sequestered within the walled garden of a page. Any decent picture or poem, while proudly featuring its author’s best intentions, must also include a legible expanse of emptiness between thoughts where we latecomers may infer our own lives. Then, stepping into the gaps between words, the mark we will leave will be like the inscription of birds on the shore of a vast ocean.

Carrie Cooperider, "Cuadro escrito" (published here with her permission)

Carrie originally presented this in the form of a table that placed the word-groups across from the sentences that expanded them, a presentation that emphasized the visual-schematic nature of a writing about a written painting. We still find that quality even in the presentation we have given it here, since it allows a connect-the-bolded-words reading that serves as armature to the expansion.

We liked this piece very much. The Society used it as the basis for a similar exercise, and the first round consisted of creating a reduction of Carrie's piece: take words from any of her sentences and build a text from them. Andrea Giunta's words, the bolded ones, could not be reused. Participants were at liberty to use the selected words in the order in which they were found in Carrie's writing or in some other combination. Of course we always prefer to go for the limit and so kept them in order.

If you find this constraint interesting and wish to try it, let me suggest as a base text Walter Pater's famous passage on La Gioconda in The Renaissance (London, 1893). Begin by choosing two consecutive sentences; break those down into word-groups; then proceed by expanding each word-group into a sentence. Send in the results as a comment. Here is the passage:

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

Happy holidays and happy writhing!

Tree of Hands and Schurink's Universe

2009-12-15T09:25:00.000-08:00

Last week the Society tried its hand at a new constraint, the "Tree of Hands." It was inspired by a sculpture on Second Street in Park Slope, just off Prospect Park West (below). Fashioned in bronze, it consists of two trees twining about one another and then extending branches with human hands sprouting from them. The hands are gesturing in the various signs of the American Sign Language alphabet, and thus this tree can be read. To know what its message is, you need (besides a knowledge of what letters the signs represent) to work out the sequence. Is it to be read from root to twig? Are the two trunks separate words or sentences? Which way does the reading proceed where the branches fork?

As a compositional constraint, it could hold different signs, emblems, images, a sort of ramifying Tarot. If the branches were to cross or interconnect, the system might be constructed in a less arborescent manner, more like a subway map with intersecting lines, and in fact some artists have created variants on subway maps by giving the stations new names, as Simon Patterson did with the London tube map in "The Great Bear." To see a detail click here; the stations are given the names of philosophers, musicians, and so on, and the "lines" are thus categorical. (See a "rude version" here.) The concept is actually better than the use Patterson made of it. His map is a "constellation" filled with "stars" — that's his joke, though even so one would like the stations where two lines cross to be given a name meaningful in both sets, so that Rock Stars would cross Saints at (I suppose) Kurt Cobain. But Patterson has not really understood the use some subway riders make of the system maps to trace imaginary journeys, even with the names the stations really have. A thoughtfully named map could inspire any number of narratives required to pass through a set of stations and take instructions from their names, while a lavishly branching and intersecting system would grant sufficient choices in the story-making.

We didn't think of the subway-map concept in time for last Wednesday. Some of us tried to make trees with armature wire and a large collection of rubber stamps, or just created hieroglyphic system with the stamps on the paper, placing the images so that various directions of reading were possible. We talked about world trees, the Norse Yggdrasil and the Mayan ceiba, and Erik Schurink FWS was inspired to create a universe (above left). Erik's tree, made from a camera stand and a coil of armature wire, represents the middle-earth by a sheet of paper with the four cardinal directions on it: feast, worth, qwest, and south. It is upheld, like the real universe, by a turtle (visible to the left).

Next post: Cooperider's Expansion.

(PS: The published post looks nothing like the preview. If someone can tell me how to size and place images, I'd be grateful. Apologies for the messy layout of this post.)

The Future of Fiction

2009-12-13T09:39:00.000-08:00

In its July/August number (30:5) the American Book Review asked 64 writers, mostly innovators (ABR is a great champion of innovative writing), to explain briefly what the future of fiction is, and 13 of those to elaborate their response. ABR's editors left open the question of the sort of fiction meant (mainstream or innovative), how "fiction" is to be defined, and whether it was a prediction of what fiction's future was likely to be, or a recommendation of what fiction would have to do or become in order to be a useful, meaningful practice. Respondents combined these variables as they pleased, and so the results did not form a consensus. Some recurring themes were the persistence of story-telling, the increasing importance of independent literary presses, the need to deal with, or to resist, electronic delivery systems and compositional tools, the increasing importance of collaboration and anonymity and recombinant texts (and by implication other sorts of constrained writing).

Here's my manifesto, to wrap up this series of posts on innovative fiction.

1. In the future fiction writers must place a higher value on prose and prosaics. They must invent and deploy a diction, a phrasing, a sentence more expressive than the default gesture of American demotic speech that too many writers use in order not to seem pretentious, and equally must distance itself from the stilted stylistic "literary" flourishes imitated from European literature in translation. I am not calling for a single American prose style. We have operated long enough with the Hemingway-Carver Elliptical Gesture to want to find some real alternatives, a lot of alternatives. Parataxis is good, syntaxis is good, the Attic and the periodic still survive, but could we call some other taxis now? We need to renew the fleet.

2. It must be readerly, that is, it must engage readers who read as creative collaborators, instead of offering to fiction-consumers no more than entertainment and information, the combination of autobiography and journalism that marks so much mainstream writing. Leave the MFA the-reader-must-relate! tricks to nonfiction. They use them more effectively anyway, if sales are any indication. If all the fiction writers in America were to down pens for a year and instead read in all the Englishes that have ever been written, from the Scottish Chaucerians to the Guyanese, we would see a surge in the level of American language-consciousness. Herman Melville read Sir Thomas Browne; we have to find our Urne-Buriall.

3. Fiction can no longer be taught in the universities and colleges. Whatever good MFA programs may do to the apprentices who enroll in them, they are poison to the writer who teaches in them, who must articulate and apply canons of correctness. Instead, let a scholarly professoriate be trained to teach literature defined as broadly as possible, to redouble the energy with which prose and poetry and drama and nonfiction are read and studied, so that BAs graduate having read a few books and with some sense of the possibilities that language might offer a writer. And how about requiring the study of other languages and literatures?

4. Fiction can no longer be thought of as a commodity in the possession of an author, to be sold and paid for in royalties, celebrity, grants, fellowships, residencies, prizes, and professorships. Fiction writers must make their living doing something else. Fiction, like most of the arts, belongs in the gift economy. For gifts made in good faith, without expectation of reward, there will be a return.

