The Inscription Over a Modern Gate to Hell

Philip Terry is a writer who works in the oulipian tradition.  He is the author of a novel, The Book of Bachelors (1995) (which was published in its entirety in an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction), which consists of nine chapters, each a lipogram on a different letter of the alphabet. He wrote a book of versions of Shakespeare's Sonnets, each modified by a different oulipian constraint (the results are predictably mixed).  And he did a... you can't really call it a translation... adaptation of Dante's Inferno.

For comparison, here are the opening five stanzas of Alan Mandlebaum's translation of the Inferno, Canto III:

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.

JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

These words—their aspect was obscure—I read
inscribed above a gateway, and I said:
“Master, their meaning is difficult for me.”

And he to me, as one who comprehends:
“Here one must leave behind all hesitation;
here every cowardice must meet its death.

And now, here are the opening lines of Philip Terry's Canto III:

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE DOLEFUL CAMPUS,

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO ETERNAL DEBT,

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE FORSAKEN GENERATION.

 

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT INSPIRED MY FOUNDERS;

POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY RUINED ME,

COUPLED BY BETRAYAL OF PRINCIPLE AND PLEDGE.

 

BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS WERE MADE,

NOW I SHALL MARK YOU ETERNALLY.

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

 

I saw these words spelled out on a digital display

Above the entrance to the Knowledge Gateway.

‘Master,’ I said, ‘this is scary.’

 

He answered me, speaking with a drawl:

‘Now you need to grit your teeth,

This isn’t the moment to shit yourself.

It's quite funny— the first nine lines are, I think, a very good joke.

But I am rather uncertain, having read (thanks to Amazon's "see inside" feature) the opening two and a half cantos, whether it's a joke that can be sustained over an entire book.  So I am hesitant to plunk down $16 to get a copy.

Anyone know if the whole thing works at all?

Poem of the Day: Four Strategic Lines

Four Strategic Lines

There, four strategic lines are anagrams.
I'm rearranging letters. A chaos features
in the rule, frames reason, grates a tragic,
rare formula. A strange aesthetic reigns.

— Anthony Etherin

Composition No. 1: a Review (Sort Of)

In 1962, French author Marc Saporta published a book entitled Composition n° 1, which was published in English (as Composition No. 1) in 1963 in a translation by Ron Howard. What made the book unusual was its format. It consisted of 150 separate, unnumbered pages, which
The reader is requested to shuffle these pages like a deck of cards; to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortuneteller’s. The order the pages then assume will orient X’s fate. (Composition No. 1, instructions)

This is not, in and of itself, a unique idea, although Saporta's novel takes it to a rather unusual extreme; he was also one of the first to try it, with others following him.* But it was unusual, and got a lot of attention -- more commented on than read, is my impression. It went quickly out of print, and was hard to find, since libraries tended either to not bother with the thing or to make it an uncirculating rarity (as at the Cornell library, for instance), presumably due to its odd format.**

Fortunately for those of us who like offbeat literature, it was brought back into print last year in what sounds like a gorgeous edition by the press Visual Editions, which seems to specialize in off-beat, oddly-formatted books. Unfortunately for those of us who aren't paid six-figure salaries for doing no work, it was priced at $40.

Fortunately, Visual Editions was kind enough, and smart enough, to put out an iPad version, which is only $5. So I bought that.

And, unfortunately, it's terrible.

Not the book -- although what I've read of it doesn't inspire me to shell out $40 for a version that I can actually manage to read in a non-annoying way. No, I'm talking about the iPad app.

The rest of this post is a review, not of Saporta's text, but of Visual Edition's electronic presentation of it. If you're curious about Saporta's text, I recommend Derik A. Badman's review, Jonathan Coe's review, and various others you can find online. Good pictures of the print edition -- which everyone seems to think was fabulously designed -- can be found here and here.

The basic app is functional enough, with a fair number of extraneous and not all that interesting bells and whistles. It has an opening title page where you can move the letters of the title, author, etc around like a refrigerator magnet -- although they also move on their own, which makes it slightly irritating. (I haven't yet given it to my three-and-a-half-year-old son -- maybe he'd love that function.) There's a "disruptive typographic artwork" using all the letters from the text, which is pretty enough, but doesn't have much to do with Saporta's novel. There's the video trailer for the print edition. And there's an introduction to the book itself Tom Uglow, who seems to be a google/youtube muckity-muck. All well and good, and as bells-and-whistles for an otherwise functional app it would be unremarkable.

The irritation begins when you actually want to read Saporta's text.

First of all, Saporta's original introduction -- the description of the text and the instructions for use -- isn't given. At all. Now, this isn't a fatal omission -- you can find it online (Derik Badman conveniently reprints it, for instance.) But frankly you shouldn't have to. If you want to add a new intro, fine, live it up. But a republication should include the whole book -- and an author's introduction is a clear part of that, especially in this instance.

But that, too, would be ignorable, if the text weren't presented in such a !@#$% annoying way.

Here's how it works. You click the "begin" button on the introductory page -- and you start to see a random flickering of 150 pages scrolling by. To stop it you touch the screen -- and you have a page which you can read. But! If you pick up your finger, it instantly starts to scroll again. That's true whether you're done, or you twitch (or have to scratch or get jumped on by a three and a half year old), or your finger muscles get tired and you try to switch fingers. And if you weren't finished the page, too bad, because there's no way to go back: if you want to re-find a page you have to restart the randomized scrolling (restart, because it is set up not to repeat a page you've already seen***) and keep hitting pages randomly until you happen on it. Otherwise it's gone. Oh, and if you miss half a page and go back, rerandomize and find it? You've lost the earlier order -- which you might be a hundred pages into -- and have to go through an entirely new random order, with old and new pages mixed in. There's no way to save an order, to return to an old order, to keep a page still without holding a finger on it the whole time, or go back to an earlier page to check something you already read. That's all impossible.

Now, to be fair, I knew all this going in -- some of the reviews I read of the app mentioned it, either as a drawback or in a 'its-probably-good-in-some-experimental-literary-sense' way. But knowing it is one thing; actually envisioning how irritating it is going to be, how much it is going to mess with the reading experience, is another thing.

What really galls me is that this is not any part of Saporta's design. If a writer wanted to write a book like this -- with the inaccessibility of the previous pages and orders, the possibility of loosing half a page from a momentary lapse of attention, and so forth, built into the conception of the thing -- then I could get into the idea, and at least tell myself that that was the experience I was supposed to be having. But a moment's thought will reveal that all of these features are extra aggravations not in the print edition.

Obviously, once you shuffle the cards into a new order, you loose the old one and can't go back to it (there are no page numbers or anything else that would make recording the old order easy), and I suppose it's always possible to drop the entire deck. So in that sense some of the app's frustrations are recreations of the original. But most aren't. In a shuffled deck of cards, there's nothing to stop you from going back to old cards; nothing to stop you from stopping your reading halfway through a page and then starting it again,**** whether the break is for a second or a decade. You can flip ahead and back, keep the order as long as you like -- even read the book twice through in the same order. You can deliberately lay out the cards and choose an order for them -- switching the random order into a preferred one, in a specific local instance, or globally. Hell, if you're willing to go to the trouble, you could even record the order (writing down opening words) and restore it later. It is, in short (and I'm guessing here, based on descriptions of the thing -- I've never seen a physical copy save in photographs) far less of a pain in the ass to read, a book which gives you many possibilities the iPad app denies.

