December 7th, 2008 / 4:19 pm
Web Hype
PRESS RELEASE: “—– — —-” by Soffi Stiassni
Our own Soffi Stiassni will be rewriting Tao Lin’s Eeeee Eee Eeee using Georges Perec’s sans ‘e’ method derived in A Void.
If you think Perec’s attempt impossible (as I did), here’s an excerpt:
Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I’d try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp – fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? – a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord […]
What is perhaps more remarkable is Gibert Adair’s English translation, just excepted, of Perec’s French La Disparition. I simply don’t know how Adair was able to translate that.
I look forward to Stoffi’s rewrite of —– — —-. I can see it already:
Andrw drivs back to Domino’s.
“Matt,” h says. “Thr’s a dolphin in the backsat. Can I go hom?”
“Lt m put ths pppronis on,” Matt says. “Thn I’ll cash you out.”
Aftr bing paid sixty-cnts gas mony for ach dlivry Andrw has fourtn dollars.
“Give half to th dolphin,” Matt says.
Which reminds me of artist Brendan Lott’s sans ‘a’ The Scrlet Letter. I think I’m gonna rewrite Stephen Dixon’s I. without the ‘i.’ I challenge someone to do The Castle without the ‘K.’
This is either high-brow Wheel of Fortune, or lowbrow Jeopardy! I can’t figure it out.
Tags: Brendan Lott, eeeee eee eeee, Georges Perec, Tao Lin
Don’t forget Menard rewriting Don Quixote word for word. More on Menard.
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i wrote my undergrad thesis largely on menard’s quixote and kathy acker’s quixote. also talked about tom phillips’ ‘humument’. do you know that book. it is so wonderful.
also, a lot of the oulipo people aren’t really that fond of the adair translation, and i have to say it is probably my least favorite of perec’s books (except for maybe ‘a man asleep’). but since i don’t read french, i have to only go by what harry matthews and ian monk say when they talk about ‘a void’ being much better in french.
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Who is Soffi?
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Humument is fantastic! I’m right there with you ben.
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The Humument is sitting on my dining room table. I have glanced at it, but won’t read until next week for school. I’m working on a paper now about Don Q and Menard. I like Life and Things by Perec and something else I read by him. I think sometimes the Oulipo stuff works better as an idea than the execution of the idea, but I do love If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but the ouliponess of it is more hidden than in something like A Void. Maybe this distinction is obvious, but A Void is written without words that use the letter e, Perec didn’t just leave out the ‘e’ (as Soffi appears to be doing or threatening to do or joking about doing with Tao Lin’s book)
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the humument is better as an object, than reading material.
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poor dolphin
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Is that a philosophical question, Catherine?
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i just chuckled loudly in the bar. if i was eating bangers and mash, mash would have come out my nose.
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1) matt: i’m kind of obsessed with oulipo and my book is based on oulipo principles, so i’m somewhat biased, but I think that in practice a lot of their stuff is great. ‘life a user’s manual’ (which you liked) is constructed entirely around oulipo principles. the constraints perec uses are not as obvious as with ‘a void’, and maybe that makes the work more palatable, but even so ‘life’ is a quintessentially oulipian work. another very good oulipo book that does not display it’s oulipo-ness so overtly is jacques roubaud’s ‘great fire of london’.
2) the other perec book i love that is maybe not talked about so often is ‘w’. that book i found to be maybe his most emotionally powerful. It also uses oulipo tactics, but is not quite as determined by its constraints as some of his other writing.
3) i wish georges perec was not dead. he is my favorite person.
4) there is an early raymond queneau book called ‘odile’ which is kind of the proto-oulipian novel in that it explains both queneau’s involvement in surrealism and provides the philosophical basis for his break with breton et al. this is of course the founding thought (along with le lyonais’s mathematics) that leads to the development of the oulipo. odile is not formally constrained itself, but it’s a really beautiful little book and is well worth the afternoon it takes to read.
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That Perec excerpt is pretty impresive. His author photo is also impressive.
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ben – I know about Life and about oulipo and am a fan and at one point I too was obsessed with them – I have done some oulipo-like constraint writing, too – maybe I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t suggesting that Life wasn’t oulipan. I was just making the comment that the ‘experiments’ are sometimes more interesting than the product. I think this is true of a lot of writing, though. Not all writing! Just some of it. Didn’t mean to sound like I was making a blanket statement.
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I realize, too, that I’m making it sound like a failed experiment is a bad thing – obviously the concept of experiment is that sometimes it doesn’t work, so I guess what I’m saying is the experiments don’t always succeed (at least to my reading). That’s not really a bad thing and isn’t intended to diminish oulipo – that’s part of the idea, right? To do new shit.
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i agree that not all oulipo stuff is great and that some of it is cooler for existing than it is as work to read. i just wanted to defend some of the work that i think is really successful.
anyways. i think we are probably more or less in agreement here. thanks for clarifying
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So if you could recommend a couple of overlooked oulipan texts? It’s been a while since I’ve dipped my toes. I’ve been meaning to read Cigarettes for a while, but haven’t had time to read anything not assigned since coming back to school.
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well, i already mentioned these but w, odile, and great fire of london are all pretty great. perec’s species of spaces is neat.
roubaud’s ’some thing black’ is also excellent i think. not so overlooked but so far not mentioned is ‘invisible cities’.
not technically by oulipo members but in the same vein: christian bok’s ‘eunoia’ and walter abish’s ‘alphabetical africa’. i liked both of those.
there are more, but those are what immediately come to mind.
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Cool – I love Invisible Cities, amazing. I teach that to my creative writing students.
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