Ouvroir de Conspiration Potentielle  

For whatever reason, some bloggers - possibly led by Mandarin Design Daily? - have decided to try and generate a wordbust with the word "oulipo." At this point their little conspiracy only generates 21 hits on Daypop, which from what I can discern is far too few to accomplish their goal.

Nobody seems to know what oulipo is, but whoever originated this business is obviously having a little fun with it. For those who don't know, OuLiPo, or Ourvoir de Litterature Potentielle, is a consortium of mostly literary figures who concentrate their creative energies on highly constrainted systems. Georges Perec, for instance, wrote an entire novel, La Disparition, without making use of the letter e (Gilbert Adair has since translated it into English as A Void). Other members have included Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, Harry Mathews, and the artist Marcel Duchamps.

At any rate, the choice of "oulipo" for a conspiratorial wordburst is ironic, because it's just this sort of word game that the group itself would countenance. Their version would probably be a little more sophisticated - finding ways to use a word meaningfully without calling attention to it so bluntly. But still, the joke has legs. The internet has given us a million external opportunities for constraints, and a limitless audience of accidental readers.

By the way, I should mention that the original name for this site, counterfactual, was inspired by OuLiPo and the new Google News site, which generates the top news stories via a weighted search algorithm. I thought it would be interesting to have a site where fictional hard news stories would be generated randomly from search-generated results. Obviously I abandoned that idea before I even got started, and that's part of the reason I abandoned the name too. But I think there's a lot to be done with the idea of highly constrained creative writing on the internet. Maybe I'm stuck in the wrong circles, but it amazes me that there isn't more to be found along creative lines. I've been throwing around the idea of starting a strictly creative/literary blog, and maybe this will be the kick in the pants I need to actually do it.

UPDATE: Here's a skeletal website for OuLiPo and a partial online version of the OuLiPo Compendium. I've never been able to find much in the way of online OuLiPo resources, but that's probably because most of the key figures are quite old. I guess this wordburst campaign will mean more links...