final idea

My puzzle for Perec;
I originally wanted to create some sort of puzzle for other people to work out or put together but it seems this particular puzzle was aimed at me, the creator! Something I’ve always noticed is that some of the time, it’s equally hard to create a puzzle, as it is to solving it.
I have made a folding wooden toy, which is covered, with my own writing. Because all the sides eventually have their time to fold out and show their sides, in different combinations, I had to think carefully about what words to use. All of the sides that meet each other and are read in the same direction match up with each other. Of course there are some sentences that are better than others and on some occasions, artistic license had to be used but more or less, all of the sentences match up and make sense. As like many other people (from specific forums that talk about subjects like this) that have tried other word games such as lipographs and anagrams, it’s strangely refreshing to actually think about that language and words you choose to use in such detail.
I chose to do this because I thought it was an interesting way of generating material. I am by no means a poet but working to a set of rules (as does Perec in, for example, A Void, where he writes the entire novel without using the letter ‘e’.) actually made it easier to generate words! Perec called these devices “story making machines”. I think Georges Perec would have liked my wooden word cube thing.
The OuLiPo group developed the theory that writing under constraints and rules was a way to achieve true originality. Perec believed that the more you limit yourself, the freer you have to become. I wouldn’t have come up with some of the sentences I ended up writing. The subject nearly always ends up self-referencing; the cubes are talking about themselves quite a lot.
Below, I have laid out all of the possible combinations of the cube. Instead of them being in cube form though, I have written them out properly; these are the produce of the “”story making machine”. I hope you can see these alright.

final idea?

For my final outcome, I wanted to focus on the playfullness in Perec's work. From reading the start of Life: A User's Manual, its easy to see his absolute love of puzzles, games and, in a number of the 'tales' in the book; craftmanship. He really values the art of creating puzzles - a side of which I'd never really thought about, particulary regarding jigsaw puzzles.

"It's not the subject of the picture, or the painter's technique, which makes a puzzle more or less difficult, but the greater or lesser subtlety of the way it has been cut."

For my final peice, I decided to make a jigsaw puzzle of my own. I've thought about lots of different things I could use as an image, but I've settled on using text. This is becuase the way Perec explains; just one puzzle peice on its own means nothing, can relate to sentences. As a novelist and writer, Perec's main tool is language. Just one word on its own can only hold so much meaning. If the sentences are broken up into to puzzle peices, the words will be as muc part of the puzzle as the peices are. I hope that explains it ok?

I decided to make my own, rather than sending it away to one of those companies that print and cut it for you, becuase of the view of Perec's that machine cut jigsaw puzzles "destroys the specific nature of jigsaw puzzles" and I wouldn't want to go against Georges' beleifes would I? "-an arbitrary cutting pattern will necessarily produce an arbitrary degree of difficulty-". I intend to make my puzzle impossible (or really really hard). This will mean that i'll have to take a photo of it when i have finished cutting it before it is destroyed forever, never to be seen as a whole again.

I doubt I will be able to make a puzzle out of wood, as I am not carpentryly gifted, so I'm thinking thick cardboard at the moment or a bit thinner than that cardboard. I'm still thinking about how I'm going to put the words on. I'm NOT going to stencil it (my first idea) becuase that will actually damage me (see picture below), so I've been thinking about using asatone but I need to learn how to do that. Below is the 'image' I will put on the puzzle. Not sure if you can see well enough here but its the preamle from the book Life: A User's Manual.

a puzzle

I think i should re-think my idea, after the crit today i felt abit lost- with only three dys to go to the deadline! panicing at the moment but ill get an idea somehow!

Thinking about Georges Perec

After reading descriptions about how Life: A User's Manual is written, I found it hard to understand how Perec got from a set of rules to a novel! I worked out which order the units of the house went in (and then found one on the internet) to see if this made it any clearer. It did, but I wanted there to be a visual pattern and there wasn't! The main rule that is being used

is The Knight's Tour which is a mathematical problem involving a knight on a chessboard. The knight is placed on the empty board and, moving according to the rules of chess, must visit each square exactly once. There are many solutions to the problem, of which exactly 26,534,728,821,064 have the knight finishing on a square from which it attacks the starting square. This one is on a 8 x 8 grid but creates a geometric pattern. For some reason I'm enjoying the book more now I've done all this. The Knights Tour wasn't the only writing constraint Perec used.

He created a complex system which would generate for each chapter a list of items, references or objects which that chapter should then contain or allude to. He described this system as a "machine for inspiring stories". There are 42 lists of 10 objects each, gathered into 10 groups of 4 with the last two lists a special "Couples" list.

