Wordiness taken beyond the ridiculous

The World's Longest Novel Longer than Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", Mark Leach has written a novel that is 17 million words. That's right. 17 million words in a single novel. (For comparison, I think the longest books I own are Atlas Shrugged and War and Peace, and both fall short of a million words and are over a thousand pages long). He also has other records!

Quote :

* longest word. Also called "the holy Jah," the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world's faiths and means "god within."

* longest sentence (3 million words).

* longest book title (6,700 words).

That's right. The title is 6700 words long. And who on God's green earth could read a 3 million word sentence and still remember what happened at the beginning? That's the equivalent of reading about 6 copies of War and Peace, except all one sentence, and asking me to remember what the first word was.

I won't even go into his methods of writing. From wikipedia, as it's not on his site "he claims to have employed a modified cut-up technique to generate what he calls a “non-linear literary collage"; i.e., (and from what he has claimed), he goes around the web, taking random bits of text from any/everywhere, runs them through generators, and slaps them into the book. Apparently William S. Burroughs did this, so I can't totally dismiss this as a literary technique. (Plus, there's a wikipedia article about it!)


And, what's great is his comments section: [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]



He also brags about how he won the National Novel Writing Month Award, as though it's a rare and valuable thing, and is based on anything more than uploading a file with 50,000 words to the illiterate bot. And he creates a news release about it. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

So, is anyone actually going to publish the damn thing? Or is it just going to sit there, quietly wasting disk space until the day he dies when somebody might have a look at the file marked "My novel" (written 3350 times, of course) and give up approximately three pages in to the first sentence?

well, you can download the thing on his website!

And by the way, that 6700 word title?

It's all one sentence. I downloaded it (yes, his title is a separate downloadable file), searched for periods and found none.

I heard about this. It looks like someone just went out of their way to make everything "the longest X". While they succeeded at that, what they failed at was every single thing that makes fiction a worthwhile pursuit.

He's baaaaaack!

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There are rules on the site against calling someone a cheater, but let's face it: if he's cutting and pasting words from all over the Net, he's not writing anything. He's just arranging them in pretty patterns.

oh, but he runs them through text generators, scrambling them and such! Algorithms make them new words, and thus new text!

Kateness wrote:

oh, but he runs them through text generators, scrambling them and such! Algorithms make them new words, and thus new text!

Soooo.... He's making a massive Text Block of Doom and Destruction, with no coherent sentences. That's not writing, that's typographical vomit.

I must've missed him last year - possibly because I tend to stay in my regional subforum, what with the rest of the boards being so damned massive. Fascinating creature, isn't he?

No, it's coherent. When he and I got in a pissing match last year, he took the excerpt I had posted, did whatever he does to it, and sent it to me as a private message. It was basically my text with some names scrambled and synonyms thrown in, but it took me about a second to realize it was my text.

Okay, so it's not typographical vomit - it's just horrendously obvious plagiarising and utterly, utterly pointless.

I mean, why the hell is he "writing"? It's not as if everyone will love him more for winning NaNo with a wordcount of one million, and it's not as if he's actually going to publish the damned thing - no self-respecting publisher would touch something like that.

It's just... fucking pointless.

I don't know guys, I kind of love him. It's art, what he's doing - postfrontal-lobotomy postmodernism. He could be the next big thing. It's very avant garde, I'd jump on the wagon now, so you can claim street cred when it goes mainstream.

I found the private message, and my corresponding piece of text.

Mine:





Koldo knew that he
wasn’t needed here. He could fall asleep and the meeting would not be any
different. It was hard for an ambassador to be of use to his country when his
country did not actually have any relations with either Namasova or Majanius,
nor was it in any real contact with the three rogue provinces. Yet, as a member
of the royal council, he was required to attend. His absences in the past had
been met with stern words from the king, so he came to these things and used it
to gauge the general mood of the other major players in the kingdom, something
always useful to be aware of.


His:
Ladel understood that her presence was superfluous to the proceedings.
She might drift into a dream and the hearing would be unaffected. A
galactic agent cannot effectively assist her planet when that planet’s
government refuses to engage in basic diplomatic practices with other
worlds, such as Zeti Reticuli or Uranus. Her home world didn’t even
maintain genuine communications with the four scoundrel territories.
Even so, as an associate of the imperial commission, she was obligated
to be present at the meeting. Her nonattendance in times of yore had
generated a severe rebuke from the Lord of the Hive, so she attended
the commission hearings and drew on them to measure the universal
disposition of the supporting actors in the Hive, a practice that had
proven valuable on many occasions.

