Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’m insanely stoked. Mark Danielewski is coming to Portland, and I get to leave work a little early to drive up there and see him. My plan is to get House of Leaves and The Whalestone Letters signed if possible, and buy Only Revolutions while I’m there. God I hope I’m brave enough to actually talk to him and ask him to sign my books. It was hard enough to be brave when I was part of CWS and meeting authors every month (omg, Dinner with Sherman Alexie!)… you’d think I’d be over my shyness by now.

Credit Where Credit is Due: Cepcion introduced me to House of Leaves a long time ago, and while I haven’t ACTUALLY finished it yet, it’s disturbing and powerful all the same. Amazon.com has a good editorial review that talks about the meta-novel structure and the crazy “sometimes you have to hold the pages backwards and in the mirror to read it” typography, or you can google Mark Danielewski and read about his crazy blue hair and social-networking++ way of getting fan participation for his new book, Only Revolutions.

I was a member of the Only Revolutions forums, but not an active participant because I joined way too late, and kept telling myself that I wanted to finish HOL before getting more involved… little did I know that time was running out.

So… according to the Only Revolutions Website (careful, lots of sound and animation!), he’ll be at Powell’s Books in Portland at 7:30pm TONIGHT to read from his new book!

I’ll be there.

Will you?

I feel a tiny TINY bit bad for those awesome sites who’ve long maintained archives of public domain literature (Gutenberg, C.U.T., and this UK library to name a few), because now they’ve got some serious competition. But at the same time, now they don’t HAVE to maintain those libraries. They probably weren’t making a lot of money off of them anyway, so now they can use those resources for something ELSE.

From the end-user and lit-geek’s point of view, this is HELLA amazing to have access to ALL PD books all in one place… amazing and “why didn’t they do this before?” because Google’s got the resources and the culture to maintain a stable, permanent, growing library. No downtime, no difficulty finding anything… if one of the little guys’ libraries was incomplete, or their servers went down, it’s Bad… But that’s not going to happen any more! I think Google taking this on is a step in the Right Direction toward an open exchange of all kinds of Knowledge. Something tells me that’s part of Google’s vision of the internet. :) Maybe. :) Just a gut feeling.

Anyway, muahahahaha. Now I can read the FULL TEXT of Alexander von Humboldt Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe from 1871 or something else equally cool like old old OLD grammar handbooks. (GOD this would have helped me when i was researching the history of punctuation last year or that old history project I did on the integrated circuit back in high school.

Finding OLD OLD texts in the library was a bitch… first your library has to own the book (or know a library that owns it and send for it), and then you have to go FIND IT… and then you usually have to carry it around. Screw that. I’m not that strong and I used to have to walk to campus… and with my research, I needed to read a TON of old books that almost NEVER were in any kind of electronic form. Thank you Google for giving this to the world so that no one else will have to feel my back breaking pain ever again.)

Anyway, I’m excited about this. Even if I’m a little tiny bit sad for the littler guys who maintain their own PD libraries. This is going to destroy them all, even while it makes literary geeks like me very very happy.

Guess how much work I’m going to get done today… heh.

Anyway, here’s the official google blog post all about this.

There’s a somber dinner-party, and Senor don Vincente Ribiera, Dictator of Costaguana goes, as does Captain Mitchell, Mrs Gould and husband Don Carlos, administrator of San Tome silver mine.

the head of the chairman of the railway board (from lond) is complaining about the train and car trip over. and talks with Mrs Gould about the town’s old distant past, how boring it is now (except for the pesky revolutions) and says that he’d help put Sulaco in touch with more greatness. The chairman helped negotiate the business of Don Vincente’s government in order to grab some land for the railway, but Sulaco’s natural barriers and surprisingly the resistance of the aristocratic residents make it hard. He gets the dictator to come to Sulaco with him and a General Montero (silver mine associate, minister of war) to come.

The railway guy (sr jon?) stops at the high point of the future railroad and meets his chief engineer and talk about moving the line away from the snobby land owners. They say don carlos can help them. he’s a bad ass.

Here, they disturb someone resting… an Indian that was “lent” to the railway peeps by the OSN… Nostromo.

I’m trying to read and understand Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. I’m having a hell of a time. BUT, I think if I write about what I do know, it might help me understand.

Chapter 1: The town’s name is Sulaco in the Republic of Costaguana in the cape of Punta Mala. There’s a legend about some Americanos who went off searching for treasure and never came back. it’s thought that their ghosts are trapped guarding the treasure.

Chapter 2: The Oceanic Steam Navigation Company (O.S.N) characterized as “violating the sanctuary of peace sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco,” and also like western pantheistic gods… good reputation for business etc.

Captain Joseph Mitchell aka “senor Mitchell, or “Fussy Joe” — captain on this end with “Smith” on the other end. He was called on to save the life of the dictator Senor Ribiera after losing a battle of Socorro.

