N+7 Writing

To me, a lot of what the OuLiPo constraints do is to free one’s writing voice from the worn routes that it might take without intervention. Doing an N+7 transpose on a text can open up new way of looking at that text since the nouns have been arbitrarily replaced and you see how the verbs and other auxiliaries work in the writing. My writing often has a subtle undercurrent of OuLiPo happening in it (e.g., the novel I’m revising started with a vague notion of story and 29 chapter titles taken from the Passover Haggadah. A similar shorter piece I wrote, “The Norton Anthology of Self-Destructive Behaviors” [https://uploads.documents.cimpress.io/v1/uploads/151c2c51-d2...], began with a list of self-destructive behaviors and a story emerged from those).

Another great overview is The OuLiPo compendium http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0974355437/donhosek which presents most of the major OuLiPo works, authors and games in encyclopedic format.

Note also the other transformations involving headwords that contain spaces: "civil war" -> "clabber", "starship" -> "starting pistol", "custodian" -> "customs union", and "galaxy" -> "galia melon".

I don't know what dictionary is being used: the post just says "I used a 1999 Oxford English dictionary" but I doubt it's the full OED, as in it "agent" is followed by (I think) entries for "agent provocateur", "agentess", "agential", "agentive", "agentship", "ageold", "ageometrical", "ageostrophic", "age-prier", "ager", "agerasia", "ageratum", … [lots of "agg…" words]… and "agile gibbon" would be very far away.

Edit: For example, The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: not OED but ODE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Dictionary_of_English) has "agile gibbon" as a separate entry in the dictionary, though it is 27 places after "agent" rather than 7.