What it's Come To

So here I am, a good two months having passed by and my brain running all cylinders firing and I. Can't. Stop. Thinking.

A bit of decompression is therefore in order.

The thing about the literature of Ralph Ellison is that it fully embraces the culture of the south while at the same time regretting that transplanting it to the north will result in someone getting shot or going crazy or even turning into Anansi the trickster god in the flesh.  If we look into the idea of a picture of the north, what sort of culture do we get?  Jazz culture, white man's culture, something like that.  The south is black culture, blues culture, and regrettably unable to find peace of any kind that doesn't involve fear and lynching.  This is the world that Ellison's novels are operating in, and he had such a time trying to find a solution that he never even finished his second novel.  It's posthumous, constructed from over two thousand pages of notes and narrative that never went anywhere.

The thing about posthumanism (or transhumanism) is how much I am tickled by the thought of existing as a being inside and outside my head.  If there's one thing I want, it's the ability to go on living after my cellular processes stop working properly.  Mind you I don't think it will work out that well--and anyway the only relevant bits of transhumanism for me are the technological bits that change the way we tell stories.  Storytelling is, you must understand (absolutely must come to terms with), the only thing we've got that's really special.  And the way we tell those stories is running into problems, because there's limits and advantages to all the mediums.

One medium cannot copy another, although you'll notice that hasn't stopped people from trying.  But if you want the reason that people still prefer books to kindles, it's because nobody's written something specifically for an e-book reader yet.  The medium's there but nobody has seen fit to take advantage of its peculiarities.  Computers don't have this problem, we've got cybertexts, hyptertexts, posthypercyberelectrotexts and god knows what else all taking advantage of the computer's ability to display words and sounds and links to everywhere else.  The internet itself is becoming a storytelling medium which we've started to take advantage of but it's not quite there (MUDs fired the first shots but it's not quite there yet.  We're building worlds but not telling stories in them, not really, not yet).  There will, perhaps, be literature written for the iPad or whatever the next new thing is.  Who knows?  I just want to write a phd and get funding to play video games.

Ah, but there are so many other ways to tell stories, old analog ways, card games and pen and paper.  It's all out there in a jumbled mass, and who draws the line between what is a story and what is not a story?  Is it enough to create a world after all?  This is the sort of thing that I can envision fueling debates across university departments across the world, if we can just get over our rather childish rejection of video games as a legitimate form.  I mean come on, we're past that now, aren't we?  There's books, MIT funds the hell out of electronic game studies, we have even come up with our own diametrically opposed camps to snipe at one another with (oh, you ludics!  Oh, you narratologists!)!  There is a middle path, of course, but everyone knows you have to have those two sides or you'll never get anywhere.

My brain has become incapable of really focusing on one project for any length of time, it demands multiple problems to chew on in parallel processes, and while it gives me a hell of a headache from time to time it also makes sure that I sleep like a log at night due to the oversaturating overstimulation of it all.

Proto-Proposal

The Container in Contemporary Postmodern Metafiction

It has been said by those who know what they're talking about that metafiction is a response to a worry that the world of literary fiction has grown stale—and one might be tempted to point to some of the books of the last decade as evidence that this has occurred. One could further say (if one were so inclined) that if books grow stale as a platform for narratives, then Amazon.com president Jeff Bezos will be happy to see we have become a paperless society; the container does not matter, according to Bezos, provided the narrative survives¹. This is of course completely untrue: the container can (and does) provide crucial interpretive information that can hinge upon the shape of the book itself. In other words, the shape of the book and the shape of the text² can influence the meaning of a text. The shape of the text can be replicated in other forms, but the shape of the book is something else altogether. Using the works of Mark Z Danielewski (House of Leaves, Only Revolutions), the following questions will be addressed: What is the relationship between the structure of a text and its meaning and how does Danielewski address this relationship in his novels (or in other words, why is the container important)? What role has emerging technology played in the experiments seen in contemporary metafictional novels? Finally, why is any of this important?

There are a few ways to tackle these questions, but as metafictional authors are notorious for allowing their texts to tell stories while commenting on the act of storytelling I see no better method than allowing the books to speak for themselves. After laying down a firm critical framework—describing just what sort of literature Danielewski has been writing, for example,³ as well as explaining the sorts of theories that he is working off of in the creation of these novels—the real analysis of the texts can begin. A close reading of the texts will not only reveal the theories of the relationship between structure and meaning, but are themselves examples of that very same relationship. In the case of Only Revolutions, for example, the book's structure not only emphasizes the circular nature of the narrative, but it gives the two protagonists something to struggle against—a structure without which they could not be free in the first place. House of Leaves mimics the labyrinthine nature of the house on Ash Tree Lane through the very way in which the text is presented, a dizzying maze of footnotes that lead to dead ends, contradictory evidence, and voices arguing for dominance. Most importantly, both books allow the reader to approach the text in multiple ways.

