Writing Machines Notebook

Annotations, sketches, shards, snippets, marginalia

Please use headers and edit subsections only to avoid parallel edit problems :)

Uncreative Writing: Bart's Note

"Uncreative Writing" by Kenneth Goldsmith

Date: 17/09/2025

Reading group: Bart - Ema - Robin - Tommi - Youjung

Protocol: We take turns reading pieces of the physical book out loud. While one person is reading the others will take notes in a digital copy of the text.

Notes:

Methods 2025-10-01: Group Discussions Of Texts That Had Been Read

Marcel Bénabou: Rule and Constraint (org.: La règle et la contrainte)

• Rule is a metric or a form while a constraint is a generative result
• Benabou argues in favour of constraint and points out to both strict and freedom-based literary schools of thought, as if they were missing the whole point of language: which is to be treated as an object in itself, not a mere conveyor of information.
• Some forms of constraint are accepted/desired: poetic forms like an alexandrine or a sonnet (also, haiku or limerick) have specific rhyme schemes, or a set number of syllables or lines
• Constraints does not confine the authors but liberates them, you escape from your own censorship.
• Constraints can enhance your creativity by limiting your toolset. Rules are for comprehension, constraints are for cerativity.
• Language is something material, i think about the container(like a book, laptop) but language & rules itself have a material, what differentiates grammar and crazy writing machines

• "Each page is a bed where letters lie"
• "Constraint forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources"
• "Constraint goes beyond rules, people who have questioned language can escape the system and reveal hidden resources" – maybe a reason why someone starts to learn coding to understand the constraints

Raymond Queneau: A Story as You Like It

• Interesting to put this into the context of the time when it was created, modern day the stories are very complex but might have been interesting back in the days.
• All of the choices that you get at the end is very opinionated, everything is a opinion which is quite different from asking your boss for a raise. In this, reader casts a judgement to the choice and story.