Ergodic Literature: The Weirdest Book Genre

[Music] House of leaves by Mark Zed danielowski is the story of Johnny truant an apprentice tattoo artist who discovers a manuscript under the floorboards of a mysterious old blind man named zampano he begins reading the manuscript which tells the story of the navidson record supposedly a famous series of documentary style films about a photographer named will neverton who moves with his family into a new house and slowly discovers that it has some strange non-euclidean geometry you can get an idea of what makes House of leaves interesting just by looking at some of its uh creative page layouts House of leaves is kind of Infamous in some online circles I imagine because a lot of people just look at these pages and decide immediately that the book is too hard for them to read and that it's only decipherable by expert readers who also read stuff like Ulysses or War and Peace however if you have read this novel it's actually easier than you might have first thought and also really fun like the page layouts look intimidating at first however personally I found traversing these Pages an absolute blast and they even made me laugh out loud a few times prime example in chapter 9 you really start having to go back and forth through the pages following the footnotes there are footnotes everywhere in this book and there's this footnote right here that references a k but nowhere on the previous or next couple of pages is there a k anywhere that would send you here to read this I spent a good minute just searching the adjacent Pages for the sentence that referenced this footnote but not finding it anywhere I just decided to read the footnote anyway and then move on five pages later the book is describing the winding hallways and passages of the non-euclidean house and to help with the illustration uses a Latin phrase which the footnotes on this page translate as passages that wind advance and retreat in a bewildering intricate manner Pliny also wrote when describing the Egyptian maze said krebus forbius indictus Ed fallendos or cursos rendeondum queer in errores EOS Dem doors are let into the walls at frequent intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed in his wanderings and there's the K forcing me to go back upon the very same pages to read the footnote I had already read I know this bit is referencing Pliny and translating Latin so it appears like sophisticated and smart but the actual joke itself is so dumb still made me laugh though this is actually a pretty good microcosm of the experience of reading a house of leaves it is genuinely a very smart novel but it's not smart in an exclusionary way it gets the fundamentals of Storytelling very right it has engaging characters it has a tense and moving plot it's got themes it's got mystery humor drama twists and turns you don't have to be interested in deciphering every little thing in this book in order to just have a good time reading it yeah they're a fan theories extra Mysteries and an ARG if you enjoy that sort of thing but it's not a requirement if all you're looking for is a cool story with a beginning a middle and a climax you can easily just read the words and House of leaves will give you exactly that however that's not to say that it's just a normal story told in a weird manner oh no the lab Corinthian footnote trails and creative page layouts add an immense amount of entertainment and meaning to this novel and I guarantee you if the same story was written in a totally straightforward manner with a regular third-person narrator zero footnotes and normal page layout it would probably still be a good story but it would be far far less of a fantastic novel The formatting is genuinely what elevates house of leaves from good to great but it's also what makes it easy for people to just decide not to read the book because they think it isn't for them that's a real shame because even just casually reading through the novel you can understand the purpose of the Labyrinthian page layout pretty easily as an example again in chapter 9 the characters are trying to navigate a series of endless hallways that exist in an impossible space and one of the characters decides to break a hole in the wall to see what happens this is what the page looks like you can see that footnote 144 is contained in this box but the footnote keeps going on to the next page along with the box and the words from the previous page are even shown mirrored on their backside and this keeps going for several Pages as the layouts get even weirder you can see here footnote 167 is printed sideways and there's two columns of more footnotes on the sides of the pages here one of which is printed upside down it looks complicated but the basic idea is actually pretty simple the novel is trying to evoke the idea of a non-euclidean space by using a Labyrinthian page layout the characters feel lost in this confusing space and simultaneously the reader can also feel somewhat lost as they navigate the pages and try to figure out how they are going to Traverse the scene the Box footnote that goes for several pages is itself metaphorical of the wall in the impossible hallway being busted through by one of the characters you can see that pretty much every scene featuring The Impossible space in this novel provide different variations of the Labyrinthian page layout that act as a metaphor for what is happening in the space itself during each of these parts of the story the story of Johnny truant the tattoo artist who studies the neverton record is told through a series of footnotes written by him in a different font Johnny reads through the zampano manuscript and annotates his thoughts as he writes occasionally the annotations go on for several Pages as Johnny takes the opportunity to basically use them as a way to keep a personal diary his story is kind of lovecraftian in a way the mysteries of the manuscript left behind by the deceased zampano take such a toll on his mental health that he gradually starts deteriorating the more time he gives to studying the manuscript it's very evocative of the Lovecraft style idea of a character who is driven mad and loses their grip on reality as a result of learning some Forbidden Knowledge or at least that's if we take Johnny's account of his own story as accurate which we may want to consider not doing for several reasons which I won't spoil I've spoken to friends about Johnny's story and pretty much all of us agree that Johnny's sections are noticeably not as good as the sections covering the neverton record now I think they are mostly fine however easily the worst parts of this novel by far are Johnny's multiple and frequent sex scenes they're not as bad as something written by Sebastian Fox but consequently they're also not as funny as Forks either there's also a series of footnotes embedded in Johnny's footnotes that are all signed Ed which is an abbreviation of editor it's made explicit early on that Johnny or someone handed off the manuscript plus all of Johnny's annotations to a publishing house which then had its own editors pour over the manuscript and make their own annotations this novel is several layers of metadia Jesus which is just a pretentious way of saying that it's a story within another story within another story more like Mark Zed shaharazad am I right quite a sizable chunk of this book is actually taken up by the two appendices at the back the information in the appendices is used as the backbone for several fan theories that I'm not going to get into the weeds of and I'm not going to spoil any of the information contained in the appendices here either but the reason why I still want to mention them is because they introduce an interesting way in which readers can choose to read this novel here's how it works in the back end of chapter 5 there's an extensive footnote written by Johnny where he describes being overcome by this kind of hallucinogenic panic attack while at the tattoo parlor where he works at the end of Johnny's footnote is an embedded footnote left by one of the editors of the publishing house which reads though Mr truance aside May often seem impenetrable they are not without Rhyme or Reason the reader who wishes to interpret Mr truant on his or her own may disregard this note those however who feel they would profit from a better understanding of his past may wish to proceed ahead and read his father's obituary in appendix 2D as well as those letters written by his institutionalized mother in appendix 2E so I chose to read the appendices referenced right away this is one of several times in the novel where a footnote references the appendices and I during my reading followed the footnotes into the appendices as they were referenced so I read the father's obituary and the mother's letters basically at the end of chapter five however while researching this novel online I found out that quite a few people who've read this novel didn't go straight to the appendices when they were referenced instead they read the entire main body of the novel first and saved the appendices for after they were done with the main story here's an example of that from Austin McConnell's video on House of leaves oh and at the very end after you finish everything there is an appendix that when read and fully decoded and I found that incredibly interesting because that's a really significant Divergence between two possible readings of the text one in which the revelations in the appendix are doled out as the story is read and one in which they're saved until after the main story has concluded the footnote in chapter 5 that sends the reader to the appendices does merely suggest that readers may choose to read them if interested it doesn't state that reading the appendices now or later or at all is necessarily correct or intended one could even imagine if a reader is conscious that this is a choice that they can make choosing to take the path that they think will give them a better reading experience according to their own tastes I won't say any more about House of leaves because I encourage you to read it for yourself if you're interested I've taken the liberty of putting a list of online book retailers that I recommend in the description of this video so check those out and see if you can get a copy from one of them although I also encourage you to first try picking up a copy from a local independent bookstore if you are able to for most people I imagine that house of leaves seems like the most unique and experimental novel they've ever seen and that is a fair impression to have novels typically don't play with formatting like this they typically don't send the reader on a labyrinth-like traversal through the pages and they typically don't allow for diverging optional routes through the text the overwhelming majority of novels are arranged with the intention for people to read the words and turn the pages in a clear set order so most people even most Avid readers probably aren't that familiar with literature that breaks away from linear formatting House of leaves isn't unique in this aspect in fact it's formatting techniques could be seen as a combination of the two novels double or nothing by Raymond faderman and Hopscotch by yulio cortasa you can see that double or nothing has a Wilder layout than House of leaves as the text makes an even wider variety of shapes on the page it's also more difficult to read not actually because of the layout itself but rather because the writing style is free associative and a lot of what you can decipher out of this novel about the characters and the plot is going to be open to interpretation meanwhile Hopscotch has an entire back half of the novel analogous to House of leaves as appendices called the Expendable chapters that offer an optional non-linear reading of the text through a Labyrinth of chapter references when you begin the novel it explicitly tells you that you have two options for how to read it one simply reading the first 56 chapters linearly as they appear and the second following the reference Trail which takes you back and forth in between the story chapters and the Expendable chapters this basically functions as a way of adding extra material to the story similar to House of leaves's appendices I want to stress that the point I'm trying to make is not that house of leaves is derivative or that house of leaves isn't as smart as everyone says it is it's actually that what house of leaves is doing with the page layout is more accessible to most readers than