And there's no earthly reason this had to be the case. Why not simply have the "begin" button put the pages in an order -- and then let the reader slide back and forth (as in the iBooks or Kindle apps) in that order as often as they like --- and even, heaven forfend, lift their finger up from the page without it swirling off? Ideally, that order would hold even if you want to go back and reread the intro, quit the application, or whatever... until a "shuffle" button were hit again, and the order was randomized once more. Again: I'm not suggesting lessening Saporta's experimental design; I'm suggesting faithfully recreating it, rather than adding to it in ways he never intended or imagined.

So why did they do it? Presumably some theoretical idea about emphasizing the randomness of the text, enhancing the aleatory nature of the experience. Or something. But frankly, as far as I'm concerned, it's bullshit: it turns an actually aleatory text into an unreadable one.

Now, in my personal opinion, it would be nice if etexts added new functionality rather than just recreating the old. Which is to say, with a deck of cards, there's no easy way to remember an old order after shuffling up a new one. But in the ebook version it'd be easy to have each order remembered (if the reader wished) so that you could read one, read another, and then go check something in the first version. I think that'd be neat. Here, of course, I can see plausible theoretical objections -- since this isn't something Saporta intended -- but personally I'd be in favor of adding an ability and then allowing readers not to use it, rather than denying it. But I can see why some people would disagree.

But not giving you the options the physical book gives you? Not letting you even read the text without holding a finger on the page? That's just lousy design.

And frankly it made the book essentially unreadable for me.

Again, to be fair, I'd probably have persisted despite this if what I did read of it grabbed me. I read at least a dozen pages in their entirety, and part of another dozen or two more (usually because I lost my place halfway through without meaning to, rather than loosing interest). But none of them struck me enough to persevere through the irritating format -- or, as I said, to shell out $40 for the paper version. A novel like this is not going to grab the reader by plot, obviously, so it needs to grab the reader in some other way: with fine prose, striking ideas, interesting juxtapositions on different pages, strong characters, startling brief vignettes on any given page -- something. And thus far the pages I read didn't grab me that way. I'd probably continue to explore it at least a little... except that the design of the app is irritating enough to dissuade me.

In short: total ebook fail.

If anyone from Visual Editions should happen on this review, my request would be to put out a new (free!) upgrade of the app. At least make the thing work the way a deck of cards would: with the reader able to go back and forth, lift their finger off the page, and not loose the order until the decision to reshuffle is made. I don't know the first thing about iPad programming, but I can't imagine it'd be that hard to do. So please, make this odd, experimental book at least as usable and reader-friendly as its author did -- and as you made the print version.

For anyone else: if the idea of the book intrigues you enough to want to read it, I advise you to shell out $40 for the paper version, or go to one of the libraries that lets you read their copy under armed guard and do that. Using the iPad version, even as a test to see if you like it enough to go to the trouble and expense of getting a paper one, just isn't worth it.

I will admit, though, that this whole experience has made me rather curious about B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates. Fortunately, however, it's not available in ebook format, so there's no temptation there. If I want to read it, I've got to shell out for a dead tree copy.*****

_________________
* Other examples. Well, there's Raymond Quneau's famous work Cent mille milliards de poèmes [A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems], published in 1961, the year before Saporta's novel (and thus, presumably, not an influence on it, since the latter was almost certainly already been well under way). (Quneau's poem is translated in its entirety in the Oulipo Compendium, and is also available in various online formats.) A later work, on which Saporta was an influence, was B. S. Johnson's novel The Unfortunates, which was published in 27 sections, with a first and last identified and the rest shuffleable into any order. Robert Coover's 2005 short story "Heart Suite" is in the same format. And beyond these, there is the world of hypertext with its vast and ill-defined boundaries.

** There were worse solutions. According to Johnathan Coe, "the British Library holds two copies [of the French edition]: both, I'm sorry to say, diligently bound by over-zealous librarians (though at least each copy has the pages bound in a different order)."

*** Which means -- yes, I clicked through to check -- that once you reach the very last page, you can pick your finger up and read it in an ordinary fashion, as there's nothing left to scroll: one page you get to read in an ordinary way.

**** In the iPad version, of course, lifting a finger starts the shuffle again, leaving the old page unrecoverable -- so that you can only stop on the end of a page. If you quit the app (or close the iPad) halfway through a page, then restarting it will return you instantly to the shuffle, not to the page you left.

***** The Unfortunates, unfortunately, seems to be as unavailable at libraries as Composition No. 1 is -- for, presumably, the same reasons.

Poem of the Day: Theme with Two Variations

The theme, William Wordsworth's classic poem "Daffodils"

Daffodils

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

-- William Wordsworth

The first variation, a parody, by that prolific poet "anonymous":

There once was a poet named Will

Who tramped his way over a hill

    And was speechless for hours

    Over some stupid flowers

This was years before TV, but still.

-- Anonymous

...I gotta admit that last line just kills me.

The second variation: an oulipian transformation of the poem by Harry Mathews, using the N+7 technique (which I've discussed (and essayed) before, including my reservations about it). The Oulipo Compendium defines the technique as follows:

Choose a text and a dictionary. Identify the nouns in the text and replace each one by counting seven nouns beyond it in the dictionary... With classical poetry, meter and rhyme can be ignored or respected. In the latter case, one selects the first noun to satisfy the prosodic requirements of the original starting with the seventh noun listed in the chosen dictionary. The search for a suitable replacement may extend over several successive letters...

The Oulipo Compendium reprints Mathews's poem in its entirety, but should your copy of the book not be right at hand, just for convenience, here it is:

Imbecile

I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o'er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.

Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle on the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day:
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance,
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.

The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not but be gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:

For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
Which is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.

-- Harry Mathews

I wouldn't, myself, have taken this work to imply any disrespect for Wordsworth, but apparently Mathews is not much of a Wordsworth fan:

Mathews has no qualms about dissing Wordsworth. Indeed, he can't understand how anyone who takes literature seriously and cares about words can not disrespect Wordsworth. As he told me on the phone shortly after the reading, he holds Wordsworth responsible for the largely mistaken direction of most modern literature. Before Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, he said, personal feelings were just a small part of what literature addressed. Because of Wordsworth, emotions became the subject of literature: sincerity moved to the center of the literary enterprise, and to be morally responsible meant that one had to account for one's feelings. "It's all so nauseatingly bourgeois."

"I also hate him for the hypocrisy of his theoretical positions," Mathews said, warming to his subject. He was thinking especially of Wordsworth's pronouncement, in his 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads, that the language of poetry should be the "language really used by men." "'Language that men really use.' What could be more 'poetic,' more literary, than Wordsworth's language? If only he had used simple, unpoetic language. If someone had come along capable of combining the intricacies of Milton's prosody with genuinely simple diction, wouldn't that have been something?"

Wouldn't that last have been Robert Frost?

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into Daffodiliana.

Gilbert Adair, 1944 - 2011

Gilbert Adair died two days ago.

