Category: Week 1

How did we get to be the way we are– our tastes, our style, our families’ household incomes? Do we structure ourselves and our tastes and styles based on suggestions made to us by internet algorithms such as Amazon.com?

When I think about the way I used to go about finding books to read or movies to watch when I was young, I remember that if I had seen a friend reading/watching or being suggested a book or movie by a friend, the only other way I had to base my choosings on was by going to the store, looking in whatever genre I felt like delving into that particular day, and then reading the synopses on the backs of covers/boxes. My taste developed from there, reading/watching first and then deciding whether or not I liked it and would watch it again in the future or suggest it to others. Nowadays; however, things are much different.

With sites like Amazon.com and friendship databases like Facebook and Myspace, we have a lot more resources to help shape our tastes than ever before. Product sites like Amazon.com track and record our searches and purchases to make future suggestions to us, based on what an algorithm rounds off what it judges to be our likings. Also, how fickle have we become with sites like Facebook and Myspace? If we see something on someone’s profile that we like, how likely are we to check out the other things in the same category to see if we like those too? Or for the ones of us who are the most maleable, what a person wears on their body based on their interests/tastes listed on their profile might influence another person to try and dress the same.

What scares me is that we have lost our ability to shape our own tastes and styles. How well do I know the people that I know? Are their styles their own? How did they come to like that book they recommended to me? Did they even read it or did they read one that prompted Amazon to suggest the one to them that they later suggested to me, almost knowing that I would like it if they knew my tastes already. That would be extra creepy!

when we talked about companies being able to cross reference and find out our taste i was a little skeptical. even though i like a wide range of styles and genres when it comes to music and writing, i’m also very particular about what i read and don’t read. i hadn’t used amazon or any site like that to recommend anything to me before but had relied on advice from friends as to what books and bands i should check out. the same friend wouldn’t always be right about what i would or wouldn’t like and even though i knew i was influenced by those around me, i had made my own decision once given the choices.

i decided to test this theory out and look up some writers on amazon that were often compared to writers i didn’t like and see what it recommended me. my first shot was neil gaiman because he is the only writer that remotely resembles fantasy that i like but all the recommendations were his other works so that didn’t help. i decided to look up ray bradbury because he is one of the few sci-fi writers i enjoy but the recommendations were hg wells and phillip k dick–a classic and my favorite. next i tried kafka thinking a classic would recommend me bad classics [and there are many] but i was told i would like hemmingway and nerval. finally as a last shot i looked up hp lovecraft and finally was given recommendations i wouldn’t like–fantasy and fan fiction.

what does this all say? i hadn’t used one of these things before and i don’t get my ideas of what i should check out by magazine reviews of books and records so i couldn’t be that influenced. except i was probably influenced by those who were and there are only a limited number of authors anyway. all in all it made me feel not like an individual. i think thats what postmondernism is about. feeling part of a mass group but still isolated at the same time.

In light of the readings in class from our textbook in recent weeks, I wonder how many of the digital works that we have studied this week are true “postmodern pieces.”  They all seem unconventional and creative, offer a commentary on modern culture, present “old” media in a new setting, and challenge the traditional way that we “read” or experience artistic work. But the fact that they are part of the relatively new digital environment does not make them necessarily fit the criteria (at least for literary works) as postmodern expression, I think.

I keep thinking there must be something more there that makes them warrant study and debate. “Nio” strikes me as original, witty and appealing, while the Weather Visualizer is, to me, just plain silly (sorry).  What makes either of them “push the boundaries” and turn modernism upside down, however? The Whale Hunt (the project I chose for my inquiry), for example, certainly challenges the traditional form of the photojournalistic essay; it presents artistic work in unusual ways and includes the viewer/reader in the adventure.  We even have the ability to create our own “ending” by leaving the narration at any point.  Okay, we’ll call that “postmodern.” But how many of the digital creations are “antidetective” stories described by William V. Spanos in “The Detective and the Boundary” (173); or recreate reality in the dramatic way that Baudrillard anticipates in “The Precession of Simulacra” (105); or drastically “re-frame” the narration to expose the literary conventions of storytelling, as Patricia Waugh notes in our assignment for next week “From Metafiction” (247)? Some yes, some no?