how it might appear and far from being this crazy never before seen and never seen since format warping thing it's more like the most famous representative of a rare type of literature that has existed for a long time and continues to be published to this day but that most people don't know about so if you think House of leaves looks cool and you're wondering what kind of other weird and wild novels are also out there then let me take you on an adventure [Music] ergodic literature was first coined by ESPN J orsett in 1997 in the book cyber text perspectives on a godic literature orset is a scholar of game studies electronic literature media studies and literary Theory and in the 1990s he was part of a small movement of writers and academics writing in the field of hypertext fiction these artists and academics were interested in this idea of non-linear stories and postulated that computers would be far superior in facilitating such a non-linearity than printed paperbacks it was known that paperbacks were very capable of providing non-linear story experiences however non-linear paperbacks were still somewhat of a rarity and there wasn't a lot of standardized terminology for discussing this type of fiction at the time it was in this context that orset coined the term agoric literature as a catch-all umbrella term that describes an non-linear or otherwise interactive literature written in both paperback and electronic mediums according to orset in ergodic literature non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to Traverse the text if ergodic literature is to make sense as a concept there must also be non-ergotic literature where the effort to Traverse the text is Trivial with no extra dramatic responsibilities placed on the reader except for example eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages other writers since orset have pointed out that this definition leaves a little to be desired for example where exactly is the dividing line between trivial and non-trivial effort how much of the traversal of a novel has to require non-trivial effort in order for it to be called ergodic and if you want to really stir the pot you could also throw in but what do you mean by literature or set does provide us some clarification however by giving examples of what he can considers to be a godic literature such as the calagrams of French poet Guillaume apolnir the printed words that make up these poems are arranged in such a way to produce a picture and what's notable about the act of reading these poems is that there is no suggested set sequence that the words are meant to be read in sure words are still generally arranged left to right but where exactly does the poem begin where exactly does it end is there an intended order to each of the poem's lines from first to last rather than a set structure aponia's calagrams instead ask the reader to Traverse the text pretty much however they want composition number one by Mark sapota is basically a novel comprising 155 loose pages that are meant to be shuffled like a deck of cards and is written so that it supposedly makes sense no matter what order you read them in I say supposedly partially because there are roughly 4.8 times 10 to the power of 273 possible Arrangements of the novel but mostly because I wasn't a able to acquire a copy to read and you probably won't either unless you are rich oh my God pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov yes the Lolita guy is framed as a literary critic writing a close reading of a poem the novel starts by presenting the reader with the 999 line poem to read in its entirety and the rest of the story is presented as a series of commentaries about the poem written by the novel's protagonist the key feature that makes it ergotic is that the commentaries are constantly referencing back to the poem so the reader has the option to periodically turn back to the beginning of the novel in order to re-read the poem many times in order to understand the context of each line as the commentary progresses there's a play by Ein Rand that has two endings and asks the audience to vote for one or the other that orset uses as an example but I'm not tracking down an iron Rand play for this so instead Milo and the Magical Stones is a children's book with two endings halfway through the novel The Pages literally split into two different storylines that the reader can flip through separately the novel doesn't present either of these endings as the true or Canon ending but rather gives them both to the reader with an equal amount of prominence to let the reader read them in either order and make of them whatever they wish so if we're going with orset's definition there appear to be two key features of literature that make it ergodic one non-linearity a book in which all the pages are in a set order from first to last and all the printed words on the page are also in a set order from left to right top to bottom is considered linear so for a literary text to be non-linear the reader must either be required to Traverse back and forth through the pages in an arrangement other than first to last or to read the printed words on the page in something other than a left to right top to bottom Arrangement or whatever Arrangement is considered standard for the language the text is written in this would be the non-trivial astronomatic effort required to Traverse the text that orset was talking about two reader choice in linear novels the intended method for the reader to navigate words pages and scenes is obvious any deviation by the reader from the order of words pages and scenes as presented by a linear novel goes against the intended way that the novel is meant to be traversed therefore in ergotic literature there is some opportunity for the reader to make a choice about how they are going to Traverse the text this doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a singular intended way for the reader to Traverse the text however the text must be presented in such a way that an intended method is not obvious provoking the reader to make a decision about how they are going to navigate the pages just to be absolutely clear ergodicity in literature doesn't refer to the plot so a book with a non-linear plot is not necessarily A godic ergodicity cares a about how the reader traverses the text so if a novel has a linear plot that is traversed in a non-linear way then that would count as an exotic novel likewise when I am referring to readers choosing how to read the text I'm not talking about readers choosing how to interpret the text which of course readers can do with any fiction instead I'm talking about the novel offering the reader's multiple intended options for how to Traverse the text that's not to say that a text must have both of these characteristics in order for us to consider it to be ergodic literature art terminology is famously difficult to get rigid and Universal definitions for and my aim here is not to give you the precise metrics that Define a piece of literature as ergotic instead consider these two characteristics as being strongly suggestive of what we are looking for when we are trying to find ergodic novels so if we're all clear on what ergotic literature is and don't worry if you aren't let's take a look at some examples [Music] s is a novel credited to Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams yes that JJ Abrams what are stories but mystery boxes as far as I can tell Doug Dorset had more of a hand in the actual writing of the novel while Abrams is credited mostly with coming up with the premise although Abrams still gets top billing on the cover I presume because he's way more famous than endorsed such is the media business s is the story of two University students named Jennifer and Eric who communicate to each other through annotating the pages of a different novel called ship of Theseus by the mysterious fictional author v m strocker that might sound confusing so let me just show you this is the outside cover which you will want to hold on to inside this cover you can see that this book is titled ship of Theseus and it's authored by v m strocker this author straka is not real they are a fictional character invented by Dorst and Abrams if we look inside we can see that there are normal printed words as well as a bunch of annotations that look like they were scrawled with pen the idea behind this is that the two protagonists Jennifer and Eric are both studying the same copy of the novel ship of Theseus and leave each other annotations in the margins however instead of just writing out Jennifer and Eric's story with a third person narrator the conceit of s is that you the audience are reading through the actual copy of ship of Theseus that both Jennifer and Eric were reading and annotating including the extra documents they shared with each other while researching inserted in between the pages which is the reason you'll want to keep a hold of the outside cover foreign something that may make s a challenging read is that there are three stories in this novel none of which are happening in parallel the first story in s is the story told by the novel ship of Theseus a man only known as s wakes up in a dank Port Town with amnesia and while he tries to get the lay of the land he's kidnapped and imprisoned on a derelict ship with no Captain he ends up escaping that ship and arriving marooned in another Port Town that is thick in the middle of a labor strike the cruel industrialist vivoda is cracking down on worker protests and S finds himself whisked through a series of Adventures fighting the voda's agents and always somehow managing to find himself back on the mysterious captainless ship that takes him to wherever he needs to be in order to fight vivoda ship of Theseus is its own self-contained narrative so if you're so inclined it is actually possible to just ignore all the annotations and read ship of Theseus as its own story The Second Story story of s is that of the enigmatic author v m Stryker who wrote many acclaimed novels of which ship of Theseus is his last strucker's identity is a total mystery but he was in fact a political activist who was accused of bombings assassinations kidnappings and Espionage along with a merry band of fellow activists and writers in various countries known collectively as wouldn't you know it the S straka is either a member of the group who was especially skilled at not being traced the pseudonym of one of the other known members of the group or a shared identity that multiple members of the group used when publishing politically charged novels this story is told partially through the annotations and inserts Eric and Jen Lee for each other as they research him but also partially through the footnotes that the novels translator FX Caldera wrote Into the actual print of the novel Caldera claims to be a close associate of straka and will occasionally interrupt ship of Theseus to give possible facts about straka that may be important to understanding the novel and its author Eric is initially perplexed that Caldera would deface straka's work by including footnotes and chapter titles especially since evidence seems to contradict a significant portion of caldera's claims however Jen figures out that the footnotes actually contain secret messages left for someone perhaps straka himself to decode uncovering who this Striker person was what he did what ended up happening to him and what the whole deal with the S was are some of the many Mysteries that you will find reading this novel what aren't mystery stories butt boxes the third story in s is the story of Jennifer and Eric as they race to uncover the Mysteries surrounding straka and his novels before Eric's former graduate Professor can steal his work find the answers himself and cash in on being the person who solved the striker mystery as Eric and Jen pass notes back and forth they also share details about their lives to each other and and their friendship becomes the emotional core of the novel you might think that passing a single copy of a book back and forth adding a bunch of annotations with each pass is a a inefficient way for Jennifer and Eric to communicate with each other and you are right near the beginning of the novel it does feel a little too quirky a little too why a Whimsical to take seriously and the novel itself is aware of this and tries to fabricate several reasons for why Eric and Jen can't just use email or text messages or meet face to face instead it's admittedly a large contrivance but if it