Adair is, I think, best thought of as a writer in that slightly old-fashioned category, "man of letters". Some obituarial writings stress his relationship to film -- he was a film critic, and had some of his novels filmed. But Adair was largely about words and the culture of words so far as I can see.

I've only read two-and-a-bit books by Adair, although I've enormously enjoyed all of it, and read some more than once.

First, I've read Adair's utterly fabulous and delightful novel The Death of the Author -- a postmodern murder mystery (which, incidentally, is a whole subgenre), based around (not Barthes, as one might think from the title, but rather) Paul De Man, and the various revelations around his history of writing literary criticism for a fascist-friendly newspaper during world war two, including at least one directly antisemitic piece. It's really quite terrific, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in that sort of thing (a murder mystery set in academia, a send-up of De Man, a postmodern mystery, or anything else). (Much later update: it turns out the book has been brought back into print by Melville House Publishing, so you can read it, if you like (and those of you who think you might like most definitely will like.))

Second, I've read Adair's astonishing translation of Geroges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition, published under the title A Void. A lipogram, of course, is a piece of prose written deliberately eschewing one (or more) letters of the alphabet; Perec's La disparition contains no instances of the letter e (in French, as in English, the most common letter of the alphabet). Adair's translation, rather remarkably in my view, respects this constraint, and manages to translate Perec's e-less French novel into an e-less English one. (Perec's novel, incidentally, is also a postmodern mystery, in which the lack of an e symbolizes greater, unspeakable losses which haunt an unknowing world.)

For obvious reasons, translating a lipogram into a lipogram is a much harder, and thus in some ways more impressive, linguistic challenge than simply writing one: Perec could shape his novel according to his constraint, discussing things that happened to have no e in French, whereas Adair had to follow Perec's subject matter. There have been critiques of how well he did this (scroll down (or search for Adair) at this link to read Ian Monk's critique of Adair's translation). But personally I am quite grateful that he did it, and did it as well as he did.

(I've dealt with this topic before; for more on the translations of La disparition, see this post; for more on lipograms in general, see this one.)

Finally, I've read a few of the essays in Adair's (unspeakably marvelously titled) collection The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice. I think that title alone justified Adair's existence on this earth, and ought to preserve his memory.

Adair wrote all sorts of other things -- a biography of the real boy who inspired Thomas Mann's Death in Vencie, The Real Tadzio; a sequel to Lewis Carroll's two Alice books, Alice Through the Needle's Eye; and a number of other novels, including his most famous, Love and Death on Long Island, and also a number of other mysteries (about which I know little).

As a man of letters in an age of which tends to max out after 140 or so, I fear Adair is not very widely known, and may well not be long remembered. But it's a pity. Letters really get good when they pile up in long sequences: and Adair did this very well. If you've not heard of him before, and you enjoy sequences of letters longer than 140, see if you can track down The Death of the Author. It's quite fabulous. And I myself may well see if I can track down Love and Death on Long Island, which sounds good too.

Gilbert Adair, RIP.

Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

I'll get around to the explanation in a minute, but the main thing I wanted to do in this post is to quote the first paragraph of an avant-garde novel-in-progress, The Book From the Ground, by the contemporary artist Xu Bing. (The first name is pronounced -- very, very roughly -- like "shoe".*) So before I explain anything, let me quote the opening paragraph:

Go on. Read it. Yes, you can. Really. Just try. ... ... See? That wasn't that hard, was it?

-- that last of which is (if I understand it) precisely the point.

Xu Bing -- who was born in China, moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, but who seems to have recently repatriated to China -- is a conceptual artist. My experience of his work, however, differs from my experience of most conceptual artists in that I find that he's actually working with interesting concepts. The work which (as I understand it) really made his name was A Book From the Sky, which is described on the artist's site as follows:

An all-enveloping textual environment, "A Book from the Sky" is composed of massive sheets of Chinese characters, some left loose and some bound into books, which are suspended form the ceiling, pasted on the wall, and laid on the floor. Everything about "A book from the Sky" has the look of authenticity. Form its arrangement of headings and marginalia on the page to its string bindings and indigo covers, the work mimics in every detail the characteristics of traditional Chinese printing and book -making. While donning such a guise, however, "A book form the sky " is supremely inauthentic. Its characters are purely of the artist's invention and utterly without meaning. What is most [unsettling] perhaps is the way in which Xu Bing's characters approximate the real thing , for the artist has composed them from the variant parts that make up Chinese characters.**

The coolness factor here is a bit hard to grasp unless you understand the way in which Chinese characters are made from parts of other Chinese Characters, but if you do get this, it seems pretty cool indeed. (Or shocking -- apparently his work was very controversial when first displayed.)

The Book From the Ground -- a project begun eight years ago and still ongoing -- is conceived as a sort of thematic sequel (sidequel? something) to the previous work. Here's how Xu Bing describes the origins of the project on its associated web site:

Book from the Ground is a novel written in a "language of icons" that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life... This project first began with my collecting safety manuals from a number of airlines... Then, in 2003, I noticed three small images on a pack of gum (they translate into please use your wrapper to dispose of the gum in a trashcan), and came to realize that in so far as icons alone can explain something simple, they can also be used to narrate a longer story. From that point on, through various channels, I began to collect and organize logos, icons, and insignia from across the globe, and I also began to research the symbols of expression employed by the specialized fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others...

Xu Bing then connects this to earlier (in and of themselves false) descriptions of Chinese as a universal language:

In 1627, the French thinker Jean Douet, in an essay titled "Proposal to the King for a Universal Script, with Admirable Results, Very Useful to Everyone on Earth," first suggested that Chinese was a potential model for an international language. The word "model" is important here because Douet does not limit this "universal script" to the form of Chinese characters per se. He instead focuses on the universal potential of the system of recognition upon which the Chinese language is based. Today, nearly four hundred years later, human communication has indeed evolved in the direction predicted by Douet. We have come to sense that traditional spoken forms are no longer the most appropriate method for communication. And, in response, great human effort has been concentrated on developing ways to replace traditional written languages with icons and images. For this reason, among others, humankind has entered the age of reading images.

And lastly connects the project with his own previous work:

I have created many works that relate to language. This subject first took shape twenty years ago with a piece called Book from the Sky. It was called Book from the Sky because it contained a text legible to no one on this earth (including myself). Today I have used this new "language of signs" to write a book that a speaker of any language can understand; I call it Book from the Ground. But, in truth, these two texts share something in common: regardless of your mother tongue or level of education, they strive to treat you equally. Book from the Sky was an expression of my doubts regarding extant written languages. Book from the Earth is the expression of my quest for the ideal of a single script. Perhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its significance rests in making the attempt.

(Despite the length of those excerpts, the full essay is, in fact, much longer -- click through if you want to read more.)

Whether he's successful or not you can yourself judge. Certainly the above passage is comprehensible to me -- and, I suspect, will be comprehensible to many people who speak no English, so it's not that language that's clarifying it for me. (I have doubts about its universality -- it seems to me to be a sort of "language" of its own -- but I agree with Xu Bing that the attempt itself is worthy.)

