Enabling Inhibitions that Enable
I just got off the phone with my Dad — can that man ever talk! Don’t get me wrong its not like the annoying parent phone calls you see in the movie where the poor protaginist sighs and says “oh brother” ACtually I prefer talking to my Dad over almost anyone else.
He says, among dozens of other things, that it was always delightful to have a stray literature student in his Aesthetics class. I responded by saying that in my experience far too many students respond to a text more like a lawyer than the approach you’d get in an aesthetics class.
And so I did some crawling… I wondered what there was, out there, that might approximate for me the experience of being the lucky lit. student in an aesthetics class, aside from a conversation with the father I’m fortunate to have, I mean.
It turns out that something like what I was looking for was posted on one of my regular haunts: Grand Text Auto. The Post was called Oulipolooza. A name which made absolutely no sense to me.
I found the answer by following the first link to MadInkBeard (a term that still baffles me). MadInkBeard describes its own origins as being influenced by:
… the (mostly French) group called the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle)… . To put it as succinctly as possible the idea of the group is to create new forms of literature for the possible use of other writers. It’s not about creating new literature qua literature, but about creating forms for new literature. Now using the words “form” is pretty damn open… Basically, the Oulipian concept involves “constraint”, voluntarily chosen rules which affect the process of writing (such as writing a novel without the letter ‘e’ (Perec’s La disparition a.k.a. A Void) or writing a book whose structure is based on the drawing of a sequence of tarot cards (Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destiny (sorry, the Italian escapes me)), in many Oulipian constraints this involves starting with a base text that is then transformed through constraints.
This is all so new to me, and yet it feels familiar. I think that the creative process, in that it involves a distinction between what I want to make and what I do not want to make, has to do with these “constraints.” I think they are silly, the constraints given as examples here, but there is probably some value to it.
The Grand Text Auto post also led to some intersting experiments with this kind of “limitation.” One is called, appropriately enough: Endless Limitations. It says its purpose is: “to offer ways in which limitations and constraints can be imposed upon a task (writing a poem, painting a picture, composing a piece of music) which prevent self consciousness and allow creativity to flourish” because, and I also quote:
self consciousness is, by definition, inhibiting.
Also, the post turned me on to Constrained.org which is something like {fray} except that it employs these new methods.