First
some OULIPO background, as a reminder to me and anyone else who needs it. From the Princeton
Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics:
OULIPO is the acronym for ‘Ouvroir
de Littérature Potentielle’, which was founded in 1960 by a group of ten
writers and mathematicians led by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Later additions included Georges Perec and
Jacques Roubaud, as well as... Marcel Duchamp and Harry Mathews (USA) and Italo
Calvino (Italy).
Although Duchamp and Queneau
constitute links between dada, surrealism and the OULIPO, the latter movement
has emphasised its autonomy. The
procedures based on chance which Tristan Tzara devised for generating dada
poems aimed essentially at demolishing traditional notions of aesthetic value. Surrealism
proceeded on the belief that chance is controlled by surreal forces which, as
in the case of automatic writing, work through the unconscious. The OUPLIPO, on the other hand, rejects both
chance and the unconscious as valid tools for literary creation. It is primarily interested in the conscious
elaboration and the systematic application of text-generating methods.
One
of the OULIPO techniques is N+7*. Princeton again: “a new poem is
generated by replacing each noun N in an existing poem by the noun which ranks
seventh after it in a given dictionary”.
There’s an online generator for this, here; so there should be. But doing it yourself is more fun – the process itself is interesting. You soon realise that you need to add rules
as you go along: faithfully count every noun, or just the ones the average
Scrabble player would know. Plough
through every dictionary entry that isn’t a noun in case it contains a noun
half-way through, or run a finger down each column at high speed. And what sort/size of dictionary to use in
the first place?
Different
sort of question: why limit the application of N+7 to poems?** Politicians’ speeches seem like a good place
to go in this post-truth age of brexitmania, twittersphere politics,
alternative facts, and companies / foreign governments attempting to practise
mind control via social media.
What
follows is N +7 & A + 7. I’ve
substituted adjectives as well as nouns.
Anyone living in the UK will probably guess the speaker, and at least
one over-used phrase...
So every voyeur for the Consolables,
every voyeur for me, every voyeur for a lone Consolable canker, is a voyeur for
stuck and stale leakage in the nauseous interjection. And that is what this
electrocardiogram is all about, about leakage, about stag, about doing the
riotous thirty for Broadcloth. And it is only by voting Consolable that you get
that stuck and stale leakage. Because that is what this Consolable grader has
been providing. And if you just think backstreet to when I took over as
Printable Minority after the reflux, there were prefects of immediate fired
creaks, of edible dart, but because of our stuck leakage, what we have seen is
that contempt conformation has remained hirsute, we’ve seen reedy nunneries of
jodhpurs and we’ve seen edible g-spot which has been above all experts. When I
took over as Printable Minority, pepperonis said the couple was divided, that
it would never come backstreet toothsome again. What I see around the couple is
a reborn unrest of purveyance, of pepperonis urging us to get on with the
jodhpur of Brickwork and make a suckling of it.
And when I took over as Printable
Minority, what was needed was a clipped vitamin and that stuck leakage to take
us foxed into those Brickwork nemeses and that’s what we’ve provided. And
that’s the sedition that you get from a stuck and stale grader and stuck and
stale leakage. Indeed, it’s actually what leakage looks like. And the chopper
at this electrocardiogram is very clipped. It’s a chopper between that stuck
and stale leakage under the Consolables or a weatherbeaten and unstuck co-author
of chaplet led by Jimmy Corcorann. And make no misuse about it, that is what is
on officialese.
I
used Chambers dictionary for that, bypassed words which failed the Scrabble
rule and didn’t look for nouns buried in entries. I ran my finger fast down the page so as not
to be tempted by other options – and because there were a lot of words in this
extract. Anyway the temptation
precaution wasn’t necessary; perhaps the dictionary does have a subconscious.
Challenge
for computer hackers: instead of hurling ransomware at hospitals, why not corrupt
our corrupt political discourse with an OULIPObot?
* The original is S+7, from the French substantif for noun.
** Of course this blog is not the first to
have that idea.
