The World's Longest Novel in English

 

Waco novelist Madison Cooper made news in 1952 when Time magazine declared his 1.1-million-word Sironia, Texas to be "the longest novel by an American writer ever to be published." Fifty-six years later, another Texas writer with Waco ties is challenging that record with a 2.5-million-word work he claims is the world's longest published novel in English.

 

Waco-born writer Mark Leach is following in the footsteps of Cooper with Marienbad My Love, the story of a Christ-haunted filmmaker who believes he is called 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.

 

"I first saw Last Year at Marienbad in an English lit class in college, and although it is one of my favorites today I must say I was not initially impressed," Leach said. "The interminable French narrator, the non-linear plot, the long tracking shots -- the film seemed to go on forever. Of course, some people might say the same thing about my novel."

 

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 current holds the Guinness Book of World Records title as the longest novel in English. Marienbad My Love is more than twice 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. But Leach said it is Sironia, Texas that has been his greatest inspiration. 

 

"Madison Cooper has been something of an idol for me throughout the 20-year process of writing Marienbad My Love," Leach said. "Sironia, Texas was a complex work that Cooper produced in secret over a period of years, keeping it hidden from everyone in town. I grew up hearing stories about how he kept track of the many characters and plots of the novel by writing his notes on a paper window shade. If someone entered the room while he was writing, he'd raise the shade to hide his work."

 

Although Marienbad My Love is primarily set in the Dallas area, where Leach has lived most of his life, the novel also features several tributes to Waco. Leach incorporated a mention of the Waco Horror, an early 20th-century lynching that appears in Cooper's book; references to a rash of UFO reports in Waco and Central Texas the early 1950s; and the famous Waco tornado in 1953.

 

A recurring element in Marienbad My Love is a photography-based time travel machine created by a fictional version of Leach's grandfather, Jewell Poe Rowan, a professional photographer who operated a studio in downtown Waco that was destroyed in the 1953 tornado.

 

"After my grandfather's death in the early 1970s I learned that years before he had been something of a pioneer in color photography," Leach said. "He worked on a new type of double reversal film stock, Although he never took the film to market, the story of his efforts has encouraged me to pursue my own creative endeavors."

 

 

EXCERPTS FROM MARIENBAD MY LOVE

 

... Now in these broken, derelict days after the end of time it is possible to combine two opposites into a new whole. Are you familiar with William Burroughs’ Nova Trilogy? No matter. The idea is simple. Create something new and unique by combining something old and commonplace. This technique generates an original creative product.

 

Distressing tale from The Twilight Report – a Paraguayan physicist claims we shall journey not only through the cosmos but through the fourth dimension, too! We know his claims are true for today we are back from a time journey to 1979, bringing with us an explanation of what we saw and how it was completed.

 

First, a warning: This operation requires extreme accuracy as it is a difficult enterprise. It is based in part on mid-20th century experiments conducted by my grandfather, Jewell Poe. These experiments were aimed at creating a new process for color photography. Brightly colored ribbons were tied to a leafless, winter tree in the Poe family’s backyard in Waco, Texas. Double reversal film stock was exposed through a lens or prism. Somehow wires were crossed and time/space polarity was reversed. The developed film reveals a horizon beyond the horizon. I am caught in the psychic entrainment, snapped out of the last weekend of youth in 1979 and back to 1953 Waco and forward to outer space. I am spun into an elliptical orbit around the cicadian scientific outpost on Uranus, where they know of my grandfather’s experiments. I focus on the heavy blue silence, and a slow wave goes through me.

Beware, friends. The Jewell Effect is equal parts excitement and danger, just as you would expect when traveling beyond the outermost border marking the back of beyond. Only the adventurous should apply. However, the fourth dimension belongs to everyone who has the courage and the know-how to come in. It belongs to YOU. So here is the entire four-part process, precisely as it works.

