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Not A Wake: A dream embodying (pi)'s digits fully for 10000 decimals
"Not A Wake" is a collection of poetry, short stories, a play, a movie script, crossword puzzles and other surprises, constructed according to a unique counting the number of letters in successive words of the text (the first word has 3 letters, the next word has 1 letter, the next word has 4 letters, and so on) reveals the first 10,000 digits of the famous mathematical number pi (3.14159265358979...). Fans of the number pi, constrained writing (such as Georges Perec's "La Disparition"), wordplay, puzzles, or experimental prose and poetry will find much to savor in this, the first book-length work based on the pi constraint.
- GenresPoetryFictionMathematics
108 pages, Paperback
First published February 17, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 13, 2022
5 stars for the concept and the fact that he pulled it off (well, I only did spot checks). Better than 5 stars for the *crossword puzzles* (!!!!) that he inserted in the middle, which (allegedly) also follow the concept.
But, alas, as a "book" that one tries to "read", 1 star. In other words, it take a great deal of imagination on the part of the reader to glean meaning from the (ahem!) string of random-ish words in this treatise.
The best part is definitely the appendix, where Mr Keith allows himself to describe what he was trying to do, without adhering to the Pi digits rule.
My advice is to buy the book IF: It is a gift for a math geek; or if you want to award Mr. Keith for this accomplishment. Otherwise, take my word for it - he does it!
But, alas, as a "book" that one tries to "read", 1 star. In other words, it take a great deal of imagination on the part of the reader to glean meaning from the (ahem!) string of random-ish words in this treatise.
The best part is definitely the appendix, where Mr Keith allows himself to describe what he was trying to do, without adhering to the Pi digits rule.
My advice is to buy the book IF: It is a gift for a math geek; or if you want to award Mr. Keith for this accomplishment. Otherwise, take my word for it - he does it!
March 1, 2022
This one is extremely hard for me to rate. If there were an option for half stars, this would be an easy 2.5 for me. But there isn't, and so I have to go with my gut. The book's structure is based on the digits of pi. That's cool as hell.
Here's the thing: obviously the author is familiar with constrained writing as practiced by Oulipo (he even talks about them a bit in the afterward), and his experimentation here is really cool. As a fan and practicioner of ergodic literature myself, I love this kind of formal experimentation, and it takes a daring and intelligent writer to take on a project like this. BUT...
At the same time, reading this is not exactly a pleasant experience. It reads like poetry, with the occasional attempt at narrative coherence, and although visually striking and philosophically daring, the book just isn't that interesting or fun to read. Not exactly a fun summer beach read here. But I guess I'm glad it exists? I don't mean to damn with faint praise, but well, 3.141592653...
Here's the thing: obviously the author is familiar with constrained writing as practiced by Oulipo (he even talks about them a bit in the afterward), and his experimentation here is really cool. As a fan and practicioner of ergodic literature myself, I love this kind of formal experimentation, and it takes a daring and intelligent writer to take on a project like this. BUT...
At the same time, reading this is not exactly a pleasant experience. It reads like poetry, with the occasional attempt at narrative coherence, and although visually striking and philosophically daring, the book just isn't that interesting or fun to read. Not exactly a fun summer beach read here. But I guess I'm glad it exists? I don't mean to damn with faint praise, but well, 3.141592653...
January 28, 2023
Starting at 6001th digit:
Everywhere is whiteness. Everywhere a smooth, a seamless ceiling. Glossy floors, totally colorless walls. No dark shadowings, simply a bright, hot beam of light is on every visible surface. I apprehend three bits of weirdness: • A rumble of invisible machinery, • A concealed but noticeable tunnel that leads ahead, • The lightly sloping floorings underfoot. I walk, perceiving the shallow-but-real downstairs tilt now in evidence. Tunnel’s close, I’m inside: in darkness, complete darkness, obscuring behind and (downright plausibly) ahead. Darkness seeming, logically, even blacker after minutes of lightness. I proceed very slowly over an uneven and rough surface with hands stuck to walls. This underfloor clearly wandering constantly downwards, I soon touch a new sleek surface, discovering a big button radiating heat.
Everywhere is whiteness. Everywhere a smooth, a seamless ceiling. Glossy floors, totally colorless walls. No dark shadowings, simply a bright, hot beam of light is on every visible surface. I apprehend three bits of weirdness: • A rumble of invisible machinery, • A concealed but noticeable tunnel that leads ahead, • The lightly sloping floorings underfoot. I walk, perceiving the shallow-but-real downstairs tilt now in evidence. Tunnel’s close, I’m inside: in darkness, complete darkness, obscuring behind and (downright plausibly) ahead. Darkness seeming, logically, even blacker after minutes of lightness. I proceed very slowly over an uneven and rough surface with hands stuck to walls. This underfloor clearly wandering constantly downwards, I soon touch a new sleek surface, discovering a big button radiating heat.