I should forewarn anyone who wants to read more, however, that the web site's navigation is a bit counter intuitive -- I suppose Xu Bing didn't spend as much time clarifying that as he did trying to clarify his symbolic language. If you go to the web site and click on the "read" icon, you are directed to this page, which is called (in the web browser) "basic", which contains a six paragraph text (can I call it a text?) of which the above-quoted paragraph is the opening. This text is titled, appropriately enough, "". But there's no indication of any further text -- at first I thought that that brief passage was the entirety of the work. If you then click again on the "reading" icon, however, it takes you to this table of contents, which lists fourteen chapters (by number only), with a final page promising "to be continued". There isn't any indication (that I've seen) about the relationship between the initial text and the fourteen numbered chapters. I've only carefully read the former, so I may well be missing something, but a brief scan of the latter makes it seem like the original text is a sort of proof-of-concept sketch, which is then elaborated in (rather than continued in) the first chapter of the actual book.

Still, if you're looking to read more, you'll want to go beyond just the first page.

Since the table of contents lists only numbers, but the actual pages themselves have chapter titles (all in Xu Bing's symbolic language, naturally), I thought it might be of some small service if I were to provide a hyperlinked table of contents to the work as it exists so far:

Preface (?):
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 12:
Chapter 13:
Chapter 14:

There it is, if you wish to read it. As with many tables of contents, I think you get at least a hint of the story's shape just from the titles. I can't recommend it -- again, all I myself have read is what I'm calling the "preface" -- which is interesting as language, but not so interesting as story. But it looks like the longer version may well improve on that latter score. Someday soon I hope to find out.

A post script: two categorical queries

Is The Book From the Ground a Oulipian work, i.e. a work of constrained literature?

I would say it is not. It is an experimental work, certainly, but not I think "constrained" in the sense that that term is used by the Oulipo and its adherents. I can imagine some disagreement on this point -- the Oulipo has done some work on altered languages, such as Jaques Jouet's "The Great-Ape Love-Song" (published in English translation in Oulipo Laboratory). Nevertheless, it seems to me that a newly-invented language -- particularly one not related to any existing language, but pictorial in origin -- while involving, as every task does, certain constraints, is clearly not constrained literature in any plausible sense.

Is The Book From the Ground comics under the McCloudian definition ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"***)?

Again, I would say no. It's not that I am unwilling to apply McCloud's -- to my mind, extremely fruitful -- definition broadly. (In fact, I have been criticized for doing so in the past (see comments.)) But it seems to me that Xi Bing's work is clearly not comics in any plausible sense of the spirit of the term (again, in McCloud's usage).

Again, I can imagine some disagreement here: one might say that Xu Bing's work consists entirely of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer", so if it is not comics, then does it not represent a plain counter-example to McCloud's definition? I would say it does not, because what Xu Bing is doing ultimately is repurposing what were pictures and other images into a symbolic language, i.e. by the time he's "written" his "texts" what he's working with are no longer images in the sense that McCloud intends.

That said, I think that you could make a plausible argument to the contrary, and either understand what Xi Bing is doing as comics (it is derived, as noted above, from airline instruction manuals and the like, which McCloud does specifically include in his understanding of comics), or tweak McCloud's definition to exclude it (which risks accusations of monster-baring, but may be the best way to go). Alternatively, you could understand Xi Bing as taking comics and changing it into a textual language -- see it not as comics, but as a derivation of one particular form of them. This might be the most accurate approach.

Did you include this entire postscript just as an excuse to tag this post with "ou-x-po" and "comics", since you thought Xi Bing's work would be of interest to those interested in those categories, despite the fact that it isn't, basically, either Oulipian or comics?

We said just two questions.

________________
* I haven't seen any site which prints that in proper pinyin, i.e. with tones marked, or I'd reproduce that. Without tones, the pinyin doesn't give sufficient information to pronounce his name. (If anyone happens to know, please leave the information in comments! If it helps, his name in Chinese (according to Wikipedia) is 徐冰.)

** Be grateful I cut off the quote before he started talking about "deconstructive bricolage".

*** Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 9.

John Hollander's 13-line American Love Affair (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 11)

Two recent posts each referenced to (different) poetry anthologies by John Hollander, who I also knew as the author of the classic work Rhyme's Reason: a Guide to English Verse. This serendipity made me wonder about Hollander's own poetry which (grading still undone) I went and read some of. I like him -- I think I may come to like him a lot, although far from having come to any considered judgment, I'm still processing my first impression. But as part of Attemps's Accidental Poetry Month™ I thought I'd share my favorite of his poems so far.

The poem I've selected is from Hollander's 1983 collection Powers of Thirteen, which won him the Bollingen prize and which was included in its entirety (unlike his other books, which were selected from) in his 1992 Selected Poems, so it seems like at least some people (including, presumably, Hollander himself (assuming he selected the selections in Selected P)) think it's representative of his best work.

Powers of Thirteen is, by the sound of it (so far I've only read a few selections I've found online) a rather Oulipian work.* It consists of 169 (13 squared) poems, each of 13 lines, with 13 syllables in each line. I can't (yet) comment on the success (or otherwise) of the whole, but the following poem (which may or may not be titled An Old Song -- the online source I've found is ambiguous on this), which is the 29th poem in the series, is quite wonderful.

Powers of Thirteen: 29

What she and I had between us once, America

And its hope had; and just as I grieve alternately

For what I know myself to have lost of what had been,

And for all that loss I was suffering all that while

I was doing, I thought, so well, so goes the nation,

Grieving for her hope, either lost, or from the very

Start, a lost cause. All our states and I are one in this.

O my America, my long-lost land lady of

The hardening ground, the house neither ancient nor in

Good repair, the brackish stream, the half-abandoned mill,

The red plastic bucket that hung in the place we kept

By the beach where, I remember, August evenings

Rang with hilarity until we trembled with cold.

-- John Hollander

There are a limited number of poems that seem to me to say something genuinely insightful about America; but this is, I think (again, I'm still assimilating it) one of them.

I hope to get ahold of Hollander's Selected Poems in the near future; if so, I'll share further thoughts (and, probably, further poems) then.

_____________
* The Oulipo is a French literary group that studies and promotes the notion of literary constraint; any poetic form, whether old like a sonnet or new like Hollander's 13s, counts -- and the fact that the work contains 169 such poems makes it doubly (squaredly?) so.

Poem of the Day: L. A. Lindon's Dopplegänger

As a follow-up to yesterday's date-driven discussion of Perec's Palindrome, here is a palindrome of a very different sort: a poem by J. A. Lindon (who was apparently a master of palindromes at all levels) which is a palindrome by lines rather than by letters, that is, the first line and the last line are identical, and so are the second and the penultimate, and so forth. (A form with extremely different problems than the letter-by-letter, or the intermediate word-by-word, palindrome.)

DOPPELGÄNGER

Entering the lonely house with my wife
I saw him for the first time
Peering furtively from behind a bush--
Blackness that moved,
A shape amid the shadows,
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes
Revealed in the ragged moon.
A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Put him to flight forever--
I dared not
(For reasons that I failed to understand)
Though I knew I should act at once.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Night after night,
Night after night
He came, and I saw him crouching,
Watching the woman as she neared the gate.

I puzzled over it, hiding alone--
Though I knew I should act at once,
For reasons that I failed to understand
I dared not
Put him to flight forever.

A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have
Revealed in the ragged moon
A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes,
A shape amid the shadows,
Blackness that moved.

