Dec 21, 2014
An article on the strange 20th century French writer Raymond Roussel.
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An article on the strange 20th century French writer Raymond Roussel.
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This Week's Post
Hi Everybody,
The semester's almost done, and I'd like to say that as a class I don't think I've seen so much varied and interesting work. I hope the tasks I gave you helped push your writing in productive directions.
I'd like you to take a break from posting this week so you can focus on one final submission. Think of it as something that sums up your writing this semester--it could be a revision of something you submitted earlier, or a post pulling together the entire sequence of a story you've otherwise submitted in portions, or a piece that's completely new.
Take the week to consider things, and submit your work on Monday the 22nd.
Best,
David Chirico
Thanksgiving
Hey Everybody,
I wanted to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving. And in case you were wondering, don't post tomorrow, Wednesday the 25th. Just enjoy the break.
Best,
David Chirico
Your Work
Hi Everybody,
Thinking about the things you've all been posting over the last few weeks, I have to say you've been presenting, as a group, some of the richest, most varied, and engaging material I've seen in this Tumblr experiment so far. You also seem to really like commenting on each others' writing, and that seems to be contributing to a good community atmosphere. Last semester, after some bumps in course development, I think that class eventually reached a similar place.
I've been trying to stay a bit more in the background--my comments are sent directly to you as emails, though I'm also going to start commenting publicly. I wonder if this has contributed to what I'm seeing.
Please comment and let me know what your impressions are of the class so far. Feel free to comment by email or to this post.
And this is a true story. When I give readings, I'll often read this first--just so the audience knows that they're dealing with a madman.
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Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I generated this sequence of imaginary artworks using techniques similar to those of the OULIPO. I took a novel by Raymond Roussel, La Doublure, and translated a portion of its first chapter from French into English (the title of the book could either be translated as "The Understudy" or, "The Lining"). Rather than use the most likely word for a given context, I always chose the least likely one--this technique provided me with the introduction and part of the list of titles you encounter before the sequence begins. The sequence itself was created by taking failed poems of my own--drafts that had reached a dead end--and pushing them through the Babel Fish online translator. They went from English to Dutch to German to Japanese to French to so on and so forth then back into English. The results? A collection of odd, suggestive words and phrases, which I then used as a seed-bed for further construction. I turned them into this series of imaginary works of installation art.
"Although poetry and mathematics often seem to be incompatible areas of study, the philosophy of OULIPO seeks to connect them. Founded in 1960 by French mathematician Francois de Lionnais and writer Raymond Queneau, Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (OULIPO), or Workshop of Potential Literature, investigates the possibilities of verse written under a system of structural constraints. Lionnais and Quenuau believed in the profound potential of a poem produced within a framework or formula and that, if done in a playful posture, the outcomes could be endless."
Another idea generator: OULIPO.
Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies card set reimplemented as a dynamic web page.
This is an idea generator. Its original texts are by experimental musician Brian Eno. Even though his Oblique Strategies cards--which are shuffled and selected at random--were originally meant to help him compose music, many of the instructions you find here could be applied to writing anything.