ZAC'S HAUNTED HOUSE BY DENNIS COOPER

Zac's Haunted House by Dennis Cooper

There are very few things in literature that don't have a creative lineage of precedents...no matter how weird or different a book is, if you read widely enough you will almost always encounter someone else who did something similar. 

One of the things I find most exciting about being a writer/reader in this period of history, as we slowly transition from paper texts to digital ones, is the opportunity to create things that the world has genuinely never seen before. As far as I know, this is the first and only gif novel.

One of my favorite descriptions of the novel comes from Dennis Cooper's blog: 

"I'm coming off feeling like I've found, through creating a novel out of animated gifs, a whole new world or secret level, in the video game sense, within narrative that makes me wonder anew about what it is and what it can be. I feel like the gif form/material allowed me to do something with fiction that language-based fiction hasn't ever allowed me to do -- that is, absolutely and deeply submerge the story, plot, characters and their development until they become a background."

Besides that introduction, the best way to experience the novel is to just click through and look at it, give it some of your attention. 

Reading the novel was such an interesting experience for me because after awhile I realized that, even though it's a novel with hardly any words, I felt that I really was 'reading' it. The sequence of how the gifs are ordered and separated into groups and chapters creates a nebulous but discernible meaning. You start to notice deliberate patterns and structures, and you begin to piece together meaning in a way similar to how you discern and interpret meaning in a sequence of words or sentences. The gif novel is an extremely unique and trippy kind of reading experience, but to me it's still a reading experience. Zac's Haunted House feels like the invention of a new language to me, and I'm excited to see what this new language can say.

JULIUS CAESAR BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

My favorite line from Julius Caesar is 'death for his ambition.' That sums up the play perfectly for me. 

Caesar was arguably one of the most successful generals and politicians in human history. Caesar was so well loved and so successful that his popularity threatened to tear the Republic apart, by crowning Caesar king of the entire Roman Empire. There was a great fear that he would become a tyrant. For his ambition, Caesar was stabbed to death by his closest colleagues and friends.

Similarly, Bruno became involved in Caesar's assassination for the good of Rome, to save the Republican form of government from being replaced with a dictatorship. For his ambition, Bruno was murdered during the ensuing civil war and everyone thinks of him as one of history's most notorious traitors. 

All of the main characters in this play are powerful men, flawed politicians with personal agendas. The main characters frequently voice disdain for the general public, who are fickle and easily manipulated by lofty speeches. The public are described like this:

(reacting to a speech) "the rabblement hooted, and clapped their chopped hands, and threw up their sweaty night-caps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath..."

"You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!"

Shakespeare lived in a highly political time full of constant King of Thrones type coups and spies and civil wars, and I see this play as his condemnation of that type of world. Power corrupts. People have different takes on this play, but that's mine.  You can interpret Shakespeare's plays in about a million different ways, which is a big reason why they keep getting read all these hundreds of years later. 

My favorite parts of the play are the ones where supernatural power is invoked, aka 'beware the Ides of March' etc:

"And there were drawn upon a heap a hundred ghastly women, transformed with their fear, who swore they saw men all in fire walk up and down the streets. And yesterday, the bird of night did sit even at noon-day upon the market-place, hooting and shrieking."

No matter how high your ambition soars or how much you achieve, death is always the final result. The power of mankind is nothing compared to the power of the universe. The great wheel turns.

WITCH BABIES BY JULIET ESCORIA

Witch Babies by Juliet Escoria

This book is 23 pages of short poems. The poems are blunt and vivid. Each poem made an immediate impression on me. It's not the type of poetry that you have to study and stare at for a long time, crystal ball like, to intuit the meaning. They're sharp and quick and emotionally hard hitting. 

A lot of the poems are composed of sentences that have been cut into poetic lines, which is something I like. There's just something about a well put together sentence that's admirable in its own right. 

This is one part of a poem from Witch Babies that I kept reading over and over until I ended up memorizing it without trying:

Drowning in a pool of water

that may or may not

actually be there

while listening to 1983's

number one hit record

and not really giving

a shit

either way.

I like that so much. I feel like that's a close to perfect sentence. This is another part of a poem that I liked a lot:

He did not regret

his wanting

although he

may have regretted

the fulfillment

but what else

is there

to say about

desire.

I would like it if I didn't see my acne 

as a manifestation of my inner self

but this is difficult when my thoughts resemble swine

and there is nothing in my heart worth admiration.

There is an amusement park

on the ground with

rollercoasters

like shoestrings

and the hills still

hold green leaves but

when we took off

what lay beneath

was a snowstorm

and coal mills

and a graveyard.

