July 22, 2004
"He prefers the perverse French esthetes"
Jeff Erickson at Ernie's 3D Pancakes points to Christian Bök's Eunoia (2001), which is named for the "the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels." Each of the first five chapters is written using only one of the vowels.
And there's more, such as a chapter entitled "AND SOMETIMES", whose
content I bet you can guess.
The book's web site even has a flash animation (of CHAPTER E, natch).
But I think I'll wait for the comic-book format, myself. Or perhaps the mini-series, since according to a blurb available on amazon, "Bök has created artiflcial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Confiict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon".
The same source tells us that "[h]is conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York". As Dave Barry says, I swear I am not making this up.
In other news, "Reading is at risk in the United States, according to a new report from the National Endowment for the Arts".
Posted by Mark Liberman at July 22, 2004 08:36 AM