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The Whole of the Law
Making his way through the Christ-haunted countryside, past the trees and into the deep darkness of the wilderness, the citizen evaded the law; the citizen was a man who wore overalls and boots, as he was a farmer, and the citizen once had a wife with whom he lived and quarreled; the citizen and his wife lived in a state of financial and emotional poverty, with the wife abusing the man when he was sober and the citizen abusing his wife when he got drunk; the two fought with such a frequency that they never had time to have children, nor did they have time to contemplate the impossibility of their relationship, aside from the fact that they couldn't split apart; then, one day, there was an altercation between the citizen and his wife to such a degree that violence erupted; the citizen killed his wife, in an act he would later claim to be an act of passion, or perhaps manslaughter in more legal terms (Why, he didn't mean to kill her!), but this distinction did little to help him as he had, in fact, one way or the other, killed his wife; the citizen knew that the law would be after him, as he made no attempt to cover up his crime, nor did he try to deny it; everyone who knew about the incident knew the citizen had committed murder, intentionally or not; so the citizen, being like most men and not wanting to fall into the non-human jaws of the law, became a fugitive; indeed he left behind his life as a farmer who watched religiously over the crops as they grew and the cows as they produced milk, and, being quite the simple man, he did not take much with him as he went on the run, always on the move, always stuck with the impression that ghosts were following him, or more accurately the ever-changing but uncannily consistent eyes of the law; he had been on the run for what may have been decades, and in that time he witnessed the continuously morphing form of the law, how its agents wore different uniforms, yet possessed the same indifferent face; when the citizen started hiding from the law, he saw that they were men in dark grey uniforms, almost black, with their eyes as shadows and their disposition not so dissimilar from the citizen's own; then he saw that they sported armbands with symbols on them, and that these men now worked with attack dogs, the hounds with their teeth bared and their coats reeking of mud and something else unholy; then he saw that, at some point, the men themselves had been replaced as instruments of the law, replaced with autonomous robots who seemed different on the surface but emitted that same sense of apathetic loyalty to the will of the law; the citizen thought how strange it was that despite the change in agents, the law itself remained the same; the law (the citizen knew) was not a person, nor even a group of people, but a concept which could only be seen with one's own eyes through its myriad tendrils, the way in which it only ever revealed a minuscule fraction of itself, how it resembled a virus more than any known living thing; yes, the whole of the law was impossible to see all at once; it was so vast that no man could hope to understand its shadowy depths; even in moments of calm the citizen felt the phantasmal grip of the law around his throat, squeezing gently but always present, as if to remind the citizen of the battle he could not realistically win; the citizen had felt regret over what he had done to his wife for so long that he no longer knew when he first felt that pain of regret, that need for forgiveness, that need to be forgiven by somebody; and, tragically, but truthfully most of all, the citizen realized he could not be forgiven, that the law was not conceived to be able to forgive anyone, and that the law would hunt him down eventually; the law had to win, of course, as it never slept, nor did it think about anything, and meanwhile the citizen begged for sleep and couldn't help but think about everything; so the citizen waited within the forest, in the dead of night, for the whole of the law to engulf him; there was nothing else he could do.
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Is everyone doing upgrade? Lmao
This... this is probably the longest sentence I have ever read, and I’ve read Dickens.
I like the edginess of the story. All I need now is for a man with a gravelly voice to read this to me, tumbleweeds passing in the wind, and I’m set.
Unfortunately, the long-winded ness of this story and one sentenceness makes this story hard to read. It’s not too hard, but our eyes get no rest and the words kind of blend together.
This... this is probably the longest sentence I have ever read, and I’ve read Dickens.
I like the edginess of the story. All I need now is for a man with a gravelly voice to read this to me, tumbleweeds passing in the wind, and I’m set.
Unfortunately, the long-winded ness of this story and one sentenceness makes this story hard to read. It’s not too hard, but our eyes get no rest and the words kind of blend together.
I put off reading this for a while for somewhat obvious reasons. Nobody wants to read a story that is one block paragraph. I remember joking about doing a gimmick a couple times, but I never expected to someone to seriously enter something that was only one sentence. Oh dear.
