5 ms·

Lipogram

35 points by galfarragem 6y ago

dhosek 6y ago
Having read Perec's A void, there are some interesting “cheats” involved in the work (at least in its English translation), where certain phrases end up standing in for their forbidden equivalent, e.g., “that man” for “he.” I came across a reference to another writer's work where he wrote 5 medium-length pieces where the only vowels were A, E, I, O and U. He said that he created word lists from a dictionary and then wrote using only those words. Writing to a constraint in general is a surprisingly liberating process and while some of the Oulipo practices are not necessarily generative on their own, they do force the writer’s mind out of the well-trod tracks that it would otherwise travel along.
- flobosg 6y ago
  > I came across a reference to another writer's work where he wrote 5 medium-length pieces where the only vowels were A, E, I, O and U. That’s probably Christian Bök’s “Eunoia”.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    That's exactly the book I was thinking of. Thanks.
teraflop 6y ago
On a popular social discussion forum, a group that follows said format's constraints: https://www.reddit.com/r/AVoid5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AVoid5/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MereInterest 6y ago
Doing this as you program is also fun, as you must find standard library functions that act similarly to your daily functions, but still with analogous output. I did this a long ago, writing a program in C that avoids any inclusion of ';'. (Also, wow it is hard to avoid 'e', just for this post, though I found that I couldn't bypass that limitation for "semicolon". Doing so for a full book would bring about total insanity.)
- schoen 6y ago
  Folks who study attacks also found it practical to construct binary attack payloads without particular symbols (or with only particular symbols), in that ways of providing such payloads might constrain valid symbols. X86 attack payloads built, amazingly, with only [A-Za-z0-9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphanumeric_shellcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphanumeric_shellcode I think I saw similar work with analogous but distinct constraints in addition to [A-Za-z0-9].
  - anitil 6y ago
    tom7 made a while video explaining how to create an executable only with printable characters [0]. He even write a compiler called 'ABC' for it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA
cdelsolar 6y ago
Constrained writing is kind of amazing. The story "Cadaeic Cadenza" is very highly recommended - http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm It is a kind of meta story as the constraint is actually discussed in the story.
FridayoLeary 6y ago
lipograms that avoid a particular non consonant (not a or i) is highly difficult to do. It can only last for a short amount of words until a struggling author is struck by a long fit of insanity. And nonwithstanding said authors hard labours, his work shall probably pass into oblivion without making any impact on a world blissfully ignorant of authors long and painful hardships. His puny contribution shall only attract criticsim as fruit of a bad author who is failing at artful writing. But an author of lipograms is truly an outstanding artist. A work of art only functions as a display of an artists vast imagination. Now, a lipogram of any type-long or short, is argubly as high a form of grammatical art as anything. At the start, i didn't think i would start two paragraphs, but this sort of writing only grows on an author. I am loving writing this, and in fact i think all of us should try lipograms occasionaly. Now, i must finish this topic to maintain what small amount of wit i can still call my own. I thank you humbly for glancing at my pitiful try at a lipogram and i wish you a good day.
- amluto 6y ago
  Did you deliberately escape with the word “escape”?
  - FridayoLeary 6y ago
    i want to throw myself off a roof i'll edit it. Thanks
- lsb 6y ago
  A lipogram is not difficult to do; I'm anticipating thousands of HN folks to try a hand at a writing task that sustains its popularity, thousands of folks trying to fashion a long-form post worth a look. What is mostly unknown is a lipogram that tops any list of books that attain financial grandstanding (A Void notwithstanding), which brings a quick sadness.
  - FridayoLeary 6y ago
    your sophistication and the smooth flow of words contrasts badly with my post. Yours sounds natural and thoughtful and my post looks akward and uncouth by comparison. In fact upon looking again at my post, i must admit it is similar in look to bad instruction manuals which accompany low quality products, from china and japan.
schoen 6y ago
I've enjoyed lipograms a lot (in the past practicing not only writing but also speaking without "E"), and also admired these two tautogrammatic translations of the Genesis creation story https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht... https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ so much that I recently wrote my own tautogram-in-B version of the same text (just finishing yesterday!). I'm going to publish it somewhere soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram

