Alastair Brotchie (–2023)

A shadow is a shadow all the same.
Make two o'clock with one clock.
Never wait for yourself.*

Ditch the Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit this holiday season and instead inflict some spicy Surrealist action on your bourgeois family and friends. Of course everyone knows about the Exquisite Corpse, but how about 'Certain Possibilities Relating to the Irrational Embellishment of a City' where players are asked whether they would 'conserve, displace, modify, transform, or suppress certain aspects of a show more city' [or other object, system or concept]. Or perhaps 'Would You Open the Door?' where players imagine they are dreaming and there is a knock at the door; after opening it and recognizing the visitor, they must decide immediately if they would let the visitor in or not and why (visitors may be famous, infamous, living or dead, or someone known to all players—answers must be the first thing that comes to mind). The book also includes amusing examples of answers and outcomes from usual Surrealist suspects such as Breton, Péret, and Magritte. All games guaranteed to be even more fun with a glass of absinthe in hand.

*from Proverbs for Today by Paul Eluard and Benjamin Péret show less

A strange name for a strange and intriguing book.
Oulipo is a contraction of Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as ‘ workshop of potential literature’.
Oulipo is a group of French speaking mathematicians and writers who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. One of its founders, Raymond Queneau is the author of Exercises in Style.

The book is a compendium of different techniques and approaches which are described, often with illuminating show more examples. It gives a fascinating glimpse into a host of different ways of thinking and looking at the world.

One of the most fascinating consequences of constraints is that, far from reducing ideas and opportunities, the introduction of constraints serves as the stimulus to new ideas.

Just take a look at the spam arriving with your email to see the creative lengths that spammers will go to, to get past anti-spam software. Or the lengths that car owners in the UK will go to, to construct words from the very limited patterns of letters and digits allowed on a number plate

The book opens with Queneau’s ‘Hundred thousand million poems’ Ten pages each of 14 strips of text, that can be combined to create this immense number of different poems. From there onwards the book is a treasure trove of ideas to change the way you see.

My personal favourite is ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’ by Richard Curtis which uses the technique of substituting a vocabulary drawn from a radically different environment, in this case ‘skinheads’, and applying it to Shakespeare’s play. The language is inevitably strong, but it had me crying with laughter.

This is a book that will enliven parts of your brain that others simply cannot reach. show less

A brilliantly constructed, meticulously researched biography painting a personal portrait within a realized social and historical milieu. Really, one of the most satisfying biographies of anyone I've ever read.

"[T]he game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation and stimulus, a mine, a treasure-trove and finally, perhaps, a drug." --Simone Collinet (144)

In this very little volume, editor Mel Gooding describes and compiler Alastair Brotchie demonstrates the centrality of games to the Surrealist enterprise. An inventory of ludic methods indicate how texts, images, discursive events, and other objects are produced through the application of automatism, chance, and the absorption show more of individual efforts into transpersonal aggregates.

The fourth of the four sections consists primarily of source notes and commentaries, and even includes a list of the "known" Surrealist games which are not represented among the recipes and samples in the collection. There are two useful bibliographies: one an abridgement of Kurt Seligman's 1943 bibliography of Surrealist works (133), the other Brotchie's own pointers for "Further Reading in English." (164) In the very end of the volume, seven pages are occupied by "The Little Surrealist Dictionary."

A Book of Surrealist Games is admirably designed, with a built-in bookplate on the inside front cover, many black-and-white reproductions of Surrealist visual works, and portraits of key 20th-century Surrealists. The game instructions are in most cases perfectly lucid, and ready for practical application. show less