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A video by Rees Archibald, Andrew Infanti and Matthew Shlomowitz. Made for the Rational Rec Oulipo night in June 2007.
A playful exploration of this post-war French literary movement, OuLiPo is an acronym that translates as "workshop of potential literature" most famously explored by Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. The tenet of the OuLiPo is to create literature with constraints (not using the letter E an infamous example, or replacing nouns in texts with other from the dictionary).
Read One, Write Two
Read One, Write Two
Write two lines of a poem on a scrap of paper.
Pass the second line only to the next person, who then writes two lines of her own, passing only the second line to the next person, and so forth.
At the end, the finished "poem" is assembled, made up of the various pieces, only half of which were "visible" to more than one person.
For Next Time
For Next Time
Read Motte, Warren, Jr. Introduction to Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, Warren Motte, Jr., pp 16-25 of pdf (introduction)
In "When a Writer's Great Freedom Lies in Constraint," (The Atlantic) Joe Fassler writes:
Artistic freedom, paradoxically, relies on the presence of constraints. Expression somehow flourishes when it has rules, norms, and conventions to push against—or as William Wordsworth once wrote of the sonnet’s rigid form, “the prison into which we doom ourselves / no prison is.” But Melissa Febos, the author of Abandon Me, takes this a step further. Her entire working ethos is about willingly, even willfully, imposing limits—and not just on the page. In a conversation for this series, Febos explored how an essay by Annie Dillard inspires her to pursue only one thing, deeply, at a time, and why she’ll always choose to restrict the total number of choices in her life.
Read the conversation linked above and write a reflection exploring your own experiences working under artistic constraints (writing, visual art, music). What is the process like for you? Are you able to sense freedom when working under those conditions? How?
A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. The most famous pangram is probably the thirty-five-letter-long “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Pangrams are used to test test typing equipment and showing off letters in a typeface. They also serve as a game and mental exercise for linguists and word nerds, who play at including every letter into as short a sentence as possible. For next class, develop five pangrams of your own.
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