Booth #5: ThoRns Grove - Where Books Eat YOU

[Thorngrub]

I always wondered about that book - - how it all adds up, in the end. *I don't mean I wanna know the outcome*, rather, how all that wacky concrete-prose-poetry and offset typography, etc, etc, ends up qualifying (when all is read and done) the overall story.

It seems fascinating. . . and somewhat daunting. The typography stuff is nothin' new to someone who was raised on Alfred Bester, so you might think HOUSE OF LEAVES is right up my twisted little alleyway. 'Cept I've looked at it in bookstores . . . been quite intrigued . . . and have yet to take that final step of acquiring the book to find out for myself.

Bottom Line: *Let us know what you thought of it when you're done, Lady* ! I'm dying to find out (w/out spoilers, of course).

[TheLady]

Will do, only problem is, it's shaping up to be a very slow read so you might be waiting a while. I've come to realize you need (at least) 2 bookmarks for it, unless you want to read The Navidson Record first and then go back and read Truant's footnotes later -- some of them run on for pages and pages so that might actually be the best way to tackle it, but I'd rather read them as I go.

Plus I have so many papers to write this month I want to sit down and cry. I had almost forgotten that I used to actually read and write for pleasure, and not because it was required by some class.

[sisyphus]

House of Leaves was a really fun read....The Navidson Record was 'specially fascinating... When I read it I consumed it ravenously, having fun putting together all the little clues and feeling fascinated by the final labyrinth...

Still, for all my enthusiasm in reading it, I didnt come out with the feeling that it was up there with any of the greatest things I've ever read... In fact, it receded rather quickly into the back of my mind..

Did you know it was written by Poe's brother, who grew up in Provo Utah or something?

[Thorngrub]

oh yeah, I knew she had a brother who wrote - - there's that POE song about driving in the car about him - - but I didn't know he was THAT guy (who wrote "House Of Leaves"). Cool

[sisyphus]

that song is IN House of Leaves....

[sisyphus]

“Suppose I become curious about how my irony actually works--how it fumctions. I pick up a copy of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony and I am immediately plunged into difficulties. The situation bristles with difficulties. To begin with, Kierkegaard says that the outsanding feature of irony is that it confers upon the ironist a subjective freedom. The subject, the speaker, is negatively free. If what the ironist says is not his meaning, or is the opposite of his meaning, he is free both in relation to others and in relation to himself. He is not bound by what he has said. Irony is a means of depriving the objects of its reality in order that the subject may feel free. Irony deprives the object of its reality when the ironist says something about the object that is not what he means. Kierkegaard distinguishes between the phenomenon (the word) and the essence (the thought or meaning). Truth demands an identity of essence and phenomenon. But with irony quote the phenomenon is not the essence but the opposite of the essence unquote page 264. The object is deprived of its reality by what I have said about it. Regarded in an ironical light, the object shivers, shatters, disappears. Irony is thus destructive and what Kierkegaard worries about a lot is that irony has nothing to put in the place of what it has destroyed. the new actuality--what the ironist has said about the object-- is peculiar in that it is a comment upon a former actuality rather than a new actuality. This account of Kierkegaard’s account of irony is grossly oversimplified. Now, consider an irony directed not against a given object but against the whole of existence. An irony directed against the whole of existence produces, according to Kierkegaard, estrangement and poetry.........What is wanted, Kierkegaard says, is not a victory over the world but a reconciliation with the world. And it is soon discovered that although poetry is a kind of reconciliation, the distance between the new actuality, higher and more perfect than the historical actuality, and the historical actuality, lower and more imperfect than the new actuality, produces not a reconciliation but animosity.”

-Barthelme, Donald.dlanoD ,emlehtraB

[Thorngrub]

that will take a long time to digest

[Thorngrub]

[sisyphus]

I love Alex Supertramp!

[Thorngrub]

Abso-fuckin-lovin' this book, sisy. Thanks

[poseidon]

Happy Birthday Thorn! How old are you today?

[poseidon]

Ah...41 today. Congrat's my friend. You're a month and three days older than I. Taurus's rock! My sisters one.

[Thorngrub]

Thanks pat ! \m/ damn straight taurus's rock \m/ All May -babies do !

I had a great b-day weekend campin out down south @ the mouth of LIttle Wild Horse Canyon; went on a 6-hour hike up "Ding" canyon w/my best friends. It was sweeeeet.

We camped under a caterpillar tree. IN the morning they were crawlin all over us. Oscar the chihuahua was there. It's takin' me a while to get back into the 'online' spirit. . . I'll be back to my regular haunting of this place in no time.

[Thorngrub]

My Mom got me this for my birthday present; she had never heard of this book, nor its author, but it "caught her eye" and something drew her to it, thinking it'd be "up my alley".

The curious thing is . . .it most certainly is up my alley, and neither had I ever heard of it, nor its author.

Now I'm past chapter 10, fully engrossed, cannot put the thing down, and all I can say is, if you like reading (heh heh) . . . *read this book* !

er. . . *runs off to continue reading The Shadow Of The Wind . . .

[Thorngrub]

Here is what Cory Doctorow said about this book:

"It's the most thought provoking thing I've read all year....I can tell that this is a book I'll return to again and again and get more out of it each time I do. It's a wonderful and timely work that is a must-read in an age of ubiquitous computation, universal information resources, and hacker-activist renaissance, there's no better primer for putting it all together."

Here's what the author's own (frontispiece) introductory blurb says:

"THIS BOOK IS ABOUT CREATED OBJECTS and the environment, which is to say, it's a book about everything. Seen from sufficient distance, this is a small topic.
The ideal readers for this book are those ambitious young souls (of any age) who want to constructively intervene in the process of technosocial transformation. That is to say, this book is for designers and thinkers, engineers and scientists, entrepeneurs and financiers, and anyone else who might care to understand why things were once as they were, why things are as they are, and what things seem to be becoming."



1. R.i.t, you need to read this, and you need to read it NOW.
2. Layla, you need to read this, and you need to read it NOW.
3. shin: you need to read this, and you need to read it NOW.
4. sisyphus: you need to read this, and you need to read it NOW.
5. luke: you motherfucking NEED to read this, and you fucking need to read it FUCKING NOW.
6. Holzman: god damnit, READ THIS THING, and do it NOW!
7. frag: You really absolutely MUST read this book . . . and you must do it ASAP (seriously).
8. doc drum: ditto
9. kMc, BLANEY, maarts, patten, p cook, Riley: Get on it!
10. You all get the idea. I'm not saying everyone on this forum would necessarily enjoy/and/or/get-something-out-of-it, but I'm not kidding when I claim it is the most thought-provoking little book I've ever read, and in my humble opinion, may quite possibly be the most important book published so far in the 21st century. THAT is not "hyperbole": that is a modest proposal as close to sincerely factual as I can word it.


I will read it again. And again. I'm thinking of actually copying the text by manually typing its entirety myself for pirated distribution to friends and acquaintances. (Otherwise I'd just buy a stack of em & mail em out)

Fuckin' get yer Sterling on and read this god damned manifesto, bitches. That is all.