Finally, how is all this affected by the presence of the “database” as the “center of the creative process in the computer age,” as Len Manovich argues in his essay? As was discussed in Tuesday’s class, perhaps the criteria for a postmodern piece is that it is transformative, as was noted in the example of “Star Wars, One Letter at a Time.” It still raises a question: To what extent are these works mediated by the creator/artist, the viewer/reader, or both? Does it matter? More discussion and enquiry, please.

This isn’t going to be coherent – I’m sick. That’s my excuse.

I have rarely come across a word that when Goggled pulls nothing up. Nothing. But in the interview, in the apprendix section, on page 133, “Suddenly Danielewski introduces a startling paragraph, unfolding in fragments, provides the equivalent of Zupreuderesque, frame-by–frame description…”  Maybe I didn’t spell the word right, but I was wondering about it.  It looks German.

In the discussions about unconditional love, I wonder if there is a certain argument that could be made for Danielewski’s love for the reader.  The ideal reader.  Maybe it’s a stretch, maybe a big one, but in the interview, he spoke of writing House of Leaves for that ideal reader who noticed all the nuances, and twists and shifts and plays with text, language and form, with the same sort of language that Johnny wistfully uses about that girl that he never meets, but longed for that can be found on 117 among references.  But it seems to me that Danielewski has a love of the reader and it isn’t out of stubbornness or the need to be an artistic recluse that keeps him from commenting on his work, but the concern that by his divulging of secrets, or what certain things mean to him, he would unveil the mystery and steal the joy of the puzzle.  Maybe unconditional love is too far to go, but he seems to have great respect for the kind of relationship between author and reader that holds so much trust, and after putting around ten years of work into the novel, it certainly would have helped to have an ideal reader in mind. 

Asystole.  “A state of no cardiac activity”.  It is one of the very last things Johnny has to say, maybe that is too definitive for this book, because is it really the last thing?  But the story he tells, “the one Doc told me when I was up in Seattle” (518) is also a story of unconditional love.  The connection between a mother and her brain-damaged son, maybe it is what he wished could have been – that he would have been the one with the illness in the brain and not her, and that he could have died.  But even with all the darkness that surrounds Johnny’s character, and the illusions to suicide that he makes, I don’t think that is what this story gets at.  It is just a love story with a sad end.

I had a dream on Friday night about a house that was bigger on the inside than the outside.  It wasn’t dark but the rooms that kept leading to one another had large windows, beds and bookshelves.  I don’t know what that means.  Maybe it’s a good thing we’re moving on to something new.

In “The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves,” Mark B.N. Hansen argues that the novel is designed to emphasize-both thematically and formally-the “singularity of experience.”  Hansen says:

In an age marked by the massive proliferation of (primarily audiovisual) apparatuses for capturing events of all sorts,  from the most trivial to the most monumental, House of Leaves asserts the nongeneralizability (or nonrepeatability) of experience-the resistance of the singular to orthography, to technical inscription of any sort (606).

It’s easy to see how this plays out in the book.  There isn’t just one way to read the book-both in terms of the physical act of following the words on the page as well as the mental processing of the information.  For example, you can read all the footnote first or the main text first.  You can choose whether to go to the appendixes when prompted or choose not to.  And there are also several ways to react to the book, Johnny Truant’s disturbed reaction being one of them.

There’s an obvious correlation between the “singularity of experience” in reading the House of Leaves and the experience of reading the new media assigned for next week.  For example, in “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War,” the more you click on the images or on the text, the more boxes appear.  There aren’t obvious guidelines for which boxes of text to click first.  There isn’t an apparent linear order in the narrative.  You can click on all the bigger boxes first to have the smaller boxes pop up; you can click on one smaller box until it runs out of choices and then move onto the next smaller box until it too runs out of choices.  You can click on boxes randomly, clockwise, down in rows.  You can assume that every reader will make different choices, that their experience will be singular.