January 23, 2023
I want to give this book more stars, but it is properly incomprehensible. One day, I would like to go back through it with a fine-toothed comb and see how much meaning I can pull out of it, but even imagining doing that is a little overwhelming. Definitely an interesting read.
September 21, 2025
I love this book.
It's not very great, but I love the idea and nerdyness of it. So while I rate it quite low, I hold it in high esteem, and it is among my favorite reads this year.
A short extract I feel embodies what I don't like with the book, in the way I like it:
"So shall I write
conceiving without regret
incoherent verses"
- 25151076106
It's nerdy, it's creative. It's also messy, and disconnected.
It's not very great, but I love the idea and nerdyness of it. So while I rate it quite low, I hold it in high esteem, and it is among my favorite reads this year.
A short extract I feel embodies what I don't like with the book, in the way I like it:
"So shall I write
conceiving without regret
incoherent verses"
- 25151076106
It's nerdy, it's creative. It's also messy, and disconnected.
September 12, 2018
Not a Wake surprised me in the end: for a long time, I was predicting I was going to rate it a scant two stars. Sections five and six, out of the book’s ten (each of which approaches a different literary genre), were quite tough going; but, the last four sections played a large part in redeeming the thing as a whole for me.
The book is really a tricky work (as anyone who gets up to section ten might realize); I think it has plenty more depth of meaning than is first apparent. But: the meaning itself is tied up in that of randomness and nonsense. The constraint Keith imposed on himself, that of making the number of letters in each word in his book encode a digit or two of pi in a certain way detailed in his introduction, might seem like the literature-denying tomfoolery of a dabbling mathematician; but, as his website www.cadaeic.net makes clear (through whose Scrabble poem at http://www.cadaeic.net/scrpoem.htm I first discovered him), no one writing these days seems to have cornered the market on constrained writing more than Michael Keith. To me, Not A Wake partakes of the serious experimentation of the (often also constrained) writing of that monolith, John Cage.
The net effect of Keith’s “pilish” (as he calls the constraint he uses here) might ultimately boil down mostly to a rather longer-than-usual average word length in his writing, but I find its effect to be profound regardless. Knowing the length of each of Keith’s words to have been practically predetermined, I find I pay substantially more attention than usual to each of his word choices, even when compared to those in most poetry. While reading this book, the part I kept returning to was section three, entitled “Dream Haiku”: somehow Keith manages to marry what’s recognizably a haiku aesthetic of transience (if not haiku’s syllable counts) to his “pilish”.
That said: I did almost drop the book in frustration when I reached section five, “Dream-of-Consciousness”, which was even more disconnected and nonsensical than anything that had come before. Keith does not, indeed, show his full command of pilish narrative until the following three sections (and the narrative of section six, "Dream on Film" — however well-written — is awful as a story), and I thought he’d simply gone lazy as a writer during “Dream-of-Consciousness”. I was only able to make it through that bridge of asses by a process of loosening my mind from expected associations to an even further degree than was previously necessary, or something like that, anyway.
Then, by the end of the book, I had managed to regain enough faith in Keith as a writer that I swallowed wholeheartedly things like his constraint-flagellating paraphrase of A Tale of Two Cities’ opening in section eight. Retroactively, it then seemed that Keith had had more control than I’d given him credit for in the earlier sections, and had simply enjoyed playing with levels of nonsensicality — again shades of Cage, with his belief that art should ape nature in its disconnectedness.
Ultimately, I’d feel it to be a shame for readers who enjoy literature for its form, specifically, to dismiss Not a Wake out of hand. With all its nudges and winks, it’s more experimental and form-breaking than that now-acknowledged master Georges Perec’s A Void. Yes, I do feel that it’s not as successful an experiment; I do feel that Keith could have steeped himself more in simple literature before diving in to write it. But, I find it also sets its own kind of standard for experimental writing, poetry especially. If I’m reading something especially obtuse, I now wonder: would the words here fare any worse if they were somehow made to encode the digits of pi?
The book is really a tricky work (as anyone who gets up to section ten might realize); I think it has plenty more depth of meaning than is first apparent. But: the meaning itself is tied up in that of randomness and nonsense. The constraint Keith imposed on himself, that of making the number of letters in each word in his book encode a digit or two of pi in a certain way detailed in his introduction, might seem like the literature-denying tomfoolery of a dabbling mathematician; but, as his website www.cadaeic.net makes clear (through whose Scrabble poem at http://www.cadaeic.net/scrpoem.htm I first discovered him), no one writing these days seems to have cornered the market on constrained writing more than Michael Keith. To me, Not A Wake partakes of the serious experimentation of the (often also constrained) writing of that monolith, John Cage.
