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Love me some dadaist word games. I wrote code to apply Oulipo's S+7 game (replace each noun in a text with the noun seven words later in the dictionary) to the wizard of Oz in one of my Comparative Lit translation courses.

I had an extremely slow Perl program chugging through a dict file when Michael Radwin who lived down the hall from me came by and taught me some basic algorithms -- he said "just make a hash table with the +7th word in it; you can do it in one pass over the dict file." Mind blown.

I got an A; Auntie Emasculation and Uncle Haphaestus were a hit.

Are you sure Auntie Emasculation is not real? I feel like I’ve met at least a couple of them…
S+7 offers precisely this sort of serendipity surprisingly often!
For those who find those kind of approach fund, Raymond Queneau created: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_mille_milliards_de_po%C3%... The physical book is actually not great to manipulate but it is fun. Another recent approach: https://oupoco.org/fr/generateur-de-poeme/index.html (this one is using poems from the 19th century), and it has a "physical" implementation: https://oupoco.org/fr/le-projet/view/35/la-boite-a-poesie.ht...
I only ever read Harry Mathew’s work because Queaneu rarely wrote in English and I don’t read French. I did like Exercise in Style though.
About four weeks ago I read Harry Mathews' short-story collection The Human Country.

I came to it for "Franz Kafka in Riga" (sold to me as a sort of proto-quine, but really it's not very quiney, it's more a funny story about the writerly ego).

His most famous work in there is "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)". It's a story that requires leisure to read, as the recipe does to cook; if you just want to read the story and get it over with, it's not going to work at all. Which is clever in hindsight. Of course I just wanted to get it over with, and so it didn't come out for me.

There are several stories literally about linguistic games (particularly the first few in the book); personally I found them intriguing and entertaining but ultimately kind of pointless. (The kind of erudite game where you want to get out a paper and pencil, or go to Wikipedia, but suspect with near-certainty that you won't find any there there if you do.) "The Bratislava Spiccato" is worth reading twice just to see how the non-digressions actually do add up to a reasonable story; I thought it was going to be like Douglas Hofstadter's "Little Harmonic Labyrinth", but (IIRC) I decided that it was actually totally honest, which made the second read feel very satisfactory.

The story I enjoyed most from that collection — the one I recommend it's worth a small amount of your time no matter who you are — was "The Broadcast", which is a linguistic game in technique but not in subject matter. The (much) longer variation "Their Words, For You" also somewhat appealed to my aesthetic sense but (like "Farce Double") went on much longer than my patience.

https://archive.org/details/humancountrynewc0000math/

Thanks for the tip on the short stories. When I read “The Conversions” I tried to tease out all the meta games, same with Tlooth. But I never found it rewarding. I’m more drawn to his prose, topics, and the air of aristocracy that comes from his eccentric and wealthy upbringing. His talent plus that inescapable past makes for some unusual stories. Like The Journalist, or Cigarettes.
I’ll take the chance to recommend one of my favorite books, the Oulipo-inspired Eunoia by Christian Bök: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunoia_(book)
I also enjoyed Crystallography a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallography_(book)
if you can read Italian "All'alba Shahrazad andrà ammazzata"[0] is a collection of monovocalic sonnets which tell or describe masterpieces of literature (the title would be something like "Shahrazad shall hang at dawn", for Arabian Nights).

Umberto Eco, which famously enjoyed this stuff, wrote the preface.

Ironically I learned of this book from an American, Douglas Hofstadter.

[0] https://www.semidinchiostro.com/prodotto/giuseppe-varaldo-al...

This procedure looks like it would result in some hilarious texts; shame there is no example in the article.
Is it clear to you what is done? As far as I can tell, we are instructed to "empty" the text, then to compile three lists, but the article I see ends with:

> In the example Le Lionnais gives, the liste M is the list of all verbs appearing in the Tohoku paper.

… and says nothing about what to do with those lists.

Lieven Le Bruyn is just in the habit of cataloguing how algebraic geometry culture shows up in unexpected places, eg. http://www.neverendingbooks.org/what-about-simone-weil/ . Surprising to see on Hacker News.
The penultimate sentence is

> Finally, we fill the empty spaces in the source text by words from the target lists, in the order that they appeared in the target texts.

Ah, I seem to have skipped over that. Thanks!
If it's an Oulipo game, most likely you then go back to the original emptied text, and fill down from the lists that were made from other sources.
I worked in agebraic geometry, so I love Grothendieck, and I've read and loved a bunch of oulipo and oulipo-related authors, so this blog post has left me with a feeling of
...and then? Don't leave us hanging!