Oct 26 2006
two things
1. My latest post is up on LitKicks. It’s called “Mark Z. Danielewski Broke My Heart” and really…
“I read Danielewski’s ticket to the fame wagon, House of Leaves, a few years ago and loved it deeply. Intensely. I curled up with it in bed at night and let it tell me its dark secrets. I gushed about it to my friends. I defended it in discussions against critics who said that the writing didn’t stand up to the gimmick of the page layout, because you go to battle for the ones you love. Did House of Leaves make me feel like a natural woman? Sure, let’s just carry it too far and say that it did.”
I’m not making a habit of telling you about my LitKicks posts, but in this case, I cracked myself up about three times, so I thought I’d share. Sorry I had to cut out the extended Spice Girls metaphor — that was gold, but some things (many things, actually) don’t make it past the censor in my head. Anyway, Ta-da!
2. This is something that just proves my incredible nerdiness, but isn’t proving my incredible nerdiness what this blog is all about? I think so. Anyway, I’d like to tell you all about one of the abuses to the English language that happens to bug the hell out of me. Are you excited? I’ll bet you are. It goes like this: do you know what the word “wherefore” means? I’ll tell you. It means “why.” WHY. It does not mean WHERE. Using it to mean “where” is incorrect, and not cute. It’d be like if I decided that the word “hello” meant “I’m going to punch you in the face.” I wouldn’t be right, though I admit, I’d probably feel a lot better.
The end.
Nice piece.
And particular thanks for leading me unwittingly to the list of synonyms for a soul-patch.
Now, surely there’s no reason not to share the Spice Girls metaphor with us here ? I mean, you may have a censor in your head, but I can assure you we have no standards to violate whatsoever.
Yeah, it’s a pretty impressive list. I actually didn’t notice it when I linked to it because I was transfixed by the Springsteen soul patch, but when I clicked on the link later to make sure it worked, I saw it and thought “Huh. Well, you really do learn something new every day.”
As for the Spice Girls thing, well, it would be hard to recreate it in a truly effective way since it would basically involve rewriting my entire review. And I’m lazy. But essentially, I compared the book to the Spice Girls, and then made some points about prose and Posh’s fashion sense, because that’s totally literary, right? Exactly.