House of Leaves

"You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin."

Starting "House of Leaves" again. I haven't been to any astoundingly difficult novels that piss me off, mystify me, and scare the shit out of me all at the same time while trapping me so I can't leave for awhile. And God knows, I've got time for all that. The entire thing is a palimpsest of overlapping, pasted conceptual writing, pictures, drawings, notes, and more footnotes than true text probably, footnotes on footnotes, with different typesets and colors (the word "house," for example, as well as any foreign words that might translate as "house" are in blue, all "strikeouts" are in red, the protagonist's mother's quotes are all in purple, and different people might appear as Times New Roman or Courier or Arial) reverse writing, blocks of text removed then replaced later. Here are a couple of pages from the damned thing — embiggen 'em to see 'em in their full glory, if you're so inclined:

Typesetting this must have been a bitch.

I hate this fucking book. And I'd kill to be able to write like that.

So, scattered among my regular(?) posts here will be chunks of me bitching about this damned thing.  I suffer for my art. (Gagh.)

In Our Next Episode: I drive a spike through my foot, then whine about it for -- oh, I dunno -- y'all reckon a couple of weeks would do it?