Composer, double bassist, and writer Nat Baldwin's new book Antithesis is coming out on October 10 and is available for pre-order now. It is a privilege to share the second chapter of this experimental memoir with you, which is being published by Bridge Books. Nat has two separate CD and tape releases out today, and the tape release is a "cut up version" of the following book chapter. Both albums are released on Nat's label Tripticks Tapes and are available on Bandcamp. – Anna Heflin
Into the silence, which was also at times a roar, of my thoughts and questions forever returning to myself to search there for an explanation of my life and its purpose, into this concentrated tiny hub of dense silent noise came the cackle of a hen from a nearby back garden, and at that moment that cackle, its distinct sharp-edged existence beneath a blue sky with white clouds, induced in me an intense awareness of freedom. The noise of the hen, which I could not even see, was an event (like a dog running or an artichoke flowering) in a field which until then had been awaiting a first event in order to become itself realisable. I knew that in that field I could listen to all sounds, all music.
An excerpt of John Berger’s “Field,” above, closes the 1st chapter of your contextual concert at University, the program notes of which appear in a forthcoming chapter.
Initially, you plan to include an interpretation of Antoine Beuger’s one tone. rather short. very quiet in the performance, a duet with Parsa Ferdowsi, but ultimately decide to remove the piece from the program due to time concerns.
one tone.
rather short.
very quiet
You consider adopting a voice used in a primary section of a forthcoming chapter to the rest of the text.
once during the first half of each minute: one player plays the tone
The primary difference between the section referenced above the above fragment and the rest of the text is the omission of the word “the.”
once during the second half of each minute: the other player plays the tone
You google the literary group Oulipo, a loose community of mainly French-speaking writers known for their application of formal constraints and unusual writing techniques.
sometime one player ceases to play the tone and remains silent until the end of the piece
You are currently reading, slowly and sporadically, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, a prominent Oulipo member.
sometime the other player ceases to play the tone and remains silent until the end of the piece
Oulipo is short for ouvroir de littérature potentielle, often stylized as OuLiPo, translated to English as “workshop of potential literature.”
duration of the piece: at least 30 minutes
You do not find any references to texts omitting the word “the” on the Oulipo Wikipedia page.
Perec’s novel La Disparition, published in 1969 by Gallimard, does not use the letter “e.”
The 300-page work appears in English translation as A Void in 1994, translated by Gilbert Adair.
The exclusion of a letter within a text is a writing constraint called a lipogram.
The previous fragment is a lipogram in B, D, F, J, K, Q, V, Y, Z.
The previous fragment employs the same strategy to explain lipograms as the Oulipo Wikipedia page by referencing the lipogram in a previously written sentence.
One of the primary themes in A Void is its own lipogrammatic limitation.
Incurably insomniac, Anton Vowl turns on a light. According to his watch it’s only 12.20. With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.
The opening sentences of A Void, above.
The translations impose the same lipogrammatic constraints adapted to their own language.
The Spanish version contains no “a,” the Russian version contains no “o,” the Japanese version contains no syllables using the sound “i,” for example.
You realize that the word “the” contains the letter “e.”
The companion work, The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, and Sex, originally published as Les Revenentes, uses only one vowel, the letter “e.”
Singular Pleasures by Harry Matthews, the 1st American member of Oulipo, is a collection of 61 scenes of 61 different people masturbating.
Word Events: Perspectives On Verbal Notation, edited by John Lely and James Saunders, documents a selection of text scores, including Beuger’s one tone. rather short. very quiet, along with essays to contextualize the works.
[Composing is] not about creating or inventing differences or concatenations of differences, each sound is going to be different anyway.
Raymond Queneau’s Exercises In Style features 99 unique versions of the same story of a man witnessing an altercation on a bus.
I like the idea of a piece of music just being a few sounds, of performing music as just playing a few sounds.
From the 1st episode, Notation:
In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone’s been having a tug-of-war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A sniveling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself onto it.
Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is dedicated to Queneau, who dies 2 years prior to its publication.
Of the living members of Oulipo, you have only read Anne F. Garreta, the 1st member to be born after the group’s founding.
Beuger is a member of the composer’s collective known as Wandelweiser, founded in 1992, along with Michael Pisaro-Liu, Eva-Maria Houben, Manfred Werder, and Jürg Frey, among others, known for their extreme use of silence and extended performance durations.
