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Long ago, before most of you were born, I used to listen to music on vinyl. A vinyl single was usually about three minutes long, and a vinyl album, or LP, twenty minutes a side. When I started playing in bands, and writing my own songs, I thought it was best to write three minute songs, or to think in sets of songs forty minutes long. The technology of playing music dictated what I wrote.
When I watch a film I wonder how the screenwriter’s plotting is influenced by a movie's eventual length. If a film is ninety minutes long, each of its three acts gets to be thirty minutes. People will feel short changed if a movie is less than an hour, and often complain if it goes on for too long.
But what dictates the length of a book? I’m led to believe that publishers prefer children's novels to be shorter, but why? Is it simply because huge books don't sell? Are they too daunting or too heavy?
The original draft of a book I’ve just finished was 120,000 words. My agent insisted I cut in half. I did so, and although the book is neater, and sharper, I think it’s lost something of its rambling essence. (Can an essence ramble?)
So, like a DJ who creates an extended mix, or like the Directors Cut of a movie available on DVD, I wonder whether it’s possible to publish both long and shorter versions of my new book. And while I’m at it, I wonder if I could write an even shorter short one. Take this to its logical conclusion and my book will end up as a short story, a poem, or even a tweet. Perhaps it can exist, like matter, in a variety of states. The book is about music, so I suppose I could include a cd, or a link to a download.
These days so many of the contexts in which artists work are in flux. Writing is no longer confined to print, but to a myriad of forms. We can write blogs of infinite length (that no one will read). We can tweet pithy wisdom. (Nobody will read these either). At sea in the online world, we have no limit to their imaginings. I can write and record my music at home, upload it on to Soundcloud and don't have to concern myself with the memory capacity of the means of distribution. The LP, the CD, even the concept of music of any finite length has been challenged by software such as Koan which enables music to be ‘generative’ – that is, the composer determines certain settings (key, pitch, tempo, arrangement) and the music unfolds infinitely.
As someone who trained as a painter, then spent ten years in music before writing books, I see many art forms suddenly released from their bonds, in freefall. Of course it is liberating: there’s a new world out there, and it goes on forever.
Writers have always enjoyed creating their own restraints: Joyce’s Ulysses, Georges Perec, the works of Italo Calvino, the Oulipo movement, they have all sought to devise structures to give their work some limit, a reaction to, perhaps, a sense of reality as too chaotic.
Reality is too daunting to capture in its entirety, so we all need to be selective, to choose, to limit. But the boundaries of our reality are dissolving in the online world. We get vertigo, we run to find the edges, there aren’t any.
And our security, like the security we get from good parents who give clear boundaries, is threatened. It’s a brave new world. It's daunting and exciting in equal measure.
So, if and when my new 'work' eventually comes out, maybe it will be in several forms, the least of which will be the printed book. And if you miss most of them, please make sure you don't miss the tweet.
This week’s podcast features a special discussion with Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Liteature, a history of of the Oulipo, past, present, and future. For the uninitiated, the Oulipo is a 50-year-old group of writers and mathematicians and others interested in the idea of “potential” literature. At times highly technical and esoteric in their thinking about literature, the group also has a sort of prankster streak, which comes out in the liveliness of many of their writings. Some of the most famous works produced by Oulipian writers include Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler . . ., and Harry Mathews’s Cigarettes. (Also see: all of Raymond Queneau and Jacques Roubaud, the works of Jacques Jouet, and those of Paul Fournel.)
To supplement this week’s podcast, I thought I would post the review I wrote of Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels on GoodReads. Matt Rowe is planning on writing up a full review of this book for Three Percent, but for the time being, here you go:
In reading this charming book, I tried to recall how I first fell in love with the Oulipo. It must’ve been through Dalkey Archive, and probably had to do with one of the wild-eyed booksellers at Schuler Books & Music, but I just couldn’t remember . . . At first I assumed it was through Harry Mathews, whose books were being reissued by Dalkey at the time; it jus as easily could’ve been through Perec’s A Void, since that’s the most patently Oulipian work available in English and I remember pushing it on customers all the time. (And now do the same with my students.)
Then it suddenly came to me: When I was living in Grand Rapids, I went to a used bookstore just to look around, and found a mass market, old-school version of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro. For those who don’t know, this part of Michigan is loaded with Calvinists and their moral baggage, so it isn’t all that surprising that someone had scrawled across the title page of this book, condemning it as “erotic trash.” SOLD!
But even then, I didn’t really know what the Oulipo was. I mean, I got the concept—use constraints to write “potential” literature—and read almost everything I could get my hands on, but without the Wikipedia of today or knowledge of the French language, figuring out what this group of strange writers was all about was like solving a puzzle without any sort of picture to work off of.
