That There's a Fancy Rope

Before I get to today's book review, here's a heads-up as to what I'm going to read next: 

So you can look forward to that happenin' book review. I know you all get out there on Saturday nights and go to your crazy Pragmatism house parties and kick it up pragmatically at your wild Pragmatism nightclubs. I'm pretty sure this forthcoming book review will draw the crowds. To Phillip, who kindly loaned me this book: I've had your book for less than ten hours and already there is bike grease on it. I'm sorry. 

What did I just finish reading today? This:

And why should you care? Well, I'm not sure you will. But after thinking about it, I've decided I maybe care. Here's why.

At first I wanted to compare this novel to meeting an old friend you haven't seen for a year. Let's say you plan to meet this friend at a restaurant, and when you arrive at the restaurant, the friend is already at the table, and you talk for a couple of hours, and when you get up you realize he's been in a wheelchair the entire time and hasn't mentioned one word about his now being confined to a wheelchair.

After finishing the book, I don't want to talk about it like that at all.

Some people have called the prose in this novel "clean" or "muscular." They might be wrong. Actually, I can't imagine how muscular prose might read. It would be hard and dense and watching itself flex in the mirror all the time. Rutkowski's prose isn't like that at all. In fact, much of the book reads like a manual that explains how to plug in your toaster. I don't mean that as an insult.

What surprised me most about the book was how all of a sudden, about two thirds of the way through, it becomes a novel about bondage. No, not bondage as we are used to seeing it in literature, where the slaves are in bondage or the women are in bondage or the foreigners are in bondage. Yes, I'm talking about bondage in the That's-What-She-Said way. As in: Quick! I'm feeling lusty! Let's find the nearest drug store and buy the first thing we see that will allow me to lash your ankles to the garage door, which I will then open and close with you attached while I wear a ski mask. Bondage.

The funny thing is that when I reached that part of the book, I started to think that the reason that the book had, to that point, been kind of plain, was that the narrator was going to become a serial killer, and "clean" and "muscular" prose would, in retrospect, be totally calm and creepy. That's not at all what happened.

What does happen is that eventually the narrator meets a woman who is into swinging from her ankles upside-down and rather enjoys the paddle. Then the book no longer mentions bondage. Whatever those two are up to, it becomes none of the reader's business, and the book continues on to other things. These characters are not vilified for being weirdos.

People who might enjoy this book: fans of simple language that is not excessively and affectedly delicate, flash-fiction enthusiasts, and readers who are hanging upside-down.

House of Leaves; Better to Buy or Rent?

I really liked this book when I was in college. It's about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. The house grows. People use spools of string and flashlights and paint to find their way, but get lost anyway. Reading it is very much the same experience. 

Reading it blew my mind in the same way that first seeing a Mobius strip blew it. Following the text itself is sometimes like looking at a Mobius strip. Here's a sample page:

I reread this book recently, and it's not at all the book that I remembered. It's frustrating. I want to call it gimmicky, but at some point a gimmick can gain enough sophistication that it becomes art, and I'm not sure on which side of that line the book falls. 

Let's keep this in mind: I went to see Danielewski read at the Tattered Cover a few years ago, and something like 80% of the audience could be categorized as Single Male Computer Nerds Wearing Black Clothes and Pimple Cream. It's not the audience Danielewski deserves, but he did manage to bring out the Dweeb Club in full force. Yes, good point--I read the same books that the Dweeb Club reads. Let's move on.

At what point does a gimmick become art?

While rereading this book, I swung back and forth between two judgements of it; the first being that underneath all of the different typefaces and colored text and complicated page layouts, there was merely one cool idea strung out for a lot of pages. Just like the Wizard of Oz was merely an old man behind a curtain. However, at other times, the book really was amazing, for several reasons, and I wanted to believe it was more than pyrotechnics and projections designed to draw attention away from the curtain behind which the faux wizard hid.

