Exercises in style

Raymond Queneau has long been famously obscure or obscurely famous. His principal fame relates to having written a book which became a Louis Malle film "Zazie dans le metro."

He belonged to a tradition of literature , mathematics and philosophy that at least in France was put up with and sometimes celebrated.
Whereas in English, there has seemed to be a more meat and potatoes attitude, and a unease with overexperimentation.

One of his books Exercices de Style, (in English, the title is Exercises in Style has also been translated into Italian by Umberto Eco as well as other languages.



In each of the 99 sections, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St.-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat.
The story is in each case told in an entirely different manner from haiku to hilarious. In numbers, dialect, dialogue, pig Latin, spoonerisms, metaphor, officialese ekcetera* he maps the changes.

Recently a graphic comic version has been made by Matt Madden
has been released working through a nondescript everyday story.
A man gets up from his laptop, on his way downstairs to the kitchen , his wife upstairs asks him the time. He replies. By the time he arrives in the kitchen and looks 
in the refrigerator he has forgotten what he has come for.

as shown in the template

From this inauspicious beginning he retells the story from the view of manga, changing viewpoints and styles exhaustively.
Taking up on this theme, The Third Coast International Audio Festival from Chicago presents

The 2006 TCF ShortDocs: 99 Ways to Tell a Radio Story
with the following limits
A radio experiment with the following elements:

• An opening sentence ("To begin with, they never got along.")
  
• 3 specific sounds (pre-recorded voice, a rhythmic noise, an exclamation)
  
• A time limit (2 min 30 sec)
  

You can submit until years end as mp3s to thirdcoastfestival@gmail.com Four submissions will be included in the conference Short Docs they must be received by September 8th

ekcetera*
Queneau's English translator Barbara Wright says

He spells words the way everyone pronounces them. . . . Since I became familiar with his word "ekcetera," I have lent an ear in every country I have been in and, almost without exception, everyone, in every country, says EKCETERA. .

the Third Coast Festival website.
Matt Madden
Raymond Queneau (1903-1976)