What the fuckity fuck? o.O So he takes your scene and then just makes it sound as stilted and awkward as he possibly can? That's stupid.

If I were him, I'd be bored out of my skull.

Ayezur wrote:

I don't know guys, I kind of love him. It's art, what he's doing - postfrontal-lobotomy postmodernism. He could be the next big thing. It's very avant garde, I'd jump on the wagon now, so you can claim street cred when it goes mainstream.

I'm not sure if I, personally, would call it art, but yeah --- slap a few excerpts of it on Times' Square, hire a good agent/spin doctor, rephrase it from a 'literary work' to 'word art' (and if you want to be really hip, call it 'word.doc') and rent a spacious atelier in NoHo to showcase your constellations of work while adopting a rugged Chris Cornell-look and grumpily mouthing into the mic about dadaism and postpostmodernism and how, like, the written word is dead (deceased! pushing up the proverbial daisies! it is an ex-word!) and ta-dah, I'm sure you've fooled at least 65% of the critics.

Don't badmouth Dadaism. It's the longest-running prank in history.

He was banned from NaNoWriMo a couple of weeks ago. Finally.

It's dumb.

Holy Christ. 0_0 I never thought I'd see the work that made "Spacedust and Chaos: A Requiem" look positively minimalist.

On the other hand, any points it earns by making that epic piece of shit seem dull, it immediately loses again when you learn that this guy has puked out seventeen million words and technically written, what, none of them? He took bits of other peoples' text, sent them through a program, and then threw it into a text file. And if that "non-linear" thing means what I think it means, then he doesn't even have to make sure it all follows some kind of order. *headdesk*

See, this is why I have difficulty with a lot of experimental and/or avant-garde approaches to fiction. I know it can be a legitimate approach, and damn hard to do right, but it often gets used (especially in college-level writing courses) as an excuse to chuck a lot of shit together and not get criticized for it. Sort of like "it's my style" on DeviantArt.

ETA: Guys, I tried. I tried to read the damn title and I couldn't get through it. This is the first story I've ever seen where the title alone would require a marathon snarking.

Reading Kate's example of his technique and the Wikipedia article, I'm pretty sure he's using it incorrectly. You're supposed to completely rearrange the text and then add in your own phrases to make it make sense.

Tungsten Monk wrote:

See, this is why I have difficulty with a lot of experimental and/or avant-garde approaches to fiction. I know it can be a legitimate approach, and damn hard to do right, but it often gets used (especially in college-level writing courses) as an excuse to chuck a lot of shit together and not get criticized for it. Sort of like "it's my style" on DeviantArt.

I use this as a general rule when dealing with "avant-garde" stuff. Anything with the words "prog-", "anti-", or "post-" as the first syllable will be nothing like what comes after the dash, and it will almost certainly be less fun, more pretentious, and more pointlessly reactionary. I don't think avant-garde is used so much because the artist is lazy, more that they just like to masturbate their own egos. That, and critics will like it a lot better if you say it's avant-garde. For example, music magazines are more likely to add 1 and 1/2 stars to your album rating if you describe your music as "indie".

As for me, I'm going to download this motherfucker and see if it's snarkable.

Wish me luck, soldiers. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Mr.Doobie wrote:

As for me, I'm going to download this motherfucker and see if it's snarkable.

Wish me luck, soldiers. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Luck. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Wow. Banned from NaNoWriMo. I didn't even know that was possible.

EDIT: Okay, so even the author's opinion of his "work" is a bit terrifying.

Leach's website wrote:

“William Burroughs said that words don’t have brands on them the way cattle do,” Leach said. “Today I am opening the gates of my literary corral and turning ‘Marienbad My Love’ loose on the public."

Run! Run for your lives! It's been unleashed!

Spotts1701 wrote:

Mr.Doobie wrote:

As for me, I'm going to download this motherfucker and see if it's snarkable.

Wish me luck, soldiers. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Luck. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Thanks. Alright boys, I'm going in...

Quote :

* COMPLETE TITLE

marienbad my love in the ruins of the dreams and beliefs of a Christ-haunted journalist-turned-filmmaker exiled on a deserted island, attempting to persuade a married woman from his past to help him produce a science fiction-themed sequel to the 1960s French new wave classic Last Year at Marienbad, an act of artistic creation to bring about the death of time and the birth of a new religion if only he can make her remember him inside his celluloid voyage of dark violence...

AAAAAAAAAUUUUUUGH! No More! No more! Make it stop! Make it stop!

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