Eventually, the Oulipo Compendium came out as did Oulipo: A Primer, and all the pieces/techniques—lipograms, S+7, complicated algorithms, x mistakes y for z—started to come together. That said, until reading “Many Subtle Channels,” I don’t think I had a sense of how the Oulipo as a group has functioned for the past 50-plus years.
As a member of the Oulipo, and the “slave” who organized its archives, Daniel Levin Becker is in the unique position that he can create a context for this group of writers who, as diverse as their are personality-wise, are connected by their love of puzzles, of new ways to generate texts, of learning, of seeking out puzzles, of creating the linguistic labyrinth from which they try to escape.
For anyone who isn’t already steeped in Oulipian lore, I highly suggest you read this book, then pick up Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Mathews’s Cigarettes. After you read all of those—and possibly some of the info you can find online—you’re likely to be hooked on this way of writing and reading for life.
What’s interesting about this book to readers already familiar with the Oulipo and its crazy fun literary stylings is the way in which Levin Becker builds a context around the development of the Workshop while bringing up some really interesting questions about the nature of Oulipian writing: Is it better to reveal the constraints or make the reader figure them out? If the reader knows the constraint, is that the end of their interpretation/enjoyment of the book? How has the group’s dynamics and goals shifted from the post-WWII years to 2012? What’s the point of all this madness?
There’s a lot of great stuff i
I don’t read a lot of critical/academic books, but I can’t wait to get my hands on Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, which is coming out from Harvard University Press next month:
What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements.
An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed.
And with Jacques Roubaud’s Mathematics coming out from Dalkey Archive coming out this spring as well, it’s as good a time as any to go on an Oulipian bender. . . .
I mentioned Georges Perec's Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise last Thursday. In the UK it is published by Vintage, but in the US it comes out via Verso (with the slightly shorter, but less winningly pedantic title The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise; same David Bellos translation of the text).
Alongside the Verso title comes a website, the cleverly entitled www.theartofaskingyourbossforaraise.com. Go play.
Georges Perec fans will doubtless have noted that a nice wee hardback of Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise has just landed in the shops.
The publishers, Vintage, gloss it thus:
So having weighed the pros and cons you've decided to approach your boss to ask for that well-earned raise in salary but before you schedule the all-important meeting you decide to dip into this handy volume in the hope of finding some valuable tips but instead find a hilarious, mind-bending farcical account of all the many different things that may or may not happen on the journey to see your boss which uses no punctuation or capitalisation and certainly no full stops
It follows the publication last May of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Wakefield Press), and recent reissues, also by Vintage, of W or The Memory of Childhood and Things (which is one of my favourite Perec's, actually).
Last week, a reader commented that poetry prompts can be gimmicky. True, but sometimes they’re also great creative un-stickers—not to mention fun! Here’s a Poetry Friday post of prompted poems.
At The Miss Rumphius Effect this week, the Poetry Stretch was to write a poem in “diminishing” or “nested” rhyme. Each rhyming word is contained within the previous one. Here’s mine:
Lunatic’s Lullaby
Hush, little child, do not be afraid;
the fabric of sanity ever was frayed.
Surrender your sense when the hobgoblins raid,
for no one but madmen will come to your aid.
Following last week’s lipogram, Jennifer Knoblock threw down the gauntlet, challenging me (and anyone else foolish/brave enough to try) to write a poem using letters that get high points in Scrabble. We decided success would be measured by taking the ratio of Scrabble points to the number of letters. (Yes, it's admittedly silly.) Here’s my dubious contribution:
Limerickqxz
A foxy young doxy blew sax.
With hip-hop, she hardly was lax.
But when she played jazz,
her lip work lacked pizzazz;
then nightclubs would give her the ax.
And here’s how I figured the score (Scrabble points/letters):
A (1/1) foxy (17/4) young (9/5) doxy (15/4) blew (9/4) sax (10/3).
With (10/4) hip-hop (16/6), she (6/3) hardly (13/6) was (6/3) lax (10/3).
But (5/3) when (10/4) she (6/3) played (12/6) jazz (29/4),
her (6/3) lip (5/3) work (11/4) lacked (13/6) pizzazz (45/7);
then (7/4) nightclubs (18/10) would (9/5) give (8/4) her (6/3) the (6/3) ax (9/2).
327 points divided by 120 letters = 2.725
I'll be getting a MacArthur genius grant any day now... And yes, saxophones are VERY POPULAR instruments in hip-hop culture! How dare you suggest otherwise?
I am, of course, reminded of this wonderful Threadless shirt, "Well, This Just Really Sucks..."
This week’s Poetry Friday round-up is hosted by Wild Rose Reader!
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