I did an interview with Mark Danielewski a while back for a free magazine called the Weekly Dig on his book Only Revolutions. They didn't run the whole thing so I figured I'd run the thing in its entirety here. He also wrote the books: House of Leaves and Whalestoe Letters.

EDY: Is [Only Revolutions] meant more for the ear than the eye?

Mark Z Danielewski: There’s definitely that quality, but obviously it’s for the eye as well. We recently released the audio version of the book. Are you aware of that?

Yeah, I saw that you got Danny Elfman?

Yeah, he did the music. The audio in a way has been an invaluable key into the book. Some have listened to the whole thing, but what a lot of the people have done is just download a few tracks and that has gotten them into the swing of things. Once they actually hear the music it gives the right manner and pace to get through the book. Part of the attraction with the sound is you can hear the rhythm, you can hear the playfulness, you can hear the direction in which they are moving. On a certain narrative level, it provides a certain level of gratification. I think one of the things that can trip up people is that when you’re reading it you start to see a lot of other stuff that’s going on within each word. How the words play, the page itself, etc. and depending on where your level or where your skills are in reading these type of texts that can be debilitating. I think there are a number of ways of getting into the book. Some people are very comfortable reading it. I am very gratified with the few readings I’ve done with the number of young kids who are just tearing through the thing. That’s amazing to me, but I think part of it is that they have less prejudices to how a book is supposed to read. They’re fearless in charging through and they’re not measuring it with a book that should be this way or that way and they’re not wondering where that certain narrative twist that I’m used to. All that is not there, so they just move through it and also it’s an age where there is an inherent playfulness of language. It is a time to invent language. Part of the research that went into this book was cataloging the vocabulary that was being used throughout the late 19^th It is a time in our life when we’re sixteen where the greatest freedom that we have is really in the way we can negotiate and renegotiate the way we use language. century, during the teens, the twenties, the thirties, the forties, the fifties, the sixties, so much of it is devised by playful teenagers and using that.

Does it upset you when reviews are only about the layout and not about the story?

I don’t know if I would say upset. I don’t really write books for today and tomorrow. I write for today, tomorrow and a thousand years and a thousand tomorrows after that. It would be foolish to think that dense pieces like this to be fully digested and comprehended within a week of their unveiling. It usually speaks to me, that’s it’s pretty clear when you’re talking to people—this is something you’ll discover if you haven’t already—is that people who haven’t read the book or are just approaching the book first talk about the layout. Those people who have actually read the book and are engaged in what is really going on and the story it tells in terms of America, history, in terms of adolescence, in terms our relationship with abuse and denial in our language, etc. etc. These people rarely touch on the typography. Surely, you can see that in House of Leaves. When House of Leaves first came out everyone was talking about this sort of phenomenon, about this fellow who was just out the gate and everything. The truth is, they were saying the exact same thing. First time I was going out to readings they were like “why do you read this,” “This book’s crazy,” “Who can read this,” and “No one can get into this,” “It’s impossible. So many of the same things, “Oh, it’s a gimmick,” “Oh yeah, just because it looks like this.” Now—and we’re talking almost eight years later—it’s almost like there’s amnesia that’s taken place. “Oh yeah, everyone knew it could be read like this,” “It’s so easy,” and “It’s engaging,” Dadada…You know, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m there listening going, “Uh-huh, that’s not really the way it was.” And of course now, people do touch on the typography who are just getting into House of Leaves. But most of the time they’re talking about the characters, Zapano, and Johnny Truant. That is what’s of interest to them.

After you answer that question, I almost feel like I’m the type of person you’re talking about. I also want to apologize, but I think it’s because the book is fresh in my mind. I’m not really sure how to take it. I would like to switch over and talk about the characters a little.

You don’t have to apologize. That’s probably the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard in any interviews. So, count yourself the very first to even say that. It’s very nice of you. You know it is a project that demands time. It’s not something that is rapidly assimilated. And what I like to think is that there is the joy. You pay a certain amount of money, you pay a certain amount of time to something and I do think it’s pleasurable to have something that is rewarding that you can go back to that’s not like contemporary culture’s obsession with disposable products of all sort, disposable books, disposable computers, you know? Phones that are only designed to last a couple of years. This is something that’s designed to last a long time. It’s supposed to give you a certain experience now, and ten years from now you could go back to it and still gain something from that.

I really like knowing that it’s complex. It makes it so it is almost like a history in itself where you can’t really judge until you’ve had space and time. Especially, the way people reacted to House of Leaves earlier.

