F. M. Gleb's Blog

I was originally going to post all of this without any context, but I felt bad doing it without giving out some props.

When I was fourteen, my sister gave me a copy of A Book of Surrealist Games as a birthday present. I was a snotty brat back then (I am a little less snotty now), didn’t realize its true worth, and somehow managed to have it end up on my sister’s bookshelf, an entire state away from me. I finally rediscovered this wonderful book a few days ago, and immediately set out to read it. Before I even opened the cover, I had already begun planning strange surrealist drinking parties in my head. Of course, I had no idea what I was talking (thinking?) about: I imagined many more balls than are actually involved (zero).

When I was twenty-two, someone posted a video of a dog eating cabbage on my facebook. It’s kinda cute:

According to Wikipedia, “the surrealist works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and nonsequitur.” So then what are surrealist games? The book reads that “surrealist games and procedures are intended to free words and images from the constrains of rational and discusrive order, substituting and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation.” Well, I had to reply to the cabbage-dog video, so I figured I’d put this book to a good use.
The first game I tried was the most basic one: automatic writing. You do it like this: Put yourself in a receptive frame of mind, and start writing. Don’t think about what you’re writing. If the flow of words pauses, end the sentence and begin a new one with some predetermined letter.

I replied that I was going to reflect about watermelon, go into a receptive state of mind, and begin writing. Each new forced sentence would begin with a ‘w’, for “watermelon.” This is what I came up with:

while at a table, sharing a bad in the biblical sense, I am watching the screen of facebook. Face? Book? Why do we have a difference between a face and a watermelon. What is the difference between me and you, pole of beauty? Can we adhere to the important rules of solitaire and bridge, and can we decide where we live without talking to our dogs? World wide web is intense and is a home for us all, facebooks and watermelons and cabbage eating dogs.

Well, I don’t know if that’s really a good example of what one is supposed to come up with, but I posted it anyway. So, that was my first experiment.

My next experiment was a two-person chain game of definitions. To play this game, one person writers down a question and hides it. Then a second person writes down the answer (without knowing the question). Remarkable facts emerge! Of course, I needed a partner, so I video chatted with Nicole (who was like 1800  miles away! the internet is so cool), and we modified the rules to make things workable. We came up with this:

What is beauty?
It is when a chair has three legs too many.

The next game was similar, but with conditionals (one person writes down a sentence beginning with if/when, the next person writers down a sentence in the conditional or future tense).

If a butterfly had no wings
A string would be too short to sew a sweater

When a ship’s sails are torn
A butterfly will commit genocide against the winged

If I were to be a successful record collector
There would not be enough food for the winter

When a sturdy pair of military boots is worth its weight in gold
There will be no biscuits to be had

When a kangaroo’s pouch is already full
There will be a taco shop on the moon

If a child’s eyes lose their wonder
Humanity will shoot Christmas logs into space from battleships

Then Nicole had to go to sleep because of the two hour time difference.

So, all in all, it was pretty cool. I hope to play more games. The example results in the book are kind of more profound, but hey, Nicole and I are just plain old people from 2011 (happy new year!), not high-brows from ’20s.