fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2011-06-06 02:18 am
some_stars) wrote2011-06-06 02:18 am
though of course it cannot end there either--
spent basically all of today rereading House of Leaves--have made it about 375 pages plus the Whalestoe Letters so far. I have a strict rule about rereading this book in full and in order--ALL the footnotes, except the ones that are just comically/disturbingly long lists of names or objects--which means that despite about 11 hours of reading today I haven't gotten to many of my favorite parts. But I like the way it makes me feel exhausted and compelled to keep going, and the good parts are best when they come after the appropriate amount of reading and struggle and buildup. Although maybe I should have waited until I wasn't alone in the house but I suppose that also adds to the atmosphere. GOD I love that book so much, so ridiculously much. It is in my top five forever and ever desert island never let it go books.
(Also it is eerie and lovely and unnerving to keep stumbling across bits I forgot that I cannibalized for my fic a couple years ago, and to be able to confirm that my pastiche was actually pretty good, since I tend to hate everything I write starting about 10-18 days after finishing it. I mean, I have other reasons to hate much of that story and I really should rewrite it at some point, but no longer because the voices are all wrong!)
SO MUCH LOVE. This is one of the few media-objects about which I get incredibly irrationally defensive when people don't like it, and ridiculously distressed by people who only read The Navidson Record and none of the Johnny Truant stuff. Which is is so stupid and annoys even me, because wtf, people can read what they want for heaven's sake, it doesn't actually matter. But I am filled with so much love it bends my brain. The play between the levels of "reality," the echoes, the way the stories leak into each other and end up creating/uncreating each other, the gradual wavering emergence of a single life, or maybe two, at the center of all the layers (or maybe not), and most of all the way the question of who's real or not and who wrote what becomes first incredibly important and then, once you've learned from that, completely unimportant and meaningless. To say nothing of the way that most of what people seem to find distasteful and annoying about the Johnny Truant footnotes turns out to be thoughtful and actually transforms itself and--IT IS SO GOOD, okay, it makes me into a crazy person.
(Also it is eerie and lovely and unnerving to keep stumbling across bits I forgot that I cannibalized for my fic a couple years ago, and to be able to confirm that my pastiche was actually pretty good, since I tend to hate everything I write starting about 10-18 days after finishing it. I mean, I have other reasons to hate much of that story and I really should rewrite it at some point, but no longer because the voices are all wrong!)
SO MUCH LOVE. This is one of the few media-objects about which I get incredibly irrationally defensive when people don't like it, and ridiculously distressed by people who only read The Navidson Record and none of the Johnny Truant stuff. Which is is so stupid and annoys even me, because wtf, people can read what they want for heaven's sake, it doesn't actually matter. But I am filled with so much love it bends my brain. The play between the levels of "reality," the echoes, the way the stories leak into each other and end up creating/uncreating each other, the gradual wavering emergence of a single life, or maybe two, at the center of all the layers (or maybe not), and most of all the way the question of who's real or not and who wrote what becomes first incredibly important and then, once you've learned from that, completely unimportant and meaningless. To say nothing of the way that most of what people seem to find distasteful and annoying about the Johnny Truant footnotes turns out to be thoughtful and actually transforms itself and--IT IS SO GOOD, okay, it makes me into a crazy person.
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And I loaned out my copy, woe. Must do something about that...
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