99 Preparatory Notes to Experimental Literature

1. 1. Attempted landings.

2. 2. Is experimental literature an oxymoron or a redundancy?

3. 3. That which chases its tail into the future.

4. 4. The success of an experiment as the degree to which something new is learned about the world.

5. 5. To prove it can be done.

6. 6. Gratification disorder.

7. 7. The absence of reliable psychographic indicators of what kind of person will say the data is and what kind the data are.

8. 8. What happens when I push this button?

9. 9. Literature as that which resists the empirical.

10. 10. If it can be done, why do it?

11. 11. Can 99 preparatory notes sufficiently prepare anyone for anything?

12. 12. Maybe just one of those terms that no longer means what it means.

13. 13. Inquisitive literature, curious literature, petulant literature, literature of the yes but.

14. 14. Or that it can’t.

15. 15. Whose job is it to put interestingness into a text?

16. 16. Experimental literature as that which, in some critical way, has not finished becoming.

17. 17. To the extent that the book has a structure, it resembles a Rubik’s Cube that has not been solved.

18. 18. The journey of self-discovery is a litany of insults.

19. 19. Attentive lardings.

20. 20. Is experimental an epithet or a punch line?

21. 21. The way all practitioners except the most dogged refuse to self-identify as such.

22. 22. Like hipsters or emo bands.

23. 23. Like republican or disinterest.

24. 24. An experiment whose magic is in the finding, not the findings.

25. 25. This sublime and difficult novel—difficult now for the reader, but first for me—

26. 26. Or simply literature that flies by the seat of its pants.

27. 27. The tipping point in the genesis of each project where the author determines that conventional form will not suffice to achieve the desired results.

28. 28. Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point as a work of experimental literature.

29. 29. Would you like to come up and see my experimental Japanese etchings?

30. 30. I know it when I see it.

31. 31. Experimental literature as an attempt to find new knobs in language that can be tuned in order to alter reality in a real way.

32. 32. Whatever real means.

33. 33. As poetry, it doesn’t have to be good. It only has to contain a testable guess about being alive.

34. 34. The colon missing from Life A User’s Manual.

35. 35. Since 2001 I have kept a list of two-word phrases I like.

36. 36. Beveled suture.

37. 37. If there are desired results to begin with.

38. 38. Does every excellent work of experimental literature make its hypothesis manifest at the outset?

39. 39. What kind of pants does literature wear?

40. 40. Jacques Roubaud claims he would not have joined the Oulipo had it retained its original name, Séminaire de Littérature Expérimentale.

41. 41. Literature as the flunkey who spills coffee all over the lab table, compromising the scientific integrity of the experiment.

42. 42. [Gasp] My experimental quiche!

43. 43. The scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams makes his students rip out the page of their textbooks detailing a mathematical method for evaluating the excellence of a poem.

44. 44. Fâcheuse lacune.

45. 45. Experimental proofs of the need for linearity and also of the need for anarchy.

46. 46. Pataphysics and the poignant lack of coincidence that those people most committed to absurdity and inscrutability also had the biggest hard-on for bureaucracy.

47. 47. As if there were a control / so marvelous // you could teach it / to eat pain

48. 48. Untoward appropriations.

49. 49. What if the question is what is literature and the hypothesis everything? I have long found this to be an extremely compelling interpretation of the term, and a beautiful, albeit monumentally distracting, way of looking at the world.

50. 50. And this button?

51. 51. Schrödinger’s car.

52. 52. What does the form of 99 preparatory notes, created and practiced to measurably superlative effect by Frédéric Forte, ask about the world?

53. 53. Is a list of two-word phrases data?

54. 54. Experimental literature as, contrary to orthodox usage, that which is utterly conventional in every formal sense but is genuinely capable of effecting experimentation...