Peering furtively from behind a bush,
I saw him for the first time,
Entering the lonely house with my wife.

-- J. A. Lindon

Update: Text corrected from that at the link, based on pp. 118-119 of Howard W. Bergerson, Palindromes and Anagrams (Dover, 1978).

11/02/2011; or, Two Translations of Two Paragraphs of Le Grand Palindrome de Georges Perec

What dates count as Palindromic dates depends on the dating system you use: in American usage, today is not a Palindrome, but in European usage (which puts the day first) it is: 11 February 2011, aka 11/02/2011.* (I think the European system makes more sense than the American, but not as much sense as the Chinese, which apparently puts the year first: 2011-02-11.)

But since today is a palindromic date in European countries (one of only 60 they get this millennium (we Americans get a more paltry 36 in the same period)), I thought I'd mark the occasion by briefly mentioning a work which has often been called the greatest Palindrome ever written, by the French novelist (and member of the literary group the Oulipo) Georges Perec, "Le Grand Palindrome".

Perec's "Grand Palindrome" is 5,566 letters, and about 1000 words, long. In it, Perec -- a man given to word games in his literary works, as fans of his novel La disparition will know -- attempted to write a Palindrome that was not simply a series of words that read the same in both directions, but one which was, in some sense, a literary work.

I will admit I haven't read it. My French is too weak to be called shaky, and this is hardly very clear. As Perec's (generally admiring) biographer noted:

...it is undeniably difficult to read. Knowledge of the constraint disarms critical faculties; when you know that it is a monster palindrome, you tend to see nothing but its palindromic design. At Manchester, in 1989, doctored photocopies and unsigned handwritten versions were given to students and teachers of French who were asked, respectively, to use it for the exercise of explication de texte and to mark it as an essay. Perec's palindrome barely made sense to the readers. Some teachers took it for the work of an incompetent student, while others suspected that they had been treated to a surrealist text produced by "automatic writing". Those with psychiatric interests identified the author as an adolescent in a dangerously paranoid state; those who had not forgotten the swinging sixties wondered whether it was LSD or marijuana that had generated the disconnected images of the text. Readers seem to project their won positive and negative fantasies onto Perec's palindrome, as they do onto other difficult, obscure and unattributed works.

-- David Bellos, Georges Perec: a Life in Words, p. 429

But the first and last sentences have been translated (not as palindromes, just for their plain sense (such as it is)) -- not once, but twice. So I thought I'd share them with you here.

Here is Perec's opening paragraph:

Trace l’inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule. Le brut repentir, cet écrit né Perec. L’arc lu pèse trop, lis à vice-versa.

Perte. Cerise d'...

Here's how Bellos translates it in his aforecited biography (p. 430):

Trace the uneven palindrome. Snow. A trifle, says Hercules. Unadorned repentance, this piece born [of] Perec. [If] the bow of reading is too heavy, read back-to-front.

Loss. Cherry...

And here's how the same words (save for the two at the end) are translated by Perec's friend and fellow Oulipian Harry Mathews (as given by Martin Gardner in his book Penrose Tiles to Trapdoor Ciphers... and the Return of Dr. Matrix (p. 83)):

Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle, Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch is too heavy: read vice-versa....

And, of course, reading backwards in the French (and respacing and repunctuating the words, to be sure) gives us:

.... Désire ce trépas rêvé : Ci va ! S’il porte, sépulcral, ce repentir, cet écrit ne perturbe le lucre : Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l’écart.

Which Bellows translates:

Desire this dreamt-of death: Here goes! If it bears, entombed, this repentance, this writing bears not on lucre. Strumpet, your trickery has no bite on range or space!

Whereas Mathews translates it:

Desire this dreamed-of decease: Here goes! If he carries, entombed, this penitence, this writing will disturb no lucre: Old witch, your treachery will bite into neither the shore nor the space between,

...comparing those translations, and imagining each of them as palindromes of their mates is, I suspect, as close as non-French readers can get to experiencing Perec's "Grand Palindrome". Probably not the biggest loss ever, I'll admit. But one that I will also admit saddens me just a little.

Happy 11/02/2011!

_________________
* There are still other results if you use only the two-number abbreviation for the year, of course. See the above links for all the obsessive details you could wish.

Quotes About Harry Mathews's Cigarettes (1987)

Cigarettes.... [I]dentified by the author as his only "purely Oulipian novel." Its method of composition has not be revealed beyond a statement that it is based on a "permutation of situations".

-- Oulipo Compendium, ed. Harry Mathews & Alistair Brotchie, rev. ed., p. 126

∞

During this time, I decided to write an Oulipian novel. And I created this abstract scheme of permutations of situations in which A meets B, B meets C, and so forth. There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me....

-- Harry Mathews

∞

MATHEWS: I’d never been able to write about the world I grew up in, but Cigarettes allowed me to do it, with Saratoga Springs standing in for the Hamptons.

INTERVIEWER: Could you have done it without the method?

MATHEWS: No, I don’t think so. That’s the way I tell the truth. Oddly, the one novel I wrote using an Oulipian structure is the most conventional.

-- Ibid.

∞

In the Oulipo, there are two schools of thought. People like Calvino and Perec said that the author should acknowledge the methods he’s been using. And the other clan, which included Raymond Queneau and myself, thinks it’s much better not to let on, because this will keep the reader straining to find out.

-- Harry Mathews in Ibid.

∞

NTERVIEWER: Cigarettes... Why that title?
MATHEWS: The question, “Why is the book called Cigarettes?” is a question that should be asked.

-- Harry Mathews Interviewed by Lynn Tillman

Update: And now a quote from Cigarettes about writing -- one that seems, on its face, as if it is also about the writing of Cigarettes itself (as well as its ostensible subject within the novel) -- therefore, a quote that also seems to me to fit appropriately under the title of this blogpost:

Morris was showing him what writing could do. He advanced the notion that creation begins by annihilating typical forms and procedures, especially the illusory "naturalness" of sequence and coherence. Morris did more than state this, he demonstrated it. He made of his essay a minefield that blew itself up as you crossed it. You found yourself again and again on ground not of your choosing, propelled from semantics into psychoanalysis into epistemology into politics. These displacement seemed, rather than willful, grounded in some hidden and persuasive law that had as its purpose to keep bringing the reader back fresh to the subject.

-- Harry Mathews, Cigarettes, p, 135

(Derik Badman thought of applying this quote to Mathews own writing years before I did; but he gave only the first two sentences of the above, so I thought it was worth my quoting it at somewhat greater length.)

Update 2: And for completeness's sake, from Mathews's essay "Translation and the Oulipo", a comment reiterating the above in slightly different wording (via):

I had a similar experience with my novel Cigarettes. My "object of desire" was telling the story of a passionate friendship between two middle-aged women. That was all I knew. I had concocted an elaborate formal scheme in which abstract situations were permutated according to a set pattern. This outline suggested nothing in particular, and for a time it remained utterly empty and bewildering. It then began filling up with situations and characters that seem to come from nowhere; most of them belonged to the world I had grown up in. I had never been able to face writing about it before, even though I'd wanted to make it my subject from the moment I turned to fiction. It now reinvented itself in an unexpected and fitting guise that I could never have discovered otherwise.

