ihavebeenfloated

You know, much like otaku (for the uninformed, otaku can refer to completely retarded groups of white people who are obsessed with Japanese culture, and not awesome Japanese culture, but retarded Japanese culture like miniature toy figures of anime characters and ridiculous anime shows with girls who have huge eyes and cry tears eight feet away from their faces while screaming like some Japanese bitch getting fucked by a black guy with a huge fucking cock in hardcore porn), there’s a group of people who are obsessed with Jews and Jewish culture. I found this out recently. I mainly found it out because I’ve now ran into two women in a row who are attracted to me mainly because of my huge nose, which is slightly Jewish of me I suppose. The second girl wasn’t obsessed with Jewish culture, but the first one was, and turned me on to the whole movement of people who are apparently so bored with their own American cultureless existence that they want to apply some insanely interesting concept to someone else’s relatively non-existent culture. Do Jews even have a culture? I mean, what the hell?

Jews don’t have a culture. Jews have a religion. (Wikipedia practically agrees with me here.) And the funny thing is, if you try to define Jew culture, you end up with a laundry list of derogatory stereotypes about Jews. (Again, Wikipedia agrees with me.) So what are jewtaku? (Did you just see how I invented a new word with Dan’s help? Give it a few days and a definition will show up there.)

I’m going to go out and call Jewtaku racist. The end. No examples, no reasons, no rationale. Jewtaku are racist. They just want to fuck a bunch of Jews.

Crazy!

But awesome for me!

There was supposed to be more stuff here, but I spent so much time writing this Jewtaku thing that I forgot everything else.

Update: Here’s more stuff. I wrote this all for OKCupid. Filing this under books, too, now.

And now, something special, just for OKC:

You know what, how the hell am I supposed to throw 1,000 words in here? I could easily shit out some meaningless drivel, but I’d rather not bore people to death with my shitty poetry (look, I’m waving at you) or even shittier attempts at writing extremely short stories (still waving). Obviously I’d rather just try to offend people as much as possible, but I hope you all understand that I’m just trying, unsuccessfully, to be funny. Are you laughing? Seriously, you can’t be one of those people who posts poetry from their high school journal in their profile, are you?

All of you?

Really?

Sweet Jesus. I’m sorry.

Regardless of my apology, knock it off. It annoys me to no end when I spot a post that might seem interesting on my homescreen (read as: it has the word sex in it) and it turns out to be some meandering piece of shit attempt at a poem. It just ruins my day. It really does. I especially like it when your poetry consists of you just hitting enter every five words, occasionally omitting a word, and then you capitalize the first letters of certain words in a seemingly random fashion in order to draw my attention to the word “Fairy” and “Dragon”, because that’s always what your poems consist of. Fairies, and dragons. Otherwise it’s some whiney thinly veiled piece about how your father beat you as a child, but instead of you and your father, it’s a dog chewing on a rabbit caught in a bear trap. In fact, what I just made up right there is an analogy about two hundred times more complicated and creative than anything I have ever read in the vaults of poetry most of you have plastered all over OKCupid and Livejournal.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: I want to read your poetry a little less than I want aids.

Goddamnit, four hundred more words. How is anyone supposed to do this? I suppose I understand now why people just repost journal entries from other websites, constantly rehashing the same bullshit over and over just to get an extra percentage point toward complete. It’s a constant battle.

I’ve been reading Only Revolutions. And by reading, I mean, I got 89+89 pages into it a few weeks ago and then stopped so that I could read some Raymond Chandler. What happened between Only Revolutions and I is slightly complicated. No, wait, it’s not complicated at all. I don’t know what it is. I’ll lay it out and you can decide.

I love House of Leaves. I tried reading it back when it came out, I was maybe sixteen if not fifteen, I could check but I don’t care. I couldn’t get into it. It hurt my brain. I devoured the Foundation trilogy when I was thirteen, books that I can’t even begin to read now because they make my eyes bleed, but I couldn’t digest House of Leaves years later. I finally read it about two years ago and it swallowed my soul. My thinking revolved around it long after I finished, I even registered a domain that all my email goes to and designed it in homage to it. (Staires.org) I like House of Leaves, a lot, I sing its praises to everyone I get a chance to.