Garreta’s debut novel Sphinx is the 1st work by a female member translated into English, initially published in 1986 when she is 23 years old, portraying a love story between 2 characters without giving grammatical indication of their genders.
Werder has 10 pieces that are each 4000 pages long, each lasting 533 hours and 20 minutes.
You scroll up to add an “s” to Georges Perec’s name where necessary.
Each page is to last 6 minutes, while the instructional components alternate between 6 seconds of sound and 6 seconds of silence, the 1st piece of which is titled stuck 1998.
Pauline Oliveros’ Rock Piece closes the introduction of your contextual concert, an example of a form of composition she calls “Sonic Meditations.”
EACH PARTICIPANT chooses a pair of resonant rocks to use as percussive instruments.
Other works in translation you read while composing this text—Marguerite Duras’ The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Félix Fénéon’s Novels In Three Lines, Jon Fosse’s The Other Name, Patrik Ouredník’s Europeana, Marie Redonnet’s Forever Valley, Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program.
EACH PARTICIPANT establishes an independent pulse with the rocks.
You try to recall the reference in a book where the author states that there was a time in their life that they thought Life: A User’s Manual could teach them how to live and that Suicide: A User’s Manual would teach them how to die.
THE PULSE is to be maintained steadily without any rhythmic interpretation or accents.
You are nearly certain the reference is from Edouard Levé's Autoportrait.
WHILE LISTENING to the overall sound, if the participant perceives that s/he is synchronizing exactly, or in a simple multiple or division by 2 or 3 of another participant’s pulse, s/he stops in order to listen and begin a new pulse which is independent in rate from all other pulses.
With your copy on loan, you google the above inquiry and find an excerpt from Autoportrait published in The Paris Review as “When I Look At A Strawberry, I Think of A Tongue.”
When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean. To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up alibis to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Bagdad.
You cut and paste the Levé text from The Paris Review, resize and change the font, recolor the text from grey to black, notice that Baghdad is spelled without the “h,” consider adding it, leave it as it is published, insert quotes around the quoted text.
You remove the quotation marks from the Levé quote, italicizing the text instead.
Much later in the editing process, after receiving edits for the Sleepingfish publication (addressed more thoroughly in a forthcoming chapter), and before you submit the manuscript to presses for publication consideration, you apply a left indent to the above quote, as well as to additional quoted material throughout the text.
The End of Oulipo? An Attempt At Exhausting a Movement consists of 2 essays—Veronica Esposito’s “Eight Glances Past Georges Perec" and Lauren Elkin’s “Oulipo Lite.”
Make an effort to exhaust the subject, even if that seems grotesque, or pointless, or stupid. You still haven’t looked at anything, you’ve merely picked out what you’ve long ago picked out.
In addition to the Perec quote above, the other epigraph used for the excerpt appearing in The New Inquiry is from Tom McCarthy’s essay on Jean-Philipe Toussaint, “Stabbing the Olive,” quoted following the following fragment.
Elkin’s contribution recalls the “Foulipo Manifesto” delivered by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young at the Noulipo Conference at Cal Arts in 2005, in which they critique “the masculinist tendencies of most constraint-based writing,” while adopting Oulipian constraint techniques in the manifesto.
We don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs, and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.
In an earlier series of compositions, calme étendue, Beuger alternates between sound and silent phrases, with sounds expressed every 8 seconds and set within a performance duration of between 45 minutes and 9 hours.
Spahr and Young take off their clothes, put them back on and take them off again, before their voices are replaced with recordings of themselves speaking.
The field is a place where we experience sets of things continuously affecting one another.
From Michael Pisaro-Liu’s “Rubies Reddened By Rubies Reddening,” above, an essay from which a forthcoming chapter draws its epigraph.
PARTICIPANTS MAY END independently, or on cue. ROCK PIECE might begin and remain out-of-doors, or move indoors. Conversely, ROCK PIECE might begin in a tight circle indoors and move out-of-doors with the participants gradually dispersing until all the pulses can no longer be heard.
In a review of Autoportrait, Wayne Koestenbaum begins by defining a word you had not previously encountered—parataxis:
The placement, side by side, of two sentences whose meanings don’t transparently connect.
About Nat Baldwin
Nat Baldwin is a composer and double bassist from Maine currently living in Western Mass. He’s released several solo and collaborative works across genres and runs the experimental music label Tripticks Tapes. His previous collection of short fiction, The Red Barn, was published in 2017 by Calamari Archive. Antithesis is his first publication of hybrid nonfiction.
