view
A Documentary Saga of the OuLiPo
Music : Matthew Shlomowitz
Text : Andrew Infanti
Video : Rees Archibald
Narrators : Joanna Bailie, Dave Procter
This collaborative work was created for a Rational Rec evening in London, England in 2007. Infanti’s text applies various OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) literary constraints while Shlomowitz’s music and Archibald’s images provide wry counterpoint. (read more …)
Samples of Graphics and Texts
Documentary Saga about the OuLiPo
text department
Section 1B – Constraints [Saga Tone]
172 words
(… plus 17)
A lofty law, a LIPOGRAM with skill casts out a consonant or vocoid from a book, long or short. This class of constraint fashions vast hardships for the word-craftsman.
Thus, a constraint by opinion simplistic can harass a word- stylist causing many twists and turns of talk to say a thought without using that word-thing which must not show up.
Avoiding an obvious trap, an OuLiPO rat in his labyrinth must burrow paths of possibility around such obvious limits.
A grand catalog of OuLiPO constraints has found its way to print. Many innovations amplify proportions found in an old and famous fancy of past days. Sundry OuLiPo lyricists aim to parody our Bard’s iambic artistry through rationality not INSPIRATION. Copy his grammar and apply its rigid ramifications as a program. Gloss syntax from old songs and adapt it to an infinity of unknown, unsaid sayings. Pat and pull all into palindromic putty.
OuLiPo disdains fatuous facts. A word-craftsman culls and authors axioms as in math. Unchains a possibility by applying a formula.
Documentary Saga about the OuLiPo
text department
Section 4B - Combinatoriality [Saga Tone]
72 words
(… minus 17)
N R T S A W O L
R T S A W O L N
T S A W O L N R
S A W O L N R T
A W O L N R T S
W O L N R T S A
O L N R T S A W
L N R T S A W O
N R T S A W O L
Never restrict to sense a word or letter!
Rhyming takes sound and walks over logic. Newer tools shape associations while ordering literal revolutions.
Sequences advance, wearing out, looping, neutrally recycling things and weaving oulipien labyrinths nobly redistributing treasured significance which older laws narrowly regulated. Theory-spun aggregates of letters negate revelation’s treacherous stimulus and wake literature, nodding round the sacred accident. Weapons OuLiPo nurtures, reclaiming tenser structures: a whirligig obliging language.
Documentary Saga about the OuLiPo
text department
Section 5B- Anticipatory Plagiary [Saga Tone]
91 words
(… minus 18)
[ … like many masterpieces]
Songs by old bards must tend their tithe.
Prior poets render tribute having cozened constraints concerning
OuLiPo’s exclusive experiment. History’s harbingers invaded, inferring invention.
Contributions subsequently reconsidered plagiarism, counterfeited literature’s tutelary indemnity
incapacitated, OuLiPolitics excommunicates traditionalist appreciations. Atavistically exaggerating determinism,
neo-oulipien retro-appropriation metamorphoses anticipatory potentiality, counterdemonstrating anthropological reversibility.
Productivity propagandizes proprietary polygenesis. Imperishable legitimacy, intrinsically indefensible,
obstinately original, dissimulates embezzlement. Oulipien outrageousness recuperates recognition,
harvesting heretofore historic happenings, recently rectified OuLiPo inventions.
Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, announced fragile theories later
made truth by French men near the Seine.
