Fitting that, moments after running into my favorite writing teacher, sociologist Jim Jasper (see his comments on how to write better here and how to give better talks here), I came across a little blog post on a ‘definitive’ reissue of Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, which has been out of print for a bit. I have commented on the book (and Calvino’s) earlier, but I was inspired to learn more about the Oulipo group, which sought to promote new forms of writing. As Joshua Cohen, in the blog Tablet, explains:
Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters.
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