Thursday, June 08, 2006

daze come and go, they travel at the speed of life, hours minites seconds, all measurements of what exactly? time. tick tock light.
i was always one of thse kids who was fascinated by stars, how could a young mind get its head around the idea that the light we see from stars is ancient, the star actually may be dead by the time we see it's light. I mean for the enquiring mind, that is more of a zen koan than, 'If a tree falls' don't ya reckon?
We always look to space and wonder. I guess it may be becuase our dna knows thats where we came from, and that's probably where we will return, all we need to do is get rid of some biomass, learn to leave our bodies behind and hitch a ride with a photon. How hard can it be.

I was asked recently about my fave books, it's a great question and i will probably always give a different answer but for now this is where i stand. These are in no particular order and i recommend if you have not read any of these then do so. Now!

1984 - George Orwell
For any one who is intrested in the politics of human conditioning, this is the handbook for all regimes, including the myth of democracy. It's brilliant, always relevent and along with Animal Farm is Orwells glimpse into the individual vs the state.

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
To describe this 700 page novel is never going to do it justice, it's a piece of art that uses words in a multi narrative labyrinth of styles and hypno neuro lingistic prose that leads you into the nightmare of the protaganists situation, i read this in one long long sitting, and to this day i have never read anything like it. This is a first novel, its the novel i wish i could have written, do yourself a favour put away your steven kings and your nabokovs, go down the bookshop and buy this asap.

What's it about?

Mark Z. Danielewski's first novel has a lot going on: notably the discovery of a pseudoacademic monograph called The Navidson Record, written by a blind man named Zampanò, about a nonexistent documentary film, which itself is about a photojournalist who finds a house that has supernatural, surreal qualities. (The inner dimensions, for example, are measurably larger than the outer ones.) In addition to this Russian-doll layering of narrators, Danielewski packs in poems, scientific lists, collages, Polaroids, appendices of fake correspondence and "various quotes," single lines of prose placed any which way on the page, crossed-out passages, and so on.
Now that we've reached the post-postmodern era, presumably there's nobody left who needs liberating from the strictures of conventional fiction. So apart from its narrative tricks, what does House of Leaves have to offer? According to Johnny Truant, the tattoo-shop apprentice who discovers Zampanò's work, once you read The Navidson Record, for some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how.
We're pulled back into Johnny Truant's world through his footnotes, which he uses to discharge everything in his head, including the discovery of the manuscript, his encounters with people who knew Zampanò, and his own battles with drugs, sex, ennui, and a vague evil force. If The Navidson Record is a mad professor lecturing on the supernatural with rational-seeming conviction, Truant's footnotes are the manic student in the back of the auditorium, wigged out and furiously scribbling notes about life.
Despite his flaws, Truant is an appealingly earnest amateur editor--finding translators, tracking down sources, pointing out incongruities. Danielewski takes an academic's--or ex-academic's--glee in footnotes (the similarity to David Foster Wallace is almost too obvious to mention), as well as other bogus ivory-tower trappings such as interviews with celebrity scholars like Camille Paglia and Harold Bloom. And he stuffs highbrow and pop-culture references (and parodies) into the novel with the enthusiasm of an anarchist filling a pipe bomb with bits of junk metal. House of Leaves may not be the prettiest or most coherent collection, but if you're trying to blow stuff up, who cares?

Yeah this is the true great american novel, its the moby dick of the 20th century.

The Luicfer Principle - Howard Bloom
Here it is, Mr Blooms simple explination of the forces that have led to mankinds history of conflict, the patterns that pull us together and apart, it's a fantastic book for any one who really needs to get a grip on reality. The companian book, The Global Brain is worth reading to, it's packed with information and insight, and if you don't like what it's has to offer its worth reading for the chapter on reality being a shared hallucination.

No comments: