Taking the long view, to a fault

From the world outside Waldo's door, news for those with time on their hands.

First, an item from the world of music:

More than 1,000 music-lovers showed up on Saturday, July 5, in a German town to hear a change of note in the longest-running and slowest piece of music ever composed.

Eccentric US composer John Cage (1912-1992) planned his composition to last 639 years, meaning more than a dozen generations of musicians will be needed to play it on an automatic, as-yet unfinished organ at Halberstadt, Germany.

Entitled ORGAN2/ASLSP, it began in 2001 and has so far reached its sixth note. The second part of the name means "as slow as possible."

Neighbors have got used to the monotonous tone coming out of the former Church of St. Burchard, which was used as a pig-sty in the communist years of East Germany. At first the all-day-and-night tone sounded something like an air-raid siren.

One step at a time

The audience hushed on Saturday as two more organ pipes were added alongside the four installed so far and the tone became more complex at 3:33 p.m. local time. The second of the new pipes is set to kick in this November. A machine keeps the sound coming out.

Since some notes will not be needed for decades, pipes need only be added when donations suffice.

Organizers in Halberstadt rejected questions about what it all means.

"It doesn't mean anything," one of them said. "It's just there."

Other works by avant-garde composer Cage include one piece that consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

Because it's one of those pieces often talked about but never heard, here's a BBC clip of a performance by full symphony orchestra:

A little too esoteric? Here's news of the longest novel in history (free; downloadable if you dare. And it has Nazis and aliens):

Texas writer Mark Leach has published an expanded edition of "Marienbad My Love," the world's longest published novel in English, that tops 12.6 million words and also sets new records for the world's longest word, sentence and book title.

Leach has been making a run at the record books with his still-growing story of a Christ-haunted filmmaker who believes he is called on by God to bring about the end of the world by producing a science fiction-themed pastiche of the 1961 French New Wave classic, “Last Year at Marienbad.”

“If you’re going to destroy the world, you really ought to do it big,” Leach said. “When I released the first edition of "Marienbad My Love" in March, the original length of 2.5 million words seemed plenty long for a 21st century Apocalypse. But the ideas kept coming, and the story kept growing. Now I feel like I'm just getting warmed up.”

“Marienbad My Love” is a massive work by almost any measure. It dwarfs Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” a 1.5-million-word opus that currently holds the “Guinness Book of Records” title as the longest novel in English. “Marienbad My Love" is almost ten times as long as L. Ron Hubbard’s “Mission Earth,” which is widely regarded as the world’s longest science-fiction novel at 1.2 million words, and Madison Cooper’s 1.1-million-word “Sironia, Texas,” which made news in 1952 when TIME Magazine wrote that it was “apparently the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published.”

Leach also claims that "Marienbad My Love" includes:

* the world's longest word. Also called "the holy Jah," the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from the world's faiths. It means "god within."

* the world's longest sentence (3 million words).

* the world's longest book title (6,700 words).

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About "Marienbad My Love"

"Marienbad My Love" by Mark Leach is a love story for the end of the world. The novel features a protagonist who attempts to film a science-fiction-themed pastiche to "Last Year at Marienbad." A free ebook download of "Marienbad My Love" is available at marienbadmylove.com.