At first blush, I actually was quite engaged with the gimmick, especially as it applied to the husband and wife. There's a couple of lines early on that are quite good:
This initially was what I thought the story (and the gimmick) was about: a couple that was stuck together, unable to split apart (or into separate sentences). I thought that was clever.
But that's not what the story was about.
Damn.
So in return for disappointing my lofty expectations, you have now earned a lecture on the distinction between manslaughter and murder. Murder is defined under common law as a homicide with "malice aforethought" but the precise statutory definitions can vary by the state. Most states follow what is called the "Pennsylvania Method" or some variation thereof, which defines murder into two degrees:
1. First Degree Murder: the willful, deliberate, and premeditated murder of an individual.
2. Second Degree Murder: all other murder. Typically this refers to murder arising out of the intent to inflict serious bodily injury, "depraved heart" (i.e. extreme recklessness), or the felony-murder rule.
Manslaughter is divided into two halves. Voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. Voluntary manslaughter is the intentional killing of another person when the person meets a two pronged legal excuse: (1)they are provoked to an such an extreme that (2) a reasonable person would be likely to lose control. The classic example of this is that a man discovering his wife having sex with another man, and killing the man. Involuntary manslaughter is the unintentional killing of an individual due to criminal negligence (or recklessness).
So, in this case, it's not exactly relevant whether or not the citizen meant to kill his wife, as it's clear that by virtue of whatever he did, he acted with either the intent to inflict serious bodily injury or with flagrant disregard for human life. What is important is the circumstances surrounding the fight. From the circumstances, this seems to have been protracted engagement of physical violence, with the citizen having a history of being abusive. Given the evidence, it is likely that he himself started this encounter. Words alone are not provocation. Previous cases that I'm aware of have held that hair-pulling, hitting, and other irritating acts of physical violence have not been held to be adequate provocation to reduce the charge from murder to manslaughter (specifically in a female on male context, however).
Consequently, it is likely that the man in question could be convicted of murder.
Talking about the story proper now.
I generally enjoyed the construction of "sentences" and the vocabulary employed, but couldn't help feeling that the theme itself that the story is trying to get across is at best sort of nebulous and at worst masquerading as something more significant and insightful than it really is. I believe that the endless sentence is supposed to be a metaphor for the relentless pursuit of this thing the author terms the law or the inability of the citizen to cease moving, but the overall commentary I'm suppose to draw is not as clear.
The first issue I suppose stems from what type of law are we talking about. This is mainly a problem of establishing setting more than anything else. The initial description of the citizen and the simplicity with how the citizen escapes calls back to the simplicity of an agrarian society, but time progresses and it quickly kicks into gear to the future of autonomous robots, giving a sense of timelessness to the story. My read of this is that the citizen and overall events that take place over the course of the story are meant to be allegorical or metaphors, but I'm not exactly sure for what. The Men With Armbands and Dogs are definitely supposed to be evocative the Nazis, and the situation seems to be sort of analogous to a criticism of the unfeeling, systemic approach to law and law enforcement in sort of an homage to Kafka's The Trial. The "unchanging" nature of the law has always struck me as odd, as the law, aside from a set of bedrock rules and understandings (which are not so much part of law themselves, but just the greater social order written down), tends to fluctuate a lot. Sometimes in arbitrary ways. The other potential read is that this is somehow a commentary on religion, with themes of forgiveness, religiosity and other stuff scattered throughout the story.
So I didn't get it.
At first blush, I actually was quite engaged with the gimmick, especially as it applied to the husband and wife. There's a couple of lines early on that are quite good:
citizen and his wife lived in a state of financial and emotional poverty, with the wife abusing the man when he was sober and the citizen abusing his wife when he got drunk; the two fought with such a frequency that they never had time to have children, nor did they have time to contemplate the impossibility of their relationship, aside from the fact that they couldn't split apart;
This initially was what I thought the story (and the gimmick) was about: a couple that was stuck together, unable to split apart (or into separate sentences). I thought that was clever.
But that's not what the story was about.
Damn.
