House of Leaves: Unholy discourse

I have never read a novel with so many levels of discourse, nor such explicit narration. At its heart, we have the story of Navidson and his family, though our experience of those events is shaped by Navidson's film editing. Furthermore, we don't actually see this film, but are fed only excerpts from critical literature, which describe the scenes only as evidence for a certain reading of the text. All of this is assembled by Zampano--so much commentary on a film compiled by a blind man! But it has been organized from fragments by Truant, who also reveals up front that the entire Navidson video is a fabrication. Truant presents Zampano's work as nearly unchanged (except perhaps for the addition of the word "water" before "heater"). Yet, from his footnotes we see that Truant is practically a compulsive storyteller (aka, bullshit artist; ie, unreliable narrator). As frosting on the cake, we have the nagging question of how much change was affected by the anonymous "Editors".

Hayles does a nice job pointing out how each of these levels of narration have also affected a change in medium, from film, to scholarly article, to a box of notes, to a novel.

Also, we are constantly aware of the narration. (This book reminds me of The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is my only other major experience with this sort of thing.) Footnotes inherently break our reading of the text for the purpose of commenting on that text. (Though in House of Leaves, it's so easy to slide from the text into a footnote!) Each level of added narration comments on how the previous narrators were unreliable or biased, adding levels of their own experience to the mix. And the text wanders away from the story for pages at a time to make an abstract argument for a certain reading--such as the discussion of the mythological and symbolic nature of echo.

Certainly a very dense and somewhat unsettling read!

Creative Projects

I'm hoping you've all been thinking about what you'd like to accomplish with your creative projects for this class. We'll go around and hear from each of you in class tomorrow. I'd like to emphasize the importance of archiving your materials as you generate them, even early drafts/attempts/test-runs you don't especially like. You will be asked to account for your process at the end of the semester, and having a collections of previous versions and "cutting-room floor" sweepings will help you describe your trajectory and assess your final project in relation to your initial goals.

I'll refer you to Acid-Free Bits, an excellent resource for digital artists and writers that focuses especially on the problem of preservation. It's co-authored by Noah Wardrip Fruin, who is the editor of First Person, and Nick Monfort, a writer of interactive fiction and author of Twisty Little Passages, a critical book about IF.

I'll also invite you to take a look at one of my creative projects. Ask Me for the Moon is a combination of a poetry chapbook and a critical essay on Waikiki. It appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of The Iowa Review Web, but I'm giving you the direct link to my site to save you having to hunt through the IRW archive.

text wrap with external style sheets

Aloha!

I learned how to wrap text around images but still be able to use an external style sheet.

You can use an inline style. If you look at my home page, you can see the coding. Resize your browser and you'll see it works.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mesulliv/

Of course, if you have a lot of images, an internal css might be the way to go.

Also, if anyone wants to create a personalized/custom background for their page, I have photoshop. Let me know if you want to play!

Aloha,
michael