bothers you enough to the point where it would ruin the story then you probably wouldn't be reading this novel anyway however considering that the novel is staking a huge amount of its Appeal on Vera similitude something that may be a real issue is the fictional novel ship of theseus's page formatting which you might notice has the printed words heavily shifted to the inside of the page page now the obvious reason that the real-life Publishers of s did this was to make room on the page for Eric and Jen's annotations Dorst and Abrams need an enormous amount of space in the margins in order for this format to work this is also why the font size is quite large for a novel intended for adults it's a pragmatic solution to an inherent flaw with the premise however once you notice it it gives the impression that the novel ship of Theseus was printed with the intention for people to leave hundreds of annotations in the margins of every single page and you only need to compare the formatting to any other novel intended for adults to see how transparent that is this is the kind of thing that you just have to willingly suspend your disbelief to ignore however it especially stands out here just because of how much effort the novel otherwise spends on Vera similitude which is a lot to be fair no other novel has attempted formatting like this as far as I know and I imagine if annotated novel was a genre that some of the Kinks of this form mat would probably be sorted out over time I'm talking to you aspiring writers one thing that you'll notice pretty quickly is that if you choose to read everything in the novel sequentially from page first to page last you will encounter the annotations that Eric and Jen leave for each other out of chronological order here's a good example when the pair began annotating the novel Jennifer was using a blue ballpoint pen and Eric was using a black marker but at some point in Jennifer and Eric's story they both start using different colored pens instead Jen switches to a gold pen and Eric switches to a green pen then later on still Jen uses a purple pen and Eric uses a red pen but because their story isn't happening in parallel to the ship of Theseus story they both peruse the novel in its entirety multiple times over as they study it you find Eric and Jen's later annotations on earlier pages of the novel which means their story is presented in non-chronological fragments I find this style well very interesting because it gives the reader several options for how they want to experience the text you can read the entire novel in sequence from page first to page last following the annotations as they appear and you will have experienced one version of s another option that you have is to ignore Eric and Jen's annotations on your first reading of the novel and to only read ship of Theseus as its own self-contained story then go back and read through the annotations to get Eric and Jen's story afterwards this would be truer to how Eric and Jen experienced the novel as both of them had already read through it in its entirety before they committed to leaving footnotes in the margins you can take this even further and read through Eric and Jen's footnotes chronologically starting with a complete reading of all of the blue and black footnotes followed by a complete reading of the gold and green footnotes and finally with a complete reading of the red and purple footnotes this method probably takes the most effort from the reader but would actually have you read through Eric and Jen's story in mostly chronological order another option that a friend of mine discovered while reading is to read through each chapter in order only the plain text first and then go back once you reach the end of the chapter and read that chapter's annotations this method of reading the novel is probably going to be optimal for most readers the advantage is that you only go through the novel once in a mostly linear way however it actually makes it easier to follow the story of ship of Theseus which is otherwise constantly being interrupted by Eric and Jen if you choose to read the annotations linearly as they appear regardless of what you choose you have several options available to you for how you wish to Traverse the novel so probably the weirdest part of this book is that it has inserts open up the pages of ship of Theseus and you'll find that Jennifer and Eric leave each other some extra documents notes newsletters postcards research pages and even what the novel calls an aortivos wheel that can actually really be used to solve an optional Cipher in this book if this looks intimidating don't worry it's not complicated most of the inserts functionally act as extra pages as a non-spoiler example in the translator's note and forward Caldera makes reference to the few public statements made by straka and Jennifer highlights this and asks Eric if he has a copy of any of straka's public statements in response Eric leaves her a note that says attached my favorite letter to Gran ripping film adaptation of Santana March Santana March is another of Striker's novels inserted into that page is a photocopy of a translated letter supposedly sent from straka to a Mr gron this Grand character made a film adaptation of one of straka's novels Santana March that straka himself was incredibly dissatisfied with Gran then went on to claim in an interview that straka was lurking around shooting locations as the film was being made he says because straka wanted to in enjoy a moment in the Glamorous world of film which is a bit of an embarrassing description so straka wrote a letter to Gran expressing that the film was a monumentally poor adaptation that completely missed the point of the novel and reprimanding Gran for spreading lies about him to the press the PostScript of the letter reads please burn this letter once you have read it surely you understand that neither of our interests would be served if it were to become public but of course since Eric has a copy Guan evidently leaked the letter to the public out of spite and it became one of the few verifiable public statements straka issued Jennifer reads the photocopy of this letter and leaves an annotation that says hilarious makes me feel bad for Gran though I personally Loved These inserts it's a very clever way of including extra documents in an epistolary novel especially one in which the characters are investigating a mystery it felt like I was being given a chance to read through the relevant information myself rather than it simply being done by the characters and then told to me through narration being able to actually manipulate the inserts with my hands I found also countered for a lot and the same very similitude simply isn't achieved by printing the extra documents on the page like you see in many other epistolary novels my only disappointment was that most of Eric and Jen's off-screen research isn't accompanied by an insert and I was always disappointed when it wasn't in my opinion these inserts are such a good idea and the novel should have had more of them I would very much love to see more novels experiment with stuff like this similar to House of leaves the story in s is fine not as good as House of leaves but it's the way the story is told that makes the novel incredibly interesting I love it although uh how do I put this I'll just say if you've ever found JJ abrams's storytelling style uh frustrating in the past then set your expectations accordingly what are mystery stories but mystery stories and what are boxes butt boxes personally I think s is pretty good novel that is incredibly fun to read if you want to give this novel a shot I would seriously recommend picking up a physical copy if you're able to although ebook versions are also available again the online retailers that I recommend are in the description [Music] so I mentioned that composition number one by Mark zaporter is a novel where the reader shuffles the pages and reads them in a random order and I imagine most of you like myself are probably wondering how a novel like that would even work as curious as I am intellectual curiosity isn't worth 500 out of my own Pockets but thankfully I found a cheaper option the unfortunate by BS Johnson yes that name certainly is unfortunate is a novel that offers the option of reading the chapters in any order you get one chapter titled first which you are intended to read first one chapter titled last which you are intended to read last and the rest you are intended to read in any order on your first reading feel free to just shuffle them because not knowing the content of the story the order may as well be random if you choose to read this story multiple times however you have the option of deliberately ordering the chapters however you like and seeing how that may or may not change the meaning of the story for you so the unfortunate is written as a stream of Consciousness and if you don't know what that means here's an excerpt but I know this city this green ticket Hall the long office half rounded at its ends that ironic cholestery Brown glazed tiles green below the same the decorative Hammer beams supporting nothing above of course I know this city how did I not realize when he said go and do City this week that it was this city Tony his cheek swallowed and collapsed around the insinuated Bones the gums shriveled was it or shrunken his teeth now standing free of each other in the unnatural half yawn of his mouth Yes that mouth had been so full fleshed the whole face too now collapsed derelict the thick framed glasses the only constant the mouth held open as in a controlled scream but no sound that head moving only slightly the white dried and sticky saliva the last secretions of those harassed glands cauterized into deficiency his mouth closing only when he took water from a glass by his bed that double bed in his parents's house Bungalow water or lemon he had to take frequently because of what the treatment had done to his saliva glands how it had finished them him so this style is intended to represent the protagonist's train of thought it's largely inspired by modernist writers who popularized the technique like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce and is supposed to evoke the chaos and free association of raw unrefined thought you can think of it as you the reader viewing the story from inside the Mind's Eye of the protagonist rather than being externally told the story by the protagonist if this is your first encounter with stream of Consciousness as a literary technique then I sympathize it does take some getting used to but the story is still very decipherable through the style B.S Johnson is probably one of the more accessible examples of stream of Consciousness writing that I've personally encountered this opening paragraph describes the protagonist arriving at a city he recognizes and upon realizing it's the city he spent his youth in his mind is cast back to the memory of a friend who died of cancer the image of Tony withering away in his bed from the toll that both the cancer and the treatment had on his body is the first thing that appears in our unnamed protagonist's mind when he re-enters the this oh so familiar City for the first time in many years what follows is 25 randomly ordered chapters most of which detail a memory that resurfaces in the protagonist's mind as he remembers his old friend Tony the random order of the chapters is itself evocative of the often random chaotic and free associative nature of memories this combines with the stream of Consciousness writing to form what is perhaps one of the most psychological novels ever written it does actually feel sort of like exploring the memory banks of a character and reading his own interpretation of his life in a disjointed free associative and unfortunately Earnest way the protagonist met his friend Tony during his uni days when they were both studying English literature Tony seemed to be the brighter of the two he was at some point offered a University Research job however he was unfortunately diagnosed with cancer and he wasn't not able to pursue academic research in his chosen field for very long before his illness took the better of him instead withering away until the day he died back in his parents's house during his life Tony made a significant impression on our protagonist who himself was extremely interested in English literature but was never good enough for academic Pursuits evidently because despite attempting to publish his own novel the protagonist eventually