An unfortunate event occurred at an n+1 fundraiser. The gang managed to raise $3,000, only to wake up the next morning with the loot gone. Editor Keith Gessen noted, “We’ve been much drunker than this, but the party was so nice that we were lulled into a false sense of security.” Unfortunately, there are no leads on who ran off with the cash. But hopefully, the gang will host another party, with a sober cashmaster, as well as a keymaster. (via Bookninja)
Month / August 2006
Maps
When I was five, there was a gigantic map of Santa Clara County that hung on my bedroom wall. I can’t recall the precise circumstances in which it was placed there – whether I begged or did any number of puerile things to ensure its placement, I cannot say. What I can tell you is that I had a keen interest in the magical clover-leaf intersections, downtown San Jose’s rectilinear makeup (I particularly enjoyed the way West Santa Clara Street turned into the Alameda[1]), and the patterns which shuttled traffic[2] along such an expansive area.
I learned that my parents belonged to AAA (something called auto insurance) and that AAA offered a service to its members: you could order as many free maps as you like and AAA would send these to you by mail. Using this careful subterfuge, I actually telephoned AAA and told the helpful customer representative that my mother was sick and needed maps for an upcoming trip. It was a fib, not one I was fond of making. But to not know the world beyond Santa Clara County was an impossibility.[3] I gave the representative my mother’s AAA card number and, to my amazement, the representative listened. Sure enough, there was a package in the mail a mere four days later.
There were maps of Santa Cruz, of Monterey, of Bakersfield, of Modesto – damn near every map that was available was sent to me. The maps, in their own way, were as comforting as chicken soup.[4] Comforting in the sense that they contained bright colors and semiotics which delighted my mind’s eye. It had never occurred to any of the adults that there was something joyfully monastic about all this. It did give me comfort against the violence and upheaval that I heard beyond my bedroom door. But the knowledge of the streets that I carried inside my head got many of the adults out of lost situations in a pinch. I knew the lay of the land, but not the land itself.
The semiotics in particular allowed a portal into another world, which was, at the risk of invoking Derrida or Baudelaire, the world in some sense. For there wasn’t any particular way that this bird’s eye view could be parsed so precisely from a helicopter or a jet. The lines were clean, allowing one to view how people traveled without the clutter of houses. The intersections offered neat notation along the lines of -] [- [5] for the roads, which reflected an aesthetic minimalism that I found more pleasurable than the actual intersections themselves.
So it was no surprise that I experienced a great giddy delight upon discovering the postmodernists and their descendants.[6] They too were concerned with structure and order and creating elaborate systems that reflected the world, but that didn’t approximate it. While the systems themselves may not have been perfect or the ultimate answer, they did nevertheless contain a comfortable place to settle, a world to retreat into when I needed to escape the real world or, more accurately, find a way to recontextualize the real world through another system. It is impossible to state the emotional reaction I have had to such systems, but it was considerable.
Oddly enough, while Google Maps and their ilk are handy, they still cannot equal the joy of an unfolded map. A map sets down the record of the streets at the time that it is published. Thus, it is not the final arbiter of what’s in the real world and there are still great things to discover about it. Google Maps too has this tendency to add little markers of what’s out there. And that’s no fun. I prefer wandering along a street I haven’t known and discovering unexpected things along the way.
Is it healthy for a person to cling to an exact though somewhat abstract view of the world like a port in the storm?[7] My enemies would quibble with this, but I know that it’s healthy for me. My mind works best when hindered by a strange structural occlusion and this often prevents my thoughts and feelings from being understood. Perhaps this is why now, inspired by Danielewski, I cling to this odd format. There is a map here, but you may not understand the territory it charts.
[1] There was a bus route that traversed the entire stretch.
[2] It is important to note that the traffic scuttled in my head.
[3] Even though I learned to read at a very early age, it didn’t occur to me that one could learn about The World Outside.
[4] Dim memories of homemade chicken soup dapple through my parietal lobe, but is such a metaphor necessary? We’ve clearly established Edward Champion’s idiotic nature and many have suggested, quite rightly, that he has no right to poke his nose into certain matters. He is at best a quixotic buffoon. Can one truly imagine how he functions, thinks, and formulates? Or is such a consideration
[5] Not unlike the form I have chosen for these footnotes.
[6] See most recently, the Statement.
[7] Please note that I am not asking for sympathy here. I am merely setting this all down for the record.
