The End of Oulipo?: Update

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Last month the literary world was shaken as a pair of literary critics published the most audacious book since Georges Perec’s e-less novel A Void. Really. It’s that audacious.

Now you can buy us on Amazon in the US and the UK, as an e-book or as one of those old-fashioned rectangular paper things.

Or you can start by reading an excerpt in The New Inquiry, and then buy a copy.

Need convincing in person? There are some events happening, and we’d love for you to come along:

Tonight! Februrary 19th: my co-author Scott Esposito will be in conversation with the youngest most American Oulipian, Daniel Levin Becker, author of Many Subtle Channels, at City Lights in San Francisco.

March 11th: if you happen to be in Paris, I’ll be appearing at Shakespeare & Company with Joanna Walsh.

Further reading: Scott’s Oulipo-themed 2012: A Year in Reading, for The Millions. Chad Post wrote about us here, and Levi Asher wrote about us too.

The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement

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Very pleased to announce that my next book, co-authored with Scott Esposito, will be out from Zer0 Books on 25 January 2013. Spread the word!

The Oulipo celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 2010, and as it enters its sixth decade, its members, fans and critics are all wondering: where can it go from here? In two long essays Scott Esposito and Lauren Elkin consider Oulipo’s strengths, weaknesses, and impact on today’s experimental literature.

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This got lost in the shuffle of the book coming out and my subsequent trips to Alsace, Berlin, and London– I reviewed John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead (FSG) for Writing in Public, a book which took me slightly outside of my comfort zone as a reader but which was well worth it. An excerpt:

Sullivan is a study in contrasts: a one-time born-again Christian and a liberal-minded critic, a Southerner and a darling of the New York literati, a goofy dude and a sober social conscience. He is, therefore, in an ideal position to explore the shady byways of American identity. His essay on the Tea Party, “American Grotesque,” features just this kind of intellectual magnanimity, even if he does (as he must) eventually come down on “our side” of the fence. “Today is September 12, 2009. We are marching,” he writes. We begin to meet the other marchers: “I want my America back,” reads one of their placards. It isn’t clear for certain whose America the sign refers to until we see another sign of Nancy Pelosi’s enlarged face, into whose open mouth the crowd is tossing Lipton tea bags. “It’s only fair,” Sullivan comments. “Liberals made fun of us because, at first, we didn’t know what ‘tea-bagging’ meant (…) Now we’re turning the joke back on them.” In the very next paragraph, we see a person standing on a garbage can wearing an Obama mask and a little gold crown, sporting “a bright purple pimp’s coat with faux-leopard-skim trim.”

 

Throughout this first part of the essay, Sullivan casts himself as a reasonably-minded member of an unspecified political rally. As he begins to mention its heroes— “[Glenn] Beck is an entertainer. We love him, but he goes over the top” — we know we’re at a Tea Party gathering, and we’re confused about what we’re doing there. It’s not until after the rally, back at the hotel, that it becomes clear why Sullivan has included himself in the “we” of the lunatic fringes of the Republican Party: he is there with his first cousin, an insurance executive from Kentucky whose politics are radically different from Sullivan’s. He gets into it with his cousin: “Didn’t the crap those people were spewing originate in the e-mail accounts of lobbyists and ‘former CEOs’ and other cynically interested types? Why else would these citizens purport to fear ‘socialized medicine‘ so intensely?” By the end of the essay, Sullivan is wishing his cousin luck and hoping for him to fail.

How to make a Metro poem

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Invented by Jacques Jouet

A métro poem has as many verses as your trip has stations, minus one.

The first verse is composed in your head between the two first stations of your trip (counting the station from which you departed).

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the second station.

The second verse is composed in your head between the second and third stations of your trip.

It is transcribed onto paper when the train stops at the third station. And so forth.

One must not transcribe when the train is in motion.

One must not compose when the train is stopped.

The last verse of the poem is transcribed on the platform of your last station.

If your trip involves one or more changes of subway lines, the poem will have two or more stanzas.