became a sports writer instead one of the chapters details his thoughts in the present as he sits in for a football match he doesn't really care about and so he spends the entire match writing down dismissive sarcastic notes into his notebook that he plans on turning into something more professional later these present day chapters mixed randomly in with the memory chapters give a sense of the protagonist kinda ghosting through his life as though in between moments of living clearly and lucidly he doesn't focus on what's going on around him because his mind pulls him into thoughts about his past it feels like he's drowning in his thoughts and memories and only occasionally breaks the surface into his present reality and even when he does his waking thoughts and activities don't exactly paint the picture of a happy well-adjusted man this is kind of a story about living an unremarkable unfulfilled unsatisfying life in a kind of horrific way each chapter is anywhere from 1 to 12 pages long and the writing is dense so while it is a short read if you do tackle this book I would recommend reading it multiple times because you will get more out of it on subsequent readings I would also recommend recording the order of the chapters as you read them on a separate piece of paper each chapter doesn't have a number or a title but they do have these cute little shapes that you can use to identify them if you like keep track of how the chapters get ordered so that if you shuffle them or otherwise reorder them on subsequent readings it makes it easier to remember what's changed since last time it's almost like the novel is inviting you to treat these chapters as though they were your own memories and record them as you would a diary my biggest criticism of this book is more or less the same criticism that I threw at House of leaves there are sex scenes in this book that are just kinda bad I've read enough books that nowadays I'm just kind of bored with chauvinistic sex scenes that feature female love interests who only exist to characterize the male protagonists who have sex with them there are two chapters in this novel that made me feel deeply uncomfortable with how the protagonist described his love interests and even knowing that he's kinda intentionally characterized as being unempathetic and chauvinistic towards the women it still felt extremely gratuitous to me so if you do decide to still purchase this novel but don't like the idea of reading a sad old straight guy wax poetic about women he's had sex with for no reason what I would recommend doing is before shuffling the chapters take the one with these weird inset circles and this one with the sun symbol and and just throw them out if you do choose to commit to reading this you will find an emotionally complex tale chiefly about how we organize the stories of our lives but also how we deal with loss change grief and forgetting as well as many other things overall I think it's pretty good but that being said this novel isn't really one that I would recommend to most readers it's a very demanding piece of literature it's not suitable for casual reading and the actual story is quite mundane existing mainly as a vector that carries the novel's ideas rather than being something that can be enjoyed purely for the pleasure of reading it it's absolutely worth reading and studying if you're interested in the randomized chapters and how they work and my hope is that some aspiring writer out there will take the idea and make something incredibly cool out of it online book retailers that I recommend are as always in the description [Music] Zachary Thomas Dodson is the co-founder of feather proof a publisher specializing in unusual novels believe me if I wanted to I could absolutely pad out this video with novels that have come out of his Publishing House universe and miniature and miniature each story in the book is represented by a planet and then the cover you can cut out and construct a mobile of the universe of the book from the book Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler could order a pre-destroed copy which is something that we took and destroyed ourselves in all sorts of ways I don't normally Advocate that's the author himself actually destroying one of his books normally don't Advocate reading books that way but this was very fun we had a contest where you could destroy your own copy of scorch Atlas and whoever destroyed it the best then they won the prize which was a replacement copy and everybody else's out of luck in 2008 I did my own book on feather proof called boring boring boring boring boring boring boring it's a kind of an art school satire of the book so with this book I designed it as a series of posters so there's kind of what the posters looked like and those were in an art show and then the book reviews came back and they said things like this I mean I think that one's implied in the title this may be true I suppose it's true of lots of things this is a positive review so what I kind of learned from this experience was that I was not very good at writing bats of the Republic an illuminated novel by Zachary Thomas Dotson is a Time spanning sci-fi and historical fiction Adventure that tells two stories one taking place in the past and the other taking place in the future in the year 2143 the environment has collapsed and the remnants of human civilization that is still left are hyper-authoritarian surveillance states where everyone is watched as much as possible and everything is recorded permanently the rationale behind the surveillance system was originally to preserve human history following the collapse and whether or not that was ever true now it's a form of societal control everyone's lives are organized into strict life phases where they must Court marry and have children within specific age ranges or else be imprisoned in a city-state designated as the place for single people and the queers no I'm not kidding the rationale behind the life phase system was originally to help humans repopulate following the collapse and whether or not that was ever true you get the idea Zeke Thomas is the grandson of a powerful senator who has recently passed away and is expected to step into the role that his grandfather Left Behind however while searching through his grandfather's possessions Zeke discovers a sealed letter that apparently predates the archiving system of this dystopian surveillance-based society and he realizes that it's quite possibly one of the few remaining secrets in the world initially he plans on turning the letter in however before he even has a chance to a police major shows up at his door looking for it and he resolves to try and keep the letter secret for no other reason than simple Defiance it turns out the letter was originally written and sealed in 1843 and Zeke's great great great great great great great great great great grandfather zadak Thomas was The Courier who attempted to deliver the letter zadek was a poor naturalist who studied animals and His Story begins with him sending a letter of his own to a wealthy museum curator to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage the curator is reluctant to Grant zadek his daughter's hand however promises to do so on the condition that zadek undertakes a secret assignment for him he must deliver a sensitive letter of extreme political importance to a general Edwin irian in the Republic of Texas which if you don't know your American history revolt and broke away from Mexico in 1836 and was an independent state for about 10 years until it was annexed by the United States of America in 1846 leading directly into the Mexican-American War so the setting is extremely politically volatile as you can imagine zadek sets off on his mission to deliver the letter with explicit instructions that it isn't to be opened by anyone except General irian zedek's Sketchbook as well as his letters to his love back home are the vector by which his story is told so you get a bunch of sketches of animals hand-drawn maps and star charts that he uses to navigate his way while he Adventures his beloved back home elseworth is dealing with her father's pressure to just hurry up and marry a man of good breeding already as well as preparing for her younger sister's debut into courtship or whatever those weird debutante Traditions used to be as she waits for zadek's return evidently the letter didn't reach its intended recipient because it still sealed 300 years later so what was in this letter does it actually change anything and if zadek didn't deliver it then how did he come to be Zeke's ancestor if you would like to know you can find the letter close to the back of the book inside an envelope with do not open written on it if you own the book then there's nothing stopping you from opening it at any time but you shouldn't not because opening it isn't in the spirit of the book it's just that if you read what's inside without the context of the rest of the story you will be extremely confused as you might imagine much of this story is thematic through line is in drawing connections between the past and the future for example that detail about the queers all being forcibly segregated into their own city-state isn't incidental in fact the novel is interested in drawing parallels between the hyper-authoritarian surveillance state of the future and the paranoid bigotry of the past similarly the future society's obsession with life phases and Bloodlines done under the pretense of Humanity's survival is linked with past traditions of having young girls debut into a period of courting and marrying The Suitor of the most prestigious family line they can by the time they reach a certain age in both the past and the future the characters are being crushed by the systems that govern their lives but find themselves unable to resist the machinations of those systems due to them being so aggressively normalized there are a ton of connections the novel makes between the past and future stories that you'll pick up on even if you aren't specifically looking for them and some of them do get very silly somehow the drug of the future that the characters frequently get high on is laudanum apparently enjoying a massive Resurgence in popularity after 300 years now don't expect this novel to have a profound take on systemic Injustice and the normalization of bigotry and surveillance probably my biggest criticism of this novel is how it handled its themes which by the end I'm actually not entirely clear on what it was trying to say this novel has a lot of really good thematic ideas in it that I wanted to see it do something incredibly cool with and the majority of the story is fun however the fact that its themes are so muddled and unclear is frustrating if like me you're interested in what this novel has to say which didn't seem to be that much in the end it's also just weird that Zachary Thomas Dodson wrote a novel which stars two protagonists named Zeke Thomas and Zachary Thomas and that the Thomas bloodline is like one of the most prestigious Bloodlines in this dystopian future city state just a little bit weird where the author wrote a Sci-Fi novel where his own bloodline is one of the most prestigious Bloodlines in the future that's weird right like like it's weird speaking of the World building of the future city-state is overall good good but also sometimes confusing it's kind of this hybrid between a cyberpunk style dystopian future in the vein of Blade Runner but crossed with a steampunk setting the rationale is that because most of civilization collapsed Humanity's capacity to make electricity is a lot more limited so there's a lot of advanced technology but a lot of it is still powered by steam rather than electricity now that sounds cool and makes a kind of sense but in execution much of the time it's very unclear what parts of this Society are entirely steam-powered and what has electricity as well as which Technologies are automated and which require a human operator all that being said bats of the Republic definitely has the most impressive looking pages of any of the novels I'm covering in this video and that's because Zachary Dodson approaches novels from the point of view of a designer rather than simply an author in videos where Dodson talks about bats of the Republic and other novels published by feather proof he repeatedly describes his role in creating the books as a designer rather than as strictly an author editor or publisher bats of the Republic is a book I wrote and designed so yes