» About     » Archive     » Submit     » Authors     » Search     » Random     » Specials     » Statistics     » Forum     » RSS Feed     Updates Daily

No. 1723: Perecfield

First | Previous | 2014-02-05 | Next | Latest

Perecfield

First | Previous | 2014-02-05 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=1723

Strip by: Manyhills

{Garfield salts his cat food}
Garfield: Just what is a Monday?
SFX: PLIP
{The lid falls off the salt shaker}
{The cat food is buried in salt}
Garfield: An unlucky day overcharged with magic memories of SatSun.

The author writes:

Georges Perec (1936-1982) was a French author associated with the Oulipo movement (see SRoMGs passim). He is admired by readers from Donald Knuth to Thomas Bangalter; among his many writings are La disparition, the story of the disappearance of Anton Vowl (a lipogram that omits the letter 'e'); his magnum opus Life A User's Manual, a study of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment block partly based on a knight's tour of a 10×10 chessboard; and the work which concerns us today, The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise, an eighty-page, one-sentence, breathless comic novel based on a challenge by Jacques Perriard to write a novel based on how a computer might follow a flowchart. On page 43 of said novel (Random House Vintage Classics 2011 edition, trans. David Bellos) we discover that he, or at least his narrator, had a low opinion of Mondays.

[[Original strip: 1982-05-10.]]

Original strip: 1982-05-10.