by John Allen Paulos

The Ouvroir de Littérature  Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), Oulipo for short, is the name of a group of primarily French writers, mathematicians, and academics that explores the use of mathematical and quasi-mathematical techniques in literature. Don’t let this description scare you. The results are often amusing, strange, and thought-provoking.

The group, which was founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in Paris in 1960 and is still somewhat active, searches for novel literary structures that arise from the imposition of mathematical constraints and methods of systematically transforming texts. Theophile Gautier has written that the rigidity of the constraints ensures the durability of the work, whether in poetry, art, or sculpture. More graphically, Queneau described the group’s activity as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

Simple combinatorics plays a role in many of Oulipo’s efforts. Queneau’s 100 Trillion Sonnets is a prime example of its approach to literature. The work consists of just ten sonnets, one on each page of a ten-page booklet. (Note that the 14-line sonnet is itself a product of an artificial restriction.) The pages of the booklet are cut so that each of the 14 lines of the ten sonnets can be turned separately. Thus, we can combine any of the ten first lines with any of the ten second lines, which results in 10² or 100 different pairs of opening lines. Any of these 10² possibilities may in turn be combined with any of the ten third lines to yield 10³ or 1,000 possible sets of three lines. Iterating this procedure and utilizing the multiplication principle, we conclude that there are 10¹⁴ possible sonnets. Queneau claimed that they all made sense, although it’s safe to say that the claim will never be verified, since there are probably more texts in these 10¹⁴ different sonnets than in all the rest of the world’s literature. (His claim could, of course, be easily refuted.)

Incidentally, years ago I was inspired by 100 Trillion Sonnets to patent a variant of a Rubik cube that I called About Face. Each of the cube’s six sides pictured a face that remained a face when any of the sides were subjected to a certain class of rotations. The result was a gazillion possible mugshots. Alas, it never went anywhere. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Despite living here for nearly three years now, I have no social life to speak of. At risk of sounding self-loathing, a not insignificant part of the problem is probably just me: I’m not the most social person in the world. Plus, there’s the pandemic, which hit six months after we moved here. But I don’t think it’s just me, or even just the pandemic. An awful lot of people who moved here as adults, decades ago, and are much nicer and more sociable than I am, have said the same thing: making friends in Toronto is hard.

What avenues are there to building friendships? I’m sure it’s different for different people, but looking back to where my closest friendships originated, you have the usual suspects: 1. school, 2. university, 3. parents of my kids’ friends, 4. work, and 5. neighbours.  I realize that this list is incomplete. A more well-rounded person would probably have a sixth item: an activity of some sort. A sport, maybe, or a cultural undertaking. But this is Canada. It’s cold for most of the year, and ice hockey is not my thing. (There are certain sports, which require you to travel at unnaturally high speeds on your own two feet, that you will never master unless you learned them at a young age, before you realize that you are not immortal. Most winter sports fall in this category and I was raised in the tropics.) As for cultural activities, they are usually organized around homogenous groups—bound by things like religion or ethnicity—and getting away from that kind of uniformity was precisely the attraction of a place like Toronto.

Options one to three have served me well in the past. My largest and oldest single group of friends date back to school; I’m still close to a couple of friends from university; and occasionally go on holiday with one set of parents of my kid’s school friend. But time moves inexorably forward, and I was fully aware that as a middle-aged woman with teenage kids, these first three options were off the table. I had, naïvely as it turns out, banked on options 4 and 5, given Canada’s reputation for friendliness and love of diversity. You must understand, I moved here from Germany, where “integrate” is often code for “assimilate”, except that assimilation is purely aspirational for anyone who does not look the part.

Canada was supposed to be different. Read more »

“Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.” —Smithsonian Magazine, Do Birds Have Language

What Needs to be Sung

and I thought I was descended from apes,
but it may be birds who speak from trees
rather than primates who swing through them
with whom I am more comfortably close
because they sing! and singing’s a beautiful thing
if done with the art of Cardinals, but
still, I can’t fully renounce the grunts of apes
who share my lack of precision when it comes
to telling things as they are, who pound chests
and rattle undergrowth in the midst of jungles
when other brutes enter their perceived turf,
they too share my penchant to articulate,
though in more bellicose poetry
while from the canopy above
singing their way through the world
under the threat of hawks and cats
or a fox who would steal their young
they employ the syntax of a piccolo
the semantics of a violin
the phonology of a trill
to say what needs to be said
what needs to be sung