Whereas I can see how the House of Leaves has the singularity of experience as one of its main themes (as Hansen argues), I’m not quite sure why “My Boyfriend Came Back From the War” uses such a narrative technique.  The “plot” is basically what the title implies, a girl’s boyfriend comes back from the war, and they deal with issues that arose from their long separation.  It’s implied that the girl cheated on the boyfriend while he was away.  At times, it’s not so clear who is talking.  For example, “My mother told me you could change” could have been said by either the boyfriend or girlfriend.  Also, it seems like some lines from one box could be connected to a line in different box, forming a new meaning altogether.

I’m hoping that looking at the other new media pieces (and doing Inquiry #3) will help me figure out what this is all about.

Pulling myself away from an author’s biography is difficult; as painful for me as pulling teeth. Thomas Wolfe once platitudinously noted that ‘one should only write about what one knows’–or something like that. Maybe that bromide would have been lost to the annals of history if not for the fact that it was what every displeased critic used against Mr. Wolfe when lambasting his novels. Well, the idea that any writer could write about what he doesn’t know is nothing short of absurd; so it follows that focusing on how the writer’s material draws from his or her real life of course doesn’t seem that original (least of all, as I’ve found, to English professors) or groundbreaking. Heaven forbid me to try an unoriginal analysis of House of Leaves that lacks the pioneering spirit Danielewski patiently awaits. But I still persist in my belief that ignoring a writer’s life, past struggles, and (especially in MZD’s case) real issues in many ways inhibits and limits a work.

As we’ve mentioned in class, and by MZD’s own assertion in the interview, by reading Pelafina’s letters and understanding some of the history and influence of Truant completely changes a reader’s experience of the rest of the novel. And as we’ve all experienced, not knowing Zampano’s biography can be a frustrating hindrance, or barrier, throughout. Trying to pinpoint the full influence of Truant on Zampano’s writing, or trying to understand why he forcibly eliminated passages, is a very difficult enterprise because of this lack of information. Thus, in not knowing Danielewski’s history it would follow that if the novel is not impoverished, it is at least different. For as self-referential a novel as House of Leaves, I do not think knowing the writer’s backstory would imbue a reader with set expectations or unnecessary framework that might damage or inhibit the experience of reading a novel.

Postmodernism often relishes in a writer who will unapologetically insert himself into the novel, either as a character or a blatant voice intruding on the narrative, for the extended scope it lends the experience and understanding of a work. House of Leaves frequently plays upon the influence certain characters or histories on the other, with numerous symbiotic relationships expressing themselves, and oftentimes these are only evident when one understands where the characters come from or the state of his mind while composing. Learning something of Danielewski’s past sheds some fortunate light on such a reticent, mysterious writer, but more importantly, on the novel itself. We can discern that Truant, Zampano, and Navidson have all dealt with some serious family issues because of how they react to the hallway, and of course the context of the hallway itself. It would logically follow that understanding MZD’s own issues with family further a reader’s preexisting interpretations.

I admire MZD’s refusal to explicate his novel as much as I admire his willingness to divulge the painful, emotional details of the novel’s inception and his childhood. Particularly for me, MZD’s detailing his late father’s film of the hallway leading to the matador’s arena, a film he never saw yet was of course a part of, being there for the filming. Later in life, his father’s retelling and passion for the film created another film entirely in his imagination, one almost perfect, certainly vivid, impossible. House of Leaves left me with this same yearning for what I feel to be the most amazing film never recorded, The Navidson Record. The film of that family, and the sensation in imagining the hallway and its power, left me with the same irrational desire to see that movie, but also the same understanding which afflicts MZD, that it would only lessen in the rendering. Truant, however, is compelled to find any trace of that film, even returning to the site of his former house, and his mother’s hospital room, to devastating effect. Zampano lost his mind in rendering his imagining of such a film. But of course we all know these effects are not in the film, but in the story of that family, and those hallways that can mean so much so differently to so many—all of them frightening and, for me, sorrowful. It is MZD, Truant, Zampano, Navidson and the reader whose back-stories are embellished in House of Leaves, given a particular light. Uncovering the biographical details of the characters in the novel was one of the greatest points of interest for me, one of the novel’s most rewarding challenges. But at the same time, learning the details of the life of the most important and noticeably hidden voice in the novel, MZD, extended that most powerful echo of loss, family strife, and, why not?, love. That’s why, no matter what some academics have said to me, (return to first line).

