Above: Interior of Interaction of Color from Eye 75. Photo by Noah Kalina.

There are two types of primary colors: additive and subtractive. The subtractive primaries (CMYK) are made of pigment and become darker when combined, while the additive primaries (RGB) are made of light and become brighter when combined. In this formulation, Yale University Press’s new expanded edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is distinctly additive, brightening the corners of this influential classic and broadening it to a two-volume slipcased set.

With colored bindings inspired by one of Albers’s lessons, these volumes operate in concordance: one carries the text, the other an expanded set of 145 plates created by the artist and his students. The reworked design brings Interaction of Color closer to its original 1963 edition, which, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, was a “set of unbound folders […] heavier and larger than anything Yale University Press had ever published.”

Once again more suited to a museum patron’s coffee table than an art student’s backpack, this comprehensive set changes our interaction with Interaction, insisting we clear a space, spread the book of plates beside Albers’s descriptions, and learn the act of seeing color afresh. In lesson after lesson, Albers shows the mutability and pliancy of color as a creative material, how it is changed by the colors surrounding it, by the time we spend looking at it, by its distance from our eye, and by our eye’s own imperfections as a perceptual apparatus.

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Above, top: The Hamilton Digital Watch, the world’s first digital watch, released in 1970. Above, bottom: Emmett Williams, “IBM,” 1973.

One of the most important things I’ve ever read about typography is Paul Elliman’s essay “My Typographies.” Here’s the sparkling gem of it that I’m so fond of quoting to my students:

Writing gives the impression of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.

Beautifully put. In the essay that follows, Elliman dances among several examples of things that give the impression of writing, each of which is connected powerfully to our own origins and the rhythms of life on this planet. He reads the types of clouds in the sky, looks at constellations and signals sent to outer space through the Arecibo Message, unpacks the passing of Uruk tokens, scans the Talmud, finds our flickering digital beginnings in ASCII text and LED watches, then turns to alphabetic codes, GPS messages, and more. Perhaps his most intuitive example, though, is the alphabet of DNA, on which he quotes genetics professor Steve Jones:

It has a vocabulary (the genes themselves), a grammar (the way in which the inherited information is arranged), and a literature (the thousands of instructions needed to make a human being). The language is based on the DNA molecule, the famous double helix; the icon of the 20th century. It has a simple alphabet, not 26 letters, but just four, the four different DNA bases, A, C, G, and T for short.

And now, via Kottke, we learn of Christian Bök, who will encrypt a poem on a particularly resilient bacteria called Deinococcus radiodurans. As Wired describes Bök’s process, part of the appeal of doing this (apart from seeing if it Can Be Done) seems to be about constraint:

Bök will have to choose his ciphers carefully, as his poem chemically ordains the sequence of amino acids that the bacteria will create in response. There are 8 trillion possible combinations, but depressingly few of them yield useful two-way vocabularies.

In many ways, Bök’s project reminds me of Emmett Williams’s work — Sweethearts, of course, but also his lesser-known IBM poem, which uses a technique called “expansion by alphabet,” a process I intend to write more about in the future. However, for the time being, let me just say that no sooner had I found a computational method for collecting Williams Words then I found out that Williams himself had been experimenting with computational verse using this form. Williams is always one step ahead — beautiful. More on the IBM poem here and here.

Mentioned earlier here, Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud’s sequence “Correspondence,” now online, is a brilliant and frequently hilarious recursive read:

I’ve just received your last letter and am immediately replying. You’ve asked if I’ve received your last letter and if I intend to reply. If I may, please let me point out that your having sent your last letter makes the letter you previously sent no longer the most recent, and if I reply, as I am now doing, it is not in response to your second-to-last letter. I cannot, therefore, satisfy the requests you’ve made in your last letter.

I don’t know about you, but my life’s imitated Roubaud’s art more than a few times, making “inbox zero” sound less like a productivity strategy and more like a distant Utopian future.

I’ve been a fan of the Oulipo—a literary group founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais—since high school, so I was thrilled when Prem alerted me to the group’s reading at the New School a few weeks ago. Yale French Professor Jean-Jacques Poucel’s introduction stressed that the Oulipian model depended not only on constraints but on their verifiability:

Like any formal rule, a constraint must be verifiable, tested against the work’s “user’s manual,” while also evoking some notion of beauty, perhaps related to shape, economy or force — or, potentially, a surprising mixture of yet other features. As such, writing under constraint is not a virtual or imaginary game, but a set of concrete methods playfully developed in a real forum that values proven and intellectually satisfying results.

Readings included Ian Monk’s lipogrammatical bit of exotica, “Iris”; Anne F. Garréta’s lengthy but nonetheless fulfilling exegesis “On Bookshelves”; Hervé Le Tellier’s lovely, cryptic, “All our thoughts,”; Jacques Roubaud’s hilarious “Correspondence” from McSweeney’s 22; Harry Mathews’s hilarious “35 Variations On A Theme From Shakespeare”; and more. (For those new to the Oulipo, the works of Georges Perec and the Oulipo Compendium are both highly recommended.)

Update: Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm podcast has a nearly identical program. Listen here.

Because it’s unofficially Frank O’Hara week on L&UL, here’s another one I stumbled on via Merlin Mann’s new 43 Folders Clips Tumblr.