5. Fiction must be a telling and a teaching. Tales differ from stories by making the teller present in the narrative, and fables extend tales by proposing a teaching. Fiction should be fabulist: not "new wave fabulist" in the mode of some recent anthologies, where most of the work is mimetic lifestyle-realism with a few elements of magic, fantasy, or horror. It should function as a fable, and its agents, if not animals, should be creaturely. Its prose should be creaturely. Writers working in New Media won't be able to practice this kind of writing, but then what such writers produce is more poetry than fiction.

I don't know if this will be the future of innovative fiction, but most of the other avenues don't offer much hope, if narrative prose is to keep evolving and make itself useful and desirable. Steve Katz, surely one of the sanest and freshest voices in American fiction today, wrote two entries, one short and one long, in the ABR, deploying in both an extended metaphor drawn from nanotechnology:

I write this from among the tubules, where the nanoguys assemble themselves into organizations sometimes useful.… Though miniscule in my expression of myself, I am not diminished. Fiction is my citadel and its future my obsession. I see God in these nanotubes, and realize that is where It sequesters these days. There the future of fiction abides.…One thing I've observed about the nanocritters is that all their molecules are on the surface. How to translate that into the production of fiction is a conundrum, since authors' molecules are invariably found at differing depths. Nanos are almost impossible to influence, particularly into useful thicknesses and functions..… Fiction is their priority. They have many priorities, and fiction is one of them. (12)

Steve has composed a fabulist fiction here, and it remains for us to decide what the molecules are and how the nanoguys can be harnessed to their task, or simply allowed to perform it on their own or in collaboration with "authors." Deleuze and Guattari's distinction of the molecular from the molar may help, for those who have had the patience to tackle A Thousand Plateaus. But surely those molecules have to do with language, with the combinations of language-phenomena, so rarely entirely within a writer's control yet so necessary to respect.

By hanging with the nanos, although I can hardly say I've hooked up, I can't but present great hope for the future of fiction.

Innovative Writing 6

2009-11-14T08:23:00.000-08:00

The direction in which a lot of the energy-to-innovate is flowing, as was very evident at &Now, is towards multimedia work, which can mean many things but in practice means tech-based composition, on the web or on disc. It was particularly evident because the projectors or speakers kept breaking down, and the first thing to be said, therefore, is that the composer (a term I'll use to take in writing and visual work as well as music) must be multi-proficient or very good at collaboration. Or management: some of the work presented as collaborative soon revealed a hierarchy in which the composer was firmly in control of the whole work and its production values, while allowing associates some latitude in the interpretation of the directions. I see value in both methods of working — many situations (schools, theaters) are not natural democracies — but of course the expressed ideology is anti-hierarchical, and so a degree of disingenuousness creeps in. So what else is new, in the arts.

The multimedia approach strikes me as having potential, though I have yet to see work that weds its components or even puts them into creative competition on a level field. But I have not yet developed the taste for this sort of work, where too often one element is privileged and the others are thin. Because the skill set that goes into producing multimedia work resembles that which is used by game designers, a game aesthetic often colors the whole project. Some people will like that; not me. But that coloration, that imprints the work upon the known territory of games, is not inevitable.

The proclaimed aesthetic of this sort of work is that of the performative. I don't know if I have ever seen this spelled out in so many words, but it appears that the "performative" is preferred to an aesthetic called "absorptive," the characteristic of the "romantic novel" (add "bourgeois" to that label and you'll be on firm ground). I am groping a little here, but I think what is being opposed is a style of composition that grows out of the tradition, going back to Schwitters, Haussmann, and Mayakovsky, and running through the Situationists, Fluxus, and the Beats, of making poetry public by performing it, instead of leaving it to be absorbed with little grunts of appreciation by the elitist trained reader in the comfort of his (inevitably his) tweed-and-leather-elbow-patched armchair. The absorptive reading is seen as a consumerist reading, an appropriation of one subjective experience within another by a process of sympathetic identification, an intersubjectivity. This has to a large degree come true, as more and more of what is marketed as "literary" fiction presents the victimization of some marginalized subject in a world very far from mine (very far in its décor, its sociology, but very near in its sensibility and style, which deploys the standard, teachable set of writer's tricks), so that I, who belong to a majority culture, will sympathize with that subject's plight and perhaps do something about it. But since I am always open to fantasies of victimization, I may simply use this writing subject's desperate plight as a way of reifying my own malaise. Work that is performed before an audience addresses us differently and asks me to respond more actively, or so it is claimed. Of course there will always be readings that ask me to respond to some particular subject's "voice," but if there's a group of people listening, I will at least be able to listen not only to that voice but to the other people's listening. To that extent the language detaches itself from the subject and becomes more objective, if only because it regains a sound.

Multimedia work, while as difficult to produce as work destined to be performed before an audience, may really be used by individuals on their computers at home. The objectivity will come more from the intercommentary of the elements of the composition, and the user will be active in the composition, which he or she may use at will, attending differently with successive uses. Constrained writing, though you read it in a book, perhaps in that armchair, gains objectivity because it represents a language use that does not make sense as the utterance of a subject. It lacks the coherence that "the writer's voice" bestows and it doesn't ask participation ("absorption") in another's experience.

Nevertheless I would like to speak up in favor of "absorption." I am with Wallace Stevens when he says (in "The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm"):

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book

as much as when he says ("The Creations of Sound")

If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, sounds not chosen,
Or chosen quickly, in a freedom
That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man
Too exactly himself, and that there are words
Better without an author, without a poet…

To be continued.

Innovative Writing 5

2009-11-10T08:55:00.000-08:00

The Normal Writer is what Deleuze and Guattari call the "subject of expression." I've been rereading A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Massumi, U. of Minnesota Press, 1987, the second work on capitalism and schizophrenia), especially Chapters 10 ("1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…") and 11 ("1837: Of the Refrain"). "Subject of expression" is not a difficult concept to grasp and seems to sum up more or less what we take for granted about the artist's relation to art, viz., that art is an expression, and that what expresses it is a subject in both the cognitive sense (the perceiver) and the grammatical (performing the action). D+G don't question the expressive nature of art, and in fact they underscore art's status as placard or poster, claiming and defining a territory. In doing so they are already (pp. 316-321) associating art with ethology, the specific association being music with birdsong, and they cite Olivier Messiaen's contention that some birds are not merely virtuosos (a scientific fact; birds train to sing, and some excel) but artists. "What we wish to say is that there is a self-movement of expressive qualities [which] are auto-objective, in other words, find an objectivity in the territory they draw" (317).

