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:

Reading Notes from Sibyl

Date:2025/10/01                                                                Group Members:Barbara & Sibyl 

All notes are based on the Etherpad.

The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise - Georges Perec

~ Summary

You want to ask your boss for a raise, but every time you try, it gets ruined.

For instance:

·He doesn't look up when you knock

·None of his daughters have measles, but the fourth one is not OK > Wait 40 days.

·He swallowed a bone from the cafeteria lunch fish

“Narrative in the form of a flowchart, but there is only an input but no output. Stuck in a loop!”

~ Evaluation

• The design of the flowchart seems intentional but it’s a good hint for readers : the first 'playthrough' presents a more normal situation, which becomes increasingly absurd the deeper you delve.
• A lot of repeating sentences, if-statements, loops, like a code!

PROTOCOL

No punctuations !

A loop within the story with no exit !

~ Interpretation

• Connection to coding languages is very interesting
• You never actually ask for a raise. Only shows the process but you get stuck in a forever loop.
• Critique on company hierarchies: If your boss doesn't open te conversation to a possible raise then it will never happen even if you keep trying.

Rule and Constraint - Marcel Bénabou

~ Summary

• Hypocrisy of critics that laws of poetry/prose are seen as good but more unconventional constraints are "limiting the artist" including Anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, poetry (sonnet, anagrams) and so on.
• Language is a material object and a complex system of elements that form words/sentences/etc.
• Constraints go beyond assumed rules and reveal those two aspects.
• Some rules will not be a constraint , it will be a tool for someone to innovate something. Constraint is a tool to help explore new possibilities virtualities.

~ Evaluation

• Quite hard to understand.
• Tried to separate paragraphs and filter them to try to understand.
• Examples are hard to follow, we don't have the context.

~ Interpretation

• Oulipo pushes literary constraints to their other possibilities.
• Use tools to constitute process of deconstruction and restructuring.
• Interesting way of reframing materiality of language. Usually we think of the notebook as the object, not the written word itself.
• Tools in our brain help us combine words into sentences.

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 (1968)

• 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 (1984)

• Rule is a metric or a form while a constraint is a generative result.
• Bénabou argues in favour of constraint and points to strict as well as freedom-based literary schools of thought. He argues that both are 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. Language and rules itself have a material.
• "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 (1967)

• 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 (1960s)

• 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

Ema's gatherings

Ema's space

don't write above this line, but underneath

Blog, Refections and Piece of Writings

• Youjung's blog on workshop at Brussels and Mud cell poems
• Youjung's reflections on writing machine
• Lea's blog

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