Part 1: You begin your voyage in the corpse house of the old newspapers. You fold today in with yesterday and type up the resulting script. When you read through your daily newspaper you typically see and absorb much more than you know. In fact, you absorb everything, but it is not easily accessible to you because it is on the level of unconscious understanding. The folding process establishes a metaphorical relationship between today and yesterday. You have assembled a script that, combined with the photos, forms a montage of time. You move yourself literally about within the frame of that montage, occupying yesterday's news. You return to present time by traveling towards yesterday. You will do this many hours per the day for several months, back as far as the news goes. Exhume old magazines and forgotten novels, too. Poke about at the cadavers of brittle yellow letters and dusty government reports. Make fold-ins and write scripts. Do it even with the photographs.

 

Part 2: Proceed to the closest studio of film. Here you will learn to have a talk with yourself in reverse at all levels. This is done by running the film and sound track in reverse. This is precisely the schematic diagram employed in the creation of "El Bib." Picture Christ eating the Last Supper with his disciples. After this, reverse the film, turning satiety back to hunger. At first the film will break into a run at the normal speed. Next it drops into slow-motion. The same procedure can be extended to other physical processes, including the expelling of ectoplasm. You are offended? Not. You must move beyond your sexual prudery and reticence. Sex will be possibly the heaviest anchor holding you in the present time.

 

Part 3: Edit the resulting film into an endless loop on a single metal reel. This process results in a great circular movie, without beginning or end, birth or death. (For full effect, it should be viewed in a circular theater and projected onto a circular screen.) If you cut through the middle of the reel and view the individual frames, then you will find that the movie is actually the Deity, a sentient being realized in the form of a living movie from the back of beyond whose precise center is any point in your life and therefore totally remote and unreachable.

 

Part 4: Open the door onto the space/time continuum, and a slow wave shivers through the universe....

 

 

... Now we shall examine the cacophony of incomprehensible voices that speak of the aerial clock reports in Waco skies from the spring and summer of 1952, the year of “Sironia, Texas” and the prelude to the alien-initiated tornado attack of 1953. Today we recognize these seemingly innocuous aerial clock reports actually played what some have called a “terrifying and horrifying” role in Waco’s psychic history – and continue to excite the unconscious in the post-Hydrocarbon Age. (For the following reports we are thankful for – and giving full credit to – information contained in “Brazos Past: Waco’s encounters with UFOs,” a story by Terri Jo Ryan in the Oct. 27, 2007, edition of the Waco Tribune-Herald.)

Consider the mysterious case of the Joy Drive-in Theater.

On Easter Sunday, May 7, 1952, a soil compaction professor at James Connally AFB named Sergeant Grover Warson, 29, spotted 20 to 25 aerial clocks keeping perfect time over the Joy Drive-In Theater on Dallas Highway. He was at the theater with his wife and three children when he spotted what he called a formation of timepieces approaching them. They were about six miles away, about 6,000 feet in the air, and ticking along at an estimated 500 miles per hour. The ginger-colored glowing clock dials were only visible for about 10 seconds, but that was long enough.

 
Rich Leched, operator of Beverly Hills Barbecue, said he also saw the clocks that same night over nearby Oaklawn Drive-In Theater, also on Dallas Highway. These reports were dismissed by other observers the next day as merely moonlight reflecting off the translucent wings of flying brain crabs. (Of course, aerial clock researchers know that flocks of airborne crustaceans are one of the standard psychic projections left behind by visiting aliens.)

But Warson and Leched weren’t the only ones spotting aerial clocks in 1952. Hundreds of reports were taken by the U.S. military from Texans reporting these mysterious aerial timepieces.

In downtown Fort Worth one spring day in 1952, residents reported seeing about 100 glowing clock dials hovering over the offices of the Tarrant County Register. Reporters did not see the objects because they were busy reporting on a field of beautiful bluebonnets in nearby Irving, thereby scoring what they believed was an important scoop in their ongoing newspaper war with nearby Dallas. Even more interesting, similar clocks in the air were observed over a number of area drive-in theaters during the day.