Jim Culleny, 3/2/22

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

I was sixteen years old the first time I went to a drag show. It was an all-ages show in the Capitol Hill neighborhood—the gayborhood—of Seattle. My two best friends, Nalani and Shreya, bought tickets for my birthday. The performer was Jinkx Monsoon, who would go on to fame as the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, season five. But she was only locally famous back then, which, I have come to learn in the years since, is a special kind of thing—there is a charm and a camaraderie and a deep mirth to a local show that you don’t find when you go see an internationally famous drag queen or when you watch drag on television. 

If you never were one yourself, you must understand something about being a sixteen year old gay boy. To be gay at that age is to fumble. Everything feels like fumbling: sex, friendships, school, work, home. The very acts of identification and relation, of situating oneself in the matrix of the social world, are a brilliant, painful, altogether necessary fumbling. I remember that I wore a beanie over my messy, blond hair that night, and I had my chunky, black glasses to hide my face. I looked like a proper Seattle hipster. I was confident walking into the venue. It was my birthday after all. We took seats in the back, Nalani and Shreya one and two seats in, and me on the aisle. I have been thankful ever since that I was sat on the aisle. 

When the lights came up and Jinkx walked out, my confidence poured from my head through my chest, past my stomach and into a puddle at my feet. Never before had I seen someone so camp, so ravishing, so perfectly and inimitably themselves. Never before had I seen someone so gay. Suddenly, I was fumbling. I did not—could not—belong in such a place, in the direct line of sight of such a performer. It was not that I did not want to be there; I very much did. I was enthralled. But that uneasy sense of self, that fumbly uncertainty about where I belonged in the world, came roaring up. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Countries exist. They are places on the map which have a political identity and borders and which people or things can live in, come from, or go to.

But countries are not anymore than that.

Firstly and most obviously, countries are merely a social construction. They are collectively produced fictions (like money or religions) rather than mind-independent objects (like stones). Being fictional does not mean that countries do not matter, but it does mean that they only exist so long as enough people agree to act as if they do.

Secondly and more significantly, countries are locations, not organisations. Organisations are things like armies or corporations that convert groups of human individuals into a coordinated and powerful actor. Unlike countries, organisations are a kind of collectively produced fiction that can actually do things, often very significant things. What we call governments are a particular kind of organisation, one that has achieved the power to make and enforce rules over the inhabitants of a country, for example by hurting those who persist in daring to disagree and by preventing outsiders from entering. (In Max Weber’s famous definition, it “successfully claims a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence”.) This power is called sovereignty and it is an attribute of governments, not countries.

A common mistake is to confuse a country with its inhabitants with its government. This leads to statements that are strictly meaningless at best and deeply misleading at worst because they are category errors on the order of ‘Green ideas sleep furiously’. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait With Trees. Seattle, February, 2022.

Digital photograph.

by Dick Edelstein

On 4 October 1957, in my mind’s eye, I was playing alone in the back yard when the radio in the breezeway broadcast a special news bulletin that changed my life. We had moved from Chicago to Minneapolis in 1951 and my parents had bought a recently built house on a dead-end street in a relatively cheap residential area out near the airport. The house was built in the modern suburban style that people called a ranch-style bungalow and its most interesting post-war feature was the breezeway, a screened-in patio attached to the house. The screens that kept flies and mosquitos at bay in warm weather were swapped for glass panels when the weather turned cold and we changed our window screens for storm widows.

The radio voice announced that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite orbiting the earth. This turned out to be one of the most significant events in my life since it determined the course of my education. And that education determined the sort of person I was to become.

Changes quickly rippled through the educational system once our nation found out that it was behind in the space race with its cold war arch-enemy. The leaders of the Soviet Union knew their narrow lead was imperiled once they had awakened the sleeping giant, so they too launched an urgent campaign to train scientists and engineers of the future to fight a crucial ideological battle through space and weapons programs. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

When Theodor Adorno composed the aphorisms that formed the first section of Minima Moralia, he was living in exile in Los Angeles in the mid 1940s, a refugee from Nazi Germany. One of the most famous quotes by which Adorno is more widely known, “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” is from the 18th aphorism of Part I of the Minima Moralia, in an aphorism entitled “Asylum for the homeless.”