For Perec and me, writing under constraint proved to be not a limitation but a liberation. Our unreasonable home grounds were what had at last enabled us to come home.

Alphabetical Africa Errata: an Updated List

My previous post on Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa contained an introduction to the book and its unique constraint, a few remarks on what I thought of it, a table of all the errata I'd either seen elsewhere or found myself, and a list of possible corrections for them.

Now Johnathan Arnold, in a comment on that post has vastly expanded the list to the point where I am putting it up here in a separate post.

A reminder of Alphabetical Africa's constraint: The first half of the book consists of 26 chapters, labeled A through Z. The first chapter contains only words beginning with A; the second contains words beginning with A and B; the third words beginning with A, B and C; and so on up until Z, in which any word may appear. The second half of the book, also 26 chapters long, reverses the process. The chapters are labeled Z through A; Z uses any words; Y uses any words save those beginning with Z; X uses any words save those beginning with Y or Z, and so on back through the final chapter, A, which again uses only words beginning with A. (Again, there's more, including a few example passages, in the earlier post.)

That's the idea, anyway. But it turns out there are at least 40 50 and counting (!) departures from that schema. Here is a complete list of all the ones I know of, from all the various sources I've seen:

Chapter/Page	Error	Phrase
A1, p. 2	premature I	Alex and Allen alone, arrive in Abidjan...
D1, p. 9	premature H	...because Chester cannot hear Dogon birds chirp:
D1, p. 9	premature O	biu, biu, biu, or Dogon dogs bark:
D1, p. 9	premature O	bow, bow, bow, or antelopes:
G1, p. 15	premature I	Are Germans convincing in Africa?
H1, p. 18	premature O	...a bridge or an airport...
H1, p. 18	premature O	...a book, or a husky German...
H1, p. 18	premature O	...doors. One hundred and fifty...
H1, p. 19	premature L	...he chatters a lot...
I1, p. 21	premature U	I used to draw Alva.
J1, p. 26	premature L	...as long as he could.
K1, p. 27	premature N	...he could design a new colony...
L1, p. 30	premature O	...finds a lot of lakes...
L1, p. 31	premature S	...being a compulsive liar she lies about him
M1, p. 32	premature T	He appeared to have been a middle-aged man.
M1, p. 32	premature T	He had gone to a hotel.
N1, p. 34	premature O	I am afraid of loving her...
N1, p. 35	premature S	...everything, even all sounds, heavy, dark...
N1, p. 35	premature O	Each moment is a kind of impermanent...
N1, p. 35	premature O	...my favorite map of another African country...
O1, p. 38	premature P	...I promise her.
P1, p. 39	premature T [arguable]	...part-time only...
P1, p. 40	premature S	"...not invented anything I've seen or done."
Q1, p. 42	premature T	I am convinced that people...
R1, p. 46	premature T [arguable]	After a bit of rough-and-tumble...
V1, p. 58	premature W	...from the eastern and western edges...
W1, p. 59	premature Y	...had we been here a hundred years ago...
V2, p. 87	belated W	The children are at school when the mailman arrives...
V2, p. 88	belated W	...preferably at a time when her children...
U2, p. 91	belated W	...one rapid sweep with a pen...
U2, p. 92	belated W	...laughing men with unpronounceable names...
T2, p. 93	belated W	When Boyd discovered this...
T2, p. 94	belated W	...they meet men who are transplanting Africa.
T2, p. 95	belated W	...have come to terms with African emotions.
T2, p. 97	belated W	He walks as far as the gates of the consulate.
S2, p. 99	belated T	...Miti Safu Safu is a line of trees....
P2, p. 112	belated Q	"An hour later drums mysteriously become quiet..."
N2, p. 117	belated O	...both ends of caravan...
K2, p. 123	belated L	Like everything else...
k2, p. 123	belated L	...it conceals all hope for life by...
J2, p. 126	belated L	...as I dig a large hole...
J2, p. 127	belated L	Alex and Allen left for Africa...
F2, p. 138	belated I	...boosted an innovative design...
E2, p. 140	belated H	...Alva, her deletions are...
E2, p. 140	belated H	...accepts her corrections.
E2, p. 140	belated F	...book buyers for Emperor...
C2, p. 146	belated I	After considering all alternatives, I capture a couple crocodiles.
C2, p. 147	belated I	After I cross a...
C2, p. 147	belated D	...bag containing Alva's description.
B2, p. 148	belated C	...afraid ants can't be beaten.

Phew! That's a lot. I must admit that somewhere between 20 and 40 errors my feelings about them slip from "everyone makes mistakes" to "that's sloppy work". Assuming that they're not deliberate (and I don't think they are, based on both internet rumor about Abish's reaction to one being pointed out, and my judgment of how they seem (although obviously I could be wrong about this)), then I have to say that this mars the book in a substantial way.

In the earlier post I came up with patches for the eighteen or so I'd seen then... but another 24 takes the wind out of my sails. If anyone has patches for these, feel free to leave 'em in comments. And please do leave any further errors you see -- I will add them to the above chart once I see them.

Update (07/10/2011): Three more added from comments. Update (02/07/2012): And five more, plus a correction. Thanks! Keep 'em coming, everyone!

The Writings of an Oulipian Critic

[Updated with new links, November, 2011]

In the course of my recent investigation of Walter Abish's novel Alphabetical Africa, I came across a review of the book by Louis Bury which was done in the constraint used by the novel itself (or, more precisely, half of it: Bury's review was in 26 paragraphs, corresponding to the first 26 chapters of Abish's 52-chapter novel). It was quite well-done, a clever conceit -- and one of the few interesting things I found written on Abish's work.

Investigating, I found that Bury -- who is teaching literature at NYU while finishing up his Ph.D. in English at CUNY -- is working on a fabulous-sounding dissertation, titled Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint. When completed, it will consist of 99 short chapters -- each itself written under a constraint, often (always? I'm not sure) the constraint of the work which the chapter itself discusses.

It's a fabulous idea: the only parallels I'm aware of are Ian Monk's univocal defense of three of Georges Perec's linguistic experiments (including his two univocalisms), "Perec's Letterless Texts" (scroll down), and a number of lipogrammatic reviews of Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition (including, most notably, Ian Monk's lipogrammatic review of a lipogrammatic translation of it (scroll further down)). But of course Bury is attempting this on a grand scale.

It might objected, with some truth, that this is a bit of an obvious move -- to write about a constrained text using the constraint in the critical discussion. In reply to this objection, I would concede the point, but nevertheless defend it on two (related) bases:

First, while it is obvious, I think it is a powerfully and effectively obvious move rather than a dully obvious one. One major (and I think underappreciated) artistic effect is the retrospectively obvious move which rings with all the power of the beautifully inevitable: think of the rhyming word which you see coming, but which nevertheless hits home when it comes, or the beautifully inevitable ending of much classic tragedy. Obviousness is not always a negative criticism in an artistic context.*

Second, while doing it once (as more than one reviewer did in reviewing Perec's lipogram lipogrammatically) is a cute trick, doing a whole book of them rises to another level: a genuinely interesting Oulipian work.

Like some -- but not all -- Oulipian works, this one feels to me as one that ought to be done once: multiple versions would degrade rather than enhance the idea. But once can have all the power of the beautifully inevitable.

