 This is now out as a proper edition on The Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, with some very nice endorsement from James Davies and Philip Terry:
Tom Jenks’ erasure or reduction of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is a set of Sparknotes full of sweeping summaries of the original, filled with buzzwords and maxims you might find on Nick Clegg’s i-pad. Yet for all the computer-aided, aleatory methods, employed to produce the text, Jenks’ final human decisions have created 268 beautiful little poems with a poignancy that reminds us that it’s the language which hooks the people more than the agenda. Be careful of the fishermen. James Davies Following an Oulipian and procedural itinerary which passes through Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual and Tom Phillips’ A Humument, Jenks reinvents Mill’s On Liberty for these more constricted times, putting the constraints which Mill believed should be placed on society onto Mill’s discourse itself. The result is a triumph of minimalist artistry which subtly overturns the utilitarianism of Mill, allowing an anarchic poetry of chance and wonder to emerge from this unlikely source. Philip Terry
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