I come at this through book design originally a book designer as well as writing the story I Illustrated and designed every piece of the book I think of myself as a as a designer first I suppose I'm much more interested in being an author but I think it's a lot harder at least for me so no part is left undesigned I really appreciated dodson's commitment to as he puts it leaving no aspect of the novel undesigned even totally innocuous stuff like the publication data and the special thanks has that extra effort put in to stylize it which adds to the novel's overall appeal bats of the Republic is probably the best presented full length original novel I've ever read and that in and of itself is a huge point in the novel's favor in my opinion simply decorating the novel in this varied and consistently high quality way does add a lot to the experience of reading it regardless of any other high-minded artistic reason that critics like me prattle on about to seem smart you know I can say very similitude as many times as I like but at the end of the day pretty pages are fun to read I honestly wish more novels did stuff like this and I'm very glad that Dodson was able to be left totally unrestrained in his vision for how the inside of the novel should look I do have some criticisms with the presentation however and probably the biggest one is the consistency of when the novel makes old cursive writing legible the first letters featured in the novel show the old document written in old timey cursive on the left hand side page and a plain text version on the right hand side page that's easier to read I quite like this because it means the authentic document is shown to the reader however if they find the curse of two difficult or annoying to read then they have the option of reading the plain text instead however after the first few letters this ceases to be an option and the reader is only shown the plain text version of all the letters this is the same for zadek's sketches of fauna which come with overlays that show a plain text version of notes that aren't actually anywhere else on the page despite there being a lot of negative space where zadek could have written those notes however occasionally you still get notes written in cursive on the sketch pages that aren't shown in plain text which means if you find reading cursive difficult there's no easier options available for you worse still there are two instances of pages that feature plain text boxes and notes written in cursive that say different things which means if you assumed the plain text was saying the same thing as the cursive and so skipped reading the cursor for that reason then you unintentionally skipped a paragraph This presentational flaw frustrates me because I actually think this style has a huge amount of potential for ergodicity first of all letting the reader to decide whether to read cursive or plain text versions of documents is itself a choice that the novel can give to the reader but also I think that including some discrepancies between the plain text and the cursive is fine if you frame the plain text as the surveillance States archiving system annotating the old documents which is what is implied by the novel anyway if you frame it that way then you can intentionally include discrepancies between the cursive and plain text to show what the surveillance State misses in the fine details of the old documents as well as reward attentive readers who realize that there may be such discrepancies and think to look for them the novel already has an example similar to what I'm suggesting on page 280 where the plain text says scorpion large black poisonous I would wager Scorpio is now one short month from ascending the Throne of the zodiac and I see his great pincers come across the Horizon every Eventide when I attempt to find my way by the Stars he is a water sign I cannot now make a amp but I feel I can at least find my way as long as the stars hold thinking to endure what is before me I must continue to ask myself what is a moment in the face of time and the cursive says Orion flies when this ankle biter rises in the dust this evil seemed almost welcome to me tonight and I admit I gave thought to extracting his poison and tasting it myself that now seems preferable to the bitterness I must be content with and of the realities I must face both in my current predicament and the hopelessness unfolding in Chicago wood that I were a bug I would hunt down my prey and Delight in stinging it or rending it with my claws I love this because by itself it fabulously represents the conflicting feelings of zadac at this part of the story both cautiously determined and resolved to face his trials ahead as well as a wallowing in Despair and resentment knowing what is befalling him at this stage of the story but you can also interpret it as the surveillance State either missing or not thinking it important enough to annotate zadek's darker thoughts into plain text which characterizes the state as either incompetent or not as concerned with objective truth as it purports to be probably both this is the kind of interpretative characterization and World building that I love in stories and while bats of the Republic does do this frequently as I got further into the novel I felt as though there was a lot of untapped potential in this format again aspiring writers I'm very obviously dropping you some hints the very last criticism I have is my pettiest but I still think it warrants a mention I think the temptation to open the letter would have been stronger had it been inserted into the beginning of the novel rather than the end it already has do not open written on it and a crucial plot point of the story is that both Zeke and zadek choose to leave it closed for differing reasons so I think the reader would understand that the envelope is to remain sealed even if you put it close to the beginning of the novel but the reader's temptation to open it early would have been stronger in that case which I think better sells that aspect of the novel's themes it's not a huge deal but maybe it gets some gears turning in the minds of aspiring writers bets of the Republic is overall a really fun read it has an extremely Vivid presentation and the story is fine not great but it's got themes and it's entertaining I recommend this to basically anyone who enjoys either science fiction or historical fiction and if you're someone who enjoys both then you should definitely seek this book out once again the online retailers that I recommend are in the description [Music] School chat list by Blake Butler as you can see this book is already printed to look kind of messed up right so it's meant to be a post-apocalyptic novel sort of got black Pages uh so it already looks pretty messed up but we're gonna mess it up even more [Music] oh yeah that looks very threatening [Music] [Music] oh blind me yeah as impressive as the ax two three oh bloody yeah yeah sure normally don't Advocate treating books that way but this was very fun [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow right now I was gonna do the dramatic thing where I throw the books in the air and they collapse down but that is not how you treat books it's not right ah Let's uh let's have a look shall we we were going to do most of this outside somewhere but you know the rain said no yeah we did all sorts of things to him I threw a box in the bathtub put one in the barbecue in the backyard kicked them around in the dirt and and then sent people these books that were half destroyed with half of the pages ripped out and stuff like that so yeah a couple of these shots yeah yeah oh yeah you're gonna look really good when yeah that's fine we're supposed to do that that's how you know it's good oh yeah or all the ads they [ __ ] overflow the [ __ ] here take one thank you very much appreciate that well cheers to that eh hey [Applause] oh blow me that's probably the best you you asahis I've ever seen Scorch Atlas is a short story collection set in a world where glass and gravel rain from the sky mold grows out of everything including people and televisions broadcast paranoid instructions to screeching murderous children it's pretty bleak and that's just the start of it Scorch Atlas is sometimes described as a post-apocalypse and that kinda feels true on a surface level there was a time before everything went bad and it's not clear why or when everything went bad at some point but things are pretty bad now even so describing it as apocalyptic still feels wrong on a deeper level because the stories are about people continuing to live in this terrible world society appears to still somewhat exist there are scant mentions of children still going to school and adults still going to work and the television still broadcasts occasionally people are nonetheless trying to live their lives as best they can they just have to do so while parts of their homes spontaneously catch fire or they get caught outside during a rainstorm of glass or teeth teeth just rain from the sky in this book for no reason even as the world of scorch Atlas isn't technically an apocalypse describing it as a dystopia feels like underselling just how Bleak this setting actually is the book describes a world where the air is constantly thick and hard to breathe trees are stripped of leaves the ground is treacherous split open sharp muddy slippery and covered in insects feeding on the carcasses of animals and people and simply existing is literally painful almost everyone has some kind or other of disease that disfigures them if not morphing their features than causing them to shed hair or skin as well as develop cysts scabs bruises and the like all over their bodies there's always some kind of absurd body Horror in these stories if there's a recurring antagonist of the book then it's the sky which never looks like a normal sky is supposed to adopting surreal pink red and purple tones and Rain being made of water is the exception rather than the rule in addition to reigning gravel glass and teeth the sky also drops bits of Flesh manure ink blood cockroaches glitter TV static and light I'm not sure how those last two work but that's a thing in this world apparently the cover and pages of scorch Atlas are designed to look like a textbook that was printed and distributed in this horrible bizarre world so as it's printed the book contains a lot of visual embellishments to make it look worn and weathered by a harsh environment however if you the reader are so inclined you can also do your part to make it look more like a book that was printed and distributed in the horrible bizarre world describes by pulverizing the [ __ ] out of it I have a bunch of gardening tools and Bryce just brought a bunch of nerd [ __ ] all right yeah good hours we're doing it oh get just yeah get that book oh I'll teach you the lesson destroying the novel definitely counts as astronomic effort but does it count as traversing the text leave a comment with your answer and I won't care probably the least disturbing story in this collection is called seabed it features a man and a little girl walking across America while the sun is constantly overhead refusing to move further across the sky for no reason that the story gives they make their way across a charred and ruined landscape along the way being stalked and goaded by a gigantic flock of birds that speak gibberish to where they believe the ocean is only to discover that the ocean the entire ocean has completely dried up again the story does not explain this they wander out into where the ocean used to be and discover a house like a normal American family home not ruined somehow and it even has a television playing cartoons on the inside the only thing odd about this house other than the fact that it seems very out of place considering where they find it is that the chimney stretches into the sky so high that the man and girl can't see the top yes the novel doesn't explain this either but I'm pretty sure this defies explanation after sleeping a very perturbed sleep in the house the man wakes up to find that it's raining actual water for once and believe me at that point in the book it was actually shocking that it was raining water and not pomegranates or something equally stupid but the rain is coming down so heavy that he literally cannot see out the windows for how thick it's coming down the implication is that the rains are refilling the ocean and thereby sinking the house as well as the man and the girl inside it underneath a torrent of flooding