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Saturday, April 3, 2010

French Thought

The French will make you think. They do not put it right out there, they make you work for it, to find it...

A few posts back I did this article "Some internet marketing thoughts from Phoenix"
"In just the way you build a phrase, they all have an effect on each other. So when we write lyrics, my favorite part is when you delete the in-betweens so that it’s almost some sort of weird cryptic form of poetry that doesn’t make sense"

Does House of Kids take that approach to their art? Institubes and their artists?

There is a name that applies here: Oulipo
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.(wikipedia)

What are some of these constraints? (from wikipedia)

S+7, sometimes called N+7
Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.

Snowball
A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Lipogram
Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it does not contain any of those letters).

Prisoner's constraint, also called "Macao" constraint
A type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

Palindromes
Sonnets and other poems constructed using palindromic techniques.

Univocalism
A poem using only one vowel, although the vowel may be used in any of its aural forms. For example, "bone" and "cot" could both be used in a univocalism, unlike "sew" or "beau".


Or take out an in between line here and there....
Thanks to @VISAVISLA for tweeting and Le Monde's interesting article.

Alizee Nation

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

a really cool and informative blog.
blog and cog,
log. dog, smog.
hope and rope,
tote, wrote.

Lefty said...

Makes me think of a technique I once developed for a piece of instrumental music I wrote called "City of Cards". For the bridge melody, I took a deck of cards and assigned each card a note value, thus giving me 12 semitones plus the octave. I drew one card at a time and wrote down the note it corresponded to. Thus I ended up with a melody randomly generated by drawing cards. It was fun...

Unknown said...

Sounded fun Lefty, I am glad you shared. I try to include articles that perhaps a Rob, JR or even Alizee herself may find interesting, so to have feedback on these types of posts is always appreciated.

Anonymous glad you found it interesting...and had some fun with it too.

 

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