[HN Gopher] Oulipo's use of the Tohoku paper (2014)
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Oulipo's use of the Tohoku paper (2014)
Author : benbreen
Score : 30 points
Date : 2024-06-17 19:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.neverendingbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.neverendingbooks.org)
| ykonstant wrote:
| This procedure looks like it would result in some hilarious
| texts; shame there is no example in the article.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Is it clear to you what is done? As far as I can tell, we are
| instructed to "empty" the text, then to compile three lists,
| but the article I see ends with:
|
| > In the example Le Lionnais gives, the liste M is the list of
| all verbs appearing in the Tohoku paper.
|
| ... and says nothing about what to _do_ with those lists.
| macrolocal wrote:
| Lieven Le Bruyn is just in the habit of cataloguing how
| algebraic geometry culture shows up in unexpected places, eg.
| http://www.neverendingbooks.org/what-about-simone-weil/ .
| Surprising to see on Hacker News.
| vessenes wrote:
| If it's an Oulipo game, most likely you then go back to the
| original emptied text, and fill down from the lists that were
| made from other sources.
| yorwba wrote:
| The penultimate sentence is
|
| > Finally, we fill the empty spaces in the source text by
| words from the target lists, in the order that they appeared
| in the target texts.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| ...and then? Don't leave us hanging!
| percevalve wrote:
| For those who find those kind of approach fund, Raymond Queneau
| created:
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_mille_milliards_de_po%C3%...
| The physical book is actually not great to manipulate but it is
| fun. Another recent approach: https://oupoco.org/fr/generateur-
| de-poeme/index.html (this one is using poems from the 19th
| century), and it has a "physical" implementation:
| https://oupoco.org/fr/le-projet/view/35/la-boite-a-poesie.ht...
| demondemidi wrote:
| I only ever read Harry Mathew's work because Queaneu rarely
| wrote in English and I don't read French. I did like Exercise
| in Style though.
| quuxplusone wrote:
| About four weeks ago I read Harry Mathews' short-story
| collection _The Human Country_.
|
| I came to it for "Franz Kafka in Riga" (sold to me as a sort
| of proto-quine, but really it's not very quiney, it's more a
| funny story about the writerly ego).
|
| His most famous work in there is "Country Cooking from
| Central France: Roast Boned Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce
| Double)". It's a story that requires leisure to read, as the
| recipe does to cook; if you just want to read the story and
| get it over with, it's not going to work at all. Which is
| clever in hindsight. Of course _I_ just wanted to get it over
| with, and so it didn 't come out for me.
|
| There are several stories literally about linguistic games
| (particularly the first few in the book); personally I found
| them intriguing and entertaining but ultimately kind of
| pointless. (The kind of erudite game where you want to get
| out a paper and pencil, or go to Wikipedia, but suspect with
| near-certainty that you won't find any there there if you
| do.) "The Bratislava Spiccato" is worth reading twice just to
| see how the non-digressions actually do add up to a
| reasonable story; I thought it was going to be like Douglas
| Hofstadter's "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", but (IIRC) I
| decided that it was actually totally honest, which made the
| second read feel very satisfactory.
|
| The story I enjoyed most from that collection -- the one I
| recommend it's worth a small amount of your time no matter
| who you are -- was "The Broadcast", which is a linguistic
| game in _technique_ but not in subject matter. The (much)
| longer variation "Their Words, For You" also somewhat
| appealed to my aesthetic sense but (like "Farce Double") went
| on much longer than my patience.
|
| https://archive.org/details/humancountrynewc0000math/
| demondemidi wrote:
| Thanks for the tip on the short stories. When I read "The
| Conversions" I tried to tease out all the meta games, same
| with Tlooth. But I never found it rewarding. I'm more drawn
| to his prose, topics, and the air of aristocracy that comes
| from his eccentric and wealthy upbringing. His talent plus
| that inescapable past makes for some unusual stories. Like
| The Journalist, or Cigarettes.
| wesselbindt wrote:
| I worked in agebraic geometry, so I love Grothendieck, and I've
| read and loved a bunch of oulipo and oulipo-related authors, so
| this blog post has left me with a feeling of
| flobosg wrote:
| I'll take the chance to recommend one of my favorite books, the
| Oulipo-inspired _Eunoia_ by Christian Bok:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoia_(book)
| riffraff wrote:
| if you can read Italian "All'alba Shahrazad andra ammazzata"[0]
| is a collection of monovocalic sonnets which tell or describe
| masterpieces of literature (the title would be something like
| "Shahrazad shall hang at dawn", for Arabian Nights).
|
| Umberto Eco, which famously enjoyed this stuff, wrote the
| preface.
|
| Ironically I learned of this book from an American, Douglas
| Hofstadter.
|
| [0] https://www.semidinchiostro.com/prodotto/giuseppe-varaldo-
| al...
| abathur wrote:
| I also enjoyed Crystallography a lot:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallography_(book)
| vessenes wrote:
| Love me some dadaist word games. I wrote code to apply Oulipo's
| S+7 game (replace each noun in a text with the noun seven words
| later in the dictionary) to the wizard of Oz in one of my
| Comparative Lit translation courses.
|
| I had an extremely slow Perl program chugging through a dict file
| when Michael Radwin who lived down the hall from me came by and
| taught me some basic algorithms -- he said "just make a hash
| table with the +7th word in it; you can do it in one pass over
| the dict file." Mind blown.
|
| I got an A; Auntie Emasculation and Uncle Haphaestus were a hit.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Are you sure Auntie Emasculation is not real? I _feel_ like
| I've met at least a couple of them...
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