Notes toward an Ouvroir de la Ville Potentielle (OuViPo)

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Today I’m flying to Berlin, where Joanna Walsh and I will give a talk about the figure of the flâneuse in the modern city on Thursday. Please join us if you’re in town! Full details:

17 May, 2012
19:30
Dialogue Books
Schönleinstraße 31
Kreuzberg, Berlin, 10967 Germany

 I write, I inhabit a sheet of paper – I invest in it, I travel across it. I incite blanks, spaces… This is how space begins: with words only, signs traced on the blank page. (Georges Perec, Species of Spaces)

Join Dialogue Books as we explore the hidden boundaries and outer limits of urban exploration and the role of the flâneuse in the modern city with artist/writer Joanna Walsh and novelist/critic Lauren Elkin.

Joanna Walsh and Lauren Elkin have been exchanging ideas for a number of years. Working in different practices, they are both concerned with the city as a grid for explorations of politics and identity.

Joanna Walsh is visiting Berlin at the end of a period mapping European cities, researching her next book, which deals with love in space and cyberspace.

“I began to record my journey in photographs at theskyovereuropa.tumblr.com. What started as a side-project has now become an important part of my work. Inspired by the practices Georges Perec used in his attempts to wrestle place onto the page, I imposed the Oulipo-style constraint of showing no less than 75% sky in any photo. Drawn, like Perec, to undefined, overlooked, and in-between spaces, I explore a passenger’s aesthetic of travel in which the city, not the observer, appears to move, as from a train, a bus or a taxi. Chasing the borderlands of places and relationships, subjectivity and objectivity, I ask, does the sky over Europe have frontiers?”

Lauren Elkin is at work on a book about women and cities called Flâneuse, which challenges the widely-held idea that the flâneuse has never existed because women have not had the same access to the city as men. Part critical meander, part memoir, Flâneuse charts a path through literature and art revealing women’s sometimes liberating, sometimes fraught relationship to the metropolis.

“Cities have invisible boundaries, invisible customs gates that demarcate who goes where: certain neighborhoods, certain bars and restaurants, certain parks, are reserved for different kinds of people; a place that’s native and comfortable to one person may seem exclusionary to another. We become so accustomed to this that we hardly notice the values underlying the structure of the city. This is what Perec’s Oulipo and Debord’s Situationism attempt to disrupt: ordered, reified, normative, and oppressive city structures. But for a woman, who does not inhabit public space the way a man does, what does this disruption entail? How can women take possession of the literature and the city on their own terms? What links can we find between women’s radical movements through the city and feminism’s response to literary tradition?“

ABOUT

Joanna Walsh (Badaude) writes and draws graphic fiction and non-fiction. She is published by Tate, and has drawn and written for The Guardian, The Times, The Idler, FiveDials and The White Review amongst others. She has created large-scale artworks for the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Institute. Her website was a Webby Honoree in 2008. She is an associate member of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics. This year she will be talking at the Port Eliot Festival, The Wellcome Institute and the Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

Lauren Elkin is the author of the novel Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson) and co-author of The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Literary Movement (forthcoming from TQC Long Essays and Zero Books). Her essays on books and culture have appeared in The Guardian, Bookforum, The Daily Beast, The White Review, and Five Dials, and are forthcoming in n+1 and the TLS.  She lives in Paris and London.

