A writing exercise

A few weeks ago I was reflecting on some of the writers we’ve talked about this year: Sheila Heti, Sarah Manguso, Édouard Levé, and the late Lyn Hejinian, all of whom have experimented with forms I call neo-oulipian. Oulipo was a group of writers and mathematicians experimenting with formal constraints beginning in the 1960s. Constraints have their own nicknames, such as “Lipogram,” a text that doesn’t use one or more letters of the alphabet. 

In many ways, it’s never been easier to program writing. For readers, the dominant constraint of the past fifteen years is the algorithm. For writers, an abundance of tools exist at our fingertips to “program” or “generate” writing without code and, indeed, often without critical thought. 

And yet—the idea of committing to a constraint has never been more appealing. Most of what we term “writer’s block” is not from a lack of ideas, but (as with online dating) too much optionality. Anyway, I decided I wanted to create my own Oulipian constraint. 

I wrote 100 statements in a Google Sheet and then added a second blank sheet. I began to move the statements from the first sheet into the second sheet by row in the order 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 (the first ten digits of the Fibonnaci sequence). When I added the contents of a row to the second sheet, I deleted the entire row from the first. I treated row 1 as if it was also row 0. 

I repeated this process until the first sheet had 33 rows remaining and the second sheet had 67 rows. I then deleted the first sheet forever. I called this constraint “Liberace,” a play off Fibonnaci’s 1202 book, Liber Abaci.

With some trial and error, I also taught “Liberace” to Chat-GPT so that it could correctly reorder a spreadsheet of 100 statements. Are you feeling blocked? Want to try it out? Use the prompt below with Chat-GPT or do the whole thing manually. 

Let me know how it goes! — Daisy Alioto 

THE PROMPT

Create two spreadsheets: the first spreadsheet should have a single column populated with the 100 rows provided [attach your spreadsheet of statements], while the second spreadsheet should be a blank single-column spreadsheet with 100 rows. Using the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, interpret "row 0" as the first row (row 1) of Spreadsheet One. For each step in the sequence, transfer the corresponding row from Spreadsheet One to the next available row in Spreadsheet Two, then delete the transferred row from Spreadsheet One. After each deletion, dynamically adjust the row indices to reflect the updated state of Spreadsheet One. Repeat this process until Spreadsheet One has exactly 33 rows remaining and Spreadsheet Two contains 67 rows. Finally, display both spreadsheets with their final states.

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Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Hear from the founders of Defector, Hell Gate, and 404 Media on the state of worker-owned media collectives (Tasteland)

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MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

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• The Gaza Biennale is seeking institutional partners (artnet)

• Countess Luann covers Polyester Zine

• “The sonic world Sophie made was often exhausting but evidently inexhaustible.” (NYRB)

• “It was a tiny bit stressful thinking, Oh God, we have vermin in the window. But I thought, It’s kinetic; it’s moving. Not many things move in a window. People love it. They’re going to talk forever about the time they saw a mouse in the Barneys window.” Do NOT skip this oral history of New York department stores at Christmas (Strategist) 

• Pre-order Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies (check out that cover!) 

• Also pre-order Aidan Ryan’s I Am Here You Are Not I Love You (University of Iowa Press) 

• “I think young men have turned more conservative because ‘conservatism,’ as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.” (Never Hungover) 

• I need to know everything about “the oldest forest in the world” (Noah Kalina) 

• The first person to use this link can take n+1’s bookmatch quiz for free 

• The Creative Independent’s zine On Making a Living as an Artist is now available for free as a digital edition (Metalabel) 

• Dirt contributor Luke Winkie on “rawdogging” Ulysses (Slate)

• A firsthand account of homelessness in America…a must-read. (Esquire) 

• Need more gift ideas? How about a drawing of their favorite New York restaurant. Mine is Frankies 457 Spuntino!

• Bottega Veneta x Richard Scarry

• An essay written entirely with words that contain the letter “e” (Minor Literatures)

• “I did not know anything. I was just trying to write a page a day in that little window when I could concentrate, when I was fully caffeinated and fully awake and not getting too antsy because of nicotine deprivation. The words are hitting the page, it’s good, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.” Jonathan Franzen on the long process of writing The Corrections (Vulture) 

• “In just the last few months, 2hollis shot from niche curio to viral sensation, reaching beyond the existing cult following for his mythical Medieval rap and blistering bionic pop to conquer a larger zoomer fanbase with his new album boy.” (Complex)

• Eliza Brooke interviews director Robert Eggers about his “gothic feast” Nosferatu (SSENSE)

• Some fiction: “I might be mistaken, but I think that in all my years of dating, Wu Jiayu was the very first repeat customer.” Goodbye, Bridge of the East (Granta)