-- If, of course, it's done well. About which only time and the finished work will tell. But so far the evidence is that Bury is himself an effective Oulipian critic.

One thing to note is that the work as a whole is an Oulipian pastiche: the 99 clearly marks Bury's Exercises in Criticism as a pastiche of Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, a revising of that work of fiction into the medium of criticism (just as Matt Madden reworked it in his own brilliant revision into the medium of comics). So Bury's work itself serves as a translation of, or comment upon, Queneau's.

And the actual chapters, at least those published so far, seem to me to be well done also.

I did not see a single place in which the links to those pieces which were already published were gathered; so I asked (by email) Bury himself, who kindly supplied a series of links to those already-published pieces as well as his permission to gather them here.

So, the thus-far published pieces of Louis Bury's Exercises in Criticism:

• The Exercise and the Oulipo: 99 Variations on a Thesis (a homage to Queneau's Exercises in Style (thus, a homage within a homage) about the place of the notion of the exercise in the practice of the Oulipo)
• Abish's Africa (a discussion of Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa using its constraint)
• Absences, Negations, Voids (a discussion of Doug Nufer's Negativeland using its constraint)
• Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups: An Exegesis (I believe this uses the constraint of the titular work, but I'm not certain, not having read it) (NSFW)
  
• The N+7 Form (a brief discussion of the Oulipo's famous N+7 technique, with it then applied to the discussion itself)
• Raymond Roussel's (New) Africa (a discussion of the poem which mimics its digressive form)
• On Writing On Walking (a discussion of Andy Fitch's 60 Morning Walks, written while walking (plus some after-the-fact commentary))
• Cultural Politics, Postmodernism, and White Guys: Femininity as Affect and Effect in Robert Fitterman’s This Window Makes Me Feel (a discussion written using a method which parallels that of the titular work) - (pdf link)
• Bernadette Mayer’s Outline of Scientific Method -- "A piece on Bernadette Mayer that re-writes part of her famous list of poetic experiments using borrowed language from other types of texts"
  
• A Talk Review of "Ten Walks/Two Talks" (with Corey Frost) "A conversational review (itself only the loosest of constraints) of Andy Fitch and Jon Cotner's 10 Walks/ 2 Talks"
• Gold Fools and the Question of Narrative (the text is on p. 12 of the linked document) "on Gilbert Sorrentino's Gold Fools written using the same interrogative constraint Sorrentino uses in his novel"
• Three in the internet anthology An Oulipolooza (all three pdfs at link**):
  • "The Dictionary" (a discussion of Haryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary with a penis pun in every sentence)
  • "Job Talk" (a discussion of Doug Nufer's novel Never Again which obeys its constraint of never repeating a word after its first use (easier to do for a page than a novel!))
  • " ________ (adj) Literature and the Oulipo", a mad-libs style essay on the "po" (potential) in Oulipo
  
  

Those seem to be all that he's published so far. Bury tells me that more excerpts will be published next year; if I see them (or if he tells me about them) I'll add them to this list. (Update: the last six items on the list are new as of November, 2011; thanks to Bury for emailing to tell me about them! I've taken the liberty of quoting his description of the first three of them from his email to me.)

Personally, I can't wait to read the entire book. It sounds like an Oulipian classic in the making. I suspect that those of my Noble Readers who are fans of constrained literature will agree. If you're in that category, check out Bury's work for an appetite-whetting preview.

_____________________________
* Similarly, what is obvious is not necessarily all that easy to see. If I may be so pretentious as to quote myself: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote an undergraudate thesis (on J. L. Austin's essay "Pretending") which, done in a rush, had its problems; but it contained the following footnote which I still think, years later, makes a good point -- perhaps an obvious point, but not one I've ever seen made elsewhere -- albeit perhaps not quite as clearly as I would have liked it to:

It may be wondered that someone needs to show us what is obvious. This sense of oddity is caused, I think, by not thinking hard enough about how the word "obvious" is used. If asked to say what obvious means, we would probably say something like, "what is obvious is seen at a glance". If we look at how we use it, however, we often say something is obvious when we could not see it ourselves ("How could I have not have seen it? It's so obvious"). A good example of an Austinian situation, that we do sometimes do not know exactly what our words mean, how we can mistake them for something less subtle (for "obviously" obviously has something to do with being able to see at a glance--often we do see, and we think we should see, what is obvious at a glance) than they in fact are.

** Although these links are in some irritating embedded format that only worked for me in Safari, not Firefox.

Alphabetical Africa Errata -- With Possible Patches

Update: Read this post for an introduction to the book, and a few patches to some of the errors; but a more complete table of all known errors in Alphabetical Africa has now been posted here.

For the "constrained literature" discussion group I've been hosting, I've just read Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa. (I began it once before, but this was my first full trip through it.)

It's a strange book, written under a tight (and, so far as I know, a unique) Oulipian constraint. The first half of the book consists of 26 chapters, labeled A through Z. The first chapter contains only words beginning with A; the second contains words beginning with A and B; the third words beginning with A, B and C; and so on up until Z, in which any word may appear. The second half of the book, also 26 chapters long, reverses the process. The chapters are labeled Z through A; Z uses any words; Y uses any words save those beginning with Z; X uses any words save those beginning with Y or Z, and so on back through the final chapter, A, which again uses only words beginning with A.

To give you a sense of how this works in practice, here's the first paragraph of the first chapter A:

Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. Albert argumentatively answers at another apartment. Answers: ants are Ameisen. Ants are Ameisen?

Here's the opening of the first chapter I:

I haven't been here before. I had hoped I could hire a car, but I can't drive. I have been awfully busy finishing a book about Alva. First I contemplated doing a book about another character, and another country. Bit by bit I have assembled Africa. Although I hate hot climates I chose Africa. Desire is always alive in hot climates I have been informed. I brought a gun along, and a calendar. It is August here. Bright beautiful August. I used to draw Alva. Her face, her hands, her breasts. But I am an amateur artist. I didn't bring any drawings along. I am alone.

And here's the opening of the first chapter S:

Summarizing Africa: I can speak more freely. I find fewer and fewer impediments. Soon I'll reach my destination. Soon I'll also complete my documentation and my book. Daily Africa is shrinking from extreme heat and fatigue, as rebels in bush battle African armies led by foreigners. Orders are passed in fifteen magnificent click languages. It is no surprise really if most soldiers are missing.

You get the idea. At times particularly in the early chapters, it reads somewhat more like poetry than like fiction. If you want to sample some more, here's the book in Google Books. And here is a fabulous review of the novel in twenty-six paragraphs using (the first half of) Abish's constraint in its writing.

If this sounds utterly silly and pointless to you, then you almost certainly won't like the actual book. It's a novel that requires the experimental-literature equivalent of a healthy willing suspension of disbelief: you need to go with the flow. If, on the other hand, it sounds cool, then you probably will like it, because it's good at what it is. While I personally found the first couple of chapters tough to get through, it picks up around chapter I, and becomes a very funny, engaging book (with arguably problematic politics). It's not the Great American Novel or anything, but it's probably the Great Alphabetical African Novel,* and that, while admittedly somewhat more limited, is still a lot of fun.

And it's a wild constraint after all. Imagine writing entire chapters with so limited a vocabulary! And yet somehow Abish manages to do it.

