Quantity Over Quality
Dosa Plaza
One way to get your point across in this post-modern world is to go for quantity over quality. Raymond Queneau brilliantly showcased the predominance of style over content by repeating the same banal story in 99 different styles in Exercises in Style.
Now, this Dosa-Palooza has launched a similar assault to bring the dosa back onto every desi's breakfast table. Apart from the usual plain dosa, masala dosa, onion dosa and rava dosa, this plaza offers 100 other varieties of dosas (a total of 104!). However, unlike other post-modern movements, the difference, as one might surely hope, is that the variety is in the content and not the style.
posted by Prashanth Pappu @ 3:11 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I was hoping for a menu online... These vicarious treats are what I live for nowadays.
Another work of Queneau's : "100 trillion sonnets". 10 pages, each page containing a
sonnet. Each page cut into fourteen strips, one line to a strip. By combining strips at random, 10^14 sonnets may be generated, each of which scans perfectly. "100 trillion subs", anyone? The idea might work even better with chaat...
Haven't read (or even heard of) Queneau but he sure sounds interesting.
Re:100 trillion sonnets, I was just doing some calculations - say a guy wants to read that book and decides to spend his entire life on it. Assume he lives to a ripe old age of 100 years (that's approx. 3.3 billion seconds), does not waste any time eating, sleeping, watching TV etc : you know ... just comes out of the womb, puts on his glasses and heads straight for the book. He would have to read more than 30000 sonnets per second.
So if anyone claims to have read that book he is either a freak level speed reader like the Cheshire Cat or ... maybe he's just lying.
Well, that also makes Raymond Queneau the most prolific poet in the world! Check this for a random "master-piece"...
So we know Queneau was prolific, but
here is evidence that he was also polymathic.
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