Complete Kaos

Sweet Intoxication

or….golden throath

It’s one of my all-time favorite books.  It’s called Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.  He describes it as an “progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable.”

It is written in the form of letters between the citizens of the fictional island of Nollop, an independent nation off the coast of South Carolina and home of Nevin Nollop, who invented the phrase “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”  That phrase is written in tiles over a statue of Nollop in their town square, and when one night a storm causes one of the tiles to fall, the council decides that it’s a sign from Nollop that they are no longer allowed to use that letter, in speech or writing, on pain of progressive punishments including public beating and up to banishment.

Then another tile falls.  Then another.

The citizens, who are all very attached to their words and writing, mount a campaign to come up with a phrase that uses all 26 letters but is shorter than Nollop’s, thus proving that he was not divine and negating all the edicts.

Because the novel is told in the form of letters the citizens write, and this is the genius part…the author must also stop using the letters as they fall.  So the book gradually stops using letters until at one point I think they’re down to just five.

The resolution literally made me get up and dance around the room.

It’s clever, creative, and a not-really-veiled-at-all parable about monotheistic oligarchy.  It’s not a long book, you can read it in an afternoon.

but jfc, the amount of time it takes to constantly keep people moving and make sure they’re in the right spaces and trying to come up with wording for it is always such a shock. 

Like, fuck, I made you pick up a coffee cup, you need to put it down at some point. also I can’t remember what I dressed you in, can you push up your sleeves? I don’t remember if you even have your shirt on.

Here’s an adult:

Another really interesting thing about Jacanas is that it’s the dad who does all the child rearing while mom goes off to lay more eggs. Amd their really good dads too! Plus look at how they Cary their babies around!:

My heart galloped through the skies that night. Back to my herd, where I belonged. And I wondered if they missed me as much as I missed them. 

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002)