MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

My Life in CIA: A Chronicle of 1973 by Harry Mathews. Dalkey Archive, 2005. “Harry Mathews” has a problem. As an unemployed writer living in Paris, seemingly of independent means, he has been mistaken as a CIA agent, not just by one person but by a whole number of them. The more he tries to [...]

“Stick any two postcards to a wall and you’ve got a narrative. Unedited.” -Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy, p.88 This quote jumped out at me from a book that, for the most part, I was having a hard time keeping my interest in (after struggling through a couple chapters I ended up [...]

I come upon this stuff even when I’m not looking for it. From “Out of What Past? Notes on B Film Noir” by Paul Kerr (1979) in the Film Noir Reader, Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (NY: Limelight Editions, 1996) (107-27): Artistic ingenuity in the face of economic intransigence is one critical commonplace about [...]

Something I’ve been meaning to comment on for almost a month now. In one of Dan Green’s post on the Oulipo in relation to a Believer article on Walter Abish, he quotes the author of the article, Benjamin Lytal: “In order to minimize the element of chance in a literary text, and maximize intention, Oulipians [...]

Josh Corey, blogs on poetry, but lately has also been doing a little blogging about playing D&D (that’s Dungeons & Dragons, kids) again with some friends. I too recently started playing again with some friends. Today he put up an interesting reply to a reader who questions why he doesn’t write fiction instead of gaming, [...]

Roussel, Raymond. New Impressions of Africa (1932). Illustrations by Henri-A. Zo. Translated by Ian Monk. London: Atlas Press, 2004. Raymond Roussel’s influence on French literature of the 20th century is considerable, among his admirers numbered Surrealists (Breton, Aragon, Desnos), ex-Surrealists (Leiris), Oulipians (Queneau, Mathews (ok, he’s not French)), nouveau romanciers (Robbe-Grillet’s For a New Novel [...]

Madden, Matt. A Fine Mess. Issue 2. Alternative Comics, 2004. Matt Madden is one of the only American comic creators I know consciously working within the field of constraint (a few others’ examples can be found at the Oubapo America site such as the Transformative Exercises). As far as I am aware this is the [...]

[The original post on Dan Green's blog The Reading Experience to which I am replying.] I’ve been pondering the limits of this idea of “constraint” for quite awhile now (at least as long as I’ve had this blog), and I can’t say that I have come to any clear conclusions. What at first seems clear [...]

The Five Obstructions (2003). Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier. Now available on DVD. French language website. This past week I finally saw Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions”. The film was immediately of interest to me when I heard about it earlier in the year: Von Trier gets filmmaker Leth to remake Leth’s short [...]

I’ve been thinking about Victor Shklovsky’s concept of ostraniene, a neologism in Russian traditionally translated as “defamiliarization” but also, in the edition of his Theory of Prose (1929) that I have (Trans. by Benjamin Sher, Dalkey Archive, 1990), as “enstrangement”. The idea being that when we are familiar with something we no longer see it; [...]

Noon, Jeff. Cobralingus. Hove, UK: Codex Books, 2001. Cobralingus website. On the title page, this book is subtitled “Metamorphiction,” a neologism that handily describes the ten works contained within. Jeff Noon, best known for his science fiction, has created a rather free process for forming a new text out of an old one. An “Instructions” [...]

Bôk, Christian. Eunoia. Toronto: Couch House, 2001. Online version. Reading Eunoia aloud is a singular experience. The repetition of sounds and rhymes, assonance and alliteration all make for a poetic work of prose. I found myself reading it at a steady clip, keeping the rhythm in the forefront. You probably haven’t read anything like this [...]

I’m going to start covering comics a little more on this blog. Another topic to add to the list, mostly by way of reviews, but even starting off with a comic I manage to find myself back on track. In the new issue of Indy Magazine, Adam White reviews the complete run of Cerebus pointing [...]

Matt Madden‘s Exercises in Style is a series of one page comics which repeat the same simple story through numerous styles, constraints, forms, etc. The idea (but not the story) is based on Queneau’s Exercises de style (1947) in which he writes 99 variations on the same simple narrative — a tour-de-force of the author’s [...]

Terry, Philip. The Book of Bachelors. Special fiction issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction 19.2 (1999): 7-108. Introduction by David Bellos, Afterword by the author. Nine single men (bachelors, even) separated from the world, from people, separated from women by: windows, magazines, television screens, smoking, work. Philip Terry creates a series of stories about [...]

Georges Perec, in the “History of the Lipogram” makes an important point about lipograms, but which could apply to many constraints: …the principle of the lipogram is childishly simple;its application can prove to be excessively difficult;its result is not necessarily spectacular. (99, Motte trans.) Which leads us to: 1. A good constraint is not necessarily [...]

The lipogram is one of the most commonly cited constraints. Simply stated, a lipogram is a text written without a certain letter (or letters). The difficulty of a lipogram varies depending on which or how many letters are omitted as well as the length of the work. Georges Perec’s famous novel La Disparition is a [...]