So in return for disappointing my lofty expectations, you have now earned a lecture on the distinction between manslaughter and murder. Murder is defined under common law as a homicide with "malice aforethought" but the precise statutory definitions can vary by the state. Most states follow what is called the "Pennsylvania Method" or some variation thereof, which defines murder into two degrees:
1. First Degree Murder: the willful, deliberate, and premeditated murder of an individual.
2. Second Degree Murder: all other murder. Typically this refers to murder arising out of the intent to inflict serious bodily injury, "depraved heart" (i.e. extreme recklessness), or the felony-murder rule.
Manslaughter is divided into two halves. Voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. Voluntary manslaughter is the intentional killing of another person when the person meets a two pronged legal excuse: (1)they are provoked to an such an extreme that (2) a reasonable person would be likely to lose control. The classic example of this is that a man discovering his wife having sex with another man, and killing the man. Involuntary manslaughter is the unintentional killing of an individual due to criminal negligence (or recklessness).
So, in this case, it's not exactly relevant whether or not the citizen meant to kill his wife, as it's clear that by virtue of whatever he did, he acted with either the intent to inflict serious bodily injury or with flagrant disregard for human life. What is important is the circumstances surrounding the fight. From the circumstances, this seems to have been protracted engagement of physical violence, with the citizen having a history of being abusive. Given the evidence, it is likely that he himself started this encounter. Words alone are not provocation. Previous cases that I'm aware of have held that hair-pulling, hitting, and other irritating acts of physical violence have not been held to be adequate provocation to reduce the charge from murder to manslaughter (specifically in a female on male context, however).
Consequently, it is likely that the man in question could be convicted of murder.
Talking about the story proper now.
I generally enjoyed the construction of "sentences" and the vocabulary employed, but couldn't help feeling that the theme itself that the story is trying to get across is at best sort of nebulous and at worst masquerading as something more significant and insightful than it really is. I believe that the endless sentence is supposed to be a metaphor for the relentless pursuit of this thing the author terms the law or the inability of the citizen to cease moving, but the overall commentary I'm suppose to draw is not as clear.
The first issue I suppose stems from what type of law are we talking about. This is mainly a problem of establishing setting more than anything else. The initial description of the citizen and the simplicity with how the citizen escapes calls back to the simplicity of an agrarian society, but time progresses and it quickly kicks into gear to the future of autonomous robots, giving a sense of timelessness to the story. My read of this is that the citizen and overall events that take place over the course of the story are meant to be allegorical or metaphors, but I'm not exactly sure for what. The Men With Armbands and Dogs are definitely supposed to be evocative the Nazis, and the situation seems to be sort of analogous to a criticism of the unfeeling, systemic approach to law and law enforcement in sort of an homage to Kafka's The Trial. The "unchanging" nature of the law has always struck me as odd, as the law, aside from a set of bedrock rules and understandings (which are not so much part of law themselves, but just the greater social order written down), tends to fluctuate a lot. Sometimes in arbitrary ways. The other potential read is that this is somehow a commentary on religion, with themes of forgiveness, religiosity and other stuff scattered throughout the story.
So I didn't get it.
I don't understand what point this is making. A man kills his wife, tries to run away, and gets caught. Okay. That describes the bare-bones plot of a great many things, so what meaning am I supposed to derive from this? We're not given any reason to give particular credence to either side, to care about any of the characters, to want to know how all this turned out, how it happened in the first place.
To be blunt, I think this exists as nothing more than to write a long single sentence for the sake of doing so, and it's not even one that's reasonably constructed as such; you don't throw semicolons at will in place of periods and expect that they're equivalent. Most of these thoughts aren't sufficiently connected to warrant one, so it's not even something impressive from a structural standpoint if I can ignore the story. "Yep, that's a long sentence" isn't going to push it up my ballot unless it's built in a way that the construction enhances it instead of being a gimmick that exists for its own sake.
To be blunt, I think this exists as nothing more than to write a long single sentence for the sake of doing so, and it's not even one that's reasonably constructed as such; you don't throw semicolons at will in place of periods and expect that they're equivalent. Most of these thoughts aren't sufficiently connected to warrant one, so it's not even something impressive from a structural standpoint if I can ignore the story. "Yep, that's a long sentence" isn't going to push it up my ballot unless it's built in a way that the construction enhances it instead of being a gimmick that exists for its own sake.
Alternate Title: That's a Big Boy!