The animal artist is not a "subject of expression," in other words, but the voice of the world. "[E]xpressive qualities or matters of expression enter shifting relations with one another that 'express' the relation of the territory they draw to the interior milieu of impulses and exterior milieu of circumstances" (317). This is a much more dynamic relationship with the world with which one is continuous than the detached representation/reporting/rendering that constitutes Normal Writing. D+G "can then say that the musician bird goes from sadness to joy or that it greets the rising sun or endangers itself in order to sing or sings better than another, etc. None of these formulations carries the slightest risk of anthropomorphism, or implies the slightest interpretation. It is instead a kind of geomorphism" (318-19). I take "geomorphism" to mean that affect is not simply the expression of human feeling, which, if you are a strict Skinnerian, is the only sort of feeling there is. Affect is instead integral to what I must still mystically refer to as "the world," a concept that abolishes Emerson's distinction (in "Nature") of the Me and the Not-me. (Emerson goes on to abolish it himself.)

Various literary movements of the last century and a half have wanted to practice an objectivism that dismantles the "author" and his (inevitably his) "voice." "Language Poetry," which is so called because these poets form a school that grew up around the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, always struck me as aptly named because it aimed to take language away from those who claimed to own it and who use it to serve their own interests and preserve their own power in a hierarchical system, and to create a new one. This utopian poetic language, refusing the distinction between poetry and poetics, hence always critical, making its attack on voice, on grammar, on figurative systems, on representation, on all the conventional literary vehicles of "meaning," sought to open itself up to the language-formations that would bring in a new order. I don't think it's too much to say that this was always the goal.

But, like most Marxist movements, Language Poetry works better as a critique than as an art. It has not transcended its status as one literary school, caught in the paradox that an ideology that insists on inclusiveness must exclude anyone whose practice doesn't conform or lose its status as an ideology. It is no less caught in the toils of the university. There are anthologies, journals, symposia dedicated to Language Poetry. Like other schools it has its stars — Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein are two of the brightest. It is thoroughly territorialized.

This is not to say that it has not moved American poetry in an innovative direction. In particular it shares with constrained oulipian writing the radical revision of the reader's place in the work, from consumer to participant or even collaborator. But the activist reader of Language Poetry must pass through a sort of re-education camp that makes it more unlikely that he or she will meet the writing on the plane of delight.

Back to the musician bird, geomorphism, and delight in the next post, where I hope also to discuss the issue of performative and absorptive writing.

Innovative Writing 4

2009-11-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

Maybe, now that we've thought about the "correctness," the conformity to paradigm imposed by both the commercial literature market and the university, we can go on to ask what innovation is in writing. In some ways it seems like an odd question. We still live in a romantic/revolutionary culture, not a classic or traditional one; that can be seen in the status of the aphorism, phrase, or mot. In the classic culture the more often a maxim is repeated, the truer it becomes, the more truth-value that form-of-words accumulates, since each successive repetition is a quotation, and the more a statement is quoted as truth, the more its author is raised to a condition of wisdom, sanctity, or divinity. We still retain traces of that culture, and Dorothy Parker is (witty and) wise, Oscar Wilde or Gertrude Stein are sainted, Shakespeare is divine. But mostly we still live like restless romantics.

In a romantic culture the reverse is the case: repeating a form of words leaches truth-value out of it, and you can't even be citing Shakespeare more than so often. We must constantly be saying things in new ways. We must use language strikingly, like Kafka's axe, "to break the frozen sea within us." (It was books he was wanting to make an axe of.) Therefore innovation ought to be a core value in our literature, and all writing ought to innovate. Publishers look for the next new thing; or so they claim. Of course what they mean is the same old thing with some one striking departure from what has been done lately. "Successful" writers, by which I mean commercial writers, are under pressure to repeat whatever formula it was that first got them into the pile at Borders, with variations.

At &Now there was some fitful discussion of what we ought to be calling innovative, especially in the panel of the place of women in experimental, innovative writing — still battling the old canard that women are not naturally experimentalists, as if Sei Shonagon or Marie de France had never written. Shelley Jackson, another valid counterexample to that canard, said that innovative writing ought to move us out of our comfort zone. That comfort zone could be described as our training in literary correctness, carried out by our teachers and by the commercial publishers. Normal Art is our comfort zone — so is Normal Innovation, the gesture of defiant difference, such as the choice of marginalized situations seen as dodgy, such as drug addiction or pedophilia. One ought not to be addicted to drugs or to be molesting children; but we read novels to find out how it's done. Frisson! (Yawn.) Or there's talking about women's pussies or men's dicks. These words make us uncomfortable, but of course they also make us very comfortable by allowing us a vicarious aggressiveness, since these are aggressive terms more even than sexual ones.

What if we talked about women's dicks or men's pussies? Things start to get a little more genuinely uncomfortable, particularly if we are not using these terms figuratively. Girls with penises carry us into the world of Henry Darger and the Vivian Girls. But there is a sense, unless one is as genuinely strange an outsider as Darger was, of the trop voulu, of the writer who is working a little too hard to shock. Maybe what needs to be carried into the discomfort zone is the writer, not the reader.

To be continued.

Innovative Writing 3

2009-11-05T09:30:00.000-08:00

In my last post I noted how restrictively "correct" the university environment can be for writers (and teachers) seeking to do innovative work. Since that word "correct" is now a piece of code, I thought I ought to clarify that I didn't mean "politically correct." There are quite a few writers who think of themselves as "innovative" (if attendance at &Now is a measure), who are the opposite of correct in that sense, whose idea of innovation is quite ordinary point-of-view narrative marked by some violence of imagery or language, some sexual (yawn) explicitness with a naming of parts and a pinch of violence (ooh) against or exploitation of women, some racism carefully attributed to characters within the story. One such writer read before an audience in the Hallwalls Cinema at this last &Now. He was fulsomely introduced and lavishly applauded. He is a visiting professor at some university or other.

No, by "correctness," I simply meant the constant tic of looking over your shoulder to gauge what the departmental taste-makers will approve of. University academics need to keep up with each other's work, and in most areas of research and scholarship this is of course their best practice. In most areas there is an ongoing conversation that can be tough to join if you haven't been following it, and you certainly don't want to join it at a stage that has already been passed. But most disciplines carry on that conversation within the dominant paradigm that sets the questions valid to be asked by that community. Writers don't form that kind of community. It's good that they should get together and celebrate each other from time to time, but what they mostly actually talk about, if they are university writers, is gossip and academic politics. Readers have something to say to each other; writers mostly gather to form or to cement alliances.

Of course this problem of correctness extends outside of universities. There is, as I was saying, a dominant paradigm in mainstream publishing and a canon of correctness that can rival in its strictness the templates that the romance-publishers issue for prospective romance-writers. Even outside of that world there can be a back-drag towards the "hip," usually by a representation of edgy lifestyles, done in what one could call the Loud Style. Print has no actual volume, but you know what I mean. Its complement could be called the Mutter, a style that keeps its eyes downcast and its hair in front of its face, delivering snippets of inwardness. I realize that these styles are practiced by a generation younger than my own, and therefore I do not comment on the value of it. Writing can only have value for readers who are in a position to make use of it, and there are a variety of uses to which writing can be put, morbid fantasies among them.

