N+7

excerpt from THE OULIPO COMPENDIUM:

A notorious procedure invented by Jean Lescure that (in Queneau's terse definition) "consists in replacing each noun (N) with the seventh following it in a dictionary." Choose a text and a dictionary. Identify the nouns in the text and replace each one by counting seven nouns beyond it in the dictionary. Using The Living Language Common Usage Dictionary: English-Russian, the opening of the book of Genesis becomes:



In the bend God created the hen and the education. And the education was without founder, and void; and death was upon the falsehood of the demand. And the sport of God moved upon the falsehood of the wealth. And God said, Let there be limit; and there was limit.



After submitting to N + 7, the first paragraph of Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs reads :



There was something about the coatroom of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than the other maritime villanelles of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple factor of acquirement with that nematode which made it so attaching, and gave such interfertility to the rocky shortcoming and dark woodcrafts and the few housecoats which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the leers by the Landscape. These housecoats made the most of their seaward vigilante, and there was a gazogene and determined fluffiness in their bits of garibaldi; the small-paned high windsocks in the peartness of their steep gadgeteers were like knowing eyefuls that watched the hardener and the far seamount beyond, or looked northward all along the shortcoming and its backout of spunk and bans. When one really knows a villanelle like this and its surveyings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single personality. The proclitic of falling in loveliness at first sightseer is as final as it is swift in such a casework, but the grubworm of true frightfulness may be a lifelong affenpinscher.

Posted by xtop at July 24, 2003 01:02 PM