“I never thought this labyrinth would be a pleasant thing to return to.” — My own quest for answers within House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, and some remaining questions

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Art & Illustrations, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Mark Z. Danielewski, ReadHard Book

That up there are some of my notes on House of Leaves, the novel-creature by Mark Z. Danielewski. I skipped Little Red Moley with this one, and used Giant Fat Red Moley Journal — and even then I used at least five different kinds of Post-its, haha. I could not scribble on the margins of this particular book and not only because I had a verra pretty edition — the margins were just way too full. And, given that a chunk of the material were in the footnotes, I would only be giving myself a headache if I added my craziness to all that was already there.

It was so fun, and dorkalicious, and I do apologize for having to put you through all of my ramblings — but good lord, I feel so accomplished.

I know you’ve had enough of me not shutting about this book, but even as I was reading it, I was torn between the certainty that I couldn’t write about it as well as exhaustively as I wanted to [because the book is so intricate, the task might just be impossible], and the whole Ah, fuck it, I’ll try anyway mentality that is, basically, the foundation of this blog [and, quite possibly, my life?]

So, all week, I talked [to mostly myself] about this ridiculous book. As a recap, here are those blog posts, with summaries:

1. First encounter[s] with House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski — “And then the nightmares will begin” → Self-explanatory, I suppose? The many encounters I had with this book even before it was in my possession. First impressions, too. With the first questions of many.
2. Style, structure, and the “endless snarls of words” of House of Leaves → As style and form are incredibly significant elements to the novel, I try to chisel my way through this very labyrinthine structure—which is, frankly, this book’s selling point, what sets this book apart from so many. It’s experimental, admirable—and damn, but it can be so annoying. Sometimes, I feel as though Danielewski doesn’t want me to read him.
3. “A goddamn spatial rape.” — An examination of the uncanny and the house on Ash Tree Lane → Perhaps the subject of this novel: the house on Ash Tree Lane—its mysteries, its horror, and its ineffability [?], but oh, how this novel tries. And me, too.

I became rather obsessed with this one, I know. I guess when it hits you the right way—because, yes, I know that a lot of people found this book either too-annoying, distasteful, gimmicky, unnerving, and just plain un-readable [I’ve had several moments like that, see]—when it hits you the right way, you’re compelled to dissect and discover because of the so many questions it inspires in you, not to mention the revelations that stun you with the very way they’re crafted. That’s a mouthful that basically means: I liked this book, and I got dorky with it.

Which is not to say that I’m completely satisfied—with the book itself, and with my own exploration of it. I still have so many questions, and even though I know I’ll eventually reread this book, that won’t be for a long time, and the questions will have to wait. I have questions about all the things I tried to talk about. I have questions about characters, histories, that goddamned house, the structure of this novel, the horror it evokes, the issues of veracity and representation within the narrative. And so on, and so on.

But I’ve done what I can for now. Other books await me. Besides—holy cheesecake, I am tired. Also: Everyone who wants to read it, please read it, so we can scream together. Okay. Toodles.

“Two truths” from Paul Chowder

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Books About Books, Excerpts, Fiction - Novel, Nicholson Baker

Poems do seem to want to announce, over and over, that life’s warm zephyrs are blowing past and the gravestones are just beyond the next rise. Little groupings of gravestones, all leaning and cracked, with a rusty black Victorian fence around them. They’re just over that rise. Poets never want to forget that. And actually we need to hear that sometimes. And we need poems to declare love, too. Which they do, over and over. I love you, or I love her, or I love him — love is behind a huge mass of poems — and that’s good. Because actually those are two truths that we should keep on thinking for ourselves. I love you, and all the people I know and depend on are going to reach the end of their lives and when they go it’s completely unexpected even when part of you knew it was in the offing.

Words words words from The Anthologist, novel by Nicholson Baker. [If anyone's wondering, regular posting will resume as soon as I get out from under the bed, and get the week-old Cheetos out my hair.]

Sasha might be enjoying reading the “About the Author” pages a smidge too much –

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Books About Books, Caroline Blackwood, Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford, Lydia Davis, Paul Auster, Robert Lowell, Siri Hustvedt

[This is all obviously off the top of my head. Hello, lazy weekend.] [And thanks to The Boyfriend for letting me borrow his Robert Lowell poetry books for yet another fuzzy book pictorial.]

