"All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy is nothing short of a complete rethinking of what a novel can and should be. It's true that, taken on its own, All Work is plotless. But like the best of Beckett, the lack of forward momentum is precisely the point. If it's nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write. One is forced to consider the author, heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence. It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power. Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollock canvas as mere splatters of paint." -- Matthew Belinkie

Christ, what an asshole.

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It's worth noting that that "review" or whatever came from a site called overthinkingit.com

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what?

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Metafilter in-joke.

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ohhhhh. I've somehow managed to avoid metafilter all these years. That's totally my kind of joke though.

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I love it. Especially the typos.

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Lyn Hejinian and Susan Howe think this is very funny. Also, very 20 years too late and 2% as clever.

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I have no idea what you're trying to say, but I think it might be "I'm a humorless douche".

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I have a thing on my computer that makes it do this kind of thing in its spare time.

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Yes, I wrote that thing.

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I was trying to be ironically self-deprecating, in an effort not to look like a fanboy. I believe that, with this response, my failure in both is assured.

I shall now withdraw from the discussion and seek comfort in my butter chamber.

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the club, let me join you it.

Edited at 2009-01-27 04:49 am (UTC)

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You have a butter chamber? I am intrigued.

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You do? That's cool, I have one that does the green text from The Matrix. Your one sounds better though.

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I dunno. I'm not so big on movie adaptations.

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i think this is completely awesome.

i don't usually comment on your journal, jwz, but the overwhelming negativity inspired me.

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Did he just modify your xscreensaver hack to output ascii and then print the results?

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I seem to recall you're not crazy about Hüsker Dü, but they actually did a song called "All Work And No Play" with the lyrics you'd expect:

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The Fiction Circus has an article up about this... just beware of the picture.

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That's what you think passes for an "article"? That's what I call a "link".

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Did he do a banner style set of pages?

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This reminds me of a book I read about recently (Vladimir Sorokin's The Queue):

It is the story of a group of Russians standing in an absurdly long Moscow queue, waiting for an item which is unknown, yet believed to be of the highest quality and necessity. The book features no narrator or even traditional characters. It is instead a recording of the sounds one hears in this queue, from flirtatious conversation to grunts and moans and yawns. This non-narrative, aptly described as a "Symphony of the City" by translator Sally Laird, includes blank pages representing the silence as the queuers sleep and has no qualms about filling page after page with nothing more than the names of queuers being called by police officers at "checkpoints".

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"Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollock canvas as mere splatters of paint."

Simplistic book, meet mere splatters of paint.

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I'd celebrate this a lot more if it wasn't for the reviews on the back page. If it's going to have a review on the back page, there's only one thing it can say.

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This is 100% true.

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somewhere, mzd is gnashing his teeth and wishing he'd thought of it first

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I love how the pseud review was written before the book was started.

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A friend's MS art thesis project was to make a 100 page book of textual variations of "fuck art". Some were like airplanes running into sky-skrapers in ascii... or other things. At least he had an original phrase.

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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a bull doy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play

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