Except for the goofs.

Ah, yes: the famous errors of Abish's Alphabetical Africa. The Complete Review, which does its usual good job on Abish's book, found four errors. Reading through it, I found no less than twelve more -- and another two items that are arguably errors. Here's a complete list, combining all of them. (Update: This is now obsolete. An integrated, updated list can be found here.)

Chapter/Page	Error	Phrase
G1, p. 15	premature I	Are Germans convincing in Africa?
K1, p. 27	premature N	...he could design a new colony...
N1, p. 35	premature S	...everything, even all sounds, heavy, dark...
O1, p. 38	premature P	...I promise her.
P1, p. 39	premature T [arguable]	...part-time only...
R1, p. 46	premature T [arguable]	After a bit of rough-and-tumble...
V1, p. 58	premature W	...from the eastern and western edges...
W1, p. 59	premature Y	...had we been here a hundred years ago...
V2, p. 87	belated W	The children are at school when the mailman arrives...
T2, p. 93	belated W	When Boyd discovered this...
T2, p. 94	belated W	...they meet men who are transplanting Africa.
T2, p. 95	belated W	...have come to terms with African emotions.
T2, p. 97	belated W	He walks as far as the gates of the consulate.
K2, p. 123	belated L	Like everything else...
k2, p. 123	belated L	...it conceals all hope for life by...
F2, p. 138	belated I	...boosted an innovative design...
C2, p. 146	belated I	After considering all alternatives, I capture a couple crocodiles.
C2, p. 147	belated I	After I cross a...

(The ones from the Complete Review are the premature P on p. 38, and the final three listed. The arguable ones are the ones that are part of compound phrases: "Part-Time" in the first P chapter, and (even less convincing) "rough-and-tumble" in the first R chapter.)

(Update: Commentator Jonathan Arnold found an additional twenty-five (!!) errors which he kindly posted in the comments below. I will integrate them into this post when I have the time; in the meantime, definitely look in the comments to see a whole lot more. Update 2: The updated, integrated list of all known errata in Alphabetical Africa has now been posted here.)

There has been speculation that the known errors are deliberate, a breaking of the artistic constraint for aesthetic reasons. The Oulipo, the literary group most closely associated with constrained literature (although Abish himself has no connection to the group I'm aware of), has developed the notion of a "clinamen" (based on a term from Lucretius) for the notion of a deliberate violation of an artistic constraint for greater artistic purposes.

But I must admit I'm doubtful. Not just because I recall seeing an anecdote on the web where someone who met Abish asked him about the errors and got astonishment and a description of how hard he and his editor worked to prevent them (although I do). But because the errors don't feel like clinamen. They're too many; they're too random and uninteresting. They simply feel like... errors.

(The one way in which some (although not all) feel like clinamen is that there are obvious solutions. One of the criteria for an Oulipian clinamen is that there must be a way to "solve" the issue that does not involve breaking the constraint -- so that one is clearly doing it for reasons of aesthetic choice and not inability to find one's way out of the self-constructed maze. But this isn't true of all of them, at least for me (see below.))

So no: I think they're errors. And there are quite a lot -- in addition to the Complete Review's four, I found a dozen or more (depending on the arguable cases) in a single reading. And I wasn't really trying that hard -- I was just reading the book for the most part. So if there are 16 to 18... I bet there are more, too, that I didn't find.

Ah well. Even Abish nods. It's pretty close, right?

...Except, it seems to me, that most of these are quite readily fixable.

So in the spirit of the Age of Wiki, I offer freely, to one and all (particularly to Abish, in the unlikely event he should stumble upon this post), the following patches (to use the programming term) for Abish's novel:

Ch.	Error	Possible Fix
G1	Are Germans convincing in Africa?	Are Germans convincing around Africa?
K1	...he could design a new colony...	...he could design a cutting-edge colony... ( ...he could design an advanced colony...)
N1	...everything, even all sounds, heavy, dark...	..everything, even all noises, heavy, dark...
O1	...I promise her.	...I assure her. (...I guarantee her.)
P1	...part-time only...	...half-day only... (...casual labor...)
R1	After a bit of rough-and-tumble...	After a bit of a fracas...
V1	...from the eastern and western edges...	...from the eastern and opposite edges (...from the eastern and far edges) (...from the near and far edges...) (...from the longitudinal edges...)
W1	...had we been here a hundred years ago...	...had we been here a century ago...
V2	The children are at school when the mailman arrives...	The children are at school as the mailman arrives...
T2	When Boyd discovered this...	After Boyd discovered this...
T2	...they meet men who are transplanting Africa.	...they meet men engaged in transplanting Africa.
T2	...have come to terms with African emotions.	...have come to accept African emotions. (...have faced up to African emotions.) (...have reconciled themselves to African emotions,) [Here the fix has to be more specific as to meaning than the error-laden phrase.]
T2	He walks as far as the gates of the consulate.	He goes as far as the gates of the consulate. (He strolls as far as the gates of the consulate.)
K2	Like everything else...	As in everything else...
K2	...it conceals all hope for life by...	...it conceals all hope for continued existence by...
F2	...boosted an innovative design...	...boosted a creative design... (... boosted an advanced design...) (...boosted an experimental design...)
C2	After considering all alternatives, I capture a couple crocodiles.	After considering all alternatives, capture a couple crocodiles. (Capture a couple crocodiles after considering all alternatives.)
C2	After I cross a...	After crossing a...

Not all of those are of the same quality of course. Some I think are obviously right; some I'm not very happy with, although I can't come up with anything better.

Having offered these, I have several queries for my Noble Readers.

First, if you've read Alphabetical Africa and know of any errors that aren't on this list... please leave them in comments, and I'll add them to this table!

Second, can you think of a better patch for any of the errors that I've already found? Again, please leave suggestions in comments.

And finally: does anyone know Walter Abish, or know anyone who knows Walter Abish, or even know anyone who knows anyone at New Directions (his publisher)? It'd be great to see Alphabetical Africa 1.2 published, with all known errors removed & fixed. (Or, if these are indeed deliberate, to get confirmation of this fact.)

In the meantime, I offer them to any and all readers of Alphabetical Africa as an unauthorized erratum sheet. Feel free to mentally substitute (or even physically write in, if you buy it rather than get it from the library) these corrections for a smoother, error-free Alphabetical Africa experience.

______________________
* This gets at a separate issue, which I don't have time to go into -- a subfield in the study of literary (and more broadly artistic) constraint that I'd like to see someone delve into: there seems to me a distinction between constraints that one can imagine becoming a form, that is, a generalized practice (however obscure and marginal) with multiple works to its credit, and those that seem inexorably one-time works, constraints that are hard to imagine re-using without the results being hopelessly derivative (and which therefore will be used only in works that are formally and openly derivative, i.e. the aforementioned review of Abish's book written under (half) its constraints). The distinction would be, therefore, between (on the one hand) lipograms, which have a long (if not all that proud) history which predated Perec's novel (and which have also had an ongoing life beyond it, including multiple variations on the theme), and (on the other hand) something like Abish's constraint, which it seems to me hard to imagine replicating, not because of the technical challenge, but simply because of the overwhelming feeling that it's been done. (Where this border lies is, obviously, a point subject to dispute.)