As is typical for many of the aphorisms, “Asylum for the homeless” begins with a pointed cultural criticism before broadening its focus to draw a wide-ranging conclusion about the possibility of a good life in late capitalism. 

The pointed cultural criticism with which Adorno begins “Asylum for the homeless,” despite its title, doesn’t literally concern homelessness, but rather with the discomfort attendant with not feeling at home in one’s place of residence. He criticizes “traditional dwellings, in which we grew up,” because “every mark of comfort therein is paid for with the betrayal of cognition; every trace of security, with the stuffy community of interest of the family.” On the other hand, “functionalized [dwellings], constructed as a tabula rasa, are cases made by technical experts for philistines, or factory sites which have strayed into the sphere of consumption, without any relation to the dweller” (translation by Dennis Redmond, here).

This emphasis on the contradictions inherent in attempting to feel at home might seem bizarre, considering the horrors facing those who were literally homeless at the time Adorno was writing: destitute refugees fleeing conflict, or the Japanese Americans forced into internment camps in southern California, not to mention Adorno’s co-religionists at death camps in central Europe. In contrast, during this period, Adorno himself lived in a lovely bungalow, “a quiet nice little house in Brentwood, not far, by the way, from Schönberg’s place,” as he described it in a letter to Virgil Thomson (for quotes from Adorno’s letters to Thomson, I am indebted to a blog post from James Schmidt’s blog, Persistent Enlightenment). Read more »

by Derek Neal

We have many choices when deciding what to eat. For most of human history, however, there has likely been little to no choice at all: people ate what was available to them or what their culture led them to eat. Now things are not so simple. As I mentioned in Part 1, people go to great lengths in organizing and planning their eating, whether it be by using meal preparation kits, following a restrictive diet, or adopting another culture’s cuisine as their own. Another way of deciding what to eat, and this way will be recognizable to most, is by following the food pyramid. Once ubiquitous, the pyramid has largely gone out of fashion, and in fact it was replaced by the much less memorable “MyPlate” graphic in 2011. The pyramid and plate graphics are part of the United States government’s nutrition guides, which can be broadly taken as indicating the general public’s understanding of and relationship to food. This is not to say that most people try to achieve the guidelines set out by the pyramid or the plate, but that in examining how food is represented graphically—in a hierarchical fashion with the pyramid or in an individual fashion with MyPlate—we can see how Americans conceive of what food is (or how the government thinks Americans ought to understand food), and how this has changed over time. Read more »

Found Frederica Krueger sleeping in my bed like this.

by Claire Chambers

Maniza Naqvi’s new novel The Inn, published by Maktab-e-Danyal, is about that moment when summers of love and friendship begin a slow-motion nosedive into an autumn of sexual malice and drawn-out feuds. Sal, the novel’s protagonist, is a middle-aged radiologist originally from Pakistan. At the turn of the twenty-first century, he is living in Washington DC. There he spends much of his time holed up in a lab checking intimate X-rays of patients’ organs and body parts for tell-tale signs of disease. At other moments he is responsible for giving these patients and their relatives the worst possible news. A turning point comes when, first, he has to tell two young parents that their child is dying. Second, around the same time, a neighbour from the same apartment block as Sal dies a lonely death. This tenant’s body is only found because it starts to putrefy and the smell permeates other flats. 

Sal, a workaholic and divorcee who has hitherto not had much time for reflection, is by dint of these two deaths confronted with his own life’s emptiness. He gains a heightened awareness of America’s loneliness epidemic and obsession with privacy, and becomes desperate to make his own life more meaningful. In a quest for the pastoral lifestyle and to meet new friends, he rents a room at the titular Inn in the Virginian countryside. The inn’s owners, Billy and Sylvia, make a show of welcoming him and introducing him to their friends and to other guests. Independently, Sal also meets Maribeth, a beautiful widow who lives nearby. He gradually falls in love with this woman from such a different background to his own, who is warm-heared despite seeming right-wing and far from sensitive in her manner of speaking. Naqvi boldly positions her ageing characters, both male and female, as attractive, desiring and desired. In this sunny environment, Sal seems to be finally putting down roots and making a home for himself in the United States. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

