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Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum consists of a single, 60,000-word sentence. An epistolary fiction to an unidentified email recipient, the novel is modelled after the Japanese prose genre of the zuihitsu, an unfolding sentence in which resolution and closure are endlessly deferred. Our relationships with time and the environment have been radically altered by our awareness of global warming and the experience of being on the internet, and this shape-shifting novel is written out of and towards this moment of crisis in the ordinary, in which the experience of attention has changed entirely. Playful, disruptive and digressive, it reflects the associative movements of our minds. Lorem Ipsum is also an intimate, singular exploration of being a parent, a child, dreams, work, fantasies, happiness, memory, protest, repetition, intergenerational conflict, and the forms of community which appear or disappear based on how we conceive of 'shared time'. It is a book about the foundations upon which we build our lives: in John Ashbery’s words: ‘a chronicle of its own creation’.
200 pages, Paperback
Published May 26, 2021
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90 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
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July 31, 2022I adored this warm and self-conscious and wise and meticulous. It's a text in two minds it appears so revealing and one feels so close to the author but there's also a gauze thrown up a built-in anonymity which I find mystifying but pleasantly so it's a creative choice that announces the work as self-conscious rather than slipping into the airport-novel invisibility mentioned early on.
I feel one could trawl this as a fishing liner and this structure! There are fossil layers in the period of composition. For those unaware! It's a 50,000 (not 60,000, as Goodreads oddly alleges) word sentence. Modelled on Zeihitsu as exemplified by the radiant Sei Shōnagon. Oli has read a lot of other zeihitsu than this as well as academic pieces on the genre/form but I did find it interesting that clash or, more kindly, weave of the stillness residing in The Pillow Book and the perpetual flow of this. It's one I'm still thinking of what a gorgeous book
...common forms of affectionate address, such as love, or baby, or darling, the last of which she pronounces with a bit of a country twang, taking a little pleasure in the cliché, a gesture which makes the occasionally difficult particulars of our relationship more bearable through their abstraction into more general forms of relation between men and women - our just being one more love to another love - and at others is simply a form of content-less sociability, the lorem ipsum of our days, employed when we are talking about boring things or doing the washing up or whatever, an empty gesture, almost a kind of touch...
I feel one could trawl this as a fishing liner and this structure! There are fossil layers in the period of composition. For those unaware! It's a 50,000 (not 60,000, as Goodreads oddly alleges) word sentence. Modelled on Zeihitsu as exemplified by the radiant Sei Shōnagon. Oli has read a lot of other zeihitsu than this as well as academic pieces on the genre/form but I did find it interesting that clash or, more kindly, weave of the stillness residing in The Pillow Book and the perpetual flow of this. It's one I'm still thinking of what a gorgeous book
...common forms of affectionate address, such as love, or baby, or darling, the last of which she pronounces with a bit of a country twang, taking a little pleasure in the cliché, a gesture which makes the occasionally difficult particulars of our relationship more bearable through their abstraction into more general forms of relation between men and women - our just being one more love to another love - and at others is simply a form of content-less sociability, the lorem ipsum of our days, employed when we are talking about boring things or doing the washing up or whatever, an empty gesture, almost a kind of touch...
June 12, 2021
Lovely flow, thoughts coming in and out gently and easily, a delightful reading experience. Not a clue what happened tho
August 4, 2023
An oddity. It's one long sentence. But that's hardly the most important thing.
It's an interesting proposition - because of the endless parentheses and continuations, it's difficult to put down. With most books there's a paragraph or a sentence that makes you go 'yep, now I can nip to the loo'. But with this it has to be much more affirmative. 'This is the point at which I stop'. Funny to think of a book where you have to take active agency in stopping reading.
By and large it's not quite a narrative, in the sense of a story, but rather an expose on the writer's life; his interactions with the people around him, the peregrinatorial wash of the stories he's telling. Something like the snapshots of the 'stream of consciousness' of an individual. Somewhat obviously, this is what a stream of consciousness is like.
And quite frequently stream of consciousness is banal. Or if not that, then concerned with details that one would typically remove from a book. It doesn't go so far as 'bought some crisps, £1.20' but there's a lot of detail here that would normally be considered unengaging.
