MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Matt Madden tipped me off on Twitter, and some research* confirms that on November 24, 1960 the first meeting of the Oulipo occurred. Making today the group’s 50th anniversary! The Oulipo (and Raymond Queneau, the co-founder, in particular) were and continue to be a huge influence on my work. A great majority of my comics [...]

Issac asked for clickable links, so I’ve added links to all the works I cited (or used) in my presentation to the post that has the audio version. I’ll also add, that Mike Wenthe made my day in his post where he refers to me as “cartoonist, critic, and comics theorist”. Issac also commented: It’d [...]

This is a week late, but I’m still without internet at home and adjusting to my new housing: 1. Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978, Translated by David Bellos, 1987): This large novel alone took up a week of reading time. After all my reading of Oulipian works, I decided it was time [...]

Writings for the Oulipo by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 68p. Famiy Archaeology and Other Poems by Ian Monk. Make Now Press, 2006. 80p. Ian Monk is an English member of the Oulipo, mostly known as a translator. In these two books we find some of his non-translated work, mostly poems. Both are highly [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Exercises in Style (1947). Translated by Barbara Wright (1958). New Directions, 1981. (A French version is available at ubu.com.) In one of her two introductions (1958 and 1981) to this book Barbara Wright notes that Exercises in Style (EiS) is one of Raymond Queneau’s best-selling volumes in France. This comes as a bit [...]

Perloff, Marjorie. “The Oulipo Factor: the Procedural Poetics of Christan Bök and Caroline Bergvall.” Textual Practice 18.1 (2004): 23-45. I rarely delve into poetry here. It’s not a form of literature I am very familiar with. I don’t think I’ve ever managed to really appreciate a lot of poetry, and I’ve always been more into [...]

[I hope this is at least slightly coherent.] Early on in his essay “Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese” (an online version at the Electronic Book Review) Harry Mathews states: “… an editor would be mad to employ an Oulipian as a translator.” (70) It’s a bit of an overstatement (a [...]

Two brief quotes from Harry Mathews’ Cigarettes on writing, that show the oulipian influence at work: “Morris was showing him what writing could do. He advanced the notion that creation begins by annihilating typical forms and procedures, especially the illusory “naturalness” of sequence and coherence.” (135) “He went through Lewis’s work with him line by [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]