RSVP via events@dialoguebooks.org

Entry €5 including wine

On writing about Venice

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“’I envy you, writing about Venice,’ says the newcomer. ‘I pity you,’ says the old hand.  One thing is certain.  Sophistication, that modern kind of sophistication that begs to differ, to be paradoxical, to invert, is not a possible attitude in Venice.  In time, this becomes the beauty of the place.  One gives up the struggle and submits to a classic experience.  One accepts the fact that what one is about to feel or say has not only been said before by Goethe or Musset but is on the tip of the tongue of the tourist from Iowa who is alighting in the Piazzetta with his wife in her furpiece and jeweled pin.  Those Others, the existential enemy, are here identical with oneself.  After a time in Venice, one comes to look with pity on the efforts of the newcomer to disassociate himself from the crowd.  He has found a ‘little’ church—has he?—quite off the beaten track, a real gem, with inlaid colored marbles on a soft dove grey, like a jewel box.  He means Santa Maria dei Miracoli.  As you name it, his face falls.  It is so well known, then? Or has he the notion of counting the lions that look down from the window ledges of the palazzi? They remind him of cats.  Has anybody ever noticed how many cats there are in Venice or compared them to the lions? On my table two books lie open with chapters on the Cats of Venice.  My face had fallen too when I came upon them in the house of an old bookseller, for I too had dared think that I had hold of an original perception.

“The cat= the lion.  Venice is a kind of pun on itself, which is another way of saying that it is a mirror held up to its own shimmering image—the central conceit on which it has evolved” (13).

–Mary McCarthy, Venice Observed (1963)

The Venice Quiz (redux)

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I had so much fun with this when I first posted it back in 2007 that I had to run it again. The idea (tongue-in-cheek, people, tongue firmly in cheek) was that in order to save La Serenissima from its various enemies foreign and domestic, Venice in Peril ought to dedicate some of their efforts not only to restoring the buildings but to instituting some kind of tourist diversionary barrier– siphon off some of the flow and redirect them somewhere else, and tell them they’ll like it just as much as Venice– and they will.  Because they don’t actually care about Venice or anything it contains. They’ve just heard they should go there, so they go.

So ok, how do you decide who gets to go and who doesn’t? We could institute a tax, but that’s not fair because not everyone can pay it, and I don’t think Venice ought to become some kind of exclusive resort for rich people.  So I thought of something much more egalitarian: there should a pop quiz to get into Venice. If you don’t get at least 60% of the answers right, you have to get back on the boat and go visit some other Italian city– try Padua!–  instead.

Here is my suggestion for the Venice in Peril Pop Quiz.

1. Venice was once ruled by the Doge.  A doge is a______
a. car
b. duke in a funny hat
c. group of men in funny hats

2. Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Canaletto.  These names refer to:
a. cocktails
b. cities in Italy
c. artists

3. The Accademia is:
a. a school
b. a museum
c. a sports stadium

4. True or false: a canal is an acceptable substitute for a garbage can.

5. Do you and/or your family own and wear fanny packs [UK visitors: bum bags]? (Y/N)

6. Do you think it is acceptable to eat potato chips whilst riding in a gondola? (Y/N)

7. Do you believe that if you don’t videorecord every moment of said gondola ride it’s like it didn’t happen? (Y/N)

8. Are you likely to buy a sparkly mask as a souvenir? How many?

9. Please define the following terms in your own words and to the best of your ability: mosaic, vaulted ceiling, gothic arch, Byzantine.

10.  If told you that you were to be staying in a hotel in Venice that was built in 1890, which of the following most closely would match your response?
a. 1890? So it’s a new building. That’s disappointing.
b. 1890? Holy shit, that’s like a hundred years ago! Dude, this place is old!
c. Whatever, as long as it’s clean.

Contre Venise

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« Venise n’est pas une ville mais la représentation d’une ville.  Et de même qu’au théâtre italien tout le dispositif pivote non sur la scène ou la salle mais sur la rampe qui les sépare, car s’il y avait plain-pied il n’y aurait pas spectacle, le décisif de Venise d’est pas Venise mais la lagune qui la sépare du monde profane, utilitaire et intéressé.  Cette tranche d’eau fait office de ‘coupure sémiotique’.  Pourquoi l’initié de Venise proscrit-il l’avion au catéchumène ? Parce que, parachuté au milieu de la scène sans s’être donné préalablement la peine d’y monter, ce dernier se priverait en partie (car heureusement il y a du bateau entre l’aéroport Marco Polo et le cœur urbain) de la jouissance du franchissement, de la transgression de frontière (que les plus exaltés transforment en sécession mystique d’avec l’immonde extérieur)

(…)