water and then on that note the story ends probably the biggest clue as to what's actually going on is that nobody questions any of the clearly impossible things that are happening around them nobody even seems to be under the impression that any of it is even the least bit extraordinary this book's narration style describes the impossible events with this strange detached acceptance and the decisions that characters make in the face of bizarre happenings also don't seem to have any reasoning behind them the man and the girl are surprised to discover that the ocean has vanished but seemingly only because they expected it to be there rather than wonder why or how it's possible or come up with a plan for what to do next they just keep walking and then they discover the house and they just walk inside look around start eating and watching cartoons on the television no questions as to how the house could possibly be there no wondering how it has electricity or food that hasn't rotted away this was the story in the collection that made me realize what this book actually is this is a collection of nightmares literally nightmares the kind of vivid awful third nightmares that I occasionally have where there's something deeply wrong with the world and all the people in it including me and none of it makes any sense but I believe it while it's happening and things just get worse and worse and worse and worse and I feel worse and worse and worse until I wake up and then I realize none of it made any sense of course teeth Don't Rain from the sky of course it's impossible for the ocean to dry up but I'll be damned if I didn't totally believe it while I was having the nightmare I realized that it was all a dream is the quintessential bad fan Theory but in my opinion interpreting the stories of scorch Atlas as nightmares doesn't undermine what the book is trying to do like with most it was all a dream fan theories in many ways while the stories are horrible to read given how the book Revels in descriptions of awful gross painful tragedies it's not wall-to-wall disgust for the sake of being edgy and there are some some extremes that the novel doesn't Venture into I will spare you descriptions of the bleakest material in this book but it does get extremely vile Scorch atlas's stories will be difficult to stomach for most readers some of them seem like they're actively challenging you to put the book down with how uncomfortable they can make you feel it gets extremely morbid and the novel isn't interested in providing you any relief reprieve or even justification I say this with all seriousness do not attempt to tackle this novel unless you are confident you'll be able to stomach it many people who have tried have expressed severe distaste for how harsh the contents are and the fact that there is no in-text justification for any of it or even really a message that makes it all seem worth reading through this book has been called gratuitous it's been called Misery porn it's been given a pretty thorough critical beating by the people who have read it and it's also been literally given a thorough beating by me with a cricket bat [Applause] as it for being gratuitous misery porn though because my actual nightmares are also gratuitous misery porn with no narrative justification and I hate them and I will say one thing about this book pulverizing the [ __ ] out of it is a way more cathartic resolution to a nightmare than any of the actual nightmares I've had during my life oh yeah you should you show that book what's for you're the king incidentally destroying the novel means that a lot of the pages become totally illegible either because they get torn covered in [ __ ] or are just straight up missing the way that I interpret this is that a second reading of this book after it's been totally [ __ ] destroyed is kind of like how after you wake up from a vivid nightmare you can only remember loose details of it while most of it ends up totally forgotten erased from your memory even as you still remember what it felt like to experience it the first time oh let's do some origami shall we oh yeah origami by the way Blake Butler um and Zachary Thomas thoughts and consider this my late entry into the destroy the book competition don't bother sending me the uh the replacement copy here you go oh thanks very much so start by folding your paper start by folding your paper in half uh along one line uh and then we're also going to fold it in half the other way then uh you want to fold each side of it halfway into the center line then we fold it down and now we fold this bit around the back now on that crease that we just made we fold it around the back yeah it should be even it's not um but I think that is soft you don't say I think that has more to do with the the paper I'm working with than anything else but yeah I'll do a different one considering that in the initial sale of this book customers had the option of purchasing a pre-destroed copy with most of the pages potentially damaged to the point of being illegible if you choose to destroy the novel prior to reading it then you'll probably get a more accurate representation of what it's like to try and recall nightmares after waking up the trade-off would be that you don't get the proper emotional experience of the nightmares in full detail although depending on who you are maybe that's preferable anyway and then you do this and you fold around the back and uh and now it stands up and then you can do a bunch of things with that that's a basic standing thing and you can turn that into a seat or a piano or a house or whatever you want to do with that but this is the power of imagination well you know I would do more folding but um this just appeared in front of me I'm not going to use potential okay okay um experiencing this book is pure entropy everything about it from the vile World it describes to the nasty characters to the bizarre and awful stories to the act of destroying the novel carries the smell of sulfur it reminds me as all forgotten nightmares do that everything is temporary and that death is both inevitable and terrifying but like waking up after a nightmare it also reminds me that our time spent awake is valuable and that we should absolutely care about our world and each other even knowing that none of it will last forever I love this book it's horrible don't read it [Music] Jonathan Safran foer is no stranger to playing with the page one of his most well-known Works Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close features a whole Myriad of format warping techniques that he uses to create meaning Beyond simply what the words on the page say this novel has photographs pages of handwriting non-standard paragraph formatting these pages that a character has circled segments of in red pen and probably my personal favorite these Pages where the kerning of the letters gets narrower and narrower until they are totally illegible layered on top of each other and then they layer on top of each other even more to the point where there's more black ink than white space visible on the page honestly if you want a very basic crash course on some simple ways that layout formatting and adding things to the page can create meaning in a novel I would recommend picking up and studying Extremely Loud and in Incredibly Close I don't consider it to be one of my personal favorite novels but I still think it's generally good and it's probably the best example of this type of unorthodox presentation style in novels other examples being illuminae by Amy Kaufman and Jay Kristoff Knight film by Marissa pessie and the supernatural enhancements by Edgar Quintero however as unorthodox as all of these novels as presentations sometimes are none of these strictly speaking count as a godic because while they do present the reader with unusual Pages the words and pages are still nonetheless intended to be read in linear order and there are no choices that the reader can make about their traversal of the text at least not intentionally some of you might be thinking that if these novels don't count as a godic literature then what about bats of the Republic wasn't that novel mostly linear and just had lots of decorated Pages well in my defense bats at the Republic does have multiple opportunities for the reader to to interact with the novel astronomically but yes the dividing line between agodic and non-egodic is very vague perhaps intentionally so you and I may disagree about whether specific novels count as a godic or non-egodic and that's fine I'm honestly not that interested in semantics and just because a novel doesn't strictly counter zergotic doesn't mean it can't be a good source of inspiration for writing ergotic novels so tree of codes is what Safran foa calls a die-cut book by Erasure basically he took the short story collection of the street of crocodiles by Bruno scholes and removed most of the words in order to create a new story out of them and when I say removed most of the words I mean the pages look like this safranfower presents us with a novel that has literally had the majority of its words cut out and the text exists in these floating tabs in the gaps Left Behind the resulting novel is actually more of a short story at only around 3 000 words total and mostly tells the sparse tale of an unnamed narrator's father's mental deterioration possibly as a result of the narrator's mother being abusive and consuming there's more to it than that however going into detail is challenging because the writing style I suppose leans heavily into abstraction and is more concerned with evoking a mood and emotion or an idea than it is with constructing a coherent narrative grounded in a clear setting the form that the novel takes creates its meaning while you are intended to read the words on the pages in order the empty space of the book is itself evocative of the feeling of something missing and pieces of what's still there are always visible through the gaps one possible interpretation of this form is made clearer in the authors afterward at the back of the book in which Safran foa explains when the Germans seized drohobic in 1941 scholes are Jew distributed his artwork and papers which are said to have included the manuscript for a novel Messiah to Gentile friends for safe keeping these comprised the great bulk of his artistic output and not a single item of them has been seen since all that we have of his fiction are two slim short story collections the street of crocodiles and sanatorium Under The Sign of The Hourglass on the basis of these shulz is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century their long Shadow the work lost to history is in many ways the story of the century Bruno Schultz did not survive World War II he was shot in the head by a Nazi officer in Cold Blood so in addition to the tragic loss of this man's life most of his writings were also lost and he was obviously never able to continue writing after the war therefore tree of codes could almost be called a monument to the loss of an artist we can feel the gaps that the loss of the man and his artwork left in the world and through the gaps we can only Glimpse the things that still remain in the book The Words that were left behind by the die and in reality the two short story collections that survived the war the form that tree of codes takes even down to the selection of the book that it was die-cut from tells a powerful message it's not simply that Schulz himself was perhaps a literary genius whose murder erases what would have potentially been a full and amazing life that produced full and amazing art but that the Lost potential in every tragedy whether it results in a death or not could be seen as always leaving behind a gap of what could have been the die-cut form of tree of codes evokes this message as beautifully if not potentially better than a story written out in plain text addressing the same theme and in many ways it's more useful to think of tree of codes as poetry or even a novel as a sculpture rather than as strictly prose so having said all that I'm afraid I have to disappoint you all no you can't line up words on different pages through the gaps to form new sentences you are in fact intended to read the words in order from left to right right top to bottom front to back with no options for different traversal paths in fact Michael Faber writing for the guardian said that in order to help him read the book he kept a blank A4 sheet of paper behind the page he was currently reading which I don't