Twittering N+7

Magentic Poetry At the risk of alienating my readers on Twitter—something I’m likely to be doing anyway—I’ve been playing an old Oulipo game with my tweets today: N+7. It’s quite simple: replace every noun in a text with the noun that follows it seven nouns later in the dictionary. The results are often nonsensical, occasionally revelatory, and always evocative.

I began by N+7ifying yesterday’s tweets in reverse chronological order (avoiding tweets with @ replies for some reason). A few tweets in, I switched over to N+7ifying my most popular tweets of the past few months, as measured by the number of retweets or replies the status update had. I’ve been doing this all day, and I’ve now got two dozen or so bizarre revisions of earlier tweets.

Why do this?

Isn’t the answer obvious?

I had nothing else to say.

You could call it boredom. Or more generously, writer’s block. Whatever you call it, this fact remains: when you have nothing left to say, artificial constraints and deterministic algorithms will give you something new to say. Boredom leads to constraints, which leads to creativity. This is the nature of play. This is the nature of language. This is the nature of meaning.

Magnetic Poetry image courtesy of Flickr user surrealmuse / Creative Commons License]