the world's longest novel

“Give Me A VERB 51” is an epic poem celebrating the Apollo 11 moon landing. Based on a transcript of flight crew communications recorded on the command module from July 16-24, 1969, this book is an outer space adventure story told through the banal conversations of three men confined for days to a bedroom-sized space capsule. “Give Me a VERB 51” is about searches for missing cameras and discussions of drinking water supply valves delivered via a seamless mix of mild epithets and highly-technical astronaut jargon.

Starting with a PDF posted on NASA’s Johnson Space Center website, Leach converted the historic document to a text file and stripped out all tab spacing and paragraph and line breaks. This purely mechanical process merged the actual spoken text with page numbers and other transcription notes, generating an unbroken cosmic narrative. Leach intentionally retained all computer conversion errors, including the repeated misspelling of Neil Armstrong’s first name as “Nell” and the misreading of a famous quote: “Houston LANDED. -Tranquility Base here. THE EAGLE HAS.” The result is a unique work of conceptual writing that celebrates what the poet Christian Bok has called “the most significant achievement of any species in the history of our planet.” In “Give Me A VERB 51,” Leach embraces language as junk, detritus and the raw material for an emerging robot literature. This is space age prose for a world of writing machines.

“Give Me A VERB 51” is the latest work of literary appropriation by Mark Leach, author of the 17-million-word “Marienbad My Love,” the world’s longest novel. “What he [Leach] does is the artistic equivalent of running newspaper ads, magazine articles, and tampon covers through a shredder, pouring glue on it, then taking a piss on it and calling that art.” – name withheld at request of the commentator