Damn you Baudrillard!

As if we had any doubt about House of Leaves, the book opens with a discussion about the nature of "authenticity." A series of documents about a film about a house. Layers one, two and three of Simulacra. This is turning out even better than I thought.

House of Leaves

OK. The book we will attempt to model as a general system is Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. It's a big 'un, so we will need to read like the wind. Like the wind itself.

Mapping

The mapping software we chose turned out to be pretty nice. I hesitate to use the term "mindmapping" as it

1. Indicates that we are somehow tracing a topography of Thought. Since we are not using some ridiculously advanced brain scanning mechanism in the classroom (and unless the students have some fat NSF green they haven't mentioned yet) claiming something like this is ridiculous. The brain is made of meat with lightning inside. None of the class's instruments measure anything like this. What we are doing is recording the iterative processes that occur during our attempts to understand a given system--organizing our thoughts in the order they appear and looking for connections that do not necessarily depend on that order.
   
2. Implies a sort of trademark on what I would just call brainstorming. Evidently brainstorming is what helps kids decide on a science fair project but mindmapping is what marketing directors do to motivate their teams to pursue an operational paradigm-shift that strikes strategic brand equity. If you found yourself making air-quotes during either of the italicized phrases, you see what I mean.

What the software helps us do is abstract whatever system we encounter into a sort of "idea space" that we can study independently. This happens every day in physicist's notebooks and dry-erase boards. A man on a bicycle becomes an arrow named 5 m/s, or a falling battleship becomes a sphere of radius r. Potentially troubling details are considered and often discarded. For example, does the man happen to like French cinema? Did the MC5 ever write a soulful but impossibly violent garage rock tribute to this particular battleship? While interesting, these tidbits might not effect a given calculation.

I often mention the act of trying to understand a system as "rotating that system until a symmetry becomes clear." Imagine a poem being mapped, for example, and the concepts sorted or moved around the page until a series of connections becomes clearer. This is the sort of rotation I am talking about. If we could raise the map into three dimensions and rotate it in any direction, it might be easier to spot connections than if it were on the page, the same way relative height is easier to grasp on a 3-d model than a flat map.

The rest of the text.

After running the Billy the Kid piece through the ringer a few times, we extracted some promising patterns about simulacra, biblical imagery, lost pilots and the rugged individualism of the american psyche. Now let's use those patterns as the basis for a set of filters on the rest of the data set, i.e. the full text of Daumier, by Donald Barthelme.

By treating the first excerpt as a representative element of the whole space (text) we can focus tightly on behaviors that we suspect might turn up throughout the data.

Text I want you to map.

We Have All
Misunderstood
Billy the Kid

I was speaking to Amelia.
"Not self-slaughter in the crude sense. Rather the construction of surrogates. Think of it as a transplant."
"Daumier," she said, "you are not making me happy."
"The false selves in their clatter and boister and youthful brio will slay and bother and push out and put to all types of trouble the original, authentic self, which is a dirty great villain, as can be testified and sworn to by anyone who has ever been awake."
"The self also dances," she said, "sometimes."
"Yes," I said, "I have noticed that, but one pays dear for the occasional schottische. Now, here is the point about the self: It is insatiable. It is always, always hankering. It is what you might call rapacious to a fault. The great flaming mouth to the thing is never in this world going to be stuffed full. I need only adduce the names of Alexander, Bonaparte, Messalina, and Billy the Kid."
"You have misunderstood Billy the Kid," she murmured.
"Whereas the surrogate, the construct, is in principle satiable. We design for satiability."
"Have you taken action?" she asked. "Or is all this just the usual?"
"I have one out now," I said, "a Daumier, on the plains and pampas of consciousness, and he is doing very well, I can tell you that He has an important post in a large organization. I get regular reports."
"What type of fellow is he?"
"A good true fellow," I said, "and he knows his limits. He doesn't overstep. Desire has been reduced in him to a minimum. Just enough left to make him go. Loved and respected by all."
"Tosh," she said, "Tosh and bosh."
"You will want one," I said, "when you see what they are like."
"We have all misunderstood Billy the Kid," she said in parting.

Donald Barthleme