Yeah, it’s hilarious. I was out there when there were four people in the audience and everyone was like, “I don’t know how to read this,” “This is impossible.” “No one’s going to be able to read this.”

I recently saw the movie Badlands and I saw a lot of similarities between that, just because it’s a road movie, but I also saw Hailey and Sam being a lot like those characters. I was wondering if you’d like to talk about Only Revolutions relationship to that movie or the road movie in general.

Let me just backtrack a little to the road book.

Feel free to talk about that because I was planning on asking you about that later on.

So, can we lump them together? And if I miss something, we can go back and highlight whatever it is you want…

Early on there are just those books you love and after House of Leaves I knew I wanted to write something about the wide open. Here was [House of Leaves] all about the inside and I loved road books and road movies. The books that come to mind are pretty obvious. There’s On the Road, there’s Huckleberry Finn, there’s Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Paper Moon. There’s a bunch of others, you could even look at Wordsworth’s Prelude or on some levels you could even go back to The Odyssey, I suppose, though that’s more of a sea tale. The amazing thing to me though is that I couldn’t find and I still can’t find a book about a guy and a gal on the road. And I always wanted that book. In Kerouac, it was the lads together or being alone. In Paper Moon, it’s the father and the daughter. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it’s the father and the son. In Huck Finn, it’s Huck and Jim going down the river. There wasn’t that story that was the two lovers and all they wanted was each other. There was always the desire to have that. Of course, one of the reasons why I loved that story, beside from my own personal autobiographical reasons is because for whatever reason movies have that. We have Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, Natural Born Killers, True Romance, and all sorts of little films like Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry. You can even look at some of the early Chaplin films as having that on the road quality with the tramp and the little waif running from place to place. Or Godard’s Lost Weekend, there’s a bunch of those kind of movies, but it never existed as a book. In a simple sense, I am very proud that Only Revolutions is unique—well, it’s unique for a lot of reasons—but it is one of the first road books of a guy and gal hitting the pavement and it really is about how their relationship is shaped and reshaped by the landscape that they pass through, both literal or historical. Badlands is actually very important because a lot of the movies that I’m referencing are more violent. They’re about the outlaws that are on the road. There is an element where Sam and Hailey are outlaws because one of the significant words in Only Revolutions is out. House of Leaves was all about in, the interior. Only Revolutions is all about getting outside of things, outside of social context and historical context. Outside of laws, outside of the road itself, outside the perimeter of their own bodies. The question is the nature of their violence. One of the things they don’t rely on are the common weaponry that is iconic in the typical road movie like Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands which is a gun, a specific agent of violence. Yet, Sam and Hailey do have it though even if it isn’t literally with them. It pointedly becomes more apparent in the second half of the book. The first half is more about their sexual relationships, their drives that connect the two of them to each other. Later what comes is their decision, when they really decide to leave the world, depart from their social stasis in the middle of the book in St. Louis, to whither everything with their speed. It is the haste which they move through the world, their oblivion of all things outside of themselves that raises it all together. You start to see evidence of this when the animals die, and the plants die, and people are just driven by the fury of their speed. It is here that you start to realize how silly guns are to the gods because four or to five months to them is two hundred years to us. For Gods it’s just a road trip around the country. To think of all mayhem and destruction that passes on the outside of them. In some ways you could say the structure of the book is sex and violence and a car chase. The first half is all about the sex and the second half is all about the violence and how it is enacted. It seems to rift and also comment on the movies that I’ve mentioned. Talking about Badlands itself when Sam and Hailey go to Rushmore it’s more about the name than the granite faces and sculptures. Rush-More and Rapid-City. It’s about how they are accelerating more and more through life and not stopping to smell the roses.

I read somewhere that you actually tried to go out and travel the same route as Sam and Hailey.

I did, yes. It was great. I ended up renting a car, a mustang convertible. I wanted a dark color and they ended up giving me a bright yellow. And that was quite a trip to be driving through the Deep South in a bright yellow mustang convertible with California plates. What I did was basically follow Sam and Hailey’s routed, following it down from Pennsylvania and through DC, all the way to New Orleans where I stayed for a while. Then I followed the Mississippi up because that’s was very important, actually going to opposite direction as Huck and Jim and I stayed for a little while in St. Louis where the third section [of the book] is located. And from there I followed it all the way up to La Crosse and then I headed west across the Dakotas into the badlands and then up through Wyoming to Montana where I got caught in a freak snow storm and nearly died.

