Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Potential Literature Project

San Francisco experimental poet Taylor Brady published a chapbook in 2000 called 33549 (the zip code of his Florida home town), in which every sentence was based on that page of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: first sentence based on first page of Proust, second sentence on second page, etc. At least that's how I remember it. It was to be the first subpart of a multivolume novel called Research (as in A la recherche, get it?).

I liked 33549 a lot, although I didn't keep reading Brady's later work. I loved the idea. I might steal it for the WLP Book Club. Do any other members have Oulipo constraint-projects to propose?

3 comments:

  1. DS, did you ever read Richard Aleas's FIFTY-TO-ONE? It's a pseudonymous novel (Richard Aleas = Charles Ardai, who publishes the Hard Case Crime novels) in which each chapter takes its title (and subsequent plot development) from one of the Hard Case Crime books. It's a lot of fun!

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  2. Ah, if one only had fifty of one's own books to mine! (i.e. excavate from, no pun on "mine" intended)

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  3. Our own Levi has a more in-depth take on it:
    http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2008/11/anniversaries.html

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