Innovative writing, though, is (I contend) the writing that creates a new readership by suggesting the new uses that can be made of what that readership is being asked to read, what content and what language-uses, and not writing that addresses a pre-existing community ("market" would be the more accurate term) organized around certain lifestyle markers, whether those are the pipe-tweed-and-elbow-patches set that Henry Miller detested or the droopy waifs of today. In other words innovative writing demands readers who have some confidence in their ability to deal with something never seen before, readers restless with the offerings that dribble or spout from the usual pipelines.

Therefore one question that could occupy innovative writers is how to train innovative readers with some critical sense about what actually constitutes innovation. We need more anthologies of what Queneau called les fous littéraires, and we need those anthologies to break away from the warhorses of Modernism and Post-Modernism. We have Rothenberg, Kostelanetz, Messerli, Gross & Quasha, but what else do we have? (Please help me fill in my ignorance.) And could an anthology, or a series, of folies littéraire be addressed to readers instead of students, so that the goal could be delight instead of improvement? How about an &Now purely for readers?

To be continued.

Innovative Writing 2

2009-11-01T08:29:00.000-08:00

As a provisional definition of innovative work in writing, or any other art-form, let's say that innovation releases the medium from a deadening ownership that turns the reader into a consumer and no more. To put it more simply, innovative writing is writing freed from the assumptions and the formulae of mainstream literary writing. That practice assumes the possibility and desirability of a final form, a perfection of the work, a perceptible perfection, and the author is held responsible for bringing the work to that perfection and is praised for succeeding or blamed for failing. For perfection to be perceptible to many people, those people must share a set of values — a paradigm; and the writer must know what those people think and want, must become highly knowing about his or her readers and must play to their desires or distastes.

Various communities consolidate around different paradigms, but for a number of economic reasons (which I explored eleven years ago in an essay called "Readerly Writing"; selections can be read at www.tomlafarge.com) those communities have tended to become one quite homogeneous literary community of writers, agents, publicists, editors, instructors, critics, professors of literature, and readers. Literary writing, indeed imaginative writing broadly speaking has become a Normal Art, to adapt a term ("Normal Science") coined by Thomas S. Kuhn. That is, all the questions that are thought to be worth asking about literature are defined and then refined by the leaders of this community and make sense within this paradigm. Practices that emerge outside the paradigm (constrained writing, e.g.) will not constitute research into real and valid questions, at least not in the minds of the members of the community that practices Normal Writing.

At the heart of the paradigm stands the university. There is no other academy in this country. Therefore I will answer my earlier question, whether the arts in the United States should divorce themselves from the university, with a clear "Yes." Universities, in my view, should devote themselves to their real mission, education and scholarship, and the training of future teachers and scholars. As regards literature, their work is to train readers. I owe a great debt to the university where I did my doctorate, because it pushed me to read, not just works, but whole periods of writing that I would not have sought out on my own: Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, medieval lyric and drama, English prose style in the neo-classical and early romantic periods, the romance tradition of narrative. My reading was both honed and enormously broadened in its range. More importantly, my sense of literature was complicated to the point that when I first learned about the work of Dada, the Surrealists, the 'Pataphysicians, and the Oulipo, I had been prepared to make use of it by Middle English punctuation poems, medieval macaronic poetry, the calendrical and arithmological structures of Elizabethan sonneteers and the gemmatria of the kabbalists, and the combinatorics of Ramon Llull, by the speculations about language of Athanasius Kircher (thank you, Hans Aarsleff).

But if I had taken a degree in "creative writing" at that university, none of that richness would have been available to me. I would have received some support, some criticism, that might have helped me; I might have been steered to the writer's career path and be teaching now in an MFA program with full benefits. But I would have been a professor of writing first and a writer second. Worse, all my writing would have been perceptible within the dominant paradigm and would be judged on that basis, whereas as things stand what I write is not easily visible, both because I haven't published a lot of it, and because what I have published does not have a clear and recognizable "face." I believe this works for the other arts as well, mutatis mutandis.

Innovative work must escape from the imprisonment of that "face." Predators spot their prey (and dangers) by hunting what ethologists call a "searching image," a pre-established visual formation that matches what they must strike or flee. Animals evading predators will change their coloration or body-form in order to escape from the searching image; writing must do the same to evade the paradigmatic gaze. But the university creative writing program, which for many universities is that lucrative ruminant, a "cash cow," takes money to teach a "discipline." The concept of the academic "discipline" has become central to university teaching since the Second World War. (Before that things were more fluid, as Louis Menand showed in The Future of Academic Freedoms [U. of Chicago Press, 1996].) That concept has lately been called into question, may seem in some areas to be dissolving (Menand thinks so), but here the university creative writing program has been conservative.

I don't mean that innovative practices are not taught in universities. I do mean that the study of innovative practices will not lead naturally and easily to a career in publishing or writing for publishers, or to teaching writing. Davis Schneiderman, to pick one name from among many, teaches his students a great deal about innovative writing, especially in the area of collaborative writing, which he also practices. But my contention is that his practice and his teaching would serve us all better if he worked outside the university. Workers in universities cannot avoid the value of correctness. The university community is built around correctness, and ultimately any writer who works within the university will find himself or herself explaining to students what the correct thing is, either to endorse it or to challenge it, and will thereby move their writing practice into a zone of self-consciousness that will ultimately leach the life out of it. Therefore I say that writers, if they want to innovate, have to go back into a darkness that they won't find in universities or writers' colonies.

To be continued.

"Innovative writing" 1

2009-10-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Writhing Society, which practices a number of constrained-writing techniques — oulipian, para-oulipian, extra-oulipian, zoomorphic, biblioerotic, and propriofugal — feels itself to be in solidarity with the "innovative writing" community and more broadly with new ways of practicing and thinking about the arts. Accordingly Wendy Walker and I traveled to Buffalo earlier this month to show the Writhing Society flag (blank as yet, may feature porcupines rampant) at the AndNow 2009 conference. We stayed for five nights at the glacial, poorly housekept Hyatt Regency in downtown Buffalo, gave and attended panels and workshops, sold some Proteotypes books and some by our friends James Walsh of Observatory, Herbert Pfostl of Observatory and Blind Pony books, and Alicita Rodriguez and Joe Starr of MARGINALIA magazine. Many delightful encounters with our fellow innovators and long conversations with Rebecca Goodman and Martin Nakell. A few memorable readings, some memorably good (Danielle Alexander, Pedro Ponce, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve Katz), and some others that left us wondering what was innovative about them, they seemed so like mainstream fiction with perhaps a shade more violent sex and a choppier distribution of structural bits and points of view.