The net effect of Keith’s “pilish” (as he calls the constraint he uses here) might ultimately boil down mostly to a rather longer-than-usual average word length in his writing, but I find its effect to be profound regardless. Knowing the length of each of Keith’s words to have been practically predetermined, I find I pay substantially more attention than usual to each of his word choices, even when compared to those in most poetry. While reading this book, the part I kept returning to was section three, entitled “Dream Haiku”: somehow Keith manages to marry what’s recognizably a haiku aesthetic of transience (if not haiku’s syllable counts) to his “pilish”.
That said: I did almost drop the book in frustration when I reached section five, “Dream-of-Consciousness”, which was even more disconnected and nonsensical than anything that had come before. Keith does not, indeed, show his full command of pilish narrative until the following three sections (and the narrative of section six, "Dream on Film" — however well-written — is awful as a story), and I thought he’d simply gone lazy as a writer during “Dream-of-Consciousness”. I was only able to make it through that bridge of asses by a process of loosening my mind from expected associations to an even further degree than was previously necessary, or something like that, anyway.
Then, by the end of the book, I had managed to regain enough faith in Keith as a writer that I swallowed wholeheartedly things like his constraint-flagellating paraphrase of A Tale of Two Cities’ opening in section eight. Retroactively, it then seemed that Keith had had more control than I’d given him credit for in the earlier sections, and had simply enjoyed playing with levels of nonsensicality — again shades of Cage, with his belief that art should ape nature in its disconnectedness.
Ultimately, I’d feel it to be a shame for readers who enjoy literature for its form, specifically, to dismiss Not a Wake out of hand. With all its nudges and winks, it’s more experimental and form-breaking than that now-acknowledged master Georges Perec’s A Void. Yes, I do feel that it’s not as successful an experiment; I do feel that Keith could have steeped himself more in simple literature before diving in to write it. But, I find it also sets its own kind of standard for experimental writing, poetry especially. If I’m reading something especially obtuse, I now wonder: would the words here fare any worse if they were somehow made to encode the digits of pi?
December 10, 2017
This is a good idea and, while it isn't a masterpiece, it does provide a good entry into the world of constrained writing. Hiss preface explains that better than I can here but, essentially, you put some kind of constraint on the words you u used in your writing. (For example, A Void.) In this case, he has chosen to have every word use the same number of letters indicated by a digit in pi (π)
It's a pity he can't sustain it for an entire 10000 word novella, but his transition from prose to poetry at least shows the validity of th constrained writing concept. The poetry is as good a anything I've heard on The Drunken Odyssey and consideragly getter than the stuff I've been subjected to at readings and poetry slams. the constraint supplies what modern poetry is terrified of—discipline and structure.
HIs screenplay not only has a good narrative with a good strucvture, it might actually work as a short film, although you would be compromising the constraint a lot unless you rewrote it so only the dialogue was constrained by the digits in pi.
It also provides a challenge for a writer. Try some other transcendental numbers, and even try writing one derived from e that has no 'e's in it.
If only he could've sustained it for the full 10000 words.
It's a pity he can't sustain it for an entire 10000 word novella, but his transition from prose to poetry at least shows the validity of th constrained writing concept. The poetry is as good a anything I've heard on The Drunken Odyssey and consideragly getter than the stuff I've been subjected to at readings and poetry slams. the constraint supplies what modern poetry is terrified of—discipline and structure.
HIs screenplay not only has a good narrative with a good strucvture, it might actually work as a short film, although you would be compromising the constraint a lot unless you rewrote it so only the dialogue was constrained by the digits in pi.
It also provides a challenge for a writer. Try some other transcendental numbers, and even try writing one derived from e that has no 'e's in it.
If only he could've sustained it for the full 10000 words.
April 6, 2025
I wasn't expecting this book to go anywhere beyond a (very impressive and well-executed) gimmick, but honestly, cryptic as it is, it has surprising merit as a work of literature as well. being forced to omit pronouns / articles and use longer-than-average words has resulted in a unique syntactical structure and rhythm that is often delightful to read. yes, the reader has to do a lot of digging before coming across these gems, but they're there, I can assure you.
some of my favorite lines:
"Please compensate me a bit among kind strangers / Don't impart our syndromes again to our kids."
"Passing North, I hesitated, after hearing fearful whispers. / I recalled those murmurs: another calamity overtaking faith, / God on a nominal technicality in winter repelled."
"I speculate that something here makes executions seem ethical -- peradventure the goddess I had spotted towering within sanctuary groves."
