new Common-Place (already!) has a great defense of Undisciplined Reading--

"Is it hard to imagine John Cotton at one of the monthly meetings of the OULIPO, reporting to Italo Calvino or Harry Matthews a constraint for literary production? Well, yes. Yet Puritan sermon dictates certainly sound Oulipian: "Take a fragment from a source work. Dramatize or contextualize it in five ways. Then develop three philosophical propositions from it. Then create three rules of behavior based on it. Do this every week for the rest of your life..."