Found In Translation on Radio 4!

Hey, hey, hey, if you tune into to Radio 4 this Thursday, 19th November, at 11:30am, you'll be able to hear a show about the Oulipo, where they chat to me and my fellow Aisle16ers Ross Sutherland and Joe Dunthorne about our Oulipo-inspired poems and our show about our attempt to infiltrate the Oulipo, Found In Translation.

For those of you who don't know, the Oulipo are a French experimental literature movement who played with imposing arbitrary constraints on language (like writing an entire novel without using the letter 'e', for example) as a way of breaking out of old habits and encouraging creativity. On discovering their work and techniques, we felt as if we were learning a whole new language. And, like anyone learning a new language, the first thing we wanted to do was be as rude as possible. 'Slap a gran's damp and tangy flaps!' we hollered, straining with mirth at our uncommon verve and ingenuity.

The show is apparently Radio 4's 'Podcast of the Week', so you should be able to download it afterwards, and it'll be on Listen Again for a week as well.

Language Is Not A Game

As you may have picked up from my previous post, I just finished a mini-tour with Ross Sutherland and Joe Dunthorne called Found In Translation, about language games and our attempts to infiltrate experimental French literature group the Oulipo.

In the show, we pass it all off as frivolous japes, but in reality, experimenting with language is fraught with peril. Ross and Joe found me (thank God) the morning after my attempt to write a poem where the only vowel used was 'A'. Apparently I had suffered a massive acid reflux and regurgitated all the unused letters. I post the shocking photographs of the scene they discovered in the hope that, if you know someone who is showing signs of discovering the empowering joy of playing with language, you can show them some of the repugnant consequences and dissuade them before they fall into a life of poetry. If that fails, I am happy to forward scans of my bank statements for the last twelve months, which I'm sure will be enough to send even the most ardent of aspiring wordsmiths galloping off to start a degree in Accountancy.

[WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES FOLLOW]

'Found' Univocalisms

As some of you may or may not care, I just finished a mini-tour of our show Found In Translation, the story of my, Ross Sutherland, and Joe Dunthorne's attempts to infiltrate the infamous French experimental literature group, the Oulipo, a group so radical and misunderstood that many people still don't believe us when we say they exist.

The Oulipo believed in placing restrictions on language to unlock one's true creativity. The central form we employed in our quest to gain entry was the univocalism - a word, phrase or piece of text that only contains one kind of vowel, e.g.:

A: Adam has a fat arm.
E: She shredded the letters every weekend.
I: Nikki's kissing this minging nitwit.
O: My voodoo doll only works on God.
U: Buddy tugs unlucky chumps' ruddy spuds.

Surely, we thought, if we each write a poem using this form, they'd accept us as one of their own.

You've guessed the end - we failed to join their ranks. But sod it, we picked up low-level psychosis on the way. Writing in just one vowel sends your mind's noise-to-signal ratio screwy. You start seeing patterns everywhere. Messages spring from every street sign. It becomes clear how an intelligent, creative person under a lot of stress might all too easily begin to think the universe was talking to him through shop hoardings and coffee machines.

Here's a selection of my poorly-snapped favesies:


This is my second favourite found univocalism, seeing as it's both a univocalism and a palindrome (a word that's the same spelled backwards or forwards):


But for sheer linguistic brio, you knew we were going to have to outsource to India:


If you spot any yourself when you're out and/or about, send them to me and I'll put them up on the blog. Gw'on!