That possibly seems like I'm discreetly calling it boring; in a sense that is true but it's more that boring is its condition. A kind of rambling, and ultimately quite intimate, exposition on the writer's state.
I'm less interested as to whether this is honest - insofar as I am into the Barthesian idea of the death of the author, or rather, that I'm not interested in the fidelity of this act of writing to the nature of its author. The narrator is a narrator and I assume he is distinct from Hazzard himself.
There's a lot in here about the materials of its creation - details on how his word processor seizes every time he tries to move things, because this is one long sentence. Great rafts of copy & pasted nonsense (eg, a list of academic criteria at one point).
It's a fun book. It's a difficult book - insofar as it's atypical and puts a few demands, or re-calibrations, in the hands of the reader. But it's written in a light and engaging, witty way that's a long way from the dry asceticism of (say) Pessoa. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to the casual reader but for those who are into experimental literature and stuff that challenges the conditions of the reader, it's well worth a go. It's also relatively short, so no reason to not fill your boots.
Oh and as an aside - 'Lorem Ipsum' is a byline for the text that's often used as filler copy for websites. 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...' which is apparently a poor copy of Cicero. There's plenty of wee references like that here (and it has a list of source materials at the back of the book) so it's also one for academic literature geeks to eke out the references and allusions.
It's an interesting proposition - because of the endless parentheses and continuations, it's difficult to put down. With most books there's a paragraph or a sentence that makes you go 'yep, now I can nip to the loo'. But with this it has to be much more affirmative. 'This is the point at which I stop'. Funny to think of a book where you have to take active agency in stopping reading.
By and large it's not quite a narrative, in the sense of a story, but rather an expose on the writer's life; his interactions with the people around him, the peregrinatorial wash of the stories he's telling. Something like the snapshots of the 'stream of consciousness' of an individual. Somewhat obviously, this is what a stream of consciousness is like.
And quite frequently stream of consciousness is banal. Or if not that, then concerned with details that one would typically remove from a book. It doesn't go so far as 'bought some crisps, £1.20' but there's a lot of detail here that would normally be considered unengaging.
That possibly seems like I'm discreetly calling it boring; in a sense that is true but it's more that boring is its condition. A kind of rambling, and ultimately quite intimate, exposition on the writer's state.
I'm less interested as to whether this is honest - insofar as I am into the Barthesian idea of the death of the author, or rather, that I'm not interested in the fidelity of this act of writing to the nature of its author. The narrator is a narrator and I assume he is distinct from Hazzard himself.
There's a lot in here about the materials of its creation - details on how his word processor seizes every time he tries to move things, because this is one long sentence. Great rafts of copy & pasted nonsense (eg, a list of academic criteria at one point).
It's a fun book. It's a difficult book - insofar as it's atypical and puts a few demands, or re-calibrations, in the hands of the reader. But it's written in a light and engaging, witty way that's a long way from the dry asceticism of (say) Pessoa. I'm not sure I'd recommend it to the casual reader but for those who are into experimental literature and stuff that challenges the conditions of the reader, it's well worth a go. It's also relatively short, so no reason to not fill your boots.
Oh and as an aside - 'Lorem Ipsum' is a byline for the text that's often used as filler copy for websites. 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...' which is apparently a poor copy of Cicero. There's plenty of wee references like that here (and it has a list of source materials at the back of the book) so it's also one for academic literature geeks to eke out the references and allusions.
December 22, 2023
Someone writes an email to an unknown person in an unbroken, digressive, parenthetical, self reflexive single sentence, acknowledging the Japanese zuihitsu style, follow the brush. About parenting, language, psychology, literary theory, etymology, the life of the mind, font choice, and a lot of other things.
Personal opinion, but when it's done as well as this, there's an eerie and thrilling feeling that you are actually inside someone else's mind and you are sad to have to leave.
My book of the the year.
@prototypepubs are amazing you should buy everything they publish.
Personal opinion, but when it's done as well as this, there's an eerie and thrilling feeling that you are actually inside someone else's mind and you are sad to have to leave.
My book of the the year.
@prototypepubs are amazing you should buy everything they publish.
April 28, 2022
did someone just read my mind and made it into a book omg
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews