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No. 1244: Measure for Measure

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Measure for Measure

First | Previous | 2012-10-14 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1244

Strip by: Manyhills

Jon: My my! Are you balanced?
{Garfield falls off the TV}
SFX: WHACK!
Jon: A proof not, it seems.

The author writes:

The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais; initially concerned with "incorporating mathematical structures in literary works", its remit expanded to "include all writing that was subjected to severely restrictive methods", such as the lipogram.

Given the obvious parallels it makes sense for the 21st century Ouvroir des Garfields Potentiels (or "Ougapo") to take inspiration from Oulipist techniques. This strip uses the idea of a measure, "a procedure dependent on the length of syllables or words", specifically the third variety given in Mathews & Brotchie's Oulipo Compendium (from whence all these quotes come): "From a source text, a new text can be derived whose words have the same length as the original's".

[[Original strip: 1979-08-22.]]

Original strip: 1979-08-22.