Buggeryville

A conversation from Silence, the John Cage mailing list. I have fixed a few typos.

...

From: Marjorie Perloff
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:10:47 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo?

I am trying to determine whether Cage ever had contact with his Oulipo contemporaries in Paris--e.g. Jacques Roubaud, George Perec, Harry Matthews? Since they like him use very complex constraints, it seems to be a reasonable affiliation but I can't find anything in the literature about this and Cage never talked about Oulipo when I knew him.

Best wishes,
Marjorie Perloff

...

[people comment about how Oulipians were against Cage, including me, along similar lines]

...

From: Chris Piuma
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:02:38 -0500
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo?

There are comments by Oulipians against Cage's chance techniques. The basic idea seems to be that chance techniques lead to "nonsense" and the whole trick with Oulipo is to squeeze some sense out when you're in a straightjacket. But there is an almost raving quality to the criticism I've read by them -- rejecting chance so completely that they probably missed some interesting opportunities! Certainly they missed the entire point of Cage, but even within their framework there are some interesting things that could be done with chance (and there are some post-Oulipians who have tried to synthesize the two ideas -- or at last, *I* have ;-)

I'd have to hunt down the specific reference I'm thinking of -- I think it's in Motte's anthology?

I imagine young Cage (maybe up to Sonatas & Interludes?) would have been interested in Oulipo, but by the time they started up his esthetic aims seem to be completely different.

Yrs,

Chris.

...

From: Marjorie Perloff
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:26:57 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

Thanks, everyone, for your prompt and good responses. But I am not wholly convinced. True, Oulipo descried chance but what, in practice, is the difference between, say, a mesostic rule (even if the vertical strings are generated by chance operations) and the Oulipo N+7 rule, which is not "unchancy" in that different dictionaries would give you a different seventh noun after the N. Besides, Cage admits again and again that he changed the chance products "according to taste."

The key link may be Duchamp, who is connected to both camps. I will try to check more fully.

Marjorie Perloff

...

From: Chris Piuma
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 17:52:56 -0800
Subject: [silence] Cage and Oulipo 2

It's not "according to taste" that's at issue, though -- it would be "to have it make sense". Hence the Oulipian shortened sonnet technique (under "redundancy" in the Compendium) -- it's not just the last word, or the last syllable, or the last n letters of each line that you take -- it's as little as you can while still retaining a syntactically "intelligible" or "normative" poem.

Duchamp did spectacularly little for Oulipo except perhaps lend his name and fame to the group; he's only recorded as attending one meeting, never wrote anything Oulipian, and his entry in the Oulipo Compendium suggests he was mostly in it for the puns. Plus he seems to have joined any group or scene that would allow him...

The mesostic rule -- when Cage was composing "freehand" in it, writing "normative" poems/lectures/sentences with it -- and when he was excluding the occurrence of a key letter between the previous key letter and the following one (oof, that's a complicated rule to describe; I hope you know what I mean) -- anyway, that is absolutely an Oulipian form. "Mesostic" isn't keyed in the Compendium, but it's
mentioned under "acrostic" with this parenthetical -- "John Cage published many mesostics dedicated to friends and colleagues" -- which are the "freehand" ones I was just describing, mostly, rather than, say, the Writings Through.

The N+7 is one of a number of Oulipo rules that allow for a certain measure of indeterminacy, but are still constructed so that their results are still, in some way, "sensical". But that is the real dividing line; one gets a sense from Oulipo that without the need for ending up with something "sensical", all their acrobatics are just calculations; which is the opposite of what Cage is doing.

But I'm happy to see you working on this; the synthesis of the two modes of thought is something I've been interested in for years.

I don't recall that you were at the noulipo conference last year; I seem to recall that this issue got lightly touched upon in a few of the presentations. I seem to remember Christian Bök talking about it, but I also remember him talking about something else, so... Hrm.

Yrs,

Chris.

...

After which she privately e-mailed me a note thanking me for my thoughts.

I have no idea if she has actually written on the Oulipo/Cage dynamic yet, although she mentioned Oulipo in connection with her book on "unoriginal genius".

...

At the symposium, Retallack mentioned an "N+0" technique, which is a great idea and one that I can't believe I haven't heard before.

...

I am now thinking of using this blog as a clearinghouse for things I have written (in various places) on poetry and poetics and whatnot. Let me try to remember where else I have written such things. It is, I assume, obvious why this exchange came to mind.