So I have started to think about "innovation" in writing, and I'm not going to be able to fit all those thoughts into one post. But to give a partial preview, I want to see whether innovation is adequately defined by its notional contrary, either "mainstream" writing or "traditional writing." I want to ask some questions about what seems to be the growing assumption that innovative writing needs to be "performative" (thereby engaging the resources of many other media besides the printed page) and not "absorptive," like the transaction between the reader and the book.

Right now I'm still thinking about the venues for the AndNow conferences: at Notre Dame University, famed for Jesuits and football; at Lake Forest, a selective college in a wealthy suburb of Chicago; at Chapman University, founded as a Christian college in the county seat of Orange County, CA; and Buffalo, under the auspices but not on the premises of SUNY Buffalo.

Maybe this last setting seems most appropriate. Buffalo is a town struggling with post-industrial depression but with a strong tradition of supporting the arts (three F. L. Wright houses, the fine Albright-Knox museum, the ugly new Burchfield-Penney museum which will be a real destination when they get around to showing some of their vast holdings of Charles Burchfield's paintings). And SUNY Buffalo itself has a strong tradition of promoting innovative writing, especially poetry in the Olson-Creeley-Bernstein tradition. But it's still possible to say that the conference has been held in all these places because someone in an English department (Steve Tomasula, Davis Schneiderman, Martin Nakell, Christina Milletti and Dimitri Anastasopoulos) has had the courage and the clout to bring it to their school. Conversations with some AndNow organizers brought out the fact that blood was shed in the struggle (almost literally in one case) to get the conference to these places.

But none of these places is a natural or even a comfortable home to innovation. Maybe the avant-garde thrives on discomfort and alienation, but it also, since misery loves company, thrives where there is a community of fellow-practitioners across the spectrum of the arts. Downtown Manhattan and parts of western Brooklyn; Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, or the Bay Area come to mind, and many of the participants at AndNow have come from these places. Of course there's nothing wrong with getting out of the neighborhood and seeing a bit of the world. But when the bit of the world consists of hotel conference rooms or university classrooms (which differ really only in the carpeting, particularly hectic at the Buffalo Hyatt), then I start to ask why AndNow has to happen under the auspices of a university. And the still more important question: what is the proper role of universities and the academic world in housing the arts, especially the more vulnerable, fledgling, experimental or innovative arts? Don't those arts have something to lose from the academic connection?

To be continued.

Homomorphic Converters and Blue Fire

2009-10-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

Homomorphic Converters, the second pamphlet in the series 13 Writhing Machines, has just come out from Proteotypes in Brooklyn. 13 Writhing Machines is a series of instruction manuals in the various techniques of constrained composition. (The first pamphlet, Administrative Assemblages, is being reprinted and will be available in about a week.)

Homomorphic Converters takes a look at a variety of procedures that fill a pre-existent form with new content. For example, in "homoconsonantism" you take a sentence (the one you're reading, for instance) and reuse the consonants in the same order but with different vowels.

So: f/r/x/m/p/l/n/h/m/k/n/s/n/n/t/s/m etc. To practice "allosyntaxism" (also known as "homolexicalism" you reuse all the words from the original in a different order. There's a section on "homoikonism" about putting prexistent images to different use. For example Arcimboldo painted a bowl of vegetables that becomes a man's face when you turn it upside down. All the forms of the man's features are vegetables.

Proteotypes is also publishing Wendy Walker's Blue Fire, which also will be available in the next couple of days. Blue Fire is the first full-length poetic nonfiction produced by the application of constraints. It is the record of Wendy's fascination with the case of Constance Kent, a famous murder case in 1860s Britain. As a fifteen-year-old girl Constance was accused of murdering her four-year-old half-brother. Four years later, under the influence of a priest, she confessed to the crime, although all the evidence pointed to a manslaughter committed by her father and the boy's nursemaid. Having tried to make a novel of this material, Wendy came to see the fictional use of it as unethical. "After all, Constance had already fictionalized it." Instead she created a two-directional text, one part a poetic text derived from the first account of the crime by using one word from every line of that book and thereby extracting and exposing the patriarchal discourse of its author, Joseph Stapleton. Having composed those words into blocks of text, she then went to books that Constance is known to have read, and to books about the case, and to books published in the 1860s, and extracted from them passages of as many lines as there were words in a block of her derived text. The result gives a picture not just of the case but of the whole mentality within which it unfolded.

Order these books on Amazon or through the Proteus Gowanus webstore at www.proteusgowanus.com.

Lipophonemism, Lipotaxism

2009-10-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

In "Voyelles" Rimbaud assigned colors to vowels:

A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu…

and goes on to amplify:

A, noir corset velu de mouches éclatantes
Que bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,

Golfes d'ombres.

In the late Paul Schmidt's translation (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, trans. P. Schmidt; New York: Harper & Row, 1976):

A, black belt, hairy with bursting flies,
Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night.

The interesting thing to me is how much the affect of Schmidt's translation actually depends on the vowels u, especially in the short bu- phone, and i. Bu- evokes flies, I guess, but more broadly there is something abrupt about u and i. (Not you and I; we're all right). Those were the two vowels I was left with last Wednesday when The Writhing Society worked with the lipogrammatic procedure called La belle absente. That's the one where you compose a text using all the letters not in a name, in this case our own. (The opposite, le beau présent, uses all the letters in a name, and only those. I wrote a beau-présent poem when my son was married last June.) My name, Tom La Farge, took out the three other vowels. What I wrote felt to me more brittle and more vulgar than what I would normally write.

Christian Bök's chapter of u's in his monovocalic Eunoia (mentioned in the last post) makes you feel what an aggressive vowel u is, especially when followed by hard consonants (-ck, -nt). Here again it's not the vowel alone that carries the affect as the phoneme. Besides the obvious vulgarities, other u+hard consonant combinations produce the same effect:

Duluth dump trucks lurch, pull, U-turns. Such trucks dump much undug turf: clunk, clunk—thud. (78)

Poets used to write more about the affect intrinsic to sounds, and others have pointed out the absurdity in trying to create an affect-lexicon of sounds. Tennyson's line "the murmur of innumerable bees" stood as an example of euphonious sound-combinations expressing the lulling noise of the hive until John Crowe Ransom pointed out that you get nearly the same effect with "the murder of innumerable beeves." The feeling, in other words, was being projected on the basis of the content, not the sound. But I don't agree with Ransom. I think the line he found, about the slaughter of hecatombs of steers, is euphonious, and does rather appallingly convey a lulling, undifferentiated hive-noise, with the possible exception of the intrusive hard d. In other words the affect-content of the sounds and the meaning-content of the words are set at odds.