I enjoyed my days in Delhi School of Economics, but some aspects of the university’s policy in recruitment and promotion of teachers used to trouble me. Let me just give two examples. One is from DSE itself, but illustrative of a much more general problem in university life. We had a middle-aged colleague who had long wanted to be promoted to Readership (Associate Professorship), but failed in the usual process, because he had not done any serious research to speak of in many years. He was full of leftist clichés, and was popular with some sections of leftist students. He first started complaining that he was being passed over in promotion because his ‘right-wing’ colleagues (the term used in Economics those days was ‘neo-classical’—in the same pejorative way the term ‘neo-liberal’ is used nowadays) were biased in undervaluing his work. This after a time did not work, as even some leftist scholars in the Department shared views similar to those of the ‘right-wing’ colleagues on this matter. Then he tried a different tack.

The university recruitment and promotion process was quite arbitrary. Decisions were taken by a selection committee chosen entirely by the Vice-Chancellor, and in the committee meeting the only other people who could take part in the decision were the Chairperson of the Department and the Vice-Chancellor. Thus the Vice-Chancellor played a crucial role in the process. So this leftist colleague became noisily active in the campus-wide teachers’ union, and soon was influential particularly with the leftists there. On various campus-wide issues he made it obvious to the Vice-Chancellor that he could make his life difficult. The Vice-Chancellor, a shrewd man, tried to pre-empt him, and knowing fully well his ulterior motive, soon carefully chose a selection committee stacked to select this man. The Department Chairman, representing the faculty opinion, was in a hopeless minority in this selection process, and the man got what he wanted all these years. Read more »

by Usha Alexander

[This is the seventeenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

The peopling of Polynesia was an epic chapter in world exploration. Stirred by adventure and hungry for land, intrepid pioneers sailed for days or weeks beyond their known horizons to discover landscapes and living things never before seen by human eyes. Survival was never easy or assured, yet they managed to find and colonize nearly every spot of land across the entire southern Pacific Ocean. On each island, they forged new societies based on familiar Polynesian models of ranked patrilineages, family bonds and obligations, social care and cohesion, cooperation and duty. Each culture that arose was unique and changeable, as islanders continually adjusted to altered conditions, new information, and shifting political tides. Through trial and hardship, most of these civilizations—even on some of the tiniest islands, like Anuta and Tikopia, discussed in the preceding essay—persisted for centuries or millennia, up to the present day. But others faltered, failing to thrive or even to maintain continuity.

Most Polynesian societies that met the tragic fate of famine and disintegration were on remote islands measuring but a few square miles. But size alone was not the decisive factor. In fact, the most famous case occurred on a substantially larger island of about sixty square miles, called Rapa Nui^1, widely known as Easter Island. Despite its relatively generous size, Rapa Nui suffered certain drawbacks. Owing to its more southerly latitude, outside the tropics, it was cooler, drier, and windier than most Polynesian islands—suboptimal conditions for some of their primary crops. Freshwater sources were also few, relative to the island’s size, and sometimes difficult to access. And the cooler surrounding ocean didn’t support the shallow reefs more common to tropical seas, making the islanders’ survival dependent on deep-sea fishing.

On the other hand, when the migrants first arrived, almost eleven hundred years ago, the pristine island was crowned with a dense forest of enormous trees, including a colossal species of palm found nowhere else on Earth, as well as other edible and useful plants. Small fish and shellfish could be gathered along the coast. In addition to several species of non-migratory birds inhabiting the forestland, seabird rookeries crowded the surfaces of rocky mounts just offshore. And the island’s three dormant volcanoes provided great quarries of stone suitable for making fine tools. The fate of the Rapanui people was in no way preordained. Read more »

That Came, Not Chosen

7 a.m. sungold flings photons from mountaintop across the river
yesterday’s snow clings to a hedge of arbor vitae’s shadowgreen
just as Mom’s flour dusted the tools of her art upon the table
sifter, spatula, cups and spoons as if a painting of an arctic fable
her baked art emerges from oven fresh in probed corners of recall
warm scents sweet against this day’s elements

the twisted angularity of our apple tree spreads from hoop-house
to the spent purple plum, dead limbs an armature for the reach of Trumpet vine,
plumwood backbone for its thin vine limbs and orange bell-blossoms
which in summer float upon green raft blowing reveille for the garden
here now frozen

….. suddenly
….. unexpected
….. a gift
….. a grace
….. that came
….. ,
….. not
….. chosen

Jim Culleny
2/26/2022