Customer Reviews

Oulipo Compendium (Atlas Archive)

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Rather than individually buying a variety of basic tools, consider getting the Oulipo Compendium, which contains all the essentials: screwdrivers, wrenches, pliers, detective-novel-plot-generation-cards, Raymond Queneau's sonnet matrix, etc. Part of the benefit of an oulipo compendium of this scope is that it comes with its own carrying case, includes just about everything you need for at-home brain surgery, and is organized alphabetically, in the form of a dictionary. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie's home/auto/linguistic tool set meets all these needs and more. Fits both standard and metric sockets. Features basic Oulipo tool set, assorted sizes of screwdrivers and ice-picks, sestina modifiers, biographies of oulipo participants side-by-side with multiple permutations of the N+7 theorem, socket wrenches with 70 sockets and 5 fingers and toes, and an especially amusing photograph of Georges Perec wearing a saucy beard. Stores easily on bokshelf or in the trunk of your car for travel emergencies. Smite your enemy by inventing a law which turns "Y" into "A" whenever it is preceded by "ENEM". Recover language and see what it's like to not live as a slave to your mother's tongue.

Probably the best way for an English Language reader to get a sense of what Oulipo does at its best--you get to see how much more than a stunt the whole endeavor is. It includes much hard-to-find material, including a translation (!) of Queneau's One-hundrerd-trillion sonnets, and some neat experiments in severe overdetermination. It also includes the wonderful Skinhead Hamlet, by Richard Curtis. (Oddly, the editors--Harry Mathews is one of the major members of the workshop--say they can't track him down, but he's the screenwriter for Four Weddings and a Funeral, so shouldn't be too hard to find.) Lot's of interesting material on Georges Perec, and also on an American writer who wrote a novel in which no word is used more than once--a kind of hyper-Flaubertian enterprise.

Before reading this book, I didn't know anything about Oulipo....do you? If not, here's the gist: Oulipo are a bunch of slightly crazy people who want to find new and fun ways to write stuff. So, they create all these interesting and zany techniques to generate their writing...to me, it seems similar to how modern composers generate notes and rhythms using tone rows and stuff like that. This book is a "compendium" of these techniques, Oulipo authors, their works, etc. I think it's great. I'd recommend it to writers who want to try something new (as opposed to just writing "from the heart", or whatever) and I'd also recommend it to people who like modern, formalist type stuff. Have fun.

If you ever come across Arthur Brand's little article on the Oulipo, cherish it. I read it back in the late 80s, in an anthology somewhere, and I've never been able to find it since. It whet my appetite for these crazy masters of restricted composition, who spend their time devising totally new ways to write. This isn't a book for the "poetry of everyday life" set, or writing workshop clones. It's a book, as Brand said, for "mad scientists, mathematicians, monster-makers and angels." It's a writer's encylopedia, stuffed with ideas, strategies, graphs, games, machines, etc for making poetry and fiction.

What can I say of the Compendium, except that I wish I had known about it years ago when I was slogging through many a boring creative writing class asking, always, "Is this all we have?" Truly, there is another side to writing, a playful, divergent, fascinating side that gives the reader and the writer a world of untold possibility.

Reading this book was very like being allowed into the fold of the Ultra Cool Kids, finding them to be an evolved form of human, and being welcomed just the same. The history, writing, and exercises held in this volume should be read by everyone thinking of exploring experimental writing. If you are bored with the status quo--and how could you not be?--then this book is for you.

Oulipo is great! This book is just so full of STUFF. What they did was just spend a lot of time thinking of wild ways to inspire & direct writing, & what we're left with is this labyrinth of experimrents. For me, the one of the greatest things gleaned from Oulipo is just the general sense that therec are sooo many more conceptual & logistical systems out there that you haven't even touched upon yet but that are waiting.

(a) An alternate reference book
(b) A fountain of ideas when your jammed
(c) Literary theory written sideways
(d) A book you should pick up
(e) All of the above

harry mathews and alastair brotchie have done something remarkable: structured a book according to its own logic. (rare, really.) the structure and content of this book will help clear the air of more than a few too-common brain farts, not the least of which is the opinion that formalism implies either exhaustion or conservativism. read this book. try some of the experiments. go get some of the other titles in the Atlas series. you will say fewer stupid things at parties, and care less about the times you do.

A strange name for a strange and intriguing book.
Oulipo is a contraction of Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as `workshop of potential literature'.
Oulipo is a group of French speaking mathematicians and writers who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. One of its founders, Raymond Queneau is the author of Exercises in Style.

The book is a compendium of different techniques and approaches which are described, often with illuminating examples. It gives a fascinating glimpse into a host of different ways of thinking and looking at the world.

One of the most fascinating consequences of constraints is that, far from reducing ideas and opportunities, the introduction of constraints serves as the stimulus to new ideas.

Just take a look at the spam arriving with your email to see the creative lengths that spammers will go to, to get past anti-spam software. Or the lengths that car owners in the UK will go to, to construct words from the very limited patterns of letters and digits allowed on a number plate

The book opens with Queneau's `Hundred thousand million poems' Ten pages each of 14 strips of text, that can be combined to create this immense number of different poems. From there onwards the book is a treasure trove of ideas to change the way you see.

My personal favourite is `The Skinhead Hamlet' by Richard Curtis which uses the technique of substituting a vocabulary drawn from a radically different environment, in this case `skinheads', and applying it to Shakespeare's play. The language is inevitably strong, but it had me crying with laughter.

This is a book that will enliven parts of your brain that others simply cannot reach.