Covering Sets
So, I’ve been thinking lately about repetition. For a while I was trying to figure out at what point repetition might stop acting as simple duplication and become a prescription of the duplicating act itself. To take “A rose is a rose is a rose” for example: Stein herself has used it other places with […]
Gertrude Stein and Nouns
In her pursuit of finding “a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them,” Gertrude Stein made the following statements (among many others) about nouns:
“Things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns. . . […]
Lessness and Endlessnesslessness
Variations on Lessness is a website set up by Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr which generates all the possible versions of Samuel Beckett’s source text according to the rules the author himself used:
In 1969, the Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) published the piece of short prose Sans in French. […]
Three and a Half Limericks
I.
Said the chemist: I’ll take some dimethyloxiomidomesoralamide
And I’ll add just a dash of dimethylamidozabensaldehyde;
But if these won’t mix,
I’ll just have to fix
Up a big dose of trisodiumpholoroglucintricarboxycide.
II.
There was a young man of Japan
Whose limericks never would scan.
When someone asked why
He replied with a sigh
“It’s because I always try to get as many words into the […]
The Name
Louis Aragon, the Glass Syringe.
Arp, Clean Wrinkles.
André Breton, the Glass of Water in a Storm.
Paul Eluard, the Nurse of the Stars.
Th. Fraenkel, the Great Earth Serpent.
Benjamin Péret, the Lemon Mandarin.
G. Ribemont-Dessaignes, the Steam Man.
Jacques Rigaut, the Hollow Plate.
Philippe Soupault, the Musical Urinal.
Tristan Tzara, the Man with the Pearl Head.
From “Appendix II: Memoirs of Dadaism” by […]