35 points by galfarragem 6y ago

Having read Perec's A void, there are some interesting “cheats” involved in the work (at least in its English translation), where certain phrases end up standing in for their forbidden equivalent, e.g., “that man” for “he.” I came across a reference to another writer's work where he wrote 5 medium-length pieces where the only vowels were A, E, I, O and U. He said that he created word lists from a dictionary and then wrote using only those words. Writing to a constraint in general is a surprisingly liberating process and while some of the Oulipo practices are not necessarily generative on their own, they do force the writer’s mind out of the well-trod tracks that it would otherwise travel along.

flobosg 6y ago
> I came across a reference to another writer's work where he wrote 5 medium-length pieces where the only vowels were A, E, I, O and U. That’s probably Christian Bök’s “Eunoia”.
- dhosek 6y ago
  That's exactly the book I was thinking of. Thanks.

teraflop 6y ago

On a popular social discussion forum, a group that follows said format's constraints: https://www.reddit.com/r/AVoid5/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AVoid5/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MereInterest 6y ago

Doing this as you program is also fun, as you must find standard library functions that act similarly to your daily functions, but still with analogous output. I did this a long ago, writing a program in C that avoids any inclusion of ';'. (Also, wow it is hard to avoid 'e', just for this post, though I found that I couldn't bypass that limitation for "semicolon". Doing so for a full book would bring about total insanity.)

schoen 6y ago
Folks who study attacks also found it practical to construct binary attack payloads without particular symbols (or with only particular symbols), in that ways of providing such payloads might constrain valid symbols. X86 attack payloads built, amazingly, with only [A-Za-z0-9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphanumeric_shellcode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphanumeric_shellcode I think I saw similar work with analogous but distinct constraints in addition to [A-Za-z0-9].
- anitil 6y ago
  tom7 made a while video explaining how to create an executable only with printable characters [0]. He even write a compiler called 'ABC' for it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA_DrBwkiJA

cdelsolar 6y ago

Constrained writing is kind of amazing. The story "Cadaeic Cadenza" is very highly recommended - http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm http://www.cadaeic.net/cadenza.htm It is a kind of meta story as the constraint is actually discussed in the story.

FridayoLeary 6y ago

lipograms that avoid a particular non consonant (not a or i) is highly difficult to do. It can only last for a short amount of words until a struggling author is struck by a long fit of insanity. And nonwithstanding said authors hard labours, his work shall probably pass into oblivion without making any impact on a world blissfully ignorant of authors long and painful hardships. His puny contribution shall only attract criticsim as fruit of a bad author who is failing at artful writing. But an author of lipograms is truly an outstanding artist. A work of art only functions as a display of an artists vast imagination. Now, a lipogram of any type-long or short, is argubly as high a form of grammatical art as anything. At the start, i didn't think i would start two paragraphs, but this sort of writing only grows on an author. I am loving writing this, and in fact i think all of us should try lipograms occasionaly. Now, i must finish this topic to maintain what small amount of wit i can still call my own. I thank you humbly for glancing at my pitiful try at a lipogram and i wish you a good day.

amluto 6y ago
Did you deliberately escape with the word “escape”?
- FridayoLeary 6y ago
  i want to throw myself off a roof i'll edit it. Thanks
lsb 6y ago
A lipogram is not difficult to do; I'm anticipating thousands of HN folks to try a hand at a writing task that sustains its popularity, thousands of folks trying to fashion a long-form post worth a look. What is mostly unknown is a lipogram that tops any list of books that attain financial grandstanding (A Void notwithstanding), which brings a quick sadness.
- FridayoLeary 6y ago
  your sophistication and the smooth flow of words contrasts badly with my post. Yours sounds natural and thoughtful and my post looks akward and uncouth by comparison. In fact upon looking again at my post, i must admit it is similar in look to bad instruction manuals which accompany low quality products, from china and japan.

schoen 6y ago

I've enjoyed lipograms a lot (in the past practicing not only writing but also speaking without "E"), and also admired these two tautogrammatic translations of the Genesis creation story https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht... https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ so much that I recently wrote my own tautogram-in-B version of the same text (just finishing yesterday!). I'm going to publish it somewhere soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram