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N+7 Writing
- 7357 5y agoOriginally called S+7, invented as part of the OuLiPo (OUvroir à la LIterature POtentielle which could be translated into English as WOrkshop for POtential LIterature, WOPOLI).
- novosel 5y agoI would kindly refer anyone interested -- to the works of Raymond Russel that really started the whole thing. Also, I would recommend the book of Foucault dedicated to his work (only one of this kind in his oeuvre), called Death and The Labyrinth (in English translation).
- dhosek 5y agoThe Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style is a delightful introduction to OuLiPo. It takes the same story and tells it in 99 different ways (including N+7). To me, a lot of what the OuLiPo constraints do is to free one’s writing voice from the worn routes that it might take without intervention. Doing an N+7 transpose on a text can open up new way of looking at that text since the nouns have been arbitrarily replaced and you see how the verbs and other auxiliaries work in the writing. My writing often has a subtle undercurrent of OuLiPo happening in it (e.g., the novel I’m revising started with a vague notion of story and 29 chapter titles taken from the Passover Haggadah. A similar shorter piece I wrote, “The Norton Anthology of Self-Destructive Behaviors” [https://uploads.documents.cimpress.io/v1/uploads/151c2c51-d279-4245-9579-9571854d6d8f~110/original?tenant=vbu-digital https://uploads.documents.cimpress.io/v1/uploads/151c2c51-d2...], began with a list of self-destructive behaviors and a story emerged from those). Another great overview is The OuLiPo compendium http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974355437/donhosek http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974355437/donhosek which presents most of the major OuLiPo works, authors and games in encyclopedic format.
- hirundo 5y ago"Pursued by the Employee’s sinister agile gibbons, Princess Lela races home aboard her starting pistol," I would pay to see that.
- rossdavidh 5y agoThey're kind of like flying monkeys, except more sinister.
- gota 5y agoHow did "sinister agents" become "sinister agile gibbons?" Is "agile gibbon" a single term in that dictionary?
- hirundo 5y agoThe seventh word wasn't a noun, so they still needed one. I wonder how they picked gibbon.
- JadeNB 5y ago> The seventh word wasn't a noun, so they still needed one. I wonder how they picked gibbon. They replaced "episode" by "epistolary", so they're not insisting that the replacements be nouns. (They did say "[I] occasionally had to take a few licenses.")
- svat 5y agoIt's plausible that "agile gibbon" is a single term in that dictionary; cf. the Wikipedia article for "agile gibbon": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_gibbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_gibbon Note also the other transformations involving headwords that contain spaces: "civil war" -> "clabber", "starship" -> "starting pistol", "custodian" -> "customs union", and "galaxy" -> "galia melon". I don't know what dictionary is being used: the post just says "I used a 1999 Oxford English dictionary" but I doubt it's the full OED, as in it "agent" is followed by (I think) entries for "agent provocateur", "agentess", "agential", "agentive", "agentship", "ageold", "ageometrical", "ageostrophic", "age-prier", "ager", "agerasia", "ageratum", … [lots of "agg…" words]… and "agile gibbon" would be very far away. Edit: For example, The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: not OED but ODE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_English) has "agile gibbon" as a separate entry in the dictionary, though it is 27 places after "agent" rather than 7.