Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Hopscotch!

A truly amazing resource for those whose Spanish is better than mine, now added to the sidebar. Wonderfully designed, it includes (amazingly) the main body of the text from Cortazar’s “Rayuela” (whose proto-hypertext structuring tricks I’m busily ripping off for my own ends (and on the subject of ripping off see below)) along with a vast store of short stories and poems, most notably a couple from "Espantapajaros" by Girondo. As soon as I’ve finished the aforementioned magnum opus I’m going to start translating (poorly) some stories and poems and sticking them on here for the bi-lingual to laugh at.

Idiocy!

I’m certainly an idiot, as any regular, or even occasional, readers of The Impostume will have smartly surmised, not even owning a copy of “Tilt” by Scott Walker until a week ago ( and thereby earning the scorn of the otherwise placid L.S.O.A.B.B.C.) and am only now for the first time getting my lugholes round Peter Hammill via a selection of works from his forthcoming Re-mastered Albums on promo (Two quid! Scratch that Quidditch boy!) and it’s frankly, fairly amazing. Like Out-There, man. Electronic-folk-prog? Tangerine Dream meets Richard Thompson? Current 93 meets the Magic Band? Preposterous but strangely great, do I detect a bit of Bauhaus in there (the band) a bit of Illbient/Isolationist drone, rattle and scrape going on. Whoah! This could be a grower. Why have I never heard Van Der Graaff Generator? When will this ever end?

“First it’s Banville…..”

Looking forward to Mark Z Danielewski’s (he of "House of Leaves" fame) new novel, “Only Revolutions”, only to discover that the book consists of two stories that run past each other from different ends of the book, half of the story being upside-down on any page, and, I suspect, the stories linking up to form a mobius strip. Now this is something that I was going to do with my own novel "White Diaspora" initially but just wasn’t able to achieve with my basic knowledge of Quark and Acrobat. It does however have that, goes-backward, flip- the-book-over and read the backward text back to the start thing. But Mr Impostume, what are the chances that Danielewski ever saw your pitiful non-professionally published book etc? Well, I was extremely active on the House Of Leaves forum four or so years ago when I first started printing “White Diaspora” up, and sent out numerous free copies to people who were active on the board, so excuse my slight (self-important) paranoia.

Should I sue? Errr..well given that I ripped the structure off John Barth’s “Frame Tale”anyway (but stretched it out from a single sentence to novel length, rather as “Cloud Atlas” was ripped off “ Menelaiad”, rather as I’m now busy ripping off Cortazar) and that Danielewski has just combined it with Derrida’s “Glas” or Dickey’s “Alnilam” (though I suspect the former, given that Danielewski was a cameraman on the "Derrida" doc) it would be a bit rich for me to take umbrage.

And y’know there is always the possibility that Danielewski was in the middle of writing it (he claims it took him six years. Ah yes, but when did he decide upon the final FORM of the novel (calm down, now.)) when suddenly some nobody (boo-hoo!) turns up on his forum touting a book with the same “original” form as the one he’s going for. So…. Anyway ladies and gents I leave you to judge the similarities or otherwise for yourselves….

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

At least take some umbrage. A person with a smaller ego might at least have included some acknowledgements that mentioned your book idea, among many others...

François Monti said...

Funny you mention John Barth. In my review of OR (posted on http://table-rase.blogspot.com/, alas in French), I mentioned that Danielewski style for this book reminded me quite a bit of that of Barth, especially "Sot-weed" or "Goat-boy" era. I havn't read "Lost in the funhouse", but since it's the book published right after the 2 I mentioned, I might be onto something ;)