Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol 4

Bookish Nerd Bait: Vol 3

What is Oulipo?

Glad you asked. It’s an interesting concept. According to Wikipedia:

Oulipo (short for French: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature") is a loose gathering of mainly French-speaking writers and mathematicians which seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior, Jean Lescure and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy."

Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine", which he used in the construction of Life: A User's Manual.  As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void ) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems, such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations.

What do they mean by “constrained writing techniques” exactly? Well, Perec’s novel A Void,  for example, is a three hundred page book constructed entirely without the letter ‘e.’ I don’t know if I could write a blog post without the letter ‘e,’ let alone a whole freaking book. That’s pretty amazing. The question is, is it any good?

They also use other constraints like palindromes- the most famous of which is the old “Lisa Bonet ate no basil” line, which appears exactly the same whether you read it backwards or forwards. But they get much longer than that one.

I’d be interested in learning more about Oulipo. But while you consider whether or not to join me in my curiosity, take a look at the winners of this contest put on by the Outlet. The constraint they imposed was to write a story where no single word could be used more than once- not ‘and,’ not ‘the,’ not 'a,' not anything. Go ahead and read the winners. They’re all pretty short, but it’s interesting to see what people came back with. (Warning, some language in the first two- they seem to have been picked for their edginess. But the third is pretty impressive for its length and the story it tells.)

Oulipo!

At The Bindary

Yesterday's videos raised a specter from my own past: this catchy little diddy from a Reading Rainbow episode I haven't seen in twenty years, but whose words I could have sung to you even without YouTube's assistance. Enjoy:

We've come a long way, baby...

I came across this time capsule of a video on the Paris Review Daily:

Pretty interesting, right? Makes this next video even more impressive:

And seeing them side-by-side reminds me of this classic, demotivational poster:

More on Little Blue Books

Alright. I imagine some of you may have turned your noses up at yesterday’s post simply because you can’t appreciate the awesomeness that is Louis L’Amour. (Now there’s a writer who deserves a post of his own if I’m ever to make a clean breast of my earliest reading influences). But it got me thinking about the Little Blue Books publishing line that he mentions. It turns out L’Amour is far from the only author to remember the series fondly. Here’s more from Wikipedia:

“Many bookstores kept a book rack stocked with many Little Blue Book titles, and their small size and low price made them especially popular with travelers and transient working people. Louis L'Amour cites the Little Blue Books as a major source of his own early reading in his autobiography, Education of a Wandering Man. Other writers who recall reading the series in their youth include Saul Bellow, Harlan Ellison, Jack Conroy, Ralph Ellison, and Studs Terkel.

“The works covered were frequently classics of Western literature: Goethe and Shakespeare were well represented, as were the works of the Ancient Greeks, and more modern writers like Voltaire, Emile Zola, H. G. Wells.”

What they were reading: Louis L'Amour

"Riding a freight train out of El Paso, I had my first contact with the Little Blue Books. Another hobo was reading one, and when he finished he gave it to me. 

"The Little Blue Books were a godsend to wandering men and no doubt to many others. Published in Girard, Kansas, by Haldeman-Julius, they were slightly larger than a playing card and had sky-blue paper covers with heavy black print titles. I believe there were something more than three thousand titles in all and they were sold on newsstands for 5 or 10 cents each. Often in the years following, I carried ten or fifteen of them in my pockets, reading when I could. 

"Among the books available were the plays of Shakespeare, collections of short stories by De Maupassant, Poe, Jack London, Gogol, Gorky, Kipling, Gautier, Henry James, and Balzac. There were collections of essays by Voltaire, Emerson, and Charles Lamb, among others. 

"There were books on the history of music and architecture, painting, the principles of electricity; and, generally speaking, the books offered a wide range of literature and ideas. I do not recall exactly, but I believe the first Blue Book given me on that freight train was Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

-Louis L'Amour, in his fascinating  memoir about 

reading and roaming, Education of a Wandering Man

The Sunflower Chair, by He Mu and Zhang Qian

Just about perfect. Add a snack tray and I'm sold:

-via the ChairBlog

An Inside Look at Shelf Actualization HQ

A big thank you to all who entered our contest, and congratulations to April Simms, who was our undisputed winner- with 37 out of 50 correct answers, it wasn’t even close. Unless you tell us otherwise, April, we’ll send you a $100 Amazon gift card by email.