 

The book/zine/chapbook looks like something you would see being read aloud from at a death metal concert or a pagan ritual in the middle of the forest. It has a sweet looking hand printed sigil on the cover, a lot of beautiful illustrations by Carabella Sands, and a bloody fingerprint on the last page. 

Witch Babies is all sold out now (more copies would presumably mean more bloody fingerprints), but even better news is that Escoria's full-length poetry collection Witch Hunt is going to be released next year through Lazy Fascist Press, so be sure to get a copy of that when it comes out. (excerpt)

GILEAD BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The main character of Gilead is John Ames, who is a seventy-six year old preacher that lives in a small midwestern town. He has serious heart problems and his doctors tell him that he is nearing the end of his life. His heart could fail at any time. He has spent most of his life unmarried and alone, but in his old age he married a younger woman and they now have a seven year old son. The entire book is a letter from John Ames to his son, a letter to be read when his son grows up. 

For the last few years I've been reading terabytes of disaffected writing about how this world is fucked up and stupid, other people are fucked up and stupid, you yourself are fucked up and stupid and hopeless, and life is nasty, brutish and short etc etc

All those things might be true, but it's nice to read a book with a different perspective. President Obama has said several times that Gilead is one of his favorite books, which fits with what I know of his philosophy and personality. The main character is a kind, morally decent, intelligent person who tries to see the best in people. He wants to appreciate every remaining moment of life he has left. It's a hopeful book, and it's a book that makes you want to be good to other people. It makes cynicism look small and weak and unintelligent. 

In my mind I think about Robinson's novels as being similar to Terrence Malick's movies. They both give me a feeling of awe about reality and this world we live in, the depths of human beings. And they are both very, very beautifully made.

This is an excerpt, which will hopefully express what I mean:

"They say an infant can’t see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes, and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn’t really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any." (excerpt) (excerpt)

BINARY STAR BY SARAH GERARD

Binary Star by Sarah Gerard

This is a short novel about a toxic, co-dependent relationship. The main character struggles with anorexia and her boyfriend is an alcoholic asshole. I felt sympathy for the main character, and I felt almost none for her boyfriend. He's an asshole.

I felt like this book gave me the best insight I've read so far into the mind of someone with severe body dysphoria and anorexia. The descriptions of the wooziness and heart-racing that accompanies going without food were very vivid and actually made me feel physically bad sometimes, they gave me low level anxiety, and I mean that in a very complimentary way. The sense of self-hatred that the main character constantly feels is intense and palpable. She is living in a personal hell. 

I also didn't know about binary star systems before I read this book, and I felt like Gerard did a good job of teaching me about them. The writing is short, clipped, immersive, and page-turning. I think I read the whole book in one sitting. (excerpt)

BIPOLAR COWBOY BY NOAH CICERO

Bipolar Cowboy by Noah Cicero

I love the trailer for Bipolar Cowboy, which features several readings from the book. I love the trailer so much that I'm gonna post it below so you can watch it immediately:


 

The poems in this book are an interesting amalgam of Buddhist koans and conversational speech. I thought the poems were very sweet and melancholy and earnest, without being cheesy. The poems are very personal and specific to the author Noah Cicero, but they're also preoccupied with philosophy and trying to make sense of human experience on a grand scale.

The book reminded me a lot of a Japanese phrase: 'mono no aware.' It doesn't have an exact translation in english but wikipedia says it means 'the pathos of things.' It describes the feeling you get when you contemplate the transience and ephemerality of existence, that all things eventually die and change, nothing stays as it is. It is a sad feeling, but it's also a beautiful feeling. Like the sudden blooming and sudden death of the cherry blossoms every year, life is intense and fleeting and full of cycles of death and renewal.

I really appreciated how accessible and honest and emotional the writing was. I wish more poetry collections were like this book. (excerpt)

THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY BY ROBERT BURTON

The Essential Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton

The edition I read was an abridged version that was around 300 pages. The full book is close to 1300 pages.

This book has some of the longest sentences I've read, and some of most tortured and extravagant syntax I've read. That's awesome because it makes the book so weird and different from everything else. Burton's prose has a lot of strange moves and I'm glad I read it, but it was also a pretty frustrating book for me to spend time with. 

I was more attracted to the content, which is just as strange and goes all over the place. I did read an abridged version, but based on what I know about the book it seems like most of it just meanders all over the place, from subject to subject and anecdote to anecdote. It's supposed to be about 'melancholy' but it ends up being about everything. The best way to describe the book is that it's an encyclopedia of European civilization.