You know the whole la-dee-dah about letting the text speak for itself, the author being dead and all that jazz, the Not Looking Three Seats to Your Left when a particular piece is being workshopped. Well. Hee. Although I tend to ascribe to these, I still can’t tamp down the fascination I have for author’s lives. [I remember last year: My brain exploded when I learned that romance novelist Eloisa James was the poet Robert Bly's daughter -- it was like two ends of my shelves collided into a flurry of man-poetry and petticoats. Awesome.] It’s these connections that thrill me to no end.

You have all been witness to my obsession over the Paul Auster – Siri Hustvedt – Lydia Davis connection. Si Sasha, literary intrigera. [I don't know how to explain this fascination. Or maybe I do, and I don't really want to, haha. I know I'll implicate myself.] I am thankful though: It was precisely the knowing a portion of the behind-the-scenes of Auster’s life that I ended up discovering Hustvedt and Davis. And, well, Hustvedt is now one of my favorite novelists — one of the authors I’m so thankful to have chanced upon this year.

I guess you can see where I’m going. Last month, I read my first Jean Stafford, The Mountain Lion. And then, in the introduction, I read about her marriage to Robert Lowell. I did that Huh thing, and moved on. Last week, I read The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, loved it, and was informed by the introduction [that I tend to read midway through books, haha] that Elizabeth Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell a year after he left Jean Stafford. There is something wrong with me, because I squealed.

[And with a little Wikipedia-hunting, I found out that Lowell then moved on to Lady Caroline Blackwood, also a writer, moonlighting as a muse -- and Blackwood was married to Lucian Freud way before she met Lowell -- and Lucian Freud is one of my favorite painters ever. My brain, still exploding. And guess what? Two of Blackwood's novels are available from NYRB Classics too -- Corrigan and Great Granny Webster. Hee. I am so reading you, Miss Blackwood. And dude. Wiki tells me: Lowell died clutching one of Freud’s portraits of Blackwood in the back seat of a New York cab, on his way back to his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick. Good lord, my heart. These are stories in themselves!]

Introduction-trolling or Google-fu-ing antics aside, I do try to not let this fascination get in the way of enjoying the text itself, though. These connections might thrill me, but literature will always be the highest priority. I mean, come on, I admit that reading someone’s fiction because she was someone’s third wife is a weird way to find a book to read — but letting that information cloud one’s judgment, in whatever manner, is just, well, not for me. I don’t think I can ever go so far as having the author’s lives stand as substitutes for the work that they do. They’ll always be wonderful supplementary material, or a parallel read.

Then again, sometimes, the author’s lives are way better reads for me than the things they write. Then then again, someone’s fiction could — BAH. I’ll stop generalizing here, because I am bad at it. Usually if it applies to flaky ol’ me.

So. Where was I? O ya, reading. Back to your weekends, kids.

“It is still there, now a thick fog, and again only a light mist.” — Henry Dean’s Heavy Boots

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Excerpts, NYRB Classics, Elizabeth Hardwick, The NYRB Classics Project

When certain words touch you, because they’re just so right, as approximately right as anyone can be about things like these. More from The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, more from my favorite story of the collection, “The Oak and the Axe,” more from Henry Dean, more on that thing we have many names for and none of them right:

Truth, courage, and despair, in a desolate quality, were the attributes of his discourse. He said that when he was twenty-eight a kind of darkness had fallen upon him, a thing without apparent cause of definition, but the most real and painful experience of his life. “It is still there, now a thick fog, and again only a light mist.” He could not recover his old energy and happiness, his ambition. He just went on from day to day, enduring his cramped and knotted existence, heavy with a sort of temperamental fatigue and indolence, which were no his, just as his rather dimly lighted gray eyes were his.

postscript || The Imagined Previous Life of What I Loved, Which is Stained by Something I Don’t Bother Identifying

Tags

Fiction - Novel, Siri Hustvedt

So, like a lot of my books, I found this one in a BookSale. In fact, Hustvedt has become one of those authors that I have to rely on bargain bins for. Either overstocks or previously-owned, these books have gone through lives of their own before they came to me. Which brings us to this picture:

