Spooky ass books

I was splitting my time between struggling to stay awake and studying a handbook for writing this afternoon and decided to heed a piece of advice I gleaned from a paragraph in the section on improving your writing skills. Specifically that you should attempt to write anything, no matter how pointless every day. So here it goes. I failed my resolve to head to the pool today so I might as well get this done.

Yesterday was a strange day all around. I worked all day, proceeded to head to the library to finish a project for my writing course. It wasn't exactly one of my most lucid pieces of prose but i got it done. One of the consequences of my 12 hour work marathon was that the idea of sitting in front of a video device made me feel an aneurysm coming on. The risk of bursting an artery in my brain seemed very real and frightening at the time so I went to my bookshelf and grabbed whatever was buried way in the back. It happened to be a book my sister left with me before she left for Japan, "House of Leaves".

The reputation of this book has not escaped me and I've seen people praise it's ability to truly inspire fear in readers and how the level of detail given to minutiae is unprecedented. Thinking about it now, it seems like it has something in common with the "alternate reality games" that Nine Inch Nails, Lost and AI have all come up with to appeal to the obsessive fact finders and internet detectives among the fanbase. Case in point: the hard cover version of House of Leaves contains a huge string of hexadecimal code on the inside covers. If you transcribe this code into a text document you get an AIFF file for clip of a song from Poe. NIN had a puzzle in the lead up to Year Zero that involved taking a piece of a leaked song and running a spectrum analysis of a certain part to reveal a phone number. I've always been fascinated with the design of these kind of "games" and it seems already from the little i've read that this was a collaborative process.

But yeah. All I wanted to say was that the book has hooked me so far but I'll be extremely depressed if it loses me with the hard stuff before I'm fully invested in it. It's already got this meta "story of a story of a story" structure set up and I worry that it's going to leave me frustrated when I see people quoting parts like:

"Forgive me please for including this. An old man's mind is just as likely to wander as a young man's, but where a young man will forgive the stray, and old man will cut it out. Youth always tries to fill the void, and old man learns to live with it. It took me twenty years to unlearn the fortunes found in a swerve. Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don't think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead."

That's the problem with experimental art. You're never sure if it's more on the side of genius or pretentious.