MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

I’m a man of habit and schedule. The more I plan and schedule things like comics or blog posts, the more I get them done. So, I’m going to try something new here at the blog. In an effort to keep posting and to keep up with what I’m reading, I’m going to post weekly [...]

In this post I quoted Raymond Queneau on his novel Le Chiendent: I gave a form, a rhythm to what I was writing. I fixed for myself rules as strict as those of the sonnet. The characters didn’t appear and disappear by chance, the same way for the places and the different modes of expression [...]

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 [...]

A few quotes from Raymond Queneau on novels. The French quotes were found at this site. Translations are my own. It is insupportable to me to leave the fixing of the number of chapters in these novels [Witchgrass/Barktree (Le Chiendent), Saint Glinglin, The Last Days] up to chance. Le Chiendent is composed of 91 (7 [...]

Queneau, Raymond. Pierrot Mon Ami (1942). Translated from the French by Barbara Wright. Dalkey Archive, 1989. Calling an author sui generis is a cliché, but in the case of Raymond Queneau it is nothing but the truth. Pierrot Mon Ami, his eighth novel, is a fine introduction to the particular style of this French polymath. [...]

A translated interview with Raymond Queneau, on the idea that “novelistic activity” can be divided into two “poles”, that of the Iliad and that of the Odyssey. [From the Review of Contemporary Fiction] Includes references to two French novels I really love, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste and Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pecuchet.

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 [...]

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 [...]