Something I liked:
You know, it's not every day you read a story that seems to actively hate you. This entry is a sado-masochistic exercise in hurting the reader, telling the story of a hopeless fugitive in a single long sentence. Of course, you could have replaced some of those semi-colons with periods, but that would've made things easier for the reader, and clearly this entry had no intention of doing such a thing. By the end of the story the guy is exhausted, and so is the reader, and that's kind of nutty.
Something I didn't like:
Due to how abstract everything is, not to mention the construction, it's hard to tell what was a fault and what was put there deliberately, but a clear misfire came when the author tried to make a distinction between murder and manslaughter. Now, author, not only did you fuck that up, but you disrupted the timelessness of the narrative by trying to implement something rather specific to the real world. The flow of the story was pretty nice up to that point, but then you took one step too far.
Verdict: I have a good idea as to why it was constructed in this way, but I'm still unsure about the story itself.
Something I liked:
You know, it's not every day you read a story that seems to actively hate you. This entry is a sado-masochistic exercise in hurting the reader, telling the story of a hopeless fugitive in a single long sentence. Of course, you could have replaced some of those semi-colons with periods, but that would've made things easier for the reader, and clearly this entry had no intention of doing such a thing. By the end of the story the guy is exhausted, and so is the reader, and that's kind of nutty.
Something I didn't like:
Due to how abstract everything is, not to mention the construction, it's hard to tell what was a fault and what was put there deliberately, but a clear misfire came when the author tried to make a distinction between murder and manslaughter. Now, author, not only did you fuck that up, but you disrupted the timelessness of the narrative by trying to implement something rather specific to the real world. The flow of the story was pretty nice up to that point, but then you took one step too far.
Verdict: I have a good idea as to why it was constructed in this way, but I'm still unsure about the story itself.
At least now I know what 750 words look like when you clump them in one big pile, he-he!
Now I can't speak for everyone, but I'll put my two cents on the one-paragraph gimmick: it's a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, I could only comfortably read it by saying the story out loud, otherwise I would easily get lost, and I don't think I'm the only who's had difficulties reading this smoothly. The only big break the reader has is with that parenthesis with the new sentence in the middle (the "Why, he didn't mean to kill her!" part); other than that, the semi-colons are more like speed bumps than real true breaks. So having the one-paragraph thing will mean giving your readers a hard time getting through the story, at least the first time through.
On the other hand, I think I can see why you chose this route: stream-of-consciousness. You've depicted the half-organized stream of human thoughts pretty well, and surprisingly so since this is not a first-person but a third-person story (though I'd still say that a first-person perspective would've improved this a lot, since having it third-person would make it sound like a narrator trying to rush through the story because he wants to use the bathroom right away). It's also heightened by the implication that this citizen is either immortal or was probably living at the edge of the twentieth century in some rare rural part of Europe when he committed the crime. Either way, there's clearly something off underneath it all, and you depicted that in a good way.
Your theme about law being a faceless thing shows quite well and turns the title you've chosen from something innocuous or standard-ish into something ominous.
One last thing: you've seen the Upgrade picture in an unusual way. Kudos to you for that!
Overall, this is a gimmick done not excellently but done more than just right. Good job!
Now I can't speak for everyone, but I'll put my two cents on the one-paragraph gimmick: it's a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, I could only comfortably read it by saying the story out loud, otherwise I would easily get lost, and I don't think I'm the only who's had difficulties reading this smoothly. The only big break the reader has is with that parenthesis with the new sentence in the middle (the "Why, he didn't mean to kill her!" part); other than that, the semi-colons are more like speed bumps than real true breaks. So having the one-paragraph thing will mean giving your readers a hard time getting through the story, at least the first time through.
On the other hand, I think I can see why you chose this route: stream-of-consciousness. You've depicted the half-organized stream of human thoughts pretty well, and surprisingly so since this is not a first-person but a third-person story (though I'd still say that a first-person perspective would've improved this a lot, since having it third-person would make it sound like a narrator trying to rush through the story because he wants to use the bathroom right away). It's also heightened by the implication that this citizen is either immortal or was probably living at the edge of the twentieth century in some rare rural part of Europe when he committed the crime. Either way, there's clearly something off underneath it all, and you depicted that in a good way.