There's much more to say about this: about the affect we share with animals, about bird-song. Not tonight.

The other procedure we practiced last Wednesday was one of the most interesting oulipian ones, invented by the co-founder François Le Lionnais, and as far as I know rarely imitated. This is what Le Lionnais calls "la rien que la toute la," which Oulipo Compendium translates as "the only the wholly the." It could be called lipotaxis: what is left out is parts of speech, specifically nouns, verbs, and adjectives. That leaves adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns, including the indefinite pronouns. Clearly it helps to remember your grammar-school grammar here. Just after first reading about this procedure I was walking in Prospect Park with Wendy. It had rained recently; a large puddle covered one section of the path, and from beyond it a three-year-old boy was bearing down upon the water with every appearance of appetite. His mother, some distance in the rear, then called out: "Not through it, around it!" A perfect example of la rien que la toute la.

Jacqueline Cantwell, who works in the courts in Brooklyn, came to class with an event on her mind, witnessed that day. Here's how she describes it:

I was going into the courthouse and saw an old woman in line for the machines that check for weapons. As soon as I saw her, I knew she was ill. She was an old woman carrying over-stuffed bags. She had hospital bracelets on her wrists. The real give away was her white bra worn over her pink sweater; no woman does that.

I walked past her. A young woman, an attorney, was laughing at this woman and her fellow attorneys joined in.

I went into the library and ten minutes later, the same old woman comes into the library and announces she can't breathe. She starts ranting something while we get her in a chair. I called security and said I needed help with the old woman, "What's wrong with her is she's crazy." The court officers came and walked her out the building. She needed help; 911 should have been called. I thought court security was going to call 911 for her.

I was so upset because our duty is to hold off the street--and that means street attitudes and behavior. We are not supposed to laugh at the ill and throw them neglected on the street.

Here is what Jacqueline wrote:

For her to likely
Over her to likely
Above her to likely

Next for her
Next over her
Next above her

Because she surely next over
Because they surely next over her
Because next over them surely she

But for those hither

Wherever she hither for
Wherever she hither over
Wherever she hither above

Wherever next for her
Wherever over her
Wherever she surely not over
Wherever they surely not over her
Wherever next over them surely she
But for those hither

We all agreed that this piece accurately reproduces a fragmentary, repetitive, disoriented, yet still dignified state of mind.

Lipograms

2009-10-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday the Writhing Society tackled lipograms, the constraint where some letter or letters is made unavailable for use. Losing a vowel constrains you considerably, especially if that vowel is e, a, or o, the most common in English usage. Of course monovocalism, limiting yourself to a single vowel, is even harder. Georges Perec, who wrote La Disparition (Paris: Denoël, 1969; trans. G. Adair as A Void, London: Harvill, 1993) without using the letter e (even harder in French than in English, yet one critic never noticed!), also wrote Les Revenentes (Paris: Julliard, 1972; trans. I. Monk as The Exeter Text in Three By Perec, London: Harvill, 1996) using only that vowel. Christian Bök wrote a book in five sections, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House, 2001), in each restricting himself to a single vowel, even in the dedications to Hans Arp (aka Jean Arp, the dadaist), the surrealist René Crevel, Dick Higgins of Fluxus, Yoko Ono (also a Fluxus member), and Zhu Yu, the Chinese performance artist (or the Song dynasty poet).

In a postscript essay, "The New Ennui," Bök writes:

Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau, and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite effortes in incude them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord, and tumulus. The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, n word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed. (pp 103-4)

There are a couple of interesting points here. One might suppose that adopting multiple constraints limiting both word-forms and content would put the writer entirely at the mercy of the constraint and make it impossible to carry out a compositional intention. Yet Oulipo insists that "the only literature is voluntary literature" and insists that the use of constraints makes the writer freer than does so-called "free writing," where the writer will inevitably obey unconscious constraints. [I will be very happy indeed when English solves its problem of gender-pronoun reference.] And this is true. Paradoxically, in complex works such as Eunoia or Perec's La vie mode d'emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978; trans. D. Bellos as Life A User's Manual, Boston: Godine: 1987), where multiple constraints are scrupulously adhered to, the result is not merely distinctive in some quaint, tour de force sort of way, but really original, offering a real reading experience. Because the writer has willed a collaboration with certain realities — about language, but also about the world — he and/or she creates a text that distinguishes itself by originality, but also by its openness to collaboration by the active reader. In other words, there are two different voluntarisms at work here, the writer's and the reader's.

Bök refers to Rimbaud's famous sonnet about vowels, "Les voyelles," and creates a homophonic translation of it in "Voile." I'd like to come back next time to the idea that letters (or better, phones) have real affective content, at least in combination with one another, so that suppressing them makes a difference to the affect of the writing. To be continued!

Cut ups and critical fictions

2009-09-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a set of pieces where the compositional procedure is the cut-up. This is not Gysin and Burroughs' large-scale aleatory slicing and rearranging. I'm working more deliberately with sentences, phrases, and words. They are all cherry-picked from one source, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne, a work at the wellspring of natural history writing. White was a clergyman in the second half of the eighteenth century who spent his life observing the weather, soils, geology, flora, and especially the fauna, and among the fauna especially the birds, of the parish where he was curate, Selborne in Southamptonshire. He wrote two series of letters about them to two different correspondents, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. Although he meant to publish them as a book, the epistolary form creates a fine play between the scientific exactness of his observations and deductions and the more fully flavored style of his personal address to men he knew.

So I went through the whole book marking passages I wanted to use. Then I found the text online, downloadable from Project Gutenberg. Using my marked copy as a guide I found and copied the passages I wanted and pasted them into an ordinary Word document. Then I printed that out and for the last two days have been taking scissors to it. I'm filing the snippets in several envelopes as themes and subjects emerge; one will certainly be a natural-historical look at writers entitled "Life and Conversation of Animals." That one I have already begun to assemble, by taping down the snippets to a large quad-ruled sheet; I tape lightly at one end to make it easy to lift and move them.

I began by cutting out longer units, whole sentences in many cases running three or four lines of type. Wendy Walker, who has done this before and was watching me snip, then gave me some advice.

Wendy practiced this method in a piece she wrote in 1993, "My Man," which was published in Conjunctions. It was made up of bits from Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo (which is Italian dialect for "our man"). She wrote "My Man" as a "critical fiction," that is, a non-discursive comment on or reading of a text by using the self-critique that every text contains in the fiber of its language. She did this as an alternative to writing an analytical essay for the NEH seminar she was attending.

