I met Daniel Levin Becker two years ago in Paris at a colloquium on Paul Fournel. He had just graduated from college and was serving as a slave in the Oulipo archives — or, at any rate, this was my impression. I met him again, some six months ago at the Oulipo in New York festival, and was delighted to learn that he was now a member of that band of rats who build the maze from which they must escape. I am now doubly delighted that Daniel is playing the UpRightDown game. (Read his “Gold Swayed Shoes.”) I sat down a couple of days ago with this this brilliant young writer and talked about life and craft and witchcraft.

LEE BERMAN: As a member of the Oulipo, you are now officially trapped for life, and afterlife, in a rat maze. What is your current escape plan?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Am sans dash plan. As Sal Mara (what a man) scrawls, a smart rat plans a madcap rat-trap and thwarts that trap, laps at that trap’s snarls and scam-maps and parallax walls as a swank fatcat laps at a Manhattan. A savant rat — a packrat, at that –packs a fan and a lava lamp and a warm alpaca afghan, basks as ghazals and tankas and anagrams swarm and stalwart grammars fall apart. That pajama-clad rat sprawls, yawns, has a ratnap. That rat adapts and, at last, balks at vacant paths.

LEE BERMAN: As the newest member of the Oulipo, with the weight of mortality and immortality on your shoulders — how do you feel?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Well, let’s emend–we’ve elected the even newer member e-represented here Nevertheless, we’ll expect she resembles me: she felt perplexed, then extreme glee, then speechless reverence, then needle-ended nerves, then sheer vexèd stress, then redressed, peeve-free self-esteem. (Whee!) She felt redeemed. Me, c’est le même.

LEE BERMAN: Does Raymond Queneau appear to you in your dreams? What does he say? What does he do?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Still spring nights bring his winking spirit, grinning if I bid him sit (first midnight sighting I didn’t, which did, I think, miff him), livid if I dismiss his impish witticisms. If I’m writing simplistic kindling — nihilistic philippics, inspid chick-lit — his sighing misgivings diminish it till I pink-slip it; if I’m killing it, slinging sick fibs with brisk skill (”picnic, lightning”), his spirit insists I stick with it till I finish.

LEE BERMAN: Name three writers you admire.
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Tlooth, Hopscotch, Omoo. Who jots down böks–oops, books–so good, so rococo, so non-stop cool? So long, to boot? Don’t know. Forgot who. Whoops.

LEE BERMAN: But seriously, IS there life after death?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Mm-hmm: bugs, gulls, skunks; glum bucks, plump ducks, sunburnt kudus, cumulus fluffs. But us? Nuh-uh.

LEE BERMAN: Now let’s talk about your brilliant talk of the town, “Gold Swayed Shoes.” How did you come up with the idea? Could you discuss any constraint you might have imposed on yourself?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: As I recall, when we spoke in New York in April, on the occasion of my first reading with the Lipo Gang, for which I had read a few very short stories of specific lengths, mine-sincerely opined that it’d be a good idea for me to write a text of as many syllables as there were words (D, in Roman notation, in both cases). So off I set on my extremely lazy way. I’ve been fascinated for the last few months by shoes dangling from electrical wires, of which there are more in San Francisco than I’ve seen anywhere else I can remember, so I was excited to find the image so central to the plot of episode eleven.

Writing a monosyllabic text isn’t very hard, as formal constraints go; the inevitable accidental iambs and trochees are pretty easy to get rid of, by dividing everything into lines of ten words (or more or less, depending on one’s personal prosodic preference) and verifying at a few decibels that they hold together rhythmically. This part was kind of a lark, even if the cat did look askance at me. The biggest challenge there is getting a correct word-tally from Microsoft Word, which doesn’t know shit on the matter of hyphenation.

The other challenge, evidently, was to convey the happenings of the episode from a non-omniscient perspective, which made the whole second half more or less off-limits and forced me to be a bit byzantine in describing, say, the significance of the yellow badges and the whole yogic phantasmagoria thing. (I also didn’t find a convincing way to express “Shoah memorial” monosyllabically.)

I will say, for the record, that mastering which words are monosyllabic and which aren’t is way easier in English than it is in French, what with its incessant schwa-bandying. Nobody has ever looked at me so abhorrently as a certain high-ranking Lipo Gangster did the first time I tried to write a monosyllabic story in French. With the possible exception of the cat, for reasons explained above.

LEE BERMAN: But seriously, entre nous, what IS the point of writing under constraint?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Since I’m surprisingly bad at discussing this with a straight face, I’d rather paraphrase my elders and betters: Stravinsky said that embracing arbitrary limits can help us sidestep “the chains that shackle the spirit,” Perec simply that setting himself rules made him feel free. I buy that, I guess; I like it primarily because it’s a challenge that keeps teaching me new stuff regarding language, and because rules drastically reduce the third-guessing that creative writing typically entails in my experience.

LEE BERMAN: But seriously, do you really admire those three writers mentioned above? Come on.
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: Yes. God knows where we’d all be were Harry Mathews not Harry Mathews; Cortázar’s debut novel was sort of a dud, but most of the shorter and stranger works are great. Haven’t actually read Omoo, but why not? Herman was a total thug.

LEE BERMAN: Daniel, when were you born?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: I was born six high-school stints ago, right into a landmark of dystopian fiction. (It was fiction, right?) As of this writing, I’m just about half as old as l’Oulipo.

LEE BERMAN: Isn’t it true you tried to sell Freedonia’s secret war code and plans?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: No. You’re thinking of the environs of Mount Snowdon. The “secret code” is just the fine print from Welsh lottery brochures.

LEE BERMAN: Daniel, have you anyone here to defend you?
DANIEL LEVIN BECKER: No. Why, do you smell a rat? I have to go.

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