Nostromo, who was working on the National Central Railway (he was imported) helped out and saved Captain Mitchell and Ribiera from the mob.

Chapter 3: Old Giorgio Viola, a “Garibaldino’ and his family hide out from a mob attack (same mob attack?). Nostromo has the reputation of saving people like them, and Giorgio was the one who convinced Nostromo to seek work here in the first place. Mrs Teresa Viola, two daughters Linda and Giselle. The staff of the Casa Viola mostly hide in the plains. The family hides, and just before the chapter break, someone bangs on the shutters and they can hear a horse.

Chapter 4: It’s nostromo outside with his horse. He stops briefly, then goes with a crowd away. “Avanti”… we learn Giorgio is a bad cook, and that he was part of the revolutionary struggle that preceeded this current “counter revolution”. We learn that Georgio had a son before who died, and would be the same age as Nostromo if he had lived. We learn Giorgio believes in god but doesn’t like church/religion. We learn more aboug Giorgio’s ideals: doesn’t like elitism/aristocracy/nobility. “too many kings emporers had flourished …god meant for the poeople”. he also feels alienated from fellow italians who he knows don’t care about the “wrongs of down-trodden nations” He has “old lion” imagery/qualities. he tells stories in his cafe about the ideals and wars he was in.

We learn Giorgio is a good cook and cooked for the general in european capaigns. he fought for the americans too under garbaldi.

We are reminded several times that the “mob” or everyone lower in Sulaco suspects Giorgio of having a hidden hoard in his kitchen.

“The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it’s like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval.” (91)

but it’s hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can’t always separate the sense from the sensibility.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?040628crbo_books1

Quote from Malidoma Patrice Some’s autobiography Of Water and the Spirit:

My visual horizon had grown disproportionately. I was discovering that the eye is a machine that, even at its best, can still be improved, and that there is more to sight than just physical seeing. I began to understand that human sight creates its own obstacles, stops seeing where the general consensus says it should. But since my experience with the tree, I began to perceive that we are often watched at close distance by beings that we ourselves cannot see, and that when we do see these otherworldly beings, it is often only after they have given us permission to see further–and only after they have made some adjustments in themselves to preserve their integrity. And isn’t it also tru that there is something secret about everything and everybody?

From page 225, chapter 18.

It’s incredible because it’s implying that this habit we have of hiding parts of ourselves behind masks, or revealing more or less of ourselves to trusted people is a divine and wholesome practice. That it preserves and protects something inside ourselves. The analogy here is a person’s ability to see things in the non-physical world. If they were literal and visibly present all the time, something of their purpose, their essence, and their power would disintegrate. The non-ness, or the hidden-ness is part of their structure and substance.

Have I mentioned lately that I love this book?

Quote from Malidoma Patrice Some’s autobiography Of Water and the Spirit:

My visual horizon had grown disproportionately. I was discovering that the eye is a machine that, even at its best, can still be improved, and that there is more to sight than just physical seeing. I began to understand that human sight creates its own obstacles, stops seeing where the general consensus says it should. But since my experience with the tree, I began to perceive that we are often watched at close distance by beings that we ourselves cannot see, and that when we do see these otherworldly beings, it is often only after they have given us permission to see further–and only after they have made some adjustments in themselves to preserve their integrity. And isn’t it also tru that there is something secret about everything and everybody?

From page 225, chapter 18.

It’s incredible because it’s implying that this habit we have of hiding parts of ourselves behind masks, or revealing more or less of ourselves to trusted people is a divine and wholesome practice. That it preserves and protects something inside ourselves. The analogy here is a person’s ability to see things in the non-physical world. If they were literal and visibly present all the time, something of their purpose, their essence, and their power would disintegrate. The non-ness, or the hidden-ness is part of their structure and substance.

Have I mentioned lately that I love this book?

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.

Wonderful complex ambiguity in Henry James’ stuff. My freshman year, I read Daisy Miller and started to write a cyber-punk “version” of that story (very bad. don’t ask for a copy) because I was so impressed with the skill involved in building and creating doubt, questioning, and a fundamental inability to know the truth of the story.

In Gavin’s words, Ahern’s a ninja because he says stuff like “If any of you say ‘the author leaves it up to the reader to decide the truth’ in one of your papers, I’ll smack you.” I know he was trying to drive home that explanations are to be found in the text but the same can be applied to pieces where explanations are deliberately left out, and must be accepted that way.

I like writers who refuse to anchor their work in some kind of logic. Not because I “don’t want to know”, but because I think complexity and subjectivity should be more celebrated. It’s a better representation of the “human condition” (*gags*) than trying to rationalize and attribute X to an either/or kind of “enlightened” understanding.

Tim O’Brien’s In The Lake of the Woods is also a book I’d bear children for.

For the record, I’m on chapter 8 of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.