And because I can’t help myself, here are two stellar O’Hara readings and remembrances by MoMA from last year. O’Hara was an Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA from 1960 until his early death in 1966, and his famous Lunch Poems were written on his lunch breaks there.

Above: Photograph by Kevin Van Aelst for NYT.

This piece in this weekend’s NYT Magazine by my friend Virginia Heffernan on the poetry of Facebook status updates gave me a new appreciation for what on first inspection seemed a rather awkward form of public expression. Heffernan writes,

Status updates are part of a Twitter-like feature that induces­ members to publish their answers to the question “What are you doing right now?” Responses, which are confined to 160 characters, then show up on the Facebook home pages of the updater’s friends. My Facebook page went from a solemn chronicle — a record of who had changed their profile photos or listed a new hometown — to a collaborative epic in the style of Frank O’Hara:

Micheline is off in search of sneakers. Kristin is getting that pedicure, but they didn’t have I’m Not Really a Waitress. Had to go with In the Mood. Sean 1:20 and stumbling home. Thanks 2 all that came, especially those that contributed jager or tequilla. Jenny is keeping Beelzebub at the stave’s end.

Following Heffernan’s kicker and hot on the heels of yesterday’s Frank O’Hara reading, here is another O’Hara classic, “Lana Turner has collapsed!” which I reread recently in the excellent new collection Selected Poems: Frank O’Hara.

Above: Spinning DNA into GOD with seven moves.

Doublets, or Word Ladders, is a game invented by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll for “two little girls who found nothing to do” on Christmas Day 1877, though there is some evidence that writers played with the form during Luther’s Protestant Reformation or perhaps even earlier in the Odyssey. Carroll originally called the the game “word-links,” but by 1879 he had published enough of the puzzles in Vanity Fair magazine to merit a collection by Macmillan titled “Doublets: a word puzzle,” a reference to the witches’ incatation in Macbeth, “Double, double, toil, and trouble.” The name stuck, and the game was an immediate and runaway hit.

The rules are simple: change one word into another by altering a single letter, which counts for a step. Each step needs to read as a word, and the start and end words are often related in some poetic way. Carroll’s explanatory example involved changing HEAD to TAIL in five moves: HEAD / HEAL / TEAL / TELL / TALL / TAIL. Other popular doublets include making a DOOR LOCK, obtaining a LOAN from a BANK, and turning WHEAT into BREAD (more here and here). Later, other gamers followed in Carroll’s footsteps, adding rules for Studdlets, Splices, Splits, and Splinters (see David Miller’s excellent “Word Games for Formal Logic,” here).

In this 1996 article from The Mathematical Gazette, magician, math writer, and Carroll scholar Martin Gardner writes of Stanford computer scientist (and TeX inventor) Donald Knuth’s experiments with using computers to solve doublet puzzles:

[Knuth] constructed a graph on which 5,757 of the most common five-letter English words (proper nouns excluded) are represented by points, each joined by a line to every word to which it can be changed by altering just one letter. The graph has 14,135 lines. […] Most pairs of five-letter words on Knuth’s list can be joined by ladders. Some—Knuth calls them ALOOF words because one of them is “aloof”—have no neighbors. The graph has 671 ALOOF words, such as EARTH, OCEAN, BELOW, SUGAR, LAUGH, FIRST, THIRD, NINTH. Two words, BARES and CORES, are connected to 25 other words; none to a higher number. There are 103 word pairs with no neighbors except each other, such as ODIUM-OPIUM and MONAD-GONAD. Knuth’s 1992 Christmas card featured the smallest ladder (11 steps) that changes SWORD to PEACE by using only words found in the Bible’s Revised Standard Version.

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Above: Stevens (left) and O’Hara on the phone (right).

In the vein of Walter De Maria’s seminal 1968-69 show “Art By Telephone” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (full recording at UbuWeb) comes another telephone-based art exhibition by another august Chicago institution: Coudal Partners’ Verse by Voice. Two initial favorites are Wallace Stevens’s “The Snowman” as read by Jim Coudal, and Frank O’Hara’s “Steps” as read by Rosencrans Baldwin. (BTW: Have you noticed that Coudal.com’s patron saint is St John of God, the patron saint of booksellers? Awesome.)

My favorite love poems—for people, for food, for nature, for poetry—seem to come most frequently from the pen of the incredible Robert Hass. A wonderful reader of his own verse, this 2004 reading in his hometown of Berkeley, CA at the Lunch Poems series he hosted for eight years is a special one indeed, and a perfect way to finish the week. Enjoy.

Hot on the heels of my post about pantoums, Peter recommends you listen to the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor, titled “Pantoum.” As one set of program notes explains, “For years it was rather casually assumed that in adopting this title Ravel was merely indulging vague exotic inclinations. But nothing about Ravel’s composing was ever vague, and in 1975 the British scholar Brian Newbould proved that Ravel does in fact adhere closely to the structure outlined above and, what is more, observes a further requirement of the original form—that the poem (or movement) deal with two separate ideas pursued in parallel, in this case, the brittle opening theme on the piano and the subsequent smoother one on strings two octaves apart.” More here [PDF].