h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's a long time since I heard anything about the Oulipo. Martin Gardner discussed them in his column in the Scientific American some time back in the 70's or early 80's. One of the things that stuck in my mind was their "Noun + 7" technique for writing a story. Pick up a good dictionary and a favourite piece of English, such as "the Lord of the Rings". Now work your way through it, replacing every noun with the 7th next noun from the dictionary. You will end up with something resembling the original but complete nonsense.

Another thing the Oulipo produced was a dictionary of words which meant something in both English and French, although not necessarily the same thing. For example, "sale" means "dirty" in French. The dictionary was for writing poems which mean one thing in English and another in French.

My favourite was a short story (I think it was called 'Suburbia') which consisted of nothing but a series of blank pages with footnotes, which you had to use to figure out what was going on. I think the purpose was to attempt to write an entire story without the use of *any* of the letters of the alphabet. Now *there's* writing under constraints...

You haven't got the reference for that Scientific American article have you, by any chance? If so, I can look it up at the university library and possibly put it in the Further Reading section here. If you don't know, I'll see if I can root it out anyhow, actually - sounds interesting. Not to mention bizarre, strange, somehow worthwhile in spite of its apparent complete pointlessness.

Sorry it took me so long to reply, by the way. I wasn't actually expecting anybody to read this entry, so didn't bother to check the page...