Booles!

* * * * * * Or the Rhetoric of Unreal
* * * * * * * * * Nalls and Nimps in Xorandor's Griceland
* * * * * * * * * * * * by J. L. Speranza, for the Grice Club
* * * * * * * * * * * * * Dedicated to Jason Kennedy

"The problem with my computer," Grice would complain, "is that it fails to recognise (a) pirot, and (b) sticky wicket".

JASON asks in COMMENTARY to the squeezed 'nimplication', "Have you or Jones read any Christine Brooke-Rose, who wrote Xorandor? It's both experimental and rigorous, and she is a sort of lost piece of the Oulipo movement." Indeed, and that must be one of the best titles an author may have come up with. Thus reads this online review at

http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/xorandor.html

"Xorandor (the name comes from the logic operators XOR AND OR, the most inspired SF nomenclature since that early spaceship called "A-star-go") is a thoroughly researched, cleverly written and intellectually titillating fake." The reviewer writes: "Best not to think too hard about the unlikely conjunction of ultra-high-density logic circuits and hard radiation.) The narrators -- two mildly repellent child computer-freaks"

I wonder why Jason is suggesting this, :).

"enmesh this in argumentative meta-narrative about the best order to report the facts. Clouded by amusing computerspeak

"Nall" -- "Nimplies NOT!"

"studded with tape transcripts (complete with pause timings, P 4.36 sec) and chunks of pseudo-program: REVIEW DEC 1 "PAGES OF BLOCK CAPS NUMB THE MIND" ENDEC 1 ENDREVIEW". "All this tricksiness, this game of distancing the actual events, gives them more force than straight narrative might have." "There is a lurking joke in "eproms" for "school holidays", and one needs no degree in computer science to savour the expletives

-- "Booles!" -- "Debug!"

"And there's "diodic" and "triffic". Mentions of "erased ROM" (the state of having forgotten something) induce carpings: Read-Only Memory doesn't get erased, and human memory (which is written to as well as read) is more like mass storage -- disk or WORM. Then comes technobabble about whether the computer/rock has "a mass memory and a scratch pad memory and a dynamic memory and an EPROM and... did he do his type-checking at runtime or compiletime. [...] Brooke-Rose's cerebral antics with computers just have it."

Christine Francis Evelyn Brooke-Rose's A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets, I was educated by Jonathan Picken, is the standard reference in stylistics and related areas, e.g., in Griceian G. N. Leech's Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. She had a major influence on Andrew Goatly's The Language of
Metaphors. Goatly also did his PhD at University College, London, BTW. An introduction to her work and Goatly's can be found in Peter Stockwell's Poetics of Science Fiction, which also refers to Brooke-Rose's Rhetoric of the Unreal

