interview: mark danielewski

Electronic Book Review just posted a new interview with Mark Danielewski, author of the amazing fictive experiments House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006), here. A few teasers:

On centripetal versus centrifugal novels:

House of Leaves is what I would call a centripetal book. It's about interiorities and history and progeny and ancestors. [Only Revolutions] was pointedly a centrifugal novel. It was about getting outside. It was about looking at landscape. It was about addressing what the open was. It was about—not only an academic level—reading Agamben's "The Open" and readdressing what Heidegger was talking about with "the open." Looking at the naturalists, looking at ecocriticism.

On television, movies, & novels:

My job is to write something that could not just as easily be seen on television or at the movies.

On what is absent in Only Revolutions:

You know, one of the things this [Only Revolutions] resists is vision. The word "light" never appears. With the exception of some colors mentioned, it never quite paints those borders, the edges, it's always resisting the edges. . . . So the word, for instance, "spectacular" is never there, because it comes from speculare, to see. Words that are about seeing, for the most part, were taken out. I've been described—not as dogmatic as Oulipo—but there's a resistance to certain things.

On the future of the book:

My feeling is that there is going to be a technology that will look like this book. The three dimensional quality is an experience that cannot be done away with one reading tablet. I think what's going to happen is there are going to be pages that are as thin as this, and you can go to "A plague on both your houses" and you can click on it, and you'll connect: "Romeo and Juliet. FDR also said it." And suddenly you have this connected tissue.