Last week, a knock on my door signalled the arrival of a book I’ve been expecting for some time: the grandly titled ‘Has Man a Function in Universe?’, part of a series of books, curated by artist Gavin Wade, based on the Strategic Questions asked by Buckminster Fuller, who said:
It is my working assumption that the following 40 questions must be definitely answered before we may realistically discuss our respective philosophies and grand strategies.
My interest in the book comes from the artist Neil Chapman‘s seemingly chance encounter with an essay I wrote for my MA course about the Oulipo group. Printing out that essay on green paper, Chapman has chopped it up (it was made up of a number of free-floating paragraphs), and then integrated some of my text into the sections of the book produced by him. Rather chuffed about the whole thing, I am.
(Strategic Questions website here.)
Joe
January 25, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Good stuff. How did he find the text?
karl.whitney
January 25, 2009 at 11:30 pm
It’s on my site under ‘academic papers’ – just the essay we did for Sean on postmodernism.
Joe
January 26, 2009 at 11:16 am
Yes, I’ve had a look now. It didn’t half bring back to me how poor my essay (on Pynchon and the Great Tradition) was. I don’t think I’ll be posting that piece of work anytime soon!
Ernesto
February 7, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Hey Karl, only until now I am reminded you did write about ouilipo. Last week I was writing about the concept of “constraint writing” and oubapo- Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle. Have you come across their work, as the Oupus Readers? I was wondering if you had any recommendations about the concept of constraint in art…
karl.whitney
February 8, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Hey Ernesto,
You should look at the Oulipo Compendium, edited by Alastair Brotchie and Harry Mathews – it’s got a section specifically devoted to Oubapo, and summarises nicely the evolution of constrained writing in Oulipo. This is the best place to start, and, in a way, it’s sufficient for most needs. Beyond that, there’s a Yale French Studies issue about Georges Perec from 2004, and some of the essays in that are of interest. Also of interest would be David Bellos’s biography of Georges Perec, which would be handy to dip into – it has some good summaries of Oulipian method. There’s also a book, just published, by Alison James called ‘Constraining Chance’ which seems to be a very good study of the interplay of Oulipian constraint and chance in Perec’s work. But, most of all, I’d try Mathews and Brotchie and David Bellos’s works.
Ernesto
February 16, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Thanks so much for this, mate. Very useful indeed. Have you seen Oupus at all? I wonder what you may think about them.