It's a funny book...it doesn't read like Tao Lin, but the whole time I was reading it I kept thinking wouldn't it be awesome if one day Tao Lin ended up writing a gigantic rambling 2,000 page book like this. This book reminds me somewhat of the long sentences in Taipei, where every tiny nuance gets qualified, and the qualification gets further parsed into several more qualifications which get dissected down into molecule and atom levels of nuance until they finally resolve themselves in a kind of blurry shrug. (excerpt)

THE END OF NIGHT BY PAUL BOGARD

The End of Night: Searching For Natural Darkness In an Age of Artificial Light by Paul Bogard

This is a non-fiction book about light pollution. I wanted to read a book about this subject because in The Pillow Book, Shonagon spends so much time rapturously describing moonlight, fireflies, lanterns, embers, coals, and stars--it made me realize that her understanding of night is fundamentally different from mine. When night comes around, all I need to do is turn on a few switches (or a few screens) and my life is once again swallowed up in light.

Bogard talks about the history of public lighting, starting with the great European capitals, and he talks about the advent of electric light. Most of the book is focused on light pollution in the United States. US cities have had public lighting for some time, but most of the US remained in the dark well into the 1930s, when FDR created the Rural Electrification Administration. 

Bogard focuses a lot of attention on Las Vegas, where the brightest light in the world exists (at the top of the Luxor Pyramid--a light so bright that it has created its own mini-ecosystem of birds and bats that feast on the giant numbers of insects it attracts). The lights of Las Vegas bleed into the desert and into national parks that are hundreds of miles away.

There are several national parks in the US where you can still see the night sky fully exposed. Bogard's description of these places make me depressed, because I've never seen the sky like that. On clear nights, the Milky Way is so bright that it casts a shadow. With the naked eye, you can see a distance of 2.2 million light years into outer space. That's something I'd like to see before I die. I felt very informed by this book, I learned a lot.

RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN BY DENIS JOHNSON

Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson

I feel like when Denis Johnson is at his best he's pretty much untouchable, and he's at his best for a lot of this novel. It's about a burnt-out, suicidal man who gets stranded in a small Cape Cod resort town. The plot is difficult to sum up neatly, but it includes working as a private investigator, transvestites, and conspiracy theories. 

It's a funny book and it's surprising. Like most Denis Johnson books, the prose is top notch. There's an atmosphere of religious apocalypse woven through the whole thing, and ultimately I think of it as a religious book in the weirdest possible way. I think Jesus' Son is my favorite Denis Johnson book, then Angels, and then this one. (excerpt)

THE PILLOW BOOK BY SEI SHONAGON

The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon (translated by Meredith McKenney)

The usual description of this book goes something like 'it's like a thousand year old blog'--but that really is what it's like. I kept thinking about Megan Boyle the whole time I was reading it. 

The Pillow Book is the diary of a 10th century Japanese lady of the court. But it's more like a blog, not a diary. Diaries are private, and it's clear that The Pillow Book is written for an audience, although it is a very small and specialized audience, aka other members of the court. 

Throughout the book Shonagon tells stories and gossip, describes her days and weeks, and gives the reader long lists of things.

Some of her lists include:
+Things That People Despise
+Things That Give a Pathetic Impression
+Rare Things
+Awkward Things
+Boring Things
+Things That Should Not Be Seen By Firelight
+Things That Are Unpleasant To Hear
+Things That Should Be Large

And on and on and on, for 400 plus pages. Some parts are boring and some are interesting. Most are interesting. She seems like the type of person I would enjoy having as a friend. And she lived a thousand years ago, which is pretty cool. (excerpt) (excerpt)

POEMS AND FRAGMENTS BY SAPPHO

Poems and Fragments by Sappho (translated by Stanley Lombardo)

Sappho was a Geek poet who lived 2500 years ago. In her time, and for hundreds of years later, she was considered one of the great poets of her culture. Most of what she wrote is now lost--scholars say that only 10% of her poetry has survived--enough to fill a 65 page book. 

Most of what has survived through the millennias are just fragments of poems, and reading her poetry is like looking at ruins--small glimpses of genius, small glimpses at a world that has long vanished. 

A lot of Sappho's poems are about all-or-nothing love, the kind of love that makes you go crazy and shine like a star. Her works have been torn to ribbons by time, and yet the intense passion of her words can still reach through even all that, and touch you. (excerpt) (excerpt) (excerpt)(excerpt) (excerpt) (excerpt) (excerpt)

DON QUIXOTE BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (translated by Charles Jarvis)

This is the second time I've read Don Quixote. This year I read it over a three month span, picking it up whenever I felt like it. 

Don Quixote is a character who read so many books that he went insane. I am a compulsive and obsessive reader, I've been that way for most of my life. This is the kind of life I want and choose to live, but I do get depressed about it sometimes. Maybe I've spent too much time with my nose stuck in a book. Maybe my life would be 'better' and healthier and more socially adjusted and successful if I had moderated my reading a little bit more. I start to wonder about what books have added to my life, and what they've taken away.

