BKLYN OuLiPo: rats who build the maze from which they will try to escape
OuLiPo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: "workshop of potential literature") is a group of writers and mathematicians founded in 1960. OuLiPo creates constraints for writers to work within, thus creating "potential literature." Check out the works on this list for a good introduction, and join us this summer at Marcy for some OuLiPo-inspired writing exercises.
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Marcy Library July 26, 11am: Practice experimental and collaborative writing exercises in a fun and supportive environment facilitated by a writer and librarian. Playing with the idea of translation, we will “translate” one another’s sentences into their opposites and translate words into images and images into words.
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In Georges Perec's magnum opus, he imagines an apartment building in Paris with the facade sliced off, making a 10x10 grid, over which the narrator must proceed the way a Knight moves in chess, never landing on the same flat twice.
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Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau tells the same banal short story 99 times using 99 different styles: from sonnet to onomatopoeia to Cockney.
"A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" or "One hundred million million poems" consists of 10 sonnets in which each line can be combined with any of the 9 other poems, making 100,000,000,000,000 poems (more poems than you could read in your lifetime, even if you did nothing but read poems).
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In what is perhaps Italo Calvino's most beloved book, Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the cities he has visited in this travels. The book has a complex mathematical structure.
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A series of stories constructed around tarot cards.
Mathematician Michèle Audin, whose novel depicts mathematicians in wartime using a variety of documents, gives an inside look at the society--using Oulipian constraints.
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26 characters from Anna and Ben to Yolande and Zach, pair up for an intricate crisscrossing of 78 sexual encounters.