The advice she gave me was to cut up the sentences into smaller bits, and to make the cuts in odd places: not to isolate phrases such as prepositional phrases, for instance, but to cut after the preposition, or between the adjective and the noun it modifies.

I have been thinking about these two methods. The first, assembling a piece out of long phrases or whole sentences placed in a different sequence, makes it harder to connect them. (I have not allowed myself to add words of my own, though at some point I might try cutting up two different texts and merging them, a sort of collaged chimera.) And the original author's voice is much more strongly present in the form-of-phrase. I'm very fond of White's style, and I like the way that reordering his statements brings out their shapeliness. But I took what was left over after cutting out those longer bits and cut that into shorter, one-to-five-word segments. My plan is to make one piece exclusively from the longer bits, one exclusively from the shorter ones, and a third that uses both. The last will give me most control but also involve my making many more decisions.

The Writhing Society tried this kind of cut-up with one letter from Selborne last Wednesday. I copied it from the online text and printed it out large on a tabloid-sized sheet. The participants got to work with scissors and glue sticks. I can now say that tape works much better than glue sticks. It took us the two full hours to get a product; I think I bit off more than we could chew. But it was very interesting to see what five different people made of the same text, Letter XVII to Pennant in case you're interested. It's an unusual letter, being about reptiles and amphibians, and contains gems such as "The copulation of frogs (or at least the appearance of it, for Swammerdam proves that the male has no penis intrans) is notorious to everybody." The results were very satisfactory. Half the pleasure of The Writhing Society meetings is hearing what directions other people have gone off in, starting from the same point. "Writhing" is all about alternativity.

The Thompson-Campbell constraint, the 100 Camels constraint

2009-09-18T10:02:00.000-07:00

The motifs and structures of folklore and mythology — of all narrative, if you believe Joseph Campbell — are the elements that Mathews' Algorithm could be used to combine. Imagine a table where the rows represent different story structures i.e. sequences of events (but again Campbell would say they're all the same). You could use the plots of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, or of Conrad's stories. The structural elements need to be analogous to one another; so for instance you could do by the order of events, starting with what gets the story going ("dead father visits son," "unemployed sailor takes job as captain of African river steamboat"). Or you could use more abstract categories: "the hero reaches the first threshold and faces an ordeal" or even "complication of the rising action."

That's the rows. The columns would be filled in by motifs from the stories whose structures you used. Or, alternately, you could use folk-lore motifs borrowed or adapted from Stith Thompson or any other indexer of such "naive" literature, or motifs in modern urban fiction, especially in such highly controlled genres as ChickLit or Romance or Fantasy. (For a fine satirical catalog of Fantasy motifs, see Diana Wynne-Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (Rev. ed., Firebird: 2006.) If your first row used Shakespeare's King Lear, your second Conrad's The Secret Agent, your third some work of ChickLit, your fourth a Romance novel, and your fifth a Fantasy novel, you could then fill in the columns with appropriate motifs. Then using Mathews' Algorithm you could recombine them to get the opening of Lear forcing his daughters to express their love in words, a setting in a pornography shop in London, in whose back room anarchists meet, a disastrous altercation between two girls dating the same man, a moonlit reconciliation scene, and the intervention of a wizard riding a dragon to wrap things up.

But even here the Algorithm can be cumbersome. Its best use is really for experimentation, to get yourself thinking in recombinant terms. Mathews' himself (in "Mathews' Algorithm" [see citation in an earlier post]) proposes the use of the Lullian combinator, a set of concentric, independently moveable wheels. The "rows" would then occur along the visible rim of these wheels and the "columns" would be bounded by radii from the center. The different wheels could be turned independently from one another, and then read down from the periphery to the center. (Ramon Llull, the great Catalan kabbalist, is too large a topic for this post.)

What we did in The Writhing Society was looser yet. We practiced a constraint invented by Paul Bowles in his collection of stories "A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard" (2nd ed.; SF: City Lights, 1986). Here is his description:

"In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as a mosaic. The problem was to create a story line which would make each arbitrarily chosen episode compatable [sic] with the others, to make each one lead to the next with a semblance of naturalness."

We remember that Bowles was a friend of William S. Burroughs, co-inventor of the "cut-up" with Brion Gysin. The material Bowles used from drawn from "a group of incidents and situations I had either witnessed or heard about that year." They all took place among Moroccans in Tangier, where Bowles lived. Here's an example: "J. ate so many cactus fruit that the peelings covered his gun and he was unable to find it." Most of the anecdotes used involve only one character, none more than two, but the resulting stories use as many as four and meld their situations.

On our first try we used a set of fables ("The Ant and the Grasshopper," "Who Killed Cock-Robin?"), from which we extracted situations and characters. The next time we come back to combinatorics I'd like to try using raw anecdotal material, which is so much more particular in its detail (e.g., cactus fruit) than what gets mined from "story."

Semantic Recombination

2009-09-15T08:38:00.000-07:00

Semantic recombinations are also possible using Mathews' Algorithm. It is interesting about that algorithm that it can function at every level of linguistic difference, from individual sounds, to combinations of sound that do or don't express meaning but are not yet complete words (phonemes and morphemes) to syntactic elements, the parts of a sentence. As I mentioned in an earlier post, The Writhing Society finds that syntactic recombinations don't bring up much in the way of new, interesting sentences, unless there's quite a lot of preparatory work, and even then the results often turn out clever more than generative of further new ideas. Of course we haven't really gone very far into this experiment and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has used it to greater satisfaction. We haven't tried using the Algorithm on much smaller units, such as phones, but it would be interesting to do so with a view to creating new words, some of which might be like the utterances in the dadaist Kurt Schwitters' performances. (There are recordings of these on UBUweb.com.)

But semantic units are units of meaning; that is, one or more words that don't require a context to make a statement. In practice these units are parts-of-story or parts-of-discourse. They are analytical units. Sometimes they articulate a plot or an argument. Stories will begin with a problem, essays with an issue. The structure of what follows will be fairly predictable, even though the content may not be. That is, a story may contain a peripety in which the action changes direction drastically; we may not know which way it will turn, but we still will expect a peripety or more than one.

Because these are analytical units, various scholars have tried to complete the analysis by creating an encyclopedic schema. "Freytag's Pyramid" divides tragic structure into a rising action (inciting moment, exposition, complication) leading up to climax/crisis, and then descending through reversal (that's peripety), catastrophe, to "moment of last suspense," which I imagine is when we're wondering exactly how everyone will die. More recently, Joseph Campbell found a structure to all myth, his "monomyth," and laid it out first (in 1949) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (3rd. ed., Princeton: Bollingen, 2008). Comparing the story of the hero's quest from every culture where such myths had been recorded, he found a pattern that was independent of the processes of cultural diffusion (i.e. stories invented in one place being retold in another by merchants, conquerors, slaves, etc.). He ascribed this uniformity to the omnipresence in all cultures of Jungian archetypes. The book is worth reading if only for the wealth of stories it brings together.

