Eunoia

Oh my god. Eunoia, meaning beautiful thinking and the shortest word in English that uses all five vowels, is also a book of prose poetry by Canadian author Christian Bök. The 112-page volume took him "seven years of daily persistence" to finish. Why so long?

[Eunoia consists] of five chapters, each chapter of which contains words that use only the letter A, say, or E, I, O, or U. (There is no Chapter Y; elsewhere in this collection, outside of the title work, Bök recognizes Y as a consonant. Within Eunoia, however, he avoids the use of Y entirely.) If that weren’t enough, Bök also imposes other parameters on himself:

"All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire. . . . The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once)."

Among the myriad challenges here, no e means most past tense verbs are out and no y just about eliminates adverbs. How well does such an exercise stand as literature? Well, the full text is available here. Here's how the I chapter begins:

Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks - impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing schtick which might instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight.

I came across this amazing find via Jaybo at metafilter, who also gives links to mp3 files of the entire book and then some. And really, you have to hear it to fully appreciate it. Really.