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No. 1270: N+7 Garfield

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N+7 Garfield

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Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1270

Strip by: Manyhills

Jon: I'm looking through a veterinary supportance catalyst for a Valentine's daybook gig for Liz.
Jon: Hmmm...
Jon: Think she'd appreciate an electric probit warm-up?
Garfield: I know I would.

The author writes:

N+7 is an Oulipo procedure invented by Jean Lescure, a specific instance of the general case W±n. Each noun in the source text is replaced with the seventh subsequent noun in a dictionary; the meanings of such other instances as V-2 and A+4 should be transparent. Lescure didn't replace proper nouns, nor include them when counting up to seven, and I have followed his lead. Choice of dictionary makes quite a difference to the final text; I used the OED Online, which is why the replacing words are all quite alphabetically close to the originals.

Originally I was planning to apply this process to a randomly chosen strip, but luckily I checked first because it turns out chance is anathema to Oulipo: part of the school's rejection of Surrealism was a complete repudiation of ideas such as aleatoricism. So instead I chose the date (20)08-02-12 by permuting the date of creation, (20)12-08-02.

[[Original strip: 2008-02-12.]]

Original strip: 2008-02-12.