I admit it. I sat and stared at Harry Mathew's "Thirty-Five Variations on a Theme from Shakespeare" for five, maybe 10 minutes, before I grasped what he was doing with "To be or not to be, that is the question."
The concept of Oulipo's sinking in made the way for actual enjoyment of these otherwise weird pieces. They're also healthily suffused with sex. No doubt that's just because they're generally written by French authors and poets. Anyone whose read Baudillaire knows what I mean.
Though I found it strange that what's just a "choose-your-own-adventure" story is considered an Oulipian work. The biggest difference that I could see between Paul Fournel's "Once Upon a Colony: A Tree Story with some Ramifications," and the books I devoured as a kid, was that the latter's dragons and witches and castles were replaced by social commentary, truths about changing culture, and - again - mention of sex.
The whole "Tree Story" thing makes me wonder why some people still refuse to believe that video games are art. What's a good video game if not a kind of interactive text, and what's a great game if not an interactive, sense-immersive binary tree story?
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