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2002: A Palindrome Story in 2002 Words
This curiously beautiful volume, designed by Ingrid Ankerson and illustrated by Shelley Jackson, is the definitive edition of 2002: a Palindrome Story.
24 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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About the author
Nick Montfort
20 books38 followersNick Montfort is Professor of Digital Media at MIT. He is the author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction and Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities; the coauthor of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10; and the coeditor of The New Media Reader (all published by the MIT Press).
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 17, 2019
At times a bit of a word salad, at other times poetic:
'As Babs eyes Bob, Bob snaps time open.'
Which even makes some sense, given the 'plot'.
Where a typo is noted - "Ariadne, I felt, negates heros [sic]." the [sic] itself is of course later part of the palindrome.
And within the palindromic story, there's a palindromic refrain near the start and end which I thought worked really well.
Perhaps this is all just warmup for reading something like Finnegans Wake...
'As Babs eyes Bob, Bob snaps time open.'
Which even makes some sense, given the 'plot'.
Where a typo is noted - "Ariadne, I felt, negates heros [sic]." the [sic] itself is of course later part of the palindrome.
And within the palindromic story, there's a palindromic refrain near the start and end which I thought worked really well.
Perhaps this is all just warmup for reading something like Finnegans Wake...
Read
June 7, 2013AS FAR as value is a relation between length and style, this ten centimeter by ten centimeter is priceless. No jokes, this story will have you going back and forth and back again in glee for fourths. SO much so that the pages became unglued from the cover.
The closest approximation to this story would be Eunoia, as both revel in a certain freewheeling exercise of constraint (both also feature characters by name of Bob) though as a narrative 2002 is more satisfying.
Harry Mathews offers the sole blurb of "2002 is not only a marvel of ingenuity: it is also funny, sexy, and full of surprises" the veracity of that statement I can attest to.
Shelley Jackson's pictures are well done and printed on a translucent paper.
Montfort cowrote this volume with William Gillespie. A reissue coupled with an essay explaining how Montfort and Gillespie wrote this would be lovely—I'm guessing a computer program assisted somehow but this does not read in the same cold way of wholly machine generated text.
The closest approximation to this story would be Eunoia, as both revel in a certain freewheeling exercise of constraint (both also feature characters by name of Bob) though as a narrative 2002 is more satisfying.
Harry Mathews offers the sole blurb of "2002 is not only a marvel of ingenuity: it is also funny, sexy, and full of surprises" the veracity of that statement I can attest to.
Shelley Jackson's pictures are well done and printed on a translucent paper.
Montfort cowrote this volume with William Gillespie. A reissue coupled with an essay explaining how Montfort and Gillespie wrote this would be lovely—I'm guessing a computer program assisted somehow but this does not read in the same cold way of wholly machine generated text.
April 29, 2015
Word salad that almost maybe resembled something with a shape and story. Beautiful book, and pretty impressive to create a 2002 word palindrome.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews