Administrative Assemblages (2008)

Thirty-six pages long and illustrated with attractive and curious images such as Sir Francis Galton’s display case of eyeballs, Administrative Assemblages discusses the use in composition of forms that the world sends us: the book-index and the questionnaire (J. G. Ballard), the US Zip Code Directory (Paul Metcalf), or the gallery checklist (Gilbert Sorrentino).

One of the constraints discussed in this pamphlet uses maps as templates for literary creation. This cover shows a map dating from around the time of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and uses the shape of nations on the map to caricature their various dysfunctionalities. It reminded me of a cold-war refrain my mother used to repeat: "Russia got hungry, took a piece of Turkey, slipped on grease and broke China." Cover design by Joanna Ebenstein.


Homomorphic Converters (2009)

Homomorphic Converters generates new text by a change of content within a retained form. Homosyntaxism, for example, keeps the syntactic sequence of an original, but adds all new vocabulary following that code. The Chimera does the same, but the vocabulary is drawn from several sources: nouns from Jane Austen, adjectives from Poe, verbs from Henry Miller, and so on.

Homomorphism is new wine in old bottles, and Homomorphic Converters teaches you how to use a pre-existing form of words or of images, found or invented, to express matter radically different from what that form originally expressed.

In this second pamphlet of 13 Writhing Machines, several procedures for homomorphic composition are examined, including “Homovocalism” (re-using the vowels of one sentence in writing a new one), and the “Chimera” (keeping the sentence structure of one text while replacing the words with vocabulary from one, two, or three others). “Homoikonism” is the conflation of visual forms with imagery not usually associated with those forms (a bowl of vegetables turns out to be the face of a man, when you turn it upside down). "Homoikonism" discusses the visual applications and is illustrated throughout the pamphlet by several homomorphic alphabets.


Echo Alternators (2010)

Echo Alternators works with various kinds of homophony, where a variety of senses are grafted onto a similarity of sounds. It features an extended meditation on the life and work of Raymond Roussel.

These homophonic techniques have often been used in literary composition, and their importance to the work of Raymond Roussel, the patron saint of surrealists and of the Oulipo, is fully discussed. Other methods come from Jonathan Swift’s “Trifles” and from Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s homophonic translation of Catullus. Still others share some playful pleasures, such as “Anguish Languish,” “Poetry for Dogs,” and the rebus.


A fourth pamphlet, Prosodic Copulators, was planned; it would have proposed many superconstraints to be imposed upon the fixed forms of versification, such as the left-handed sonnet, which can use only those letters typed with the left hand.

"In short, La Farge’s 13 Writhing Machines, given the contents of this first volume, promises not only to be an utterly entertaining presentation of various formal systems of literary writing, but an illustrative example of how to get writers, young and old, to experiment with new and empowering systems outside the scope of realist psychological narrative."

—Douglas Messerli