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 took 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.

Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/UncreativeWriting_Notes

Notes:

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

Etherpad for Group Discussion

Georges Perec: The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise (org.: L'art et la manière d'aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation)

• There are different versions of this work: a diagram, a text, a radio broadcast > we mostly engaged with the text and/or the diagram.
• The experiences of “reading” the flow chart and the text are very different:
  • The concept of the diagram is a loop; a text is always linear.
  • The diagram is the script of a computer program, the text is the entire iteration.
• The written text is prefaced with an intro by the translator, which gives helpful context.
• The text is not punctuated and only in lower case. This is probably meant to simulate a computer algorithm and mechanical processes, but it also resembles the stream of consciousness of a human. The lack of punctuation makes the text uncomfortable to read, it is easy to get lost in in it—but also entertaining.
• The subject (“you”) never actually asks for a raise. A possible interpretation: Perec is trying to critique hierarchy of companies.
• from the intro: there’s an “exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion”
• “decide to try your luck afresh tomorrow”
• “circumperambulate”: to walk/wander without a destiny in circles (webster: to circle on foot especially ritualistically); in portuguese perambular means to wander

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.

Paul Fournel: The Theater Tree — A Combinatory Play

• Example for different ways of writing scripts/texts (like a "choose your own adventure games")
• Black mirror: pretended that the way the story was made is revolutionary, but actually it was not! Fournels ideas at the time also not revolutionary
• Similar structure to Italo Calvino's books

Michael Winkler: Where Signs Resemble Thoughts

• Michael Winkler: both an author and an artist
• Language is a code that we all came up with it and agreed on.
• The point of a code: someone else has to be able to understand
• Winkler made symbols out of words by connecting the letters within a circle (there are other possible codes!)
• Connecting the words with the symbols, it's possible to reflect on the word itself > serendipity
• It is an interesting exercise to take language apart to look at the single components
• Ideographic from Greek: ideo = that is seen; gramma: letter / written sign
• Other writing systems are (more) symbolic in themselves (with e.g. Chinese a system like winkler's would be way more complicated)
• Winklers symbols on the circle visually resemble the connection between stars (as in astrology)
• Language as a code is underlying computing, but the codes in computing are very inaccessible to people using other writing systems