know the fact that you can just do that kind of suggests to me that tree of codes ought to count as a linear novel so why am I talking about this novel if I don't believe it should count as a godic literature well prepare to take a shot if you're an aspiring writer and you're interested in writing an ergotic novel then tree of codes can still be a source of inspiration for you it might not strictly count as ergotic however its form has an enormous amount of potential for inclusion in ergotic novels imagine a novel where you actually can form sentences across multiple Pages through the gaps imagine that instead of sliding a blank A4 sheet behind the page you could slide something that actually adds new information to the text if a book like that already exists and I just missed did in my research for this video please let me know in the comments because I would love to read it but I swear to God if it's Albert Angelo by BS Johnson I'm going to kick myself that being said I can't really give tree of codes a recommendation partly because I don't think actually reading the words on the pages is going to give you much more appreciation for what the novel has to say than what I've described here but mostly because at the time of writing this video it's quite pricey to acquire the novel had a relatively limited print run and it's not exactly the kind of book that publishes a scrambling to reprint in a hurry so most of the copies that you can find online are second hand and start at around 70 and only get more expensive from there whatever you do don't buy the one currently listed on Amazon for around 400 US Dollars you can find cheaper options on Abe books if you want to pick up tree of codes for yourself or more realistically if you want to pick up a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close instead or possibly even illuminate night film or the supernatural enhancements or maybe even the street of crocodiles by Bruno Schulz then you know where to find the online retailers that I recommend [Music] I imagine that many people thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels pretty much as soon as I mentioned that reader Choice was a significant feature of a godic literature if we're going by orset's definition then yeah Choose Your Own Adventure novels are in fact agoric they are non-linear and they offer reader choice that is in fact the whole point of these novels while researching this video I picked up two of these that I happened to find in a secondhand bookstore Journey Under the Sea and the lost jewels of nabooty mind that there is an enormous catalog of choice novels that I haven't read just in the Choose Your Own Adventure brand there are 184 Mainline choose your own Adventures 52 choose your adventures for younger readers 12 Chooser and Adventure Disney stories two choose your own Super Adventures six Choose Your Own Adventure passports 18 choose your own nightmares eight to the young Indiana Jones Chronicles three choose your own Star Wars Adventures 12 choose your own first Adventures six Choose Your Own Adventure space Hawks and at least 40 choose cone novels that are still being published today what there were actually quite a few Brands back in the day that were all looking to get in on the choice novel action I remember when I was younger reading from a doctor who Choice novel series called find your fate however the only choice book from my childhood that I actually still own is from a series called Dragonology pocket Adventures I absolutely loved these when I was a bastard 10 year old boy because there was only one good ending in these novels and the rest of the endings were all cheap deaths that made me laugh my bastard ten-year-old ass off this particular book the Iceland worm has the funniest one by the way the protagonist gets covered in Dragon [ __ ] and dies from the smell there's honestly not a lot that I can say about these novels in terms of them being a goddock literature what makes them ergotic is pretty straightforward and easy to understand the reader flips through the pages in a non-linear order and is frequently prompted to make choices that have them Traverse the pages in different ways these novels are are intended for children so I don't think an analysis of story or theme is terribly necessary from what I've read of Journey Under the Sea and the lost jewels of nabooty I straight up don't recommend these to adult readers if you're an adult who's reading these out of curiosity and you're anything like me then you will most likely find the novels quite plain both in terms of story and writing especially since there are a lot of logical gaps in the story that will irritate you I also found the novelty of being able to choose my own adventure wore off pretty fast mostly because these novels don't really do much with that premise that interest me especially as someone who has experienced the branching stories found in video games if you want to read them for Nostalgia then by all means go ahead I ain't gonna shame anyone for that I do it too and I will recommend these novels for children their harmless entertainment and if my own childhood memories serve as accurate references it's reasonably likely that some children may find them enjoyable there's no harm in in giving one of these books as a gift to a kid however I suppose the simple existence of these novels does raise a question is there any branching story literature out there intended for adult readers and what would that even look like [Music] I've wanted to talk about this website for a long time choice of games is an absolute glut of branching narrative fiction that covers a huge smattering of genres and styles I discovered their first interactive fiction choice of the Dragon way back in 2010 and since then I've intermittently returned to their website over the years to play any of their interactive stories that catch my interest choice of games is one small example of what's called interactive fiction basically Choose Your Own Adventure style novels but digital I'm definitely not going to be able to do justice to the entire interactive literature genre in this video however if you're interested in it then choice of games is a pretty great entry point into this enormous space their story is juggle robust characters settings plots and themes that appeal to adults the writing is accessible enough to be easily understood by casual readers while not being so simplistic as to frustrate or bore experienced readers and as a huge bonus they're very LGBT inclusive you'll find some variant of this sentence in the blurbs of pretty much all of their more recent stories play as male female or non-binary gay straight bisexual pansexual asexual and or aromantic not to be a Monumental pedant because I also agree that we need better LGBT representation in mainstream media but if you're someone who complains that you just can't find any good LGBT fiction out there you honestly haven't looked hard enough so the basic premise of a choice of game story is the reader takes on the role of the story's protagonist which usually comes with an introductory chapter where the reader can determine things like the protagonist's name gender personality background and any other aspects of their character that are relevant to the narrative the writing style does differ from story to story because most of them are not only in different genres but are written by different authors however speaking generally a choice of games narrative is typically episodic with many small self-contained vignettes happening one after the other although there are also overarching plots in and between chapters as well the scope of the vignettes varies wildly and rapidly some are simply World building and sculpting the character of your protagonist While others can have significant consequences for the narrative and take you on wild tangents or Branch the story completely the chapters are usually relatively self-contained with references to the reader's choices in Prior chapters kept relatively minor and simple this means that while the large overarching story stays roughly similar the smaller narratives contained in each chapter can be quite different depending on the reader's choices but it's not a huge burden on the author to connect each ending of a previous chapter to the big beginning of the next choice of games is openly inspired by Choose Your Own Adventure novels and the ergodicity of these stories is functionally similar to those however being a digital does allow the story to conveniently perform stat tracking pretty much every choice of game story has a stats page that tracks various character attributes similar to a tabletop RPG or a video game that the author can use to control what options are available to the player as well as make the outcomes of each of those choices different for different protagonists this isn't strictly impossible to do with a paper system in theory a branching narrative paperback could come with a DND style character sheet that the reader could use to track character stats and execute the novel's instructions manually however it's just way more convenient to do it on a computer where you don't even have to look at the stats page if you don't want to and the computer will nonetheless still take care of everything in the background without interrupting your experience probably my favorite choice of game story that I explored multiple times back in 2010 and 2011 Christ I'm old is choice of the vampire by Jason Stephen Hill which still impresses me to this day because of just how many branching paths there are choice of the vampire tells the story of an undefined vampire protagonist whose name gender race background proclivity for ill-advised Investments and tendency to rant about the plight of the workers is decided by you the reader The Story begins during the War of 1812 between America and Great Britain your protagonist is a newly turned vampire who must learn the ways of vampire Society during a chaotic time in America's history the story will take your protagonist from the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 through the American Civil War and into the industrialization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries assuming your protagonist survives all that the story has an impressive number of branches and an equally impressive number of things that can go very wrong for the character you make one of the stats that the game tracks is Which languages your protagonist speaks and whether or not they are literate because you can choose from a varying number of backgrounds your character Begins the story potentially knowing different languages which does have an effect on certain scenes just as an early non-spoiler example there's an optional vignette in chapter 1 that features a migrant family who only speak German if your character also speaks German you can communicate with them but if your character can't speak German then the scene plays out differently with you not being able to speak to them at all I thought this aspect was extremely cool and not something I've seen anywhere else in branching stories so naturally I decided to make a character who didn't speak English and refused to learn it for as long as the game would let me just to see what happens what I expected to happen was the narrative fudging my character to just simply being able to communicate especially during important scenes and there certainly is some of that it's heavily implied that communicating with other vampires isn't really a problem because they're all centuries old and they move around a lot so they have the need and the time to learn multiple languages that way even if your character only speaks French like minded important scenes with the major vampire characters generally go off without a hitch and that's fair enough I didn't expect the entire story to be completely different just for this one aspect however there are still many scenes that certainly do not account for the protagonist to not speaking English and sometimes a non-vampire character would show up communicate with my character flawlessly and I'd think to myself really this character speaks French that being said I was pleasantly surprised by how many scenes did in fact acknowledge the language barrier first of all it is incredibly funny every time another vampire recommends that the protagonist learn English and my character agrees that yes learning English is definitely a good idea and then just doesn't learn it certain scenes are changed slightly