Only Revolutions excited me. I liked the concept. I thought it would be amazing.

In a way, it is amazing. The binding of the book is beautiful, the layout of the pages is beautiful, the subtle use of coloring (or not so subtle depending on your perspective) is beautiful, the two ribbons and the nuances like the binding fabric being different depending on how you hold the book is beautiful. The only problem is, about seventy pages in, I figured out the gimmick of the book.

House of Leaves didn’t have a gimmick. It’s strength laid not merely in the style it was written in, although it did help a great deal in adding to the atmosphere and pacing, but also in the writing itself. It was written strongly, you got the feeling that every sentence was carefully calculated, weighed, and measured. There wasn’t a single part of that book that was found wanting.

Only Revolutions, on the other hand, is found wanting in several ways. First off, the writing is stylized, I get that. It’s so very… that author… whatever his name is. I like it, it’s snazzy. But the problem comes when you realize the delimma of making sure there’s 360 words on every page. MZD ended up cluttering up the writing with a variety of plant and animal names. These have no effect on the story what so ever. You can say, “But you’re only 89 pages in, how can you know?” Oh, I know, buddy, I know. After being deluged with it for those pages, it becomes clear that there’s no reason for it other than padding the pages. When you then find out that all the names of the plants and animals comes from lists that people submitted to MZD, you have to begin to wonder why it’s even there. OK, I get it, Sam likes animals (and apparently shits them early in the book) and Hailey likes plants (again, she shits them as well).

Also, the dual nature of the story is almost entirely pointless. Often it doesn’t reveal anything about the characters that you wouldn’t already assume. Sam sees himself as being brave and bold, and with Hailey needing protection and help. Hailey sees herself as strong and independent, and Sam is sniffling and obsessed with her. Often times their stories exactly mirror each other, like the aforementioned segment of them shitting their prospective trademarks out of their asses. This is the one “trick” that causes people to think that they are not actually together or the same people, which then causes people to think the book is deep. But, it’s not.

The concordance on the inside flaps of the cover is another clue to a trick MZD used when writing the book. I’m actually going to assume that when he wrote the book he wrote in a generic term in place of many of the complicated words that saturate the novel. Then he ran over the novel and replaced such generic terms with more complicated terms that he mapped out in the concordance. (For those who have not bothered to explore the backward text in the concordance, they are words arranged in circles according to the subject they relate to. I think much of the overcomplicated feeling of the writing in OR is due to this.

Then you’ve got the timelines that run in the sidebar. Again, it became clear early on that these have no impact on the story in any way. The lists are pointless. The only reason the dates exist is for yet another gimmick of the novel, the constantly changing car. Early on in the novel I did a search for one of the cars that pops up, and it turned out that the actual release date of the car was a year off from the date in the book. That upset me, mainly because I figured if MZD was going for something so interesting, he’d actually bother to make sure he was accurate. He wasn’t. I can forgive that.

The constantly changing car is the one blatant clue to the true nature of the book, which seems to confuse so many people. The jackets even allude to it. “They were with us before Romeo & Juliet/Tristan & Isolde. And long after too. Because they’re forever around.” The lines about them being forever sixteen, the time line increasing ad infinitum, especially the quote about them outracing history, are all meant to confuse you. The real truth of the matter is quite simple.

This story is always occurring. There is always some boy and some girl who are in love, going around, getting into trouble, having sex, doing stupid things, with people trying to prey on them. That’s why the story lacks any sort of concrete setting in time, that’s why the car is always changing. Their stories aren’t separate in time, the car is just a gimmick to distract you from the truth of the story. The lingo is just a gimmick as well. When you look beneath the gimmicks, you start to realize that there is relatively little book to digest. The story is contrived, it’s been told hundreds of times, and MZD’s greatest trick here is making you believe that it’s something new and clever.

Which is sad, because House of Leaves was new and clever. Unlike that book, however, Only Revolutions is a purely aesthetic endeavor with very little existing under the beauty.