Don Quixote is a bittersweet kind of hero. He's a comically delusional old man who thinks he is one of the world's great heroes, although he winds up getting humiliated and beaten up and laughed out of town half the time. He is essentially homeless and destitute. Especially in Book One, he is a pathetic character, a warning against the dangers of keeping your head too high in the clouds.

Despite all that, Don Quixote actually does become one of world's great heroes. He has a steadfast idealism, an earnestness, and a chivalric code that he lives for completely. He is not a practical human being, he is a human who dreams himself into a legend. By Book Two, he is known all throughout Spain. He has traveled all over the country and had a hundred fantastic adventures. He knows things that ordinary people will never know. And he completely doesn't give a fuck what other people think of him. He is brave and wild. I love this book like a family member. (excerpt)

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY EDITED BY MATTHEW DONAHOO AND LUCAS SIMON FOSTER

Entertainment Weekly edited by Matthew Donahoo & Lucas Simon Foster

This is an 88 page anthology of short stories and poems. 

The standout story for me was 'The Library Assistant' by David Fishkind. There are lots of stories about drinking and getting drunk, but only a few stories I've read that have actually made me feel drunk. This story gives me a claustrophobic despairing feeling, like when you drink so much that the world starts spinning. (excerpt)

Tao Lin has a very funny and emotional and kind of profound two page story that begins like this: 'I just had the most intense coconut opening experience of my life by far.' 

There's also a brand new Zachary German story...that was the main reason I initially bought it. I'm waiting on the next Zachary German book like I'm waiting on the next Jay Electronica album. I enjoyed this short story, it's a revised version of a story that he told on his podcast Shitty Youth. (excerpt)

There's a bunch of other cool stuff in here too, but for the sake of space I'll just mention those three pieces.

FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS BY JOHN FOXE

Foxes Book of Martyrs by John Foxe

When I was a little kid my house was full of books about theology and church history, and one of the books I ended up reading a little bit of was Foxe's Book of Martyrs. This book scared the shit out of me. A major reason that I initially picked it was because it was a book with pictures. Here are some of the type of pictures it has:

So yeah, as a little kid this book freaked me out. It still freaks me out.

Foxe's Book of Martyrs is around 400 pages of short descriptions of being people burned alive, pulled apart, skinned, hanged, publicly beaten, stoned, tortured, starved, drowned, and pretty much every other horrible thing that can be done to a person. There is no character development or literary detail, the book basically reads like a gigantic newspaper report.

The Book of Martyrs was a pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic book. The book starts off with Christians being crucified and ripped apart by lions as they are persecuted by the Romans. The Christian church was not an established entity then. The ironic thing is that later in the book even more Christian 'blasphemers' die at the hands of the Catholic church, which has now grown into a world power. The chapters about the Inquisition are even more gory than the chapters in which Christianity is seen as a revolutionary movement that must be stomped into nonexistence.

This is a horrific book, but the other side to it is that much of the book is about people who believed in something so strongly that they were willing to die for it. There are many reports of people who chose death and torture over renouncing their faith. For the author and the intended audience, the people that die in this book did not die pointless deaths, they are heroes and examples to us all.

I didn't read the entire book again, maybe just half of it--I mostly skimmed it. In many ways the book reminded me of 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade. The violence is so extreme and gets repeated so much that after awhile you become desensitized to it. 

This is an excerpt:

The officers of the Inquisition, preceded by trumpets, kettledrums, and their banner, marched on the thirtieth of May, in cavalcade, to the palace of the great square, where they declared by proclamation, that, on the thirtieth of June, the sentence of the prisoners would be put in execution.

Of these prisoners, twenty men and women, with one renegade Mahometan, were ordered to be burned; fifty Jews and Jewesses, having never before been imprisoned, and repenting of their crimes, were sentenced to a long confinement, and to wear a yellow cap. The whole court of Spain was present on this occasion. The grand inquisitor's chair was placed in a sort of tribunal far above that of the king.

Among those who were to suffer, was a young Jewess of exquisite beauty, and but seventeen years of age. Being on the same side of the scaffold where the queen was seated, she addressed her, in hopes of obtaining a pardon, in the following pathetic speech: "Great queen, will not your royal presence be of some service to me in my miserable condition? Have regard to my youth; and, oh! consider, that I am about to die for professing a religion imbibed from my earliest infancy!" Her majesty seemed greatly to pity her distress, but turned away her eyes, as she did not dare to speak a word in behalf of a person who had been declared a heretic.

In many ways, this book is like a condensed history of the world. It didn't make me feel very endeared to humanity. It's a book that's supposed to inspire religious devotion in its readers, but it did not have that effect on me. I will say, however, that it's the type of book that makes a deep impression. It's not a book that's easily forgotten.