MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Andrews, Chris. “Constraint and Convention: The formalism of the Oulipo.” Neophilologus 87 (2003): 223-232. Andrews’ stated purpose is to define and distinguish constraint from genre and other types of rules, procedures, etc. He does this by critiquing other attempts to define constraint, most particularly Baetens and Schiavetta’s article from Formules, as well as various statements [...]

Conte, Joseph. “American Oulipo: Proceduralism in the novels of Gilbert Sorrentino, Harry Mathews, and John Barth.” Chapter 4 of Design and Debris: a chaotics of postmodern American fiction. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama, 2002. 75-111. Conte discusses constraint in the context of his work on design and disorder, chaos and order, much of which does not [...]

Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963. Marc Saporta’s book in a box Composition No. 1 is one of those books that people like to refer to in an off-hand-”it’s a book in a box where the pages can be read randomly”-way, but almost no one reads it [...]

Abish, Walter. 99: The New Meaning. Providence: Burning Deck, 1990. American author Walter Abish is probably most often mentioned for his first novel Alphabetical Africa, which is written in a kind of beginning of word lipogram (I’ll review it in the future). 99: The New Meaning is a more recent and less known book consisting [...]

Untitled Elementary Morality by Paul Fournel Translation by Derik A Badman Glass atelier Plenary meetingPreliminary interview Red velvet Insufficiant education Trifling eventsOutdated sentiments Crazy company Sanguine senior Doctrinal discussionPhotographic advertisement Retired inspector     Golden bobbles Invited to dine by a countess a bit bumbling Golden bobbles she incarnates the spirit of Lenin     [...]

An elementary morality: “Elementary Movements of Undressing” by Jacques Jouet Translation: Derik A Badman last fabric light weavefull sack studied surface assiduous hands buttocks huggedhands in place waist traced pale face unsaddled frontlively descent sibylline zone    barely slowedat the kneesit fallsto the floora foot outsidethe otherfishes for it    tender trace trace drunkbare-assed curt [...]

The Elementary Morality (Morale Élémentaire) is a fixed form of poetry created by Raymond Queneau, first appearing in the last book he published before his death Morale Élémentaire. The name was later applied to the form, from the title of that book, by the members of the Oulipo. He defines the form as follows: “Il [...]

A oft-quoted passage from Queneau: “…it must be noted that the poet is never inspired, if by that one means that inspiration is a function of humor, of temperature, of political circumstances, of subjective chance, or of the subconscious. The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appers to others [...]

An English translated, hypertexted version of Raymond Queneau’s “Un Conte a votre facon” (A Story as You Like It). [And a graphic representation of the text.] Nothing that interesting now, but in the 60′s it was a little more novel (if the story still not very exciting). When I first learned of this, I was [...]

Before his death (most likely a suicide; in 1933) Raymond Roussel arranged for the posthumous publication of a work entitled Comment j’ai ecrit certains de mes livres (How I Wrote Certain of My Books). In it he claims to divulge the method by which many of his works were written. What he gives is a [...]

A brief passage from my current reading: Not only does the process employed by Roussel for the composition of his prose works have the immense interest of adding up to a deliberate promotion of language to the rank of creative agent, instead of contenting itself with using it as an agent of execution, but it [...]

Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies [1969]. Trans. by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. Italo Calvino was elected to the Oulipo in 1973 (the first Italian in the group), yet this work, written previous to that time, testifies to his interest in structure and constraint. In the “Notes” at the end of [...]

Mathews, Harry. Cigarettes. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987. Normal, Ill: Dalkey Archive, 1998. Harry Mathews’ fourth novel is quite a departure from his previous three. One would expect some change in the 12 years since his last novel. Over that period Mathews joined the Oulipo (actually in 1972, but his previous novel is concurrent [...]

From a book I recently bought (on sale from Schoenhof’s, the foreign bookstore in Cambridge): Mais je proposerai plutôt l’exemple du musicien, puisque j’ai conçu mes Contes moraux à la manière de six variations symphoniques. Comme lui, je varie le motif initial, le ralentis ou l’accélère, l’allonge ou le rétrécis, l’étoffe ou l’épure. A partir [...]

Another procedure involving a source text. The source text (whatever you like) is broken down into its main syntactical elements, for instance: “Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.” (sentence 1 of Lowry’s Under the Volcano) translated into Nouns (N) Adjectives (A) [...]

This constraint was illustrated by Raymond Queneau in an essay entitled “La redondance chez Phane Armé” (in La litterature potentielle (Gallimard, 1973) also a section of his essay “Potential Literature” as trans. by Warren Motte in Oulipo: A primer of potential literature (Dalkey Archive, 1998)). He describes a means of reducing a poem to its [...]

Baetens, Jan. “Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form.” Poetics Today 18.1 (Spring 1997): 1-14. Jan Baetens is one of the editors/founders of the journal Formules: Revue des litteratures a contraintes, which I have collected a number of issues of, but only so far browsed through. Having now read this article by him, I [...]