Your theme about law being a faceless thing shows quite well and turns the title you've chosen from something innocuous or standard-ish into something ominous.
One last thing: you've seen the Upgrade picture in an unusual way. Kudos to you for that!
Overall, this is a gimmick done not excellently but done more than just right. Good job!
My big problem with this story is the text wall. The story concept was really good, but hard to read.
Other than that, I look forward to seeing to see what you will write next.
Other than that, I look forward to seeing to see what you will write next.
Bit of a late one this time around. Got my schedules mixed up apparently.
I can't say I had been looking forward to reading this one the moment it graced my screen. I can recall only one other time that this giant block of text gimmick was utilized and I'll admit, though I was unreasonably harsh with my review of that particular story, I still stand by every word I've said about how it was used. Digressions aside, with this entry I could at least kinda see the cards that the gimmick is placing onto the table, yet I don't think it paid off in the end. Most of it, of course, stems from my frustration with trying to read this story, but ultimately my issue with this story was that in its attempt to prove a point, it sorta shaved off every singular aspect of the storytelling and streamlined it towards driving that message home when what I really wanted was for that message to hit home on its own as the story is being told.
I just want to make it clear that I kinda like the message that we're being given here. The gimmick does kinda enforce the idea a little, though I don't think it's a good enough tradeoff for me to properly enjoy this story. Nevertheless, the message is something I think I can get behind, yet the major issue I have with it is that there was no attempt to make it a resonant one. The delivery/presentation of the idea wasn't engaging enough for the message to stick the landing.
I do understand that you may be purposely making it cold and hard for us to enjoy to reflect the character's woes but I think the way you went about it demanded too much of work on the readers' part for me to sympathize. When I read it to the end, instead of thinking: "look at all the terrible things our fellow citizen is going through in this", which is itself already a selfish concept, I'm thinking "why am I putting myself through this".
To put it simply, if Dostoyevsky had written The Brothers Karamazov as an 824-paged thesis-esque piece instead of the story it was, I don't think his ideas and philosophies would've been as talked about as they were today. I'm not saying you should write with the finesse of a dead Russian dude and expect us WriteOff lurkers to hail you as our new messiah; I'm just stating that there needs to be more effort placed in backing up the message instead of just delivering it with the subtlety and nuance of a backhand slap.
Nevertheless, thanks for writing!
I can't say I had been looking forward to reading this one the moment it graced my screen. I can recall only one other time that this giant block of text gimmick was utilized and I'll admit, though I was unreasonably harsh with my review of that particular story, I still stand by every word I've said about how it was used. Digressions aside, with this entry I could at least kinda see the cards that the gimmick is placing onto the table, yet I don't think it paid off in the end. Most of it, of course, stems from my frustration with trying to read this story, but ultimately my issue with this story was that in its attempt to prove a point, it sorta shaved off every singular aspect of the storytelling and streamlined it towards driving that message home when what I really wanted was for that message to hit home on its own as the story is being told.
I just want to make it clear that I kinda like the message that we're being given here. The gimmick does kinda enforce the idea a little, though I don't think it's a good enough tradeoff for me to properly enjoy this story. Nevertheless, the message is something I think I can get behind, yet the major issue I have with it is that there was no attempt to make it a resonant one. The delivery/presentation of the idea wasn't engaging enough for the message to stick the landing.
I do understand that you may be purposely making it cold and hard for us to enjoy to reflect the character's woes but I think the way you went about it demanded too much of work on the readers' part for me to sympathize. When I read it to the end, instead of thinking: "look at all the terrible things our fellow citizen is going through in this", which is itself already a selfish concept, I'm thinking "why am I putting myself through this".
To put it simply, if Dostoyevsky had written The Brothers Karamazov as an 824-paged thesis-esque piece instead of the story it was, I don't think his ideas and philosophies would've been as talked about as they were today. I'm not saying you should write with the finesse of a dead Russian dude and expect us WriteOff lurkers to hail you as our new messiah; I'm just stating that there needs to be more effort placed in backing up the message instead of just delivering it with the subtlety and nuance of a backhand slap.
Nevertheless, thanks for writing!