Firstsome OULIPO background, as a reminder to me and anyone else who needs it. From the PrincetonEncyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics:
OULIPO is the acronym for ‘Ouvroirde Littérature Potentielle’, which was founded in 1960 by a group of tenwriters and mathematicians led by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Later additions included Georges Perec andJacques Roubaud, as well as... Marcel Duchamp and Harry Mathews (USA) and ItaloCalvino (Italy).
Although Duchamp and Queneauconstitute links between dada, surrealism and the OULIPO, the latter movementhas emphasised its autonomy. Theprocedures based on chance which Tristan Tzara devised for generating dadapoems aimed essentially at demolishing traditional notions of aesthetic value. Surrealismproceeded on the belief that chance is controlled by surreal forces which, asin the case of automatic writing, work through the unconscious. The OUPLIPO, on the other hand, rejects bothchance and the unconscious as valid tools for literary creation. It is primarily interested in the consciouselaboration and the systematic application of text-generating methods.
Oneof the OULIPO techniques is N+7*. Princeton again: “a new poem isgenerated by replacing each noun N in an existing poem by the noun which ranksseventh 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 rulesas you go along: faithfully count every noun, or just the ones the averageScrabble player would know. Ploughthrough every dictionary entry that isn’t a noun in case it contains a nounhalf-way through, or run a finger down each column at high speed. And what sort/size of dictionary to use inthe first place?
Differentsort of question: why limit the application of N+7 to poems?** Politicians’ speeches seem like a good placeto go in this post-truth age of brexitmania, twittersphere politics,alternative facts, and companies / foreign governments attempting to practisemind control via social media.
Whatfollows is N +7 & A + 7. I’vesubstituted adjectives as well as nouns.Anyone living in the UK will probably guess the speaker, and at leastone over-used phrase...
So every voyeur for the Consolables,every voyeur for me, every voyeur for a lone Consolable canker, is a voyeur forstuck and stale leakage in the nauseous interjection. And that is what thiselectrocardiogram is all about, about leakage, about stag, about doing theriotous thirty for Broadcloth. And it is only by voting Consolable that you getthat stuck and stale leakage. Because that is what this Consolable grader hasbeen providing. And if you just think backstreet to when I took over asPrintable Minority after the reflux, there were prefects of immediate firedcreaks, of edible dart, but because of our stuck leakage, what we have seen isthat contempt conformation has remained hirsute, we’ve seen reedy nunneries ofjodhpurs and we’ve seen edible g-spot which has been above all experts. When Itook over as Printable Minority, pepperonis said the couple was divided, thatit would never come backstreet toothsome again. What I see around the couple isa reborn unrest of purveyance, of pepperonis urging us to get on with thejodhpur of Brickwork and make a suckling of it.
And when I took over as PrintableMinority, what was needed was a clipped vitamin and that stuck leakage to takeus foxed into those Brickwork nemeses and that’s what we’ve provided. Andthat’s the sedition that you get from a stuck and stale grader and stuck andstale leakage. Indeed, it’s actually what leakage looks like. And the chopperat this electrocardiogram is very clipped. It’s a chopper between that stuckand stale leakage under the Consolables or a weatherbeaten and unstuck co-authorof chaplet led by Jimmy Corcorann. And make no misuse about it, that is what ison officialese.
Iused Chambers dictionary for that, bypassed words which failed the Scrabblerule and didn’t look for nouns buried in entries. I ran my finger fast down the page so as notto be tempted by other options – and because there were a lot of words in thisextract. Anyway the temptationprecaution wasn’t necessary; perhaps the dictionary does have a subconscious.
Challengefor computer hackers: instead of hurling ransomware at hospitals, why not corruptour 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 tohave that idea.