Some examples:
-number of people involved
-length of the chapter in pages
-an activity
-a position of the body
-emotions
-an animal
-reading material
-countries
-2 lists of novelists, from whom a literary quotation is required

The way in which these apply to each chapter is governed by an array called a Graeco-Latin Square. This is an example:

It means that no two squares contain the same ordered pair of symbols and every row and every column has exactly one of each symbol. To further complicate things, the 38th and 39th list are named "Missing" and "False" and each list comprises the numbers 1 to 10. The number these lists give for each chapter indicates one of the 10 groups of 4 lists, and folds the system back on itself: one of the elements must be omitted, and one must be false in some way. Things become complicated when the Missing and False numbers refer to group 10, which includes the Missing and False lists.

I'm really enjoying this book, its very different from any other book I've read. It's as if time has been held still for me so I can walk around the house and look at everyone without them knowing! The detail he goes into is amazing but its not boring to read as I would have expected it to be. Besides the style of writing, the actuall stories (or "tales") included are so intricate and detailed. I love the story of Bartlebooth and his puzzles! - the fact that, at his death, he has nothing to show for the past 20 years of adventuring around the world although, as the reader, we know that so much more happened!

I've also been looking at other systems Perec used to generate material. He used these:

L E C A R T § I S N O U
S L E C A R T O U § I N
I T L A R O N C E S U §
L I § E C O U R S A N T
L A R U I N E S T O C §
A N T L E S § O I R C U
L § E S A C O U I N T R
I § U E L O R S A N C T
U A I R E C L O § N S T
U A N T S I C L E § R O
§ I T A R E C U L O N S
§ A L O I N C R U S T E

they are called Hétérogrammes. They are a fixed-form poem based on the isogram (above), a series of letters in which no letter appears more than once.
In the poem below, La clôture, Perec uses the principle of a joker, adding one additional letter to the original series.the jokers are written with the § sign.

L'écart
dis-nous l'écart où finit la ronce sublime
coursant la ruine
stockant l'espoir

Cul-de-sac où intrigue l'or sanctuaire :
clowns tuant —sic— le profit à reculons

Halo incrusté…

there are english translations aswell but I just wanted to explain what they were.

I might use this in my final peice (below). I want to use existing text becuase I'm not very good with words myself.

"My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today."

Perec has got an asteroid named after him.

I've only just found out that Perec wrote the worlds longest (french)palindrome- 5566 letters! despite being dead, Georges Perec is still a member of the Oulipo—which makes no distinction between living members and deceased ones.
“I consider myself a genuine product of the Oulipo. My existence as a writer is 90% dependent on my knowing the Oulipo at a pivotal point in my formation, in my literary work,”

This following passage is from where I found quite a good essay about him:

http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/oulipo/feature-oulipo/essays/magne/oulibio.html

“Exhausting the subject”Much is made now of the currency of Georges Perec. Rightly so, if one means by this that the importance of his work is increasingly recognized, but the term would hold equally true in its philosophical sense, the opposite of latency. This eminent member of the workshop for potential literature has always prized the act of literature, preferred realization to simple virtuality, and thus positioned himself in opposition to the attitude of François Le Lionnais—“Don’t forget […] that the method in itself is sufficient. There are methods without instantiation. The example is an extra pleasure that one gives to oneself and to one’s reader.”


I've also been looking at constrained writing on the web.
http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr10/10sus.htm
The ALAMO "Workshop for literature assisted by mathematics and computers" was created in 1982 by two Oulipians: Paul Brafford and Jacques Roubaud.

there was a link on tat page to
http://ambigram.matic.com/ambigram.htm
twas quite interested in making a font based on these ideas-becuase they are so hidous to look at. "Ambigrams are words or phrases that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point, most commonly right-side-up and upside-down. Ambigram.Matic is the world's first and only online Ambigram Generator! Flip any word, different words of the same length, or even an entire (symmetrically spaced) sentence on its head, and read it both ways!"-from the website.

I then looked more at palindromes (these are just loads of facts about the I found interesting).
"The actual Greek phrase to describe the phenomenon is karkinikê epigrafê (καρκινική επιγραφή; crab inscription), or simply karkiniêoi (καρκινιήοι; crabs), alluding to the backward movement of crabs, like an inscription which can be read backwards."-wikipedia, dont know their source.
Palindromes date back at least to 79 A.D., as the palindromic Latin word square "Sator Arepo Tenet Opera Rotas" was found as a graffito at Herculaneum, buried by ash in that year. Ive been there! but I didnt see it.

Another Latin palindrome, "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" ("We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire"), was said to describe the behavior of moths.

Apparently palindromes can be used in music. Igor Stravinsky's final composition, The Owl and the Pussy Cat, is a palindrome.
Brian Westley wrote a computer program for the 1987 International Obfuscated C Code Contest which is a line-by-line palindrome
The longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary is tattarrattat.

Perec in my brain

An Introduction to Georges Perec

final outcome