Bibliography

Aarseth, Espen, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, (London: Johns Hopkins University Press) 1997

Benzon, Kiki, 'Revolution 2: An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,' Electronic Book Review, (03-20-2007), <http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/regulated> [accessed 03 December 2009]

Brick, Martin, 'Blueprint(s): Rubric for a Deconstructed Age in House of Leaves,' Philament 2 (Jan 2004), <http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue2_Critique_Brick.htm>, [accessed 03 December 2009]

Danielewski, Mark Z, House of Leaves (New York: Pantheon, 2000)

• Only Revolutions (New York: Pantheon, 2006)
  

Derrida, Jaques, Writing and Difference trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge) 2001

Hamilton, Natalie, 'The A-Mazing House: The Labyrinth as Theme and Form in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves,' Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 50:1, (Fall 2008) 3-15

Hanson, Mark, 'The Digital Topography of Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves,' Contemporary Literature 45:4 (Winter 2004) 597-636

Hayles, N. Katherine, 'Saving the Subject: Remediation in House of Leaves,' American Literature 74:4 (2002) 779-806

• Writing Machines, (London: MIT Press) 2002
  

McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory, 'Haunted House—An Interview with Mark Z. Danielewski,' Critique 44:2 (Winter 2003) 99-135

Rapatzikou, Tatiani. 'Print Novels and the Mark of the Digital: Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006) and Media Convergence,' Interdisciplinary.net, <http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/rapatzikou-paper.pdf> [accessed 3 December 2009]

Waugh, Patricia, Metafiction, (London: Routledge) 2003

1 'Outbooking the Book: Jeff Bezos, Chairman, President and CEO, Amazon.com' All Things Digital, (28 May 2008), <http://d6.allthingsd.com/20080528/bezos/> [accessed 28 November 2009]

2Font choice and font size

3It has been described as both a work of ergodic fiction and a post-textual novel, two terms which are not, perhaps, mutually exclusive.

This too shall pass (I hope)

The Lindy Hop

Dance, you mad whirling bastards!  Kick up your heels thusly!

Dancing is just one of those things

I cannot do (sober) unless it is a full moon.  Lycanthropy and coordination are

remarkably similar conditions...  So why do I sometimes

think that

I should

dance

with

you?

New thought:

Where were you when Michael Flatly became intolerable to watch?  I don't remember, myself,

not when there are other things to never forget remembering.  Never remember.

Yell up the stairs saying hello for the first time or the

most recent time (time being what it was, it will be impossible to have been recalling)

did they actually know just what is/couldbe/wouldbe/won'tbe/am?

Thump.  Thump.

The dancers jump.

Twist. Twist.

Methinks they're pissed.

Flop, flap.

The people applaud.

In Which I am not a Poet

This does not make me a poet

There might be some temptation you see to say that now, now that I haven't written anything that

isn't poetry

isn't essay

isn't anything like a lie

for a while that I have stopped being author to become a poet.

I never thought much of the machinations of the universe (university)

not when it came to what it did to me (not free, that's the solution for—getting head of myself).

There are only a few times a month when I am write.

Savor this one.  Cleverness offset by a writing mistake.

Yin and yang.

I stole that from a conversation we had once.  Originality is a grand thing.

This is stolen too:

Do you want to become a lonely grumpy smartass?

That's implying I'm not already.

I made this poetic by saying it was poetic.  Don't you agree?

Line breaks wear down returns.  There is an ancient mariner, and he refuses to pay his fee.

Fi.

Fo.

Fum.

We done here?

Yeah, we're done.

What is Language and Why does it Matter?

  Language, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is difficult to pin down.  Even this concept has multiple meanings; “The system of spoken or written communication used by a particular country, people, community, etc., typically consisting of words used within a regular grammatical and syntactic structure,” “the vocal sounds by which mammals and birds communicate,” “A means of communicating other than by the use of words,” (emphasis mine) and even “The style of a literary composition; (also) the wording of a document, statute, etc.”  There are more meanings to the word, which is perhaps the problem in a nutshell: Language cannot be described without the use of itself.  That is to say, one must use language in order to describe language.  Any discussion of the use language must, therefore, begin with the acknowledgement that language is itself as nebulous as any other term.