(Admittedly that was lame)

What I took from House of Leaves was that, like we mentioned briefly in class, this novel may be many things but its essence lies in its love stories. we mentioned many examples of “unconditional love” that occur in the book between the Karen and Will Navidson, Johnny and Pelafina, Johnny and Thumper, but I think that the linked love stories of the Navidsons and of Johnny and Thumper are the two most important and poignant ones, especially in the end.

Thinking more outside of the story lines, i thought about how much we’ve talked about how long Danielewski spent working on House of Leaves, perfecting it, learning it better than anyone else ever will, I thought that the novel is a sort of love story for Danielewski himself, his love of this book, of writing it, of telling all of the stories that are in it. I especially got this impression after reading the interview we were assigned to read last class, discussing the way that it started as a novella, Redwood, and then morphing into was it is today after an incident with his father that had a heavy affect on him and the writing of the book, and another when Danielewski explained that House of Leaves is to him, a love story. 

I think there are even more cases of this love of story telling throughout the novel with the way Zampanò is writing about the Navidson Records and Johnny telling the story of himself reading it, as well as all of the stories that he likes to tell to people, especially women, throughout the book.

The direct quote from Danielewski addressing the type of story that that book: “I had one woman come up to me in a bookstore and say, ‘You know, everyone told me it was a horror book, but when I finished it, I realized that it was a love story.’ And she’s absolutely right. In some ways, genre is a marketing tool.”

After completing House of Leaves, I felt as though I had experienced the literature of the exhausted.  It was just plain tiring at times, although I always had a sense that this was an extraordinary author at work.  This was confirmed in the interview of MZD that we read for Thursday’s class.  I found myself feeling a little more patience with this book, knowing that it’s something I might go back to (or, then again, maybe not).

One aspect of the interview that I found interesting was that MZD stated, quite matter-of-factly, that “there are no errors in the book” (114).  It was a provocative comment, but how can one disprove it?  He did not say that there were no inconsistencies or contradictions in the book; he simply noted that there were no errors in the book.  It works on two levels; if one finds something one thinks is an error, MZD will simply respond that it was meant to be there, and he is also inviting his readers to “catch me if you can,” sending devoted fans on a treasure hunt (hey, it’s the journey, right?).

Another part of the interview that intrigued me was how MZD views readers.  I was impressed that he created House of Leaves over ten years.  That’s a long time, indeed, to become an expert on the pantheon of theorists, essayists, scientists, literary figures, etc., who appear in this novel. He insisted that he wrote always with the most careful and intelligent reader in mind: “I would write for the reader who gets it all, who can suspend it all, until the last possible moment before it necessarily resolve with that final chord,” he told the interviewers.  “[G]radually this idealized reader I addressed came to life in my imagination, taking in every single note, noticing every twist of phrase, appreciating all the intrinsic complexities of my narrative, understanding every modulation and harmony…” (124).  I felt a little guilty over the many times I became irritated and exasperated by the book.  If he put that much care into creating this work, maybe I should be a little more careful as a reader.  It’s a strange feeling to actually try to be objective about how I read something when the experience of reading is always so utterly subjective. As Professor Sample noted at the end of Tuesday’s class, maybe MZD is writing about reading itself.