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose, "A Grammar of Metaphor: A Critical Study of English Poets. An outgrowth of her PhD, University College, London. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, and educated at Somerville, Oxford -- where J. M. Jacks was arguing against Grice! She donated a lot of things -- letters, books, journals, to the university of Texas at Austin -- and she lives "Somewhere in the South of France" (The "C" of Grice's example). Mainly a novelist. Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was born in Geneva, Switzerland, on Jan. 16, 1923. The younger of two daughters of Alfred Northbrook Rose, who was English, and Evelyn Brooke Rose, who was half-Swiss and half-American, Christine was raised in Brussels and educated at Somerville, Oxford (B.A. 1949, M.A. 1953) and UCL (PhD. 1954). Her parents' marriage dissolved while Brooke-Rose was quite young; her father died in 1934, and her mother later became a Benedictine nun (Mother Anselm). During World War II, Brooke-Rose served as an intelligence officer in the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force, working at Bletchley Park. She married Rodney Ian Shirley Bax, whom she met through her war work, on May 16, 1944. They were divorced in January, 1948, and the marriage was later annulled. On Feb. 13, 1948, Brooke-Rose married Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz (later Peterkiewicz). When her husband became ill in 1956, Brooke-Rose began to write novels after having published Gold (1955), a metaphysical religious poem based upon the anonymous fourteenth-century English poem PEARL. Her first two novels, The Languages of Love (1957) and The Sycamore Tree (1958), were satirical novels of
manners. The Dear Deceit (1960), based upon her father's life, and The Middlemen: a Satire (1961) were also conventional novels, although The Dear Deceit used the technique of presenting the story in reverse chronological
order. After her own illness in 1962, Brooke-Rose's fiction changed dramatically; her next novel, Out (1964), discarded the traditional ideals of character and plot and began the play with language and form that has marked her work ever since. From 1956 to 1968, Brooke-Rose worked in London as a freelance literary journalist. In 1968, Brooke-Rose separated from her husband and moved to Paris, beginning a career as a teacher of Anglo-American literature and literary theory at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes. As a professor, Brooke-Rose was able to work on her fiction only during summer breaks. Such (1966) is the story of the
after-death experience of an astronomer, told in terms of astrophysics. Between (1968), centering around the experiences of a professional
translator, is a book about language and communication. In 1970, Go when you see the green man walking, a collection of short stories, was published. Brooke-Rose has called her next novel, Thru (1975), a "fiction about the fictionality of fiction." 9 years elapsed between the publication of Thru and the publication
of Amalgamemnon (1984); Brooke-Rose referred to this period as her
"traversée du desert." Amalgamemnon and three subsequent novels, Xorandor (1986), Verbivore (1990), and Textermination (1991), form a loose "computer quartet" reflecting on the demise of humanism. Amalgamemnon, written entirely in future and conditional tenses, is about a female professor of literature in a time when the humanities have become irrelevant. Xorandor is a science fiction story about the discovery by two children of a
silicon-based civilization that feeds on nuclear radiation."

>>>>>>> XORANDOR <<<<<<<<<

------"The story is written in the form
------of dialogue and computer printouts
------by the children, who use an invented
------technological slang. The book
------incorporates areas of physics
------and was written with the assistance
------of the author's cousin, Claude Brooke,
------a physicist to whom Brooke-Rose was
------briefly married from 1981 to 1982.

"In Verbivore, a sequel, the now grown children must deal with Xorandor's
descendents, whose activities have caused a failure of electronic communications media. Textermination, about the gathering of hundreds of recognizable literary characters at a Convention of Prayer for Being, deals with the advent of a semi-literate popular culture. As a translator, Brooke-Rose is best known for In the labyrinth (1968), an English translation of Alain Robbe-Grillet's DANS LE LABYRINTH and winner of the 1969 Arts Council Translation Prize. As a literary critic, Brooke-Rose is best known for her two studies of Ezra Pound, A ZBC OF EZRA POUND (1971) and A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF POUND'SUSURA CANTO: JAKOBSON'S METHOD EXTENDED AND APPLIED TO FREE VERSE (1976). A GRAMMAR OF METAPHOR (1958), a critical study of English poets, was an outgrowth of her doctoral work at University College. A RHETORIC OF THE UNREAL (1981) is a collection of essays analyzing narrative techniques in various types of fiction, while STORIES, THEORIES, AND THINGS (1991)
contains essays of structural analyses of literary texts and general discussions of issues in literary theory. Now retired from teaching, Christine Brooke-Rose lives in the south of France. The Brooke-Rose collection was purchased by the HRHRC in 1992. More information about Christine Brooke-Rose and her work may be found in the
DICTIONARY OF LITERARY BIOGRAPHY, vol. 14, pp. 124-129.

A book on her: Ellen Friedman and Richard Martin, eds.
Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose 1995. "The British novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose (born 1923) is increasingly being regarded as one of the most significant writers of the contemporary period. In her dozen novels she has explored themes as diverse as biligualism (as a metaphor for alienation) and the influence of computer technology on the humanities. As these themes suggest, Brooke-Rose is sometimes perceived as a "difficult" writer, especially given the dazzling virtuosity of the linguistic wordplay that enlivens her later novels. "Utterly Other Discourse" (a phrase from her 1984 novel Amalgamemnon) provides a valuable introduction to her work; in fifteen essays--some previously published, some written for this book--scholars from America, England, and Europe examine her work from a variety of critical angles. Also included is the
opening chapter from Brooke-Rose's autobiographical novel, Remake, offering
a rare look at the woman behind the texts.