  It is not the intention of this essay to gaze too deeply into the abyss that lurks behind the assigned meaning(s) of a word, but it illustrates an inherent instability in the practice of language that has been noted by other writers and will continue to be noticed and commented upon; it will be the case that writers and indeed anyone who speaks (any) language(s) will forever have to wrestle with language in order to convey the meaning they want to convey, or at least a meaning that can be called close enough for comfort (or government work, or your own phrase of choice).  This still does not come any closer to saying what language is, though it does come closer to saying why it's important; language is perhaps the best possible (though imperfect) method for transmission of thoughts short of telepathy.

  Language allows the world to if nothing else make slightly more sense than it would otherwise, and allows the people of the world to make a kind of sense of one another.  Language makes sense of things, categorizes things, expresses what could not be otherwise expressed.  This is the importance of language, this is why language matters.  Language's rather nebulous nature, however, means that using language to communicate complex ideas takes a special amount of care and precision.  True mastery of language comes from being able to communicate one's ideas clearly and effectively.  To say what needs to be said in a way that the meaning is left to little doubt, to utilize all the tools which have been created for the management of language over centuries of practice (metaphor, allegory, etc.), to use the rules of style and form that had been agreed upon for forms of fiction and essay and poetry—that is what separates a writing novice from a true craftsman, so to speak.  In the beginning, anyway...

Time, Space, Other Stuff

"I wish to travel through time," the old man said, sitting on his stoop.

"That's easy.  Just keep sitting there and you'll do it without much trouble."  The dapper-looking man stood leaning on his cane, the obvious 'I-have-lots-of-stops-to-make-today' pose.  He seemed to be resisting the urge to check his watch.  "You may even make it all the way to tomorrow in but a few hours."

A snort of impatience escaped the old man's nose.  "You know that's not what I meant, sir, and to pretend you didn't is a waste of time for the both of us."

"Ah, but there's where you're wrong, Mister Creely."  The dapper-looking man's smile could have stretched across the street and blocked traffic.  "Time is only a concern for those who can't move around it, and that is a talent which I possess.  A talent which, if I'm not mistaken, is what caused you to contact me in the first place."

"So you do know how to get around time."  Mister Creely looked smug.  "I knew you did, even if you wouldn't come right out and say so over the phone."

"Of course not!  Phones are not to be trusted with this sort of information."  The dapper-looking man's smile stretched even wider, though it was clear from a slight twitch that he clearly felt as if he'd lost the last exchange.  "Nor, I should add, are front lawns especially the best area to have this sort of conversation."

"Too bad.  I've heard all about you, so I'll thank you to stay exactly where you are while we conduct our business."  This statement was punctuated by a glint of gunmetal in Creely's hand.  The blanket over his legs concealed the rest.

This provoked laughter from the dapper-looking man.  "Very good, very good!  It wouldn't do you any good if I intended to do you harm, but I'm glad to see that you're the clever sort of fellow who knows to do his homework nonetheless.  Well then, I'm all ears, Mister Creely.  What do you propose to offer me in return for my secrets?"

Strange Happenings

I have, of late, become rather discontented with Barry Macsweeny.  We didn't get along from the get-go, and I find his poetry trite and boring.  It is small wonder to me that his book is out of print, because he sucks.  But what use is my opinion?  You won't have to read him unless you happen to be taking postmodern poetics as well, which you aren't.  Probably.

But I am, and it has made me hate the man.  Well, not the man, but certainly I don't like his poetry very much.  There's no playing around in it!  It's all the same sort of images and themes we've seen before, or maybe I'm just getting cynical.  Which is possible.  Of course.

And now I am in a strange place, brain-wise.  I find myself reading him and thinking that I want to be reading something else, something that isn't Macsweeny's poetry.  So I turn to my shelf, and consider it closely, and (instead of a novel) I take down a collection of Bernstein's poetry I got from the library and haven't had the chance to read, and I think what the fuck just happened here?

I wanted a break from work, so I pulled down a book of poetry?  I am reading this poetry for pleasure, rather than to feed any sort of research, or because I have to, or anything so strange as that.  I pulled the book down because I enjoy reading Charles 'motherfucking' Bernstein and no other reason.

At some point, I became
incredibly
fucking
pretentious.