That’s a shot of the inside of the cover of my copy of What I Loved [click for my thoughts], Siri Hustvedt’s novel. I had to think of a story, had to imagine a previous life. And then, well, I did some fact-checking:

There’s an “Ashland Park” in Illinois, but I don’t think a subdivision would lovingly fold p.36 — and I wonder still: Did the previous owner ever read on from that page? Maybe the previous owner had lived in Ashland Park? Or maybe the book belonged to someone in Ashland Park? But, well, why not write one’s name? Why so redundant? Do subdivision offices have libraries? Oh, and there’s also an “Ashland Park” in South Carolina that calls itself “the only destination” for both business and pleasure. Cliche aside, the place looks neat. But it’s on a road named St. Andrews. And the address, 1645 Ashland. What’s happening here? There’s a hair salon in 1645 N. Ashland Avenue and — wait for it — it’s in Chicago. And and and urgh, yes, never mind.

I was really hoping it was, I dunno, Ashkid Park from 1645 Auckland. A person. See, the book’s gone through a lot of handling. There’s that stain, for one. And you know how books get, uh, bloated from its bindings. That it’s not-so-compact, but almost fluffy. And wonderfully easy to read because the book falls open with the least resistance? I was hoping all that had been the result of one person reading this lovingly, without concern for being all-uptight about preserving the new-book look. I’m not anymore sure so much, though.

I’ve been thinking, for quite some time now, about putting up a post about these inscriptions — evidence of previous lives, marginalia, dedications. In take note of these if I find them, citing them in my notebook. I have photos. It’s a weird little hobby. In our more sentimental forays into BookSale, P. and I would go home with books if only for these inscriptions. I’ve done stories and vignettes concerning dedication, forgotten bookmarks, inscriptions. So, yeah, I ought to write about this in here, soon.

postscript || The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris

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Excerpts, Joshua Ferris

I can’t help it.  The Unnamed, novel by Joshua Ferris, has clasped its jaws around me. Here’s a long-ass quote from the novel, which I struggled not to include in my review, because that would be so pushing it. But yeah, I hereby push:

Maybe he had two kids, maybe he abused cocaine in club stalls—she didn’t know the first thing about him. It only made her want him more. She kept desire down and kept it down because of vows and obligations and an entire moral structure that could not collapse at the sight of one man in a grocery store, but it had collapsed.

She couldn’t recall the last time a person affected her so painfully. He turned to her and she quickly lost her nerve and faced the meat again. She turned back eventually. He was still looking. He smiled at her. It wasn’t one of those firm-lipped hellos with a polite little nod. It was a smile with locked eyes. He was flirting. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to wrap his tie around her hand. She wanted contact information.

What was it? Something encoded in her genes? Something reaching all the way back to the primates? The body talking. She disliked it intensely. The man’s smile was a totally negating force. It stirred complete abandon in her. It tapped into what was reckless and selfish. She saw herself stealing out of the store with him and getting into a different car and being driven past the car she shared with Tim where he sat in the passenger seat with his eyes closed, listening to public radio. A different life, a totally different life. How easy it would be. They would arrive at the man’s place and she would never leave. Give him to me and I will change. I will see the point again. I will discern the code. I will laugh into the pillow at my unbelievable luck. I will inhabit a bed for hours with a fullness I thought gone forever. I will not look at anything as a chore again. I will smile unprompted. I will be in love. I will have boundless energy. I will not complain. Get me out of my life and I will wax again. I’ll make trips to boutiques in SoHo and pick out garter belts and babydolls, and as the clerk wraps them in tissue, it will take every possible restraint not to cry out with happiness.

The calls in the middle of the night, the long car rides out to God knows where. The worry, the frustration, the uncertainty, the sacrifice. Let Becka pick him up from now on. Make him take cabs.

You know that whole splintering of selves bit? The distance between what we must do, and what we have to do; what is Right, and what is But I Want This So Bad? Jane Farnsworth is all over that, lemme tell you. Me, I like to splinter once in a while. Like now. I’m supposed to be neck-deep in work; but I rise from the mulch and the occasional candy wrapper to blog. Da-dum! Happy day, y’all.