So Much for the Granta
The Believer looks at the members of Oulipo.
The Beautiful Outlaw is a type of lipogram (for more about which, see below) wherein a chosen word—often a name—is spelled out through its absence. Specifically, the work’s first sentence (or line, or stanza, or section) contains every letter of the alphabet but the first letter of the absent word, the second all but the second, and cetera. The first sentence above contains each letter but o. The second, each but u. If you can’t guess where it goes from there, I recommend you close this magazine and take a short nap.
You may object that in order to achieve this effect, I have been reduced to writing near gibberish. To which I would be tempted to respond that my work seeks out significance deeper than the merely semantic. A more honest response, however, would be that it is very, very hard to produce aesthetically satisfying results under the weight of many of these constraints and that I, frankly speaking, suck at it. In all fairness to me, though, some of the actual Oulipians are no great shakes at it either.
I’ll explain.
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading:
- Believer in n + 1 During my vacation up in Seattle I enjoyed a new and used book store called Elliot Bay Book Co., which is a really cozy place....
- Believer v. n + 1 TEV is going to spend a week matching up n + 1 Issue 4 (the new issue, which is set to be released soon) versus...
- Believer, n + 1 In this article, which I’ll assume everyone has probably read by now, AO Scott does a pretty good job characterizing the distinct editorial approaches of...
- The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers Maybe about a year back, McSweeney’s launched its Believer Books imprint. Initially, Believer Books repurposed items originally printer in The Believer into slim volumes, like...
- Blurbs Charles Isherwood writes a column about how unethical publishers turn bad reviews into good blurbs. Frankly, anyone who buys a book based on a 1-word...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
All of Perec’s language games were played out en Français. How can these complicated Oulipian works possibly be deciphered? I’d like to hear from anyone who enjoyed reading Perec in English.
I haven’t read the Believer, so I don’t know if this question is already answered in the latest issue.