=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

The competition at Q was admittedly pretty thin, but nonetheless Raymond Queneau is a legitimate creative icon. He was born on February 21, 1903 in Le Havre, France and died seventy three years later on October 25, 1976.

He was the co-creator of the literary group Oulipo. The other man responsible was Francois Le Lionnais. The group was founded on November 24, 1960. It was a subgroup of the College of Pataphysics. In English, the Oulipo group’s full name means something like “Workshop of Potential Literature.

Queneau wrote: My poor memory is not a chronometer nor a movie camera nor a phonograph nor any other sort of finely tuned machine. It's more like nature with holes, empty spaces, hidden nooks and crannies with rivers that trickle away so that you can never dip your foot in the same water twice

He was married once and remained married for a remarkable forty-four years.

He was a surrealist for a short time but never too seriously. He disagreed with the group’s political stance and didn’t take well to Andre Breton’s dictatorial manner.

Queneau wrote: The poet doesn’t wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposal, subject to his will, submissive to his own activity. He knows how to hunt.

Most of his life he worked at a publishing house. He became a close friend of Georges Bataille.

Queneau wrote: One must see everything.

He was fascinated with mathematics. This fascination has a direct connection to his literary work and the principles of Oulipo, which imposed arbitrary constraints, often of a mathematical nature, on the composition of a text.

Maybe Queneau’s most famous work is “Exercises in Style” which tells the same mundane story—a man meets a stranger twice in one day—ninety-nine different ways. It’s been imitated many times.

Queneau came up with one of the best and most succinct reasons for not killing yourself, at least not for the time being, that I’ve ever come across. Queneau’s reasoning has kept me alive on more than one occasion.

Queneau wrote:  Why should one not tolerate this life since so little suffices to deprive one of it? So little brings it into being, so little brightens it, so little blights it, so little bears it away. Otherwise, who would tolerate the blows of fate and the humiliations of a successful career, the swindling of grocers, the prices of butchers, the water of milkmen, the irritation of parents, the fury of teachers, the bawling of sergeant-majors, the turpitude of the beasts, the lamentations of the dead-beats, the silence of infinite space, the smell of cauliflower or the passivity of the wooden horses on a merry-g0-round, were it not for his knowledge that the bad and proliferative behavior of certain minute cells or the trajectory of a bullet traced by an involuntary, irresponsible, anonymous individual might unexpectedly come and cause all these cares to evaporate into the blue heavens.  

In other words, it can all be over in a flash at any given moment, either at your own or fate’s or another’s whim, and just like that you’re free of the burden of life forever. Why rush it?