Statement
It goes without saying that when an online punkass posts an extravagant claim about a major writer[1], he must be prepared to, in the parlance of 1999, back up his shit, yo.[2] Well, I am here to tell you that I have discovered a man who can write David Foster Wallace under the table, if indeed a comparative summation between writing and drinking can be consummated. A writer who, in fact, can fit quite neatly into Tom LeClair’s prodigious fiction category.
I speak of Mark Z.[3] Danielewski. I am taking about House of Leaves, a novel that is beautiful and playful in scope as it is beautiful and playful in substance. One becomes gleefully lost and bewildered in this book. Lost in the gorgeous labyrinth of footnotes and design (house and style). Bewildered by the ongoing mystery, the series of films and the titular house’s expansive territory.
It is true that Danielewski has ripped off Infinite Jest’s zest for technical arcana, with its attention to mathematics, videotape formats, and taxonomies. But what is particularly funny – indeed an outright conceit — is that while Infinite Jest largely concerns itself with its titular film in its endnotes, Danielewski brings his film (or rather films) to the forefront. Just over the 100 page mark, Infinite Jest is still figuring itself, but House of Leaves is smack dab in the underbrush of a gorgeous flowchart of footnotes: extended across pages in boxes, upside down, in various fonts. One is led on a remarkable adventure. What is the house?[4] And does Danilewski really know what’s going on?[5]
The cross-reference here is laid out so magically that I now see precisely why Wallace needed to write “Host.” Looking at House of Leaves, it’s damn clear that Danilewski was stabbing away at the ambitious footnote design well before Wallace. And if elaborate points of reference along these lines aren’t enough for you, there’s appendices and even an index.[6] This is good for people who have a perfervid history with Maps.
More importantly, while House of Leaves is a stunning academic satire in which Danielewski uses language to tell us that there are some things in life that simply should not be explained by intellectuals (a trait shared by Infinite Jest), Danielewski has more streetcred than Wallace in the form of Johnny Truant, a rough-and-tumble Angeleno who latches onto words and phrases within the text to expound upon his debauchery and a man who unapologetically confesses that he is a monoglot trying to round up academics to translate passages (often sleeping with them).
Amazingly, despite Truant’s recurrent interruptions, Danielewski’s sense of timing works. Just when you’re finding out about various excavations into the house, Truant interrupts. And you wonder if you can continue to pay attention to both Truant and Zampano[7]. Can these two contrapuntal narrators tango with the best of them? Are they the Hope and Crosby of the page? Or perhaps the Keaton and Arbuckle? Or peanut butter and jelly? Well, yes.
I apologize for the general effusive nature and my inability to pinpoint specific examples of this book’s greatness. But I am perhaps too intoxicated right now to think coherently or even concretely.
So we’ll leave it at this for the time being: Joe Bob says check it out.
[1] See “Is DFW Washed Up?”
[2] Pardon these quaint gropes for streetcred. Pardon further the egregious switch from third person to first person that will soon follow. I have abandoned first person plural for the most part, and yet there is part of me which pines for that royal and pretentious phrasing, even though I am clearly beneath it and even though it makes me sound as if I am speaking for some mysterious board of directors.
[3] What does the Z stand for? Will somebody tell me? I am too indolent to Google right now.
[4] And why does The World Outside figure so briefly into it all?
[5] First answer: you get a strong sense. Second answer: Oh, frighteningly so.
[6] Now I know where Ander Monson pilfered the idea from. No wonder he mentioned Danielewski during the Segundo podcast.
[7] Again, laziness prevents me from finding the precise diacritical mark employs upon the O. It was not readily apparent in Microsoft Word when I used Insert/Symbol -– the way a smartass linguistic nut does when he insists on spelling everything O so precisely.
It Took Three Days of Staring at an Inert Storefront Before Anything Exciting Happened
The Register: “An attempted burglary of a Liverpool sports store was foiled after a vulture-eyed viewer of a Beatles-related webcam alerted police.”
So Long and Thanks for Everything But the Fish?
New York Times: “Far from being slow learners, manatees, it turns out, are as adept at experimental tasks as dolphins, though they are slower-moving and, having no taste for fish, more difficult to motivate. They have a highly developed sense of touch, mediated by thick hairs called vibrissae that adorn not just the face, as in other mammals, but the entire body, according to the researchers’ recent work. And where earlier scientists saw in the manatee’s brain the evidence of deficient intelligence, Dr. Reep sees evolution’s shaping of an animal perfectly adapted to its environment.”