Another semantic unit, also found in myths and legends though not always occurring predictably at a given point in the story's unfolding, is the "folklore motif." Vladimir Propp published his Morphology of the Folk-Tale in Russia in 1928. The American scholar Stith Thompson followed with his Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends (6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1932-7). Here is a part of his classification:

J0--J199. Acquisition and possession of wisdom (knowledge)

†J10. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from experience

†J30. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from inference

†J50. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from observation

†J80. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by parable

†J100. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by necessity

†J120. Wisdom learned from children

†J130. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from animals

†J140. Wisdom (knowledge) through education

†J150. Other means of acquiring wisdom (knowledge)

J180. Possession of wisdom

One of the interesting aspects of this sort of codification is the assumption of naiveté in the choice of materials, even though the composition of those elements may be highly sophisticated. Campbell sees mythic elements even in the modern novel, especially in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But this post has gotten too long! To be continued!

"Duplicity"

2009-09-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

Harry Mathews begins his essay "Mathews' Algorithm" with a comment on the literary importance of combinatorics:

"From the reader's point of view, the existence in literature of potentiality in its Oulipian sense has the charm of introducing duplicity into all written texts, whether Oulipian or not. It isn't merely a sonnet in Queneau's 100,000 Billion Sonnets on which doubt is cast by the horde of alternatives waiting to take its place; the most practical work of prose, no matter how sturdy it may seem in its apparent uniqueness, will prove just as fragile as soon as one thinks of subjecting it to S+7 or Semo-Definitional Literature" (Motte, Oulipo [U. of Nebraska Press, 1986], 126).

(The two last named procedures replace words in a text either with other words found a certain number of spaces later in a dictionary or with their dictionary definition. 100,000 Billion Poems was the work around which Oulipo was founded: ten sonnets of fourteen lines each, composed so that any line of any sonnet can be replaced with the equivalent line from any other sonnets, yielding ten-to-the-fourteenth poems.)

Mathews' terms duplicity and doubt (which seem as if they might have come from a famous essay on Hamlet by Harry Levin), can best be understood as the contrary of inevitability. Texts, especially texts embalmed in a literary canon, are sometimes studied as if they could never have had any other form than the one they took. Even when we compare drafts with the result, we're usually looking to see how the text was improved by the process of rewriting it. Ezra Pound's overhaul of Eliot's The Waste Land is a familiar example.

In other words, we're assigning value to form seen as perfectible. Of course this is a platonic entelechy, never realizable in practice. But there is also that pleasure in seeing what a text might have been if it had not been changed, growing perhaps from a sense that the editor, even when this is the same person as the author, may make changes that bring the text more into conformability with some exterior sense of value — and then we're back to Normal Art (on which see an earlier posting). The strangeness of the earlier versions, the way in which they don't "compose" as neatly as the final one, is a value in itself, unless of course the process of revision has tended to "make it strange," as sometimes happens.

Of course writers will always be faced with forking paths at every level of composition, and of course they need to make up their minds, and to do so they need some sort of canon of value. But Mathews' point is about readers, a group that also includes authors (who are the first readers of what they have written). The image of the alternatives lurking behind the elements of linguistic composition at every level, like the alternative universes evoked by quantum mechanics (and also by 'Pataphysics), is deeply pleasing to me. And writers need to play, in order to find the value around which a text will form. Using a procedure that throws your expression away, a long way away, from what you'd thought you meant to say, is not guaranteed to produce usable results, but it will create fascinating, delightful language-structures that may after all be usable in some way you never would have come upon.

Next time we'll get to the semantic application of "Mathews' Algorithm," and to an interesting variation on it that The Writhing Society came up with and that yielded good results: the "100 Camels" constraint.

Mathews' Algorithm

2009-09-13T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Writhing Society has been trying out some of the combinatoric methods invented by Oulipo. I still have not got my head around all the various ways in which mathematics can apply to composition in language and would like in particular to understand topology better. (Is there a "Topology for Dummies"?) Combinatorics, which Jacques Roubaud places at the heart of the early oulipian program ("Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau" in Warren Motte, Jr., Oulipo. A Primer of Potential Literature), is quite complicated enough. Perec used the greco-latin bi-square in the composition of La vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual), and one of these days I hope to try that procedure.

Lately The Writhing Society has been experimenting with Mathew's Algorithm. Harry Mathews describes it in both the Oulipo Compendium and in an article in Motte. He arranges several sets made up of equivalent members in a table like a multiplication table, which is primarily a method of visualization. As a simple example, here is a table in which each row forms a sentence and each column lines up subjects, adverbs, verbs, and complements.

Nixon reluctantly accepted the need for resignation.

Willy immediately rejected a profitable career as a safe-cracker.

Aisha hardly enjoyed eating raw fish wrapped in dried seaweed.

Carla testily refuted the implication that Sarkozy was too short.

Mathews now proposes two ways of recombining the elements, by moving the second line one space to the left (or to the right), the second line two spaces, the third line three spaces. The words that leave the square come back at the other end, so that moving the second line left produces:

immediately rejected a profitable career as a safe-cracker Willy

If one has shifted the line to the left one reads the column down, starting with the original first word. That would produce this sentence:

Nixon immediately enjoyed the implication that Sarkozy was too short.

If to the right one reads the column up, starting with the first word. That would produce:

Nixon testily enjoyed a profitable career as a safe-cracker.

We found that it helps to have a pair of scissors to hand and to cut the table up into 16 squares. But besides being hard to visualize, this procedure, at the syntactic level, really requires quite a lot of work before you can start. I had to change the last of my sentences from "the implication that her husband was too short for her" because of the feminine pronoun that would have introduced. A female Nixon is of course an intriguing, if not a disturbing thought, but in the end we agreed that the results are not worth the work -- except at the semantic level. More about that in my next.

What I'd like to do here

2009-09-07T15:46:00.000-07:00

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.

Homomorphic Converters will come out in September

2009-09-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is the first posting on my first blog. Welcome to The Writhing Society! The Society is an actual class/salon that meets every Wednesday at 6:30 at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY. We practice and discuss composition with constraints — arbitrary, invented rules for writing and sometimes for visual-verbal composition. We drink wine, free at $2 a glass, and eat popcorn for the salt.

This month Proteotypes will publish the second pamphlet in my series 13 Writhing Machines. The series will serve as a manual for constrained composition, especially in writing. This pamphlet, Homomorphic Converters, considers the use of previously used forms for new and unexpected contents. It should be out late in September!