Your one-liner didn't happen to involve the phrase "thebookyoupoo", did it?
Anyway, we had the "scared" discussion a long time ago, when you were like...oh, god, like 14 or 15? I know we discussed The Ring specifically-- the girl crawling out of the TV isn't scary to me because it's not possible. I actually found the horses committing mass suicide in the American version a lot creepier. I think I said to you then that I'm never scared of things that are logical impossibilities. Aliens in chests don't scare me. Human nature is much scarier to me.
of Leaves never struck me as a scary book. co-opting tropes from the horror genre doesn't, to me, necessarily mean something is "scary." It did strike me as an interesting exploration of what can happen in text: that a place can be depicted as a character, that a person can be depicted as a setting...once you are writing, you can attribute traits to things that normally would not go with those things. I think that's the important part of the book for me.
I think one of the problems you discuss also entirely has to do with the context in which you received the book. I got the book as a gift from a friend before the hype. I knew about the book because I was a Poe fan, and Haunted is based on the same recordings of the Danielewskis' father that of Leaves is based on. It hadn't gotten massive pomo-hipster attention at that point, and I didn't have anyone else's response to the book to go on. So there was nothing to be turned off by. As a reader, I've chosen to use the color in the title because it's actually intended to be part of the title, the way the movies Se7en is actually Se7en and not Seven or e e cummings is e e cummings and not E. E. Cummings. There's a difference between a design choice and a title, and the title of the book is of Leaves, not House of Leaves.
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Anyway, we had the "scared" discussion a long time ago, when you were like...oh, god, like 14 or 15? I know we discussed The Ring specifically-- the girl crawling out of the TV isn't scary to me because it's not possible. I actually found the horses committing mass suicide in the American version a lot creepier. I think I said to you then that I'm never scared of things that are logical impossibilities. Aliens in chests don't scare me. Human nature is much scarier to me.
of Leaves never struck me as a scary book. co-opting tropes from the horror genre doesn't, to me, necessarily mean something is "scary." It did strike me as an interesting exploration of what can happen in text: that a place can be depicted as a character, that a person can be depicted as a setting...once you are writing, you can attribute traits to things that normally would not go with those things. I think that's the important part of the book for me.
I think one of the problems you discuss also entirely has to do with the context in which you received the book. I got the book as a gift from a friend before the hype. I knew about the book because I was a Poe fan, and Haunted is based on the same recordings of the Danielewskis' father that of Leaves is based on. It hadn't gotten massive pomo-hipster attention at that point, and I didn't have anyone else's response to the book to go on. So there was nothing to be turned off by. As a reader, I've chosen to use the color in the title because it's actually intended to be part of the title, the way the movies Se7en is actually Se7en and not Seven or e e cummings is e e cummings and not E. E. Cummings. There's a difference between a design choice and a title, and the title of the book is of Leaves, not House of Leaves.