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alexsarllEven though I got 11+ hours of sleep last night, I don't feel like I've assimilated this weekend. En route to Black Plastic, I saw Neighbourhood Watch signs warning that areas were protected by Smart Water, which just gave me the Waters of Mars fear. The night itself was ace (even if I was a little surprised when, though lots of people were dancing to Kenickie's 'Magnatron', an awful lot of them asked me what it is. But then, it was always an oddly out-of-place song). The problem arose when I went for pub lunch the next day and essentially started drinking again far too soon. And then carried on, on and off, around the filming of 'The Oxford Dons', for far too long. One interesting development of which was the discovery of a new booze. Now, clearly one is always discovering new spirits and liqeurs because the world has a near-limitless variety of foodstuffs which can be weaponised. But a new pint-type beverage, that's rare, and yet this year I've encountered two - first alcoholic ginger beer, and now Faro, which ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
augstone had brought back from Belgium (so it does have a purpose after all) and which smells like beer but tastes of tea. Yum.
This may be why I woke up disastrously late for my Sunday plans, only to discover that they'd been cancelled anyway (a mercy, under the circumstances), and then achieved very little with the day except confirming that Spider-Man 3 is even worse than I'd expected. Bruce Campbell's Frenchman is about the only redeeming feature.
A lot of people I know have read Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves and so far as I'm aware, most agree that it's one of the most terrifying books ever written, its experimental textual tricks working perfectly with the central tale(s) to produce an unease which really feels like it's coming out of the pages to get you.
And yet, nobody much seems to talk about his follow-up, Only Revolutions. I picked it up early in 2007, thought it looked a bit forbidding, and only got around to it this year. And, well, when I thought it looked forbidding, I didn't know the half of it.
It's subtitled 'a novel'. Which is necessary, because otherwise one could easily mistake it for a free verse epic, or perhaps something like Jeff Noon's Cobralingus. Here's the opening - or one of them, but more on that later. I'm not going to attempt the tabbing, but bear in mind, this looks more justified than the original:
Samsara! Samarra!
Grand!
I can walk away
from anything.
Everyone loves
the Dream but I kill it.
Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
over me: - Up Boogaloo!
I leap free this spring.
On fire. How my hair curls.
I'll destroy the World.
Oh, and all the letter Os are in yellow. As is the ribbon bookmark. You read eight pages of this and then revolve the book, start reading it from the back and upside down, where there's an alternate version of the story, with green Os and ribbon. The yellow (theoretically gold) story is Hailey's, the green Sam. They're in love. They drive an ever-changing car, its make and model different each time it's mentioned. Where Hailey's story has plants, Sam's always has animals; he's more romantic than her, too. There are other differences, from minor variants in word choice upwards, but also similarities: both of them always write 'us' in capitals, US (because they somehow represent America?) and 'alone' and 'always' become 'allone' and 'allways'. There's a power to the poetry, often - sometimes it just becomes a series of sounds, sometimes the book actually tries to have a plot and then it gets bogged down (the sequence in the St Louis Club/Grill/Cafe &c is especially wearing). At its best, it really sings:
"- By something wide which feels close.
Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly
across US. Between US. Where we're
closest, where we touch, where we're one.
Somehow continuing on separately.
- Hold me tighter."
And the two versions of the story make a sort of sense, the book revolving like the wheels of all those automobiles. But, that's not all, because each story has sidebars of something else. One runs up to, and one runs away from, Nov 22 1963. Each contains historical snippets for a given day, edited down to near-incomprehensibility. So:
March 4 1976
Pan Am's negligence.
Nigerian BS Dimka
arrested.
Tokyo's 4,000 workers.
Frank Church.
- our greatest foreign
policy problem is our division at.
- and pervasive feer.
Patty Hearst guilty.
Jorge Rafael Videla over
Isabel Martinez de Peron."
'Over' always signifies victory - in election, in sport - and people always 'go' rather than die. I don't know what the point of these sidebars is. They make it hard to follow the two parallel versions of the main story, but they contain something resonant just often enough that I don't feel I can skip them.
This might be another masterpiece. It might just be an experiment too far. Certainly, I think I'm going to wait for someone else to take the first dip before I attempt his third novel.
augstone had brought back from Belgium (so it does have a purpose after all) and which smells like beer but tastes of tea. Yum. This may be why I woke up disastrously late for my Sunday plans, only to discover that they'd been cancelled anyway (a mercy, under the circumstances), and then achieved very little with the day except confirming that Spider-Man 3 is even worse than I'd expected. Bruce Campbell's Frenchman is about the only redeeming feature.
A lot of people I know have read Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves and so far as I'm aware, most agree that it's one of the most terrifying books ever written, its experimental textual tricks working perfectly with the central tale(s) to produce an unease which really feels like it's coming out of the pages to get you.
And yet, nobody much seems to talk about his follow-up, Only Revolutions. I picked it up early in 2007, thought it looked a bit forbidding, and only got around to it this year. And, well, when I thought it looked forbidding, I didn't know the half of it.
It's subtitled 'a novel'. Which is necessary, because otherwise one could easily mistake it for a free verse epic, or perhaps something like Jeff Noon's Cobralingus. Here's the opening - or one of them, but more on that later. I'm not going to attempt the tabbing, but bear in mind, this looks more justified than the original:
Samsara! Samarra!
Grand!
I can walk away
from anything.
Everyone loves
the Dream but I kill it.
Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
over me: - Up Boogaloo!
I leap free this spring.
On fire. How my hair curls.
I'll destroy the World.
Oh, and all the letter Os are in yellow. As is the ribbon bookmark. You read eight pages of this and then revolve the book, start reading it from the back and upside down, where there's an alternate version of the story, with green Os and ribbon. The yellow (theoretically gold) story is Hailey's, the green Sam. They're in love. They drive an ever-changing car, its make and model different each time it's mentioned. Where Hailey's story has plants, Sam's always has animals; he's more romantic than her, too. There are other differences, from minor variants in word choice upwards, but also similarities: both of them always write 'us' in capitals, US (because they somehow represent America?) and 'alone' and 'always' become 'allone' and 'allways'. There's a power to the poetry, often - sometimes it just becomes a series of sounds, sometimes the book actually tries to have a plot and then it gets bogged down (the sequence in the St Louis Club/Grill/Cafe &c is especially wearing). At its best, it really sings:
"- By something wide which feels close.
Open but feels closed. Lying weirdly
across US. Between US. Where we're
closest, where we touch, where we're one.
Somehow continuing on separately.
- Hold me tighter."
And the two versions of the story make a sort of sense, the book revolving like the wheels of all those automobiles. But, that's not all, because each story has sidebars of something else. One runs up to, and one runs away from, Nov 22 1963. Each contains historical snippets for a given day, edited down to near-incomprehensibility. So:
March 4 1976
Pan Am's negligence.
Nigerian BS Dimka
arrested.
Tokyo's 4,000 workers.
Frank Church.
- our greatest foreign
policy problem is our division at.
- and pervasive feer.
Patty Hearst guilty.
Jorge Rafael Videla over
Isabel Martinez de Peron."
'Over' always signifies victory - in election, in sport - and people always 'go' rather than die. I don't know what the point of these sidebars is. They make it hard to follow the two parallel versions of the main story, but they contain something resonant just often enough that I don't feel I can skip them.
This might be another masterpiece. It might just be an experiment too far. Certainly, I think I'm going to wait for someone else to take the first dip before I attempt his third novel.
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