[silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

[Chris Piuma]

It's not "according to taste" that's at issue, though -- it would be  
"to have it make sense". Hence the Oulipian shortened sonnet  
technique (under "redundancy" in the Compendium) -- it's not just the  
last word, or the last syllable, or the last n letters of each line  
that you take -- it's as little as you can while still retaining a  
syntactically "intelligible" or "normative" poem.

Duchamp did spectacularly little for Oulipo except perhaps lend his  
name and fame to the group; he's only recorded as attending one  
meeting, never wrote anything Oulipian, and his entry in the Oulipo  
Compendium suggests he was mostly in it for the puns. Plus he seems  
to have joined any group or scene that would allow him...

The mesostic rule -- when Cage was composing "freehand" in it,  
writing "normative" poems/lectures/sentences with it -- and when he  
was excluding the occurrence of a key letter between the previous key  
letter and the following one (oof, that's a complicated rule to  
describe; I hope you know what I mean) -- anyway, that is absolutely  
an Oulipian form. "Mesostic" isn't keyed in the Compendium, but it's  
mentioned under "acrostic" with this parenthetical -- "John Cage  
published many mesostics dedicated to friends and colleagues" --  
which are the "freehand" ones I was just describing, mostly, rather  
than, say, the Writings Through.

The N+7 is one of a number of Oulipo rules that allow for a certain  
measure of indeterminacy, but are still constructed so that their  
results are still, in some way, "sensical". But that is the real  
dividing line; one gets a sense from Oulipo that without the need for  
ending up with something "sensical", all their acrobatics are just  
calculations; which is the opposite of what Cage is doing.

But I'm happy to see you working on this; the synthesis of the two  
modes of thought is something I've been interested in for years.

I don't recall that you were at the noulipo conference last year; I  
seem to recall that this issue got lightly touched upon in a few of  
the presentations. I seem to remember Christian Bök talking about it,  
but I also remember him talking about something else, so... Hrm.

Yrs,

Chris.

On 19 Feb 2007, at 5:26 pm, Marjorie Perloff wrote:

> Thanks, everyone, for your prompt and good responses.  But I am not  
> wholly convinced.  True, Oulipo descried chance but what, in  
> practice, is the difference between, say, a mesostic rule (even if  
> the vertical strings are generated by chance operations) and the  
> Oulipo N+7 rule, which is not ‘unchancy” in that different  
> dictionaries would give you a different seventh noun after the N.   
> Besides, Cage admits again and again that he changed the chance  
> products “according to taste.”
>
> The key link may be Duchamp,, who is connected to both camps.  I  
> will try to check more fully.
>
> Marjorie Perloff
>
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