Oulipo's use of the Tohoku paper (2014)
neverendingbooks.org
neverendingbooks.org
I had an extremely slow Perl program chugging through a dict file when Michael Radwin who lived down the hall from me came by and taught me some basic algorithms -- he said "just make a hash table with the +7th word in it; you can do it in one pass over the dict file." Mind blown.
I got an A; Auntie Emasculation and Uncle Haphaestus were a hit.
I came to it for "Franz Kafka in Riga" (sold to me as a sort of proto-quine, but really it's not very quiney, it's more a funny story about the writerly ego).
His most famous work in there is "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)". It's a story that requires leisure to read, as the recipe does to cook; if you just want to read the story and get it over with, it's not going to work at all. Which is clever in hindsight. Of course I just wanted to get it over with, and so it didn't come out for me.
There are several stories literally about linguistic games (particularly the first few in the book); personally I found them intriguing and entertaining but ultimately kind of pointless. (The kind of erudite game where you want to get out a paper and pencil, or go to Wikipedia, but suspect with near-certainty that you won't find any there there if you do.) "The Bratislava Spiccato" is worth reading twice just to see how the non-digressions actually do add up to a reasonable story; I thought it was going to be like Douglas Hofstadter's "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", but (IIRC) I decided that it was actually totally honest, which made the second read feel very satisfactory.
The story I enjoyed most from that collection — the one I recommend it's worth a small amount of your time no matter who you are — was "The Broadcast", which is a linguistic game in technique but not in subject matter. The (much) longer variation "Their Words, For You" also somewhat appealed to my aesthetic sense but (like "Farce Double") went on much longer than my patience.
Umberto Eco, which famously enjoyed this stuff, wrote the preface.
Ironically I learned of this book from an American, Douglas Hofstadter.
[0] https://www.semidinchiostro.com/prodotto/giuseppe-varaldo-al...
> In the example Le Lionnais gives, the liste M is the list of all verbs appearing in the Tohoku paper.
… and says nothing about what to do with those lists.
> Finally, we fill the empty spaces in the source text by words from the target lists, in the order that they appeared in the target texts.