[SNIP]

Hi Martin

I've never come across the concept of a lipogram before but I can't, for the life of me, see the point.

Neither, I'm afraid, can I see the point of the cited passage. If I were to open a book, and the first page presented to me was as below, I'd quickly close it and never pick it up again.

Now you may think I'm a literary philostine but, believe me, I devour books by the shelf-load, and this is a load of waffle to me.

Just my POV :-)

Terry

>In any case, it is a matter of resources, will and skill. Georges Perec wrote a whole novel which is a lipogram, La Disparition. without using the letter "e".
>
>Here is a fragment of the excelent translation of Gilber Adair (the title became "A void") which managed to keep the lipogram:
>
>
>Noon rings out. A wasp, making an ominous sound, a sound akin to a klaxon or a tocsin, flits about. Augustus, who has had a bad night, sits up blinking and purblind. Oh what was that word (is his thought) that ran through my brain all night, that idiotic word that, hard as I'd try to pun it down, was always just an inch or two out of my grasp - fowl or foul or Vow or Voyal? - a word which, by association, brought into play an incongruous mass and magma of nouns, idioms, slogans and sayings, a confusing, amorphous outpouring which I sought in vain to control or turn off but which wound around my mind a whirlwind of a cord, a whiplash of a cord, a cord that would split again and again, would knit again and again, of words without communication or any possibility of combination, words without pronunciation, signification or transcription but out of which, notwithstanding, was brought forth a flux, a continuous, compact and lucid flow: an intuition, a vacillating frisson of illumination as
> if caught in a flash of lightning or in a mist abruptly rising to unshroud an obvious sign - but a sign, alas, that would last an instant only to vanish for good.
>
>
>Enjoy!