I think I will follow Susan Sontag’s line of reasoning from here on out and likewise denounce the interpretation of works of art as, “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings'” (208).  It seems as if it would be a lot less work this way, but that is a weary attempt at complaining without being whiny.

The ideas of the literary critics that Graff cites in his essay (I thought about listing them in a footnote, but then decided that it would be annoying for everyone involved.  I’d be the girl who was trying way too hard), seem to have the general opinion that one of the things that distances post-modern literature from that of the modern period, is the frustration of meaning and symbols in literary text.  Moving from symbolism and representation of reality and truth that characterized works fo the modern is a shift to frustrate the search for those things.  It is a compliment to the last literary criticism we read concerning the “anti-detective” story, as both are the author’s attempts to confound expectation.

These ideas, I think can be easily related to House of Leaves.  Maybe the tricks with the structure and the embedded puzzles are attempts to confront the search for  meaning and symbolism.  Sure, they kind of come off as annoying and are a little bit like yelling, “Look at me.  Look at what I can do!”  But just like the academic footnotes and the idea of possibilities being exhausted in ways to approach the novel, they help it to escape “meaning” something.  Maybe it allows it to be strange and different simply for that and nothing more (which I doubt).

Another real quick jump from analysis to the novel – everything we’ve read in the last week only makes me thing that the ending won’t be an ending at all.  It will be a stop.

**SPOILER ALERT!**

When I was reading House of Leaves for the first time, it was impossible to look up all the historical, literary, religious references that MZD added to the text.  Since I went through the book several more times to build the model for Inquiry #2, I had a chance to slow down a bit and was able to do some research on some of those references.  I thought it’d be fun to talk about a few of them here:

Ash Tree Lane

Obviously, the Navidson’s house is on Ash Tree Lane.  The ash tree apparently plays a significant role in Norse myths.  The Yggdrasil (Old Norse for ash tree) was believed to be the World Tree that stands at the center of the universe.  This World Tree joins the nine worlds of Norse cosmology, which includes worlds that exist above, on, and below earth.  MZD might have chosen Ash Tree Lane as the location for the Navidson’s house because it a place where the human world and the supernatural world coexist.  The reference suggests that the house is at the center of the universe, or at least suggests that something important and universal happens in that house.  I wonder if there is any mention in the text of the existence of nine worlds.

Succoth

While I’m on the topic of the location of the house, the narrative also describes the house as “sitting quietly on the corner of Succoth and Ash Tree Lane” (18).  Succoth is Hebrew for the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacle, but it can also refer to a location.  This location could be (among other places) “the place of entering into darkness” or “where Jacob, on his return from Padan-aram after his interview with Esau, built a house for himself and made sukkot (booths) for his cattle.”  The Jacob reference is connected to Chapter XI, where critics attempt to make a comparison between Jacob and Will Navidson.  I’m still not really sure how this comparison is important to the overall scheme of the novel.

Devil’s Ear

In the story Johnny tells about being a Pit Boxer includes the detail that the Captain took him to Devil’s Ear in Florida (15).  Devil’s ear is an underwater network of caverns that reminds me a lot of a labyrinth.  The experience of going through this cave network is probably similar to the experience of exploring the labyrinth of the house.  In fact, people have died in that cave despite the efforts to enact safety measures such as this sign.

There are also subtler connections between this underwater location and the text.  Reston becomes sea sick when he goes on the rescue mission into the house with Navidson, and the metaphor of sea exploration appears throughout the text.  In addition, the reference to the sea and to the ear is mentioned in Navidson’s Dream #2.  In footnote 385, Derrida plays with the French word for snail (limaçon), which could refer to a spiral staircase (such as the one in Navidson’s house) or the spiral canal of the inner ear (the cochlea).  Note that the diagram of the cochleal fluids vaguely resembles the map for Devil’s Ear.  The reference might also be related to the theme of sounds in the novel (e.g. the echo), since the cochlea is the part of the ear that transforms vibrations from the air into nerve signals to the brain.