"a dog lying quietly under a strange tribunal / TO INDEMNIFY SEEMED ALMOST SINFUL / here where he'll collect himself excitedly / I believe cues first indefinite suggestions of innocence."
some of my favorite lines:
"Please compensate me a bit among kind strangers / Don't impart our syndromes again to our kids."
"Passing North, I hesitated, after hearing fearful whispers. / I recalled those murmurs: another calamity overtaking faith, / God on a nominal technicality in winter repelled."
"I speculate that something here makes executions seem ethical -- peradventure the goddess I had spotted towering within sanctuary groves."
"a dog lying quietly under a strange tribunal / TO INDEMNIFY SEEMED ALMOST SINFUL / here where he'll collect himself excitedly / I believe cues first indefinite suggestions of innocence."
April 12, 2024
As an exercise in constrained writing, attempting to write multiple pieces in a variety of forms (including a short play, poetry, crosswords, etc.), this is impressive work. It sounds like Michael Keith really did this as a challenge to himself based on mnemonic devices people have created to remember PI. That being said - if you stripped away the artifice and the, for lack of a better word, conceit, the question becomes this: would I recommend this as a work to be read for the joy of the narratives and and experience? My answer would be no. The idea of this work almost being representative of a dream (when one is “not a wake (sic)”) feels more like a rationalization by Keith for why the pieces don’t really hold together based on their own mechanics and structure. Kudos to Keith for pulling this off - it is quite an achievement (and must have been amazingly time-consuming), but not necessarily one that I will feel a need to revisit in the near future.
March 13, 2022
Quite the undertaking. My favorite part was the movie script. I can’t imagine writing a book based on the number of letters in each word matching the digits of pi, through 10,000 places. Much of it reads like poetry.
Please note: The kindle book costs $3.14. 😁
Please note: The kindle book costs $3.14. 😁
June 25, 2022
Really cool concept and very fun to flip through. Could be helpful in memorizing a good number of digits of pi. Dont expect much coherence in the writing though.
July 25, 2022
I am giving this book three stars in an attempt to converge the overall rating for this book towards 3.141592653…
January 28, 2023
I loved this book. it’s such a unique example of constrained writing.
June 27, 2024
The title is an accurate description of this marvelous example of constraines writing. Several founding members of OuLiPo would have enjoyed this work greatly.
March 14, 2025
Was a good read. - 3.14.2025 at 3:14 pm.
November 27, 2012
This book is written in Pilish. That means each word corresponds to a digit of Pi. The title is a good example: Not = 3, A = 1, Wake = 4. The first three digits of Pi.
The premise is interesting, especially if you're thinking about the interplay of form and content. Pilish is a form of "constrained writing", writing upon which formal requirements are self-imposed. One could argue that any writing is constrained writing, but that's neither here nor there...
I think the gimmick of this book is a good way for an average writer to get noticed. I understand how difficult it is to work under these constraints, but much of the writing in this book is rubbish. Especially the poetry. It seems to be going for some Whitman-esque perusal of all of the universe, but really it just seems like prettied-up free association. When you're talking about a newspaperboy in one stanza and a dominatrix in the next and an octopus in the next, you really need to cool your jets.
Some of the later passages really interested me, though. The screenplay about "zompires" annoyed the hell out of me. An attempt at being funny that just regurgitated genre tropes in the most facile way Pilish could allow... anyway, some of his prose wasn't bad though. And by the final chapter (which I have to admit, is a rather brilliant twist), I felt that I had experienced something sort of unique. Parts of this book did make me question my assumptions about form and content, so I can forgive some unfortunate writing.
The premise is interesting, especially if you're thinking about the interplay of form and content. Pilish is a form of "constrained writing", writing upon which formal requirements are self-imposed. One could argue that any writing is constrained writing, but that's neither here nor there...
I think the gimmick of this book is a good way for an average writer to get noticed. I understand how difficult it is to work under these constraints, but much of the writing in this book is rubbish. Especially the poetry. It seems to be going for some Whitman-esque perusal of all of the universe, but really it just seems like prettied-up free association. When you're talking about a newspaperboy in one stanza and a dominatrix in the next and an octopus in the next, you really need to cool your jets.
Some of the later passages really interested me, though. The screenplay about "zompires" annoyed the hell out of me. An attempt at being funny that just regurgitated genre tropes in the most facile way Pilish could allow... anyway, some of his prose wasn't bad though. And by the final chapter (which I have to admit, is a rather brilliant twist), I felt that I had experienced something sort of unique. Parts of this book did make me question my assumptions about form and content, so I can forgive some unfortunate writing.
Want to Read
June 27, 2024The first book entirely written in Pilish! (I wonder who will even try to translate it to other languages? =)
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