The biggest problem with calling the novel gimmicky is that each of my frustrations with the book was echoed in the text itself. For example, if I found a passage to be a tad maudlin, then a fabricated source would be footnoted giving the same opinion and several possible explanations for the sentimentality. This is one of the many ways that reading Danielewski's text is like exploring Navidson's house, and why it's a book I enjoy thinking about more than I enjoy reading. Does that mean that Danielewski's has succeeded?

There are a lot of shifting walls in House of Leaves, and I don't mean to suggest that readers will use these walls to bang their heads against. Reading the book is very much like exploring the House, and Danielewski had to write really to make that happen. Perhaps the best compliment that I can give is that there aren't many books I read ten years ago that I would care to read again.

This would be a great book to read in the winter, when it gets dark early and you want to sit in your living room with a cup of tea and remember why you never go down in your crawlspace.

Some tips for exploring Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves.
1. For goodness' sake, don't take your rifle into a haunted house.
2. Use the buddy system.
3. Somewhere near the book you will find a pile of dust that used to be your bookmark. Don't panic.
4. Carry your Dweeb Club card at all times, I guess.
5. You can watch the author dance in leather pants in a video on YouTube. 

Things are Changing, but Trees will Still Suffer

My wife had almost convinced me to start another blog for the purpose of reviewing books. However, you may have noticed that maintaining one blog seems, at times, too much for me. Therefore, this blog will henceforth have a dual purpose, united under the banner of Harming Trees. The banner is, of course, unnecessarily large and made of paper.

I will still be posting photographs of my artwork, when I can muster the effort it takes to retrieve the camera from all the way down there in the drawer by my elbow and bring it all the way back up to my eye.

I will also be posting book reviews. I like reviewing books, as it helps me make something of all of the time I spend reading, and it helps me pay closer attention to what I'm reading, because it's as if I'll be tested on the material--even though I'll be the one administering/grading the test and will certainly turn a blind eye when I catch myself cheating. Yes, plenty of trees will be harmed in the printing of the books I'm going to read, but I urge you to print out several copies of each review and then nail each copy to a tree.

I wish I could tell you what I'm going to review first, but I can't. I've been buried in a big pile of literary crap-o-la as of late, and don't have anything worth talking about. However, because I'm am a good American, this won't stop me from talking.

Here's the book I've been beating my head against the longest:

This book weighs almost three pounds. It has cured my insomnia. It is so dry that Smoky the Bear is on guard in my library. I'm sorry Mr. Taylor. I do find your book interesting, but only five minutes at a time. I do intend to finish this book, so perhaps someday, when I am eighty, I'll be able to give this book a proper review.

(When I say, "in my library," what I'd like you to picture is me reading in a grand two story room that is hideously decorated with lots of velvet pillows and golden ropes, has a walk-in fireplace, a ladder on wheels, charts on the walls, a wet bar inside the clock, and a string quartet playing--but not too loud--in the corner. Because that is exactly how things are in my library.)

Here's a book I read this year that I sadly don't remember a single thing about:

Here are two books I read last year that sort of look alike:

Here's a Pop Quiz:

If the zombies had taken over, and you had sheltered up in a public library, and you had to light a fire to cook the glowing, eight-legged squirrel you caught by the leaking nuclear facility, which one of last year's (2010) most popular novels could you read by the firelight in order to send you into a kind of cerebral arrest and thus make you, presumably, of little interest to the zombies?

Ink on one of New York City's Central Park's dead tree.

Everybody's Favorite Weirdo

Ink on dead tree. I drew this after we went to the zoo and saw a zookeeper feeding an anteater ants from a very long glass vial. It was adorable.

Like Peas and Carrots

Ink and colored pencil on dead tree. These are studies for paintings I painted for my wife, who wrote a short story (ink on lots of dead tree) about characters encountering giant vegetables. That there is a son of Bea, with the pea, and Barret with the carrot. Perhaps someday I'll be inspired to paint Bjorn with the giant ear of corn.

Thumbs Down Airlines

Ink on dead tree.