« Loup et domino invisibles, guidé par les rails d’itinéraires fléchés, chacun s’en va par campi et calli fredonnant son petit air d’opérette, déguisé comme il convient (c’est encore lors du carnaval, où la pantomime s’avoue le plus, qu’on joue le moins).  La fête est programmée, encadrée, répétée, Marinière et chapeau de paille à ruban rouge, le gondolier joue à donner la sérénade ; le facchino, à porter les valises ; le camerière, à nous servir en sifflotant scampi et calamaretti ; et nous, entre l’Arsenal et les Prisons, à espion en mission, à Casanova en cavale, à l’entremetteur, au dandy dégoûté ou à l’ambassadeur déchu.  Touriste, on peut même jouer au touriste ».

–Régis Debray, Contre Venise

La folie vénitienne

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« Il n’est pas rare de voir de grandes émigrations de peuples inonder un pays, en changer la face et ouvrir pour l’histoire une ère nouvelle; mais qu’une poignée de fugitifs, jeté sur un banc de sable de quelques cents toises de largeur, y fond un état sans territoire; qu’une nombreuse population vienne couvrir cette plage mouvante, où il ne se trouve ni végétation, ni eau potable, ni matériaux, ni même de l’espace pour bâtir; que de l’industrie nécessaire pour subsister, et pour affermir le sol sous leurs pas, ils arrivent jusqu’à présenter aux nations modernes le premier exemple d’un gouvernement régulier, jusqu’à faire sortir d’un marais des flottes sans cesse renaissantes, pour aller renverser un grand empire, et recueillir les richesses de l’Orient; qu’on voit ces fugitifs tenir la balance politique de l’Italie, dominer sur les mers, réduire toutes les nations à la condition de tributaires, enfin rendre impuissants tous les efforts de l’Europe liguée contre eux: c’est là sans doute un développement de l’intelligence humaine qui mérite d’être observé ».

–Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise (1819)

Paris, London, Venice

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Toute existence est une lettre postée anonymement; la mienne porte trois cachets: Paris, Londres, Venise; le sort m’y fixa, souvent à mon insu, mais certes pas à la légère. –Paul Morand, Venises

[All of life is a letter posted anonymously; mine bears three stamps: Paris, London, Venice. It was fate that took me there, though I often didn't realize it, but certainly not casually.]

Perhaps it’s some belated fin-de-siècle fates that have assigned me to these three Jamesian cities, but for better or worse they’re where I’m linked; they are my subjects and my backdrops and my milieux. It seems somehow appropriate, then, that my first novel, about Venice, is being published in Paris before anywhere else, just as I prepare to move to London, at least part-time for now.

Morand, in his wonderful book-length essay Venises, reflects on his career as a diplomat and his relationship to history, to literature, to his family, and to place, writing lyrically about his connection to Venice, but also his tendency to find “Venices” elsewhere– in Paris, London, and even Bangkok. Anywhere there is unpredictable water, canals, waterways, watervistas, there is another Venice. And he reads back these cities onto Venice, where “every street is the Seine.”

Paris, as I have said, is where I taught myself to write, sitting in cafés imitating Ernest Hemingway, but as Paris became my new everyday, I moved indoors from the cafés, and developed the writing habits that are, by now, inseparable from the work itself. (That’s a fancy way of saying I can only write on my couch.) But spending more and more time in Venice gave me a space away from my everyday life– even in a beautiful city like Paris, daily life becomes humdrum– to measure the effects moving to a foreign country were having on my psyche.  To set my first novel in Paris seemed too obvious, and potentially limiting– I didn’t want to typecast myself as someone who could only write about her own experiences, and expatriates in Paris is a subject that I believe has to be approached with either sheer innocence or advanced cynicism, neither of which I had at the time. So I turned to Venice, which seemed the perfect metaphor for the act of building your home in a place where you have no foundation to do so– no land to build on, only bits of mud.

The result, in English, is Floating Cities, but for now– and as of today!– the book is out (only) in French under the title Une Année à Venise. To have my first book come out in the city where I became a writer seems the sweetest of coincidences.