Now then, to sate the curious among you, let’s identify each of the 70 authors pictured in our latest stroll through the halls of ShelfActualization.com. Let’s start out in the lobby:

On the mezzanine level to our left we see Roberto Bolaño hunched over the railing next to Albert Camus. Jhumpa Lahiri and Zora Neale Hurston stroll down the hall, while Walt Whitman, Margaret Mitchell, Sinclair Lewis and Hermann Hesse take in a view of the lobby below. Ensconced in the easy chair on the landing above, Henry James watches over all.

At the foot of the stairs Thornton Wilder watches J.M. Coatzee shake hands with an unseen guest, and Ray Bradbury looks up from the floor. Meanwhile, Robert Louis Stevenson and Saul Bellow make their way to the gym on the basement level while Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather trade a few quiet words, Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks on the house phone, and Samuel Beckett studies something through a magnifying glass. 

On to the billiard room, where testosterone levels are admittedly high:

Let’s start at the back of the room on the left. Dostoevsky, in his long coat, and Nabokov, in short-pants and knee socks, gather around the far table with a white-suited Mark Twain, a shirtless, shouting Hemingway and Englishman George Orwell. James Joyce sticks his head through the doorway to see what’s going on, and Wallace Stegner looks on in amusement.

Reading the paper at the back of the near table is William Faulkner. Perched at the front of it is Aldous Huxley. Cormack McCarthy, Edgar Allen Poe and Franz Kafka huddle behind a seated John Cheever, who pets an unseen canine companion. Standing at the far right is John Steinbeck, and in front of him rests Joseph Conrad.  Scott Fitzgerald turns halfway around to face the camera while Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo watch over a napping Kurt Vonnegut. Gazing out the window to the left is Jack Kerouac.

So where are the ladies, if not in the Billiard Room? Many of them tend to congregate in the Gallery:

Here, ladies’ men Jules Verne (seated) and Ivan Turgenev (standing) vie for the attention of (from left to right) Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Edith Wharton, Harper Lee, Pearl Buck, Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Carson McCullers.

And in the Dining Hall a small crowd is already gathering for tea:

At the table on the left John Dos Passos entertains Alice Munro and Ayn Rand. On the right, Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison and Italo Calvino shoot the breeze. Over Ellison’s shoulder, Leo Tolstoy and Gertrude Stain catch up on the latest gossip. And Alexandre Dumas waits at the table to the left while Don Delillo stands in the background.

High overhead, Herman Melville, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen look down from upper floor windows.

Because it leads out to the gardens and the indoor swimming pool, the Conservatory is often a place you’ll see people start to let their hair down a bit. 

As he stretches for a run, Haruki Murakami watches William Saroyan toss a hat onto Marcel Proust’s head.  J.P. Donleavy tries to interest J.D. Salinger in a game of soccer, while Jorge Luis Borges, lost in his own world, makes a crayon rubbing of the stone pillar behind Donleavy. This amuses Umberto Eco, who straddles a chair like the cool customer he is. On the right , Jack London stands ready for his afternoon swim and Thomas Mann looks up from his crossword puzzle.

There's lots more to show you, but we'll let them get back to their work for the time being. Until then, you can continue to follow all your favorite writers as we talk about their books, their lives and their writing on the front page.

Another Month in the Can

Thanks for hanging out with us! Above are the authors we mentioned this past month, and here are the most popular posts from the same period:

• Hemingway and Gellhorn
• The Tour de France
• Review: Silas Marner, by George Eliot
• First Line Friday: Cry, the Beloved Country
• Bookish Nerd Bait Vol. 1

And of course, the wacky search terms that led some of you here:

• “On the Road mental illness”  >>>>  Diagnosing Dean Moriarty
• “Pronouns with no antecedent Faulkner”  >>>>  Faulkner & Pronoun Ambiguity
• “Egan system tension grip”  >>>>  takes you to Jennifer Egan
• “Barcelona gracia neighborhood”  >>>>  Tucker’s birth as a reader
• “Moby Dick seventh grade essay”  >>>> MacEvoy’s birth as a reader
• “Trivium down from the sky  >>>>  the only place we’ve used ‘trivium’
• “No pants required”  >>>>  Takes you to this post of the same title
• “lanza en astillero English translation”  >>>>  takes you here
• “Hate on the road Kerouac”  >>>>  shows you whyyou shouldn’t
• “two figures in a greek frieze”  >>>>  takes you to Mr.Faulkner