Writing Machines Notebook
Annotations, sketches, shards, snippets, marginalia
Please use headers and edit subsections only to avoid parallel edit problems :)
Uncreative Writing: Bart's Note
Date: 17/09/2025
Reading group: Bart - Ema - Robin - Tommi - Youjung
Protocol: We took turns reading pieces of the physical book out loud. While one person is reading, the others will take notes in a digital copy of the text.
Pad: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/UncreativeWriting_Notes
Notes:
Reading Notes from Sibyl
Date:2025/10/01 Group Members:Barbara & Sibyl
All notes are based on the Etherpad.
The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise - Georges Perec
~ Summary
You want to ask your boss for a raise, but every time you try, it gets ruined.
For instance:
·He doesn't look up when you knock
·None of his daughters have measles, but the fourth one is not OK > Wait 40 days.
·He swallowed a bone from the cafeteria lunch fish
“Narrative in the form of a flowchart, but there is only an input but no output. Stuck in a loop!”
~ Evaluation
- The design of the flowchart seems intentional but it’s a good hint for readers : the first 'playthrough' presents a more normal situation, which becomes increasingly absurd the deeper you delve.
- A lot of repeating sentences, if-statements, loops, like a code!
PROTOCOL
No punctuations!
A loop within the story with no exit!
~ Interpretation
- Connection to coding languages is very interesting
- You never actually ask for a raise. Only shows the process but you get stuck in a forever loop.
- Critique on company hierarchies: If your boss doesn't open te conversation to a possible raise then it will never happen even if you keep trying.
Methods 2025-10-01: Group Discussions Of Texts That Had Been Read
Georges Perec: The Art of Asking your Boss for a Raise (1968)
- There are different versions of this work: a diagram, a text, a radio broadcast > we mostly engaged with the text and/or the diagram.
- The experiences of “reading” the flow chart and the text are very different:
- The concept of the diagram is a loop; a text is always linear.
- The diagram is the script of a computer program, the text is the entire iteration.
- The written text is prefaced with an intro by the translator, which gives helpful context.
- The text is not punctuated and only in lower case. This is probably meant to simulate a computer algorithm and mechanical processes, but it also resembles the stream of consciousness of a human. The lack of punctuation makes the text uncomfortable to read, it is easy to get lost in in it—but also entertaining.
- The subject (“you”) never actually asks for a raise. A possible interpretation: Perec is trying to critique hierarchy of companies.
- from the intro: there’s an “exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion”
- “decide to try your luck afresh tomorrow”
- “circumperambulate”: to walk/wander without a destiny in circles (webster: to circle on foot especially ritualistically); in portuguese perambular means to wander
Marcel Bénabou: Rule and Constraint (1984)
- Rule is a metric or a form while a constraint is a generative result.
- Bénabou argues in favour of constraint and points to strict as well as freedom-based literary schools of thought. He argues that both are missing the whole point of language, which is to be treated as an object in itself, not a mere conveyor of information.
- Some forms of constraint are accepted/desired: poetic forms like an alexandrine or a sonnet (also, haiku or limerick) have specific rhyme schemes, or a set number of syllables or lines.
- Constraints does not confine the authors but liberates them, you escape from your own censorship.
- Constraints can enhance your creativity by limiting your toolset. Rules are for comprehension, constraints are for cerativity.
- Language is something material. Language and rules itself have a material.
- "Each page is a bed where letters lie"
- "Constraint forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources"
- "Constraint goes beyond rules, people who have questioned language can escape the system and reveal hidden resources" – maybe a reason why someone starts to learn coding to understand the constraints
Raymond Queneau: A Story as You Like It (1967)
- Interesting to put this into the context of the time when it was created, modern day the stories are very complex but might have been interesting back in the days.
- All of the choices that you get at the end is very opinionated, everything is a opinion which is quite different from asking your boss for a raise. In this, reader casts a judgement to the choice and story.
Paul Fournel: The Theater Tree — A Combinatory Play
- Example for different ways of writing scripts/texts (like a "choose your own adventure games")
- Black mirror: pretended that the way the story was made is revolutionary, but actually it was not! Fournels ideas at the time also not revolutionary
- Similar structure to Italo Calvino's books
Michael Winkler: Where Signs Resemble Thoughts (1960s)
- Michael Winkler: both an author and an artist
- Language is a code that we all came up with it and agreed on.
- The point of a code: someone else has to be able to understand
- Winkler made symbols out of words by connecting the letters within a circle (there are other possible codes!)
- Connecting the words with the symbols, it's possible to reflect on the word itself > serendipity
- It is an interesting exercise to take language apart to look at the single components
- Ideographic from Greek: ideo = that is seen; gramma: letter / written sign
- Other writing systems are (more) symbolic in themselves (with e.g. Chinese a system like winkler's would be way more complicated)
- Winklers symbols on the circle visually resemble the connection between stars (as in astrology)
- Language as a code is underlying computing, but the codes in computing are very inaccessible to people using other writing systems
Ema's gatherings
Ema's space
don't write above this line, but underneath