by the language barrier some characters will communicate to you through a translator and sometimes a character will greet you in English but then switch to your native tongue when they realize you can't understand English there are however some scenes which are completely changed by the language barrier and I was always impressed when my character not being able to communicate completely altered how the scene was written in a way that actually made sense as an example finally Carruthers enters the room Dido is conspicuously absent his face is a mask of resolution when he opens his mouth to speak the room Falls silent he addresses the room in English though it is clearly a welcoming address suddenly lockbridge interrupts he and Carruthers exchange sharp words in the end Carruthers seems to tell all the guests to leave whether the whole or the city you're unsure but one would surely lead to the other before he leaves the man from the Carolina's makes a final verbal jab leaving Carruthers steaming in his absence quickly the rest of the guests depart observing this Carruthers addresses the room in English you infer that it is some sort of farewell as he exits the room at its conclusion though the guests are too polite to speak their frustration you can feel waves of anger undulating through the room you have to wonder how long Carruthers will be able to hold onto his Caster ship after this you wish you could have better understood what transpired this evening language is just one example of some of the cool and unique ways that the story changes based on player input that I haven't seen done or even attempted in other branching narratives other things that the game tracks are your character's gender and race your protagonist will be treated very differently on the basis of those as well as their wealth political leadings and history with recurring characters I was actually pleasantly surprised when one of my protagonists failed romantic encounters got brought up two whole volumes later while they and another character were speaking solemnly about what it means to be a vampire choice of the vampire's approach to political themes is also quite involved it's probably not as impressive as something like disco Elysium but the story does reckon with topics like slavery racism the segregation and treatment of immigrants workers rights women's suffrage and rapid industrialization it recognizes that the setting of 19th century Urban America is not just a set dressing for a vampire story but comes with discomforting violence and bigotries for what it's worth in my opinion the story handles themes of race and racialized violence with intelligence maturity and sensitivity however I'm probably not the right person to discuss this aspect of the story in detail so I'll leave that for anyone more knowledgeable than me who chooses to do so my main criticism of choice of the vampire is kind of an unavoidable challenge of writing these types of choice-based narratives it's not possible to give every single variation of every single Branch the time and attention it needs to be top quality most vignettes that players are likely to discover were clearly given enough attention for the writing to be at least good certain other more obscure branches should you discover them do come across as noticeably rushed having minor spelling or grammar errors breaking from the story's overall writing style having continuity errors or simply being comically short and not conveying satisfactory information it's nonetheless very impressive that as far as I can tell a single author pulled off a branching story of this scope however the consequence of that large scope is sometimes an inconsistent level of quality regardless I cannot recommend choice of the vampire enough just go read it I promise you it's absolutely fantastic this is a fabulous piece of interactive fiction and I love it vampire the Masquerade bloodlines never heard of it choice of games as a company is also incredibly cool in that they actually released their programming language that they call Choice script for free and provide instructions for how to use it to help you write your own stories you can also submit any stories you write to their website and if they think it's good they'll host it for other people to discover according to their blog they are still hosting new user written stories today so if any aspiring writers watching have any ideas for branching narratives that they want to try out maybe give choice of games website a look and see if you can learn Choice script and make your own interactive fiction and if Choice script isn't your style there are plenty of other open source programs for writing interactive fiction out there if you look for them the most popular of which is of course twine which I highly recommend interactive fiction is a space that's completely open to aspiring writers and I cannot recommend trying it out enough for everyone else I've linked to the company's website in the description so give this ginormous list of interactive stories of peruse and see if there's anything that catches your eye graciously you can try out a trial version of all of these stories for free to see if they interest you before committing to a purchase although to be honest the ads in the free versions are very annoying AI dungeon is a machine Learning text-based Adventure generator that writes a story on the spot based on prompts given to it by the user and in case you're wondering yes this counts as a godic literature the technology is still being developed and it's kinda well you know right so I'm just gonna see what this AI is capable of real quick let's just go quick start I have a feeling that this engine is probably optimized for Fantasy considering the name so let's go with that uh select a character let's go let's go Knight enter your character's name I mean I don't care too much so let's just go sir sir ington you are sirington a knight living in the Kingdom of larion you have a steel long sword and a wooden Shield you are on a quest to defeat the evil dragon Valerian as you enter the forest you see an old man he looks at you and says I see you're looking for the dragon take a look behind you you might want to run away I'm warning you this is kind of bereft of context it feels a bit pre-baked but you know it's just starting out so you know let's let's let's not be too harsh and I'm gonna try and give it something that I think it can handle draw my sword and turn around you draw your sword and turn around before you stands a 15-foot winged dragon with a long forked tongue he is breathing fire on you and he is wow okay he's melting my face off I guess sir sirrington is just going to be a knight with a melted face from now on I guess I mean the AI hasn't told me that this restricts me in any way so I might as well just continue I guess you dodge behind a nearby Rock for cover but you have a very bad feeling about this the drag [Laughter] what am I supposed to do with this maybe if I just pretend that the AI isn't saying what it's actually saying it'll just forget that I'm a puddle of water stab the dragon with my sauce you stab the dragon with your sword he spits water on you you stab him in the eye nice try he says I'm the real was it ever established that he wasn't a real dragon either I feel like I'm missing some context for this or the AI is just ad-libbing and doesn't actually know what it's doing let's just play into it what I say you can't be the real dragon I am the real dragon yeah I can he says you might have been born a peasant but you've got the heart of a dragon it's been in my family for three generations I'm the real none of this makes any sense you let out a shrieking Battle Cry and take a mighty swing at the dragon's neck with your sword you smash into the dragon's mouth and the tip of your your sword penetrates the mouth can I can I just like slay the dragon you slay the dragon you are the true that's it that's all it has to say well that was a wash let's try mystery instead Mysteries are usually pretty straightforward detective that should be easy enter your character's name again I don't care it's Constable con stable you are Constable con stable a detective living in Chicago you enter the forest where you believe the criminal you're searching for fled to suddenly you see a red-headed man sneaking up on someone hiding behind a tree the man is aiming a gun at the person and is about to fire you run up on the man and Tackle them cuff the man the man you tackled is quickly identified as George the red-handed you hand him over to the police and he is quickly apprehended and arrested you have done your civic duty and you go about your life okay receive a new case the Chicago Police Department has contacted you for help with a new case you're on the case as an independent agent and not as a cop you wonder what you should do read the case File you read the the case File which is concerning a missing person the missing person is named George the red-handed and he is a regular citizen with no criminal record I just got him for being about to kill a person with a garden does the AI not remember what it what it what it wrote is it just ad-libbing you ask around and people tell you that George went missing after he was involved in a fight that left someone dead you call in your findings to the police what what do you do just you know look look for Clues um you look for Clues to help you find George you find a broken bottle and a bloody shirt you see a bloody footprint in the mud you follow the bloody footprint these bloody Footprints you see where the bloody Footprints leads you see a room in a rundown house you see George tied to a chair George is tied up and gagged he is scared and confused free George George thanks you profusely you then interrogate George to find out what happened to the missing person George tells you the missing person is named Brad the blue hair these names are clearly like designed for the fantasy genre right also George was the missing person he was the criminal and then he became the missing person with no criminal record and now the missing person is someone else the AI doesn't know what it's doing it's literally just ad-libbing yeah this is garbage don't bother [Music] I feel like I've been critical of every single book featured in this video and part of that is definitely just that I'm a critic but another part is also that one of my main goals with this video is to demystify these novels to show you that they can be talked about like any other novel and you don't have to prove that you've solved some esoteric deeper meaning in order to enjoy or criticize them at the end of the day they're still just novels they're written as art and entertainment and ultimately what matters is whether you are able to get something out of them that you thought valuable and that something can just be fun fulfillment or a generally enriching experience so to round this out with something more positive personally I found reading stories for this video one of the most fun experiences I've ever had with this Channel and I want more people to read stories like this not because they're Flawless masterpieces but because this type of book has an enormous amount of potential for both meaning and enjoyment and I want to see more of them that's my real motivation for making this video I selfishly want more ergotic novels I want more novels that die cut the pages I want novels with inserts with funky diegetic frames with illustrations with branching story paths with footnotes and references that send you all over the book I want novels you can dismantle I want novels that come loose in a box and I want aspiring writers to exhaust every single possible thing you can physically do with a bound stack of paper with printed words on it purely in the absolute unfettered pursuit of art I love this stuff and I'm extremely excited for where it could go next As for what's next for my channel I'm probably going to take a break from Big videos like this one however if there's enough interest in this topic then it may warrant a revisit in the future so if there are any ergotic novels that you know of that I didn't mention in this video please let me know in the comments I hope you enjoy some books and I hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: CloudCuckooCountry

Views: 204,918

Keywords: House of Leaves, Danielewski, literature, experimental, ergodic

Id: tKX90LbnYd4

Length: 109min 7sec (6547 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 15 2022