Another Creative Writing Challenge -- 1.618...

if not the GR exactly, try Fibonacci

The Golden Ratio has fascinated me for quite some time (and though I'm not proud to admit it, I would be remiss if I did not:  It was Dan  Brown, via The Da Vinci Code, who introduced it me).  About the same time I read The DVC, I was learning about the Oulipo.  My thought then and still--simple enough in concept but in practice perhaps, at worst, impossible, and at best, monstrously impractical and inartistic--is to use this ratio as an Oulipian restriction for some type/piece of creative writing.  Maybe write a poem where each stanza increases its letter count by increments of the ratio and maybe that poem could be about a conch shell (okay, that's stupid) or the dimensions of someone's beautiful face (cheesy to the extreme of bad Shakespeare imitations) or the evidence of God in nature (or lack thereof, depending on how you see things--as potentially good as bad) by its exquisite design.  I don't know.  I've tried many times and failed, miserably, on each attempt.  Maybe I just need a good idea to build from.

What do you think?

Got an idea?

Can you do it?

Care to share?

My Newsfeed at the top of the page is COOL--

--because it gave me this link, and, oh!, how I wish I were closer to North Carolina!

A couple of links for you:

http://facstaff.unca.edu/pbahls/CCP2010Home.html and
http://www.critiphoria.org/

• The first contains a brief notice for the upcoming Oulipo conference celebrating its 50th brithday.  Wa-hoo.  I've mentioned the Oulipo here.  (I'm still waiting for someone to take advantage of my little writing challenge here.  COME ON ALL LOVERS OF T.E. HULME AND CREATIVE THINKING!)

• The second is an online literary magazine for Oulipo and Oulipo-ish writing, and it's got some crazy-cool stuff in it.  Check it out.

(Oulipo is weird, often interesting, and sometimes even exciting poetry.)



meeting of the Oulipo



Oulipo Sample

taken from McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, issue 22

"Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare," by Harry Matthews

2.   Anagram:  Note at his behest: bet on toot or quit
5.   Lipogram in I:  To be or not to be: that's the problem
6.   Lipogram in E:  Almost nothing: or nothing: but which?
7.   Transposition (W+7):  To beckon or not to beckon: that is the quinsy
22.  Reductive: One or the other--who knows?
31.  Homophony:  Two-beer naughty beat shatters equation
33.  Heterosyntaxism:  I ask myself: is it worth it, or isn't it?
34.  In Another Meter:  So should I be, or should I not? / This question keep me on the trot.
35.  Interrogative Mode:  Do I really care whether I exist or not?

Obviously, I didn't quote all of them, and there are a variety of other limiting approaches to different genre.  I just don't feel like typing them all up.

But here's something extra:

Today I was Mr. Andreason, a 6th grade teacher. Well, I was his sub. One of the many times for which he had inadequate material for me and the students, some of the kids took to writing each other codes. I had a thought: Suppose a computer could figure out what a coded message says--a cypher--without knowing the cypher, simply by recognizing the patterns of letters and punctuation plus the number of letters in a word and the relationship of word lengths in context (like, there are only so many three-letter words with potential context as frequent as "the").... Anyway, that got me thinking about the Oulipo and their seemingly random restrictions.

Here's what I'm thinking: what if we took a piece of literature--a short piece, in this case--and represented it exclusively with dashes, like a hangman puzzle. Then, what if the writer replaced those blanks with letters to form words in grammatically correct syntax to form a new piece of writing?

Here's an example, and we'll even call it a contest (I have no idea what the prize would be--fear not, it won't be an old pair of my shoes like what Tobin took once for a prize), to the first person to create a new piece from Hulme's "Above the Dock:"

----- --- ----
----- --- ----- ---- -- --------,
------- -- --- ---- ----‘- ------ ------,
----- --- ----. ---- ------ -- --- ----
-- --- - -----‘- -------, --------- ----- ----.

You can fill in the blanks anyway you like, so long as every blank is used and the result makes sense, grammatically and poetically.

(If anyone has the guts to even attempt this, comment or email your results!)