But let us return to Waco. Even before the aerial clocks hit the media, a Connally AFB civilian instructor named Seth E. Joella and his wife reported their own close encounter at the Oaklawn Drive-In Theater.

According to the Air Force’s files, on May 2, 1952, Joella and his wife noted a flaming, yellow timepiece approaching them overhead from the southwest. The fast-moving clock appeared to be emitting particles of burning metal, some kind of stream of sparks, from its stem, which was longer than any jet aircraft from the free world. Strangely, the clock was eerily quiet, a tick-tick-ticking sound the only sonic indication of its true existence.

 
On May 25, 1952, Pallmalla Larks of Waco, who worked for Loam Grass Soil Compacting Company, was watching a movie at the Oaklawn with his wife when he saw two groups of glowing clock dials cross the night sky. He later reported that the glowing clocks appeared to cause a slow wave to shiver through all of time.

In September 1952, Waco photographer Jewell Poe received several calls about an aerial clock, and so he went out to the Oaklawn Drive-in to shoot the image on his experimental color film with flouride9-based emulsion applied to feeling-toned film stock. In his lab notebook he noted that the stars made streaks of light across the picture and the clock made a single blur towards what he came to recognize as the midnight of the soul. The end of his notes revealed that the aerial clock appeared to have fired a pink light beam into the sky, perhaps indicating the home of the Deity and even the exact location of Heaven.

Townsfolk were all atwitter! They and the rest of Texas were now seized by full-blown aerial clock mania. One Waco citizen even claimed he had figured out the aerial clocks, gears and all, and he wanted to send his divinations to the Army for help in the atomic field. But he didn’t know how to go about it, so therefore he had decided to wage his own battle against the attacking plague of sky-timers. He fired a Colt six-shooter into the night sky, creating a huge tear in the atmosphere that allowed stars to pour out of the night sky. The result was a shooting star storm of epic proportions.

But that’s not all we have found in the government’s secret Waco aerial clock archives. Decades earlier, way back in 1918, a serviceman at Rich Field in Waco observed a 150- to 200-foot-long clock-shaped object after leaving the mess hall with his comrades. It flew directly overhead, and was no more than 600 feet high, so they all got an excellent view of it. It had no gears, no rigging, it was noiseless and appeared as a clock dial in a decided flame color. They could observe no windows. They watched it follow the Dallas Highway until it disappeared from sight. They all experienced the weirdest feeling of their lives and sat in their tent puzzling over it for some time.

 

Due to these stories and many others, the Dallas Highway is still known as Aerial Clock Row, a terrifying and horrifying place of alien-created bewilderment, a place where several members of the galactic criminal element were indicted in 36 leukemia-related deaths, though the actual death toll was considerably higher, a report that we were never again to see the light of day due to the 100 glowing clock dials hovering over the offices of the Tarrant County Register, a scene that reporters did not see because to them the objects were motivated by unreal events and had nothing to do with the beautiful field of bluebonnets in Irving, the ground zero of their newspaper war with Dallas. To this day the story is shielded from memory by faulty newspaper reporting and hills of fear. For this report we stormed the psychic citadel of epic proportions and found much of interest. But that’s not all we have found in the Waco newspaper archives. Decades earlier, way back in 1918, a serviceman at Rich Field on Sunday, May 7, 1952, was engaged in a soil compaction experiment of epic proportions, an event involving a professor at James Connally AFB named Sergeant Grover Warson, 29, who spotted 25 aerial clocks streaking out of the heavens in a shooting star storm of epic proportions.

But that’s not all.

We have found in the Waco newspaper archives a decades-old collection of two spleen, lymph nodes and petrified hands. They were passed through the flames to waiting extraterrestrials outside, a day that would be recalled but due to exposure to extraterrestrial DNA resulting in weakness and reduced exercise tolerance ...