I got out there and near-wheel drive convertibles are not the things to be driving when the highways are iced over and I was heading towards Bozeman Pass with three or four inches of solid ice on the highway. As soon as I got on it I realized that I had to get off because all the exits were closed because so much snow. They hadn’t been plowed yet. And I’m going very slowly, but the trucks which are fitted for that weather are still moving by at eighty miles per hour. Every time they would pass they would kick up this huge veil of white and it would last seconds. You couldn’t see anything. You would count “One one-thousand…Two one-thousand…three one-thousand,” and then it would clear, but three long seconds is a while when you can’t see where you’re going and you’re still moving at forty miles per hour. I remember we were coming upon a bridge (cough) and there was a UPS truck behind me, a few truck lengths behind me. There was another semi that was passing me and it passed me just as I was hitting the bridge. It threw up this whiteout. I’m counting, “One one-thousand, Two one-thousand, three one-thousand,” and my back tires lost grip of the road. They started to kick out behind me and I just realized that—fortunately having grown up in Utah I knew a little about driving in the snow and canyons—you just can’t hit the breaks. You have to move with. I remember just taking this deep breath and relaxing and just saying, “This is it,” because if I started to spin I would have hit the edge of the road and probably would have gotten flipped over. God knows what would have happened there. Sure enough the white out cleared and the UPS truck was two or three feet off my back bumper and his hazards were on. He no doubt had seen me lose control in the white out that blinded him and he put on his hazards because he figured he was going to have the Mustang as a hood ornament, I guess. But fortunately, I came through that. I gave it some gas and pulled away. Eventually the UPS truck passed me and I sort of hung behind him and we found an exit just short of Bozeman Pass in Livingston. I ended up holing up there for a few days until the ice melted and I could make my way on. It was pretty intense experience.

Yeah, it’s basically every man for himself up on those roads.

It really is. You get so used to the streets of a modern metropolis in the US. Even though it’s a highway and nice and clean on the map, it’s really one straggly lane surrounded by ice. It was pretty wild.

When you did go on the road did you have any company? Did you try and do the girl and guy thing? Or did you go by yourself?

I ended up going by myself. I would have loved to have done that, but it was not to be. I think I had just ended a relationship and there was some thinking about how nice it would have been to be with her or someone else. It was also in keeping because what I recognized was that as much as it is about the literal trip it is also about the longing we all have. I just had breakfast with a friend of mine who had just finished her own road trip with a guy and she’s read Only Revolutions. In fact, she’s gone and done the northern part of that journey. She traveled the Northern elements of the Mississippi. Then headed west on La Crosse and went to Badlands, but didn’t head as north as Montana. It was interesting though because what she was describing was that even though she was with this guy there was still that longing to be with that perfect road partner. So, Sam and Hailey, as much as they are about that literal story, they’re also about the fulfillment of the longing that we’ve all had, to have that perfect partner in crime. And most of us never have it, but that doesn’t mean that the dream doesn’t exist and in some ways this book explores what that dream is and where that dream would go if you took it to its absolute fulfillment and if you just ate the honey of your desire and ran the car on the fumes of your own affection. At the expense of all other things, where would you end up? In Sam and Hailey’s case they tell us it’s a cold, ice enclosed mountain.

One part I found interesting, from a personal standpoint, was their stop in St. Louis just because I’ve done my own road trip and me and my friend ended up stopping in St. Louis to do work also, it was just paving driveways. I’m curious of why you had them stop there at that time and what were the reasons or was it just coincidence?

Oh god yes, there were lots of things. St. Louis is such this rich history you know? There’s a centrality to the US and its not precise, but there’s a strange state that saw an enormous amount of violence during and after the civil war because of the mix of factions between North and South that lived there. It wasn’t just a Northern state; it wasn’t just a Southern state. You know, it’s been called the gateway to the west and you can look at the arch, the ark that finally rose out of its soil which could be looked at as a part of Sam and Hailey’s journey: through it and around it. Some of the literary figures that come from there; Elliot was from there. There are a lot of reasons that I’m sort of just giving you sign posts towards which I’m not going to totally divulge, but St. Louis has a very rich history in that respect.

One of your intentions with the book is for it to be a lasting image and from other sources I’ve read you’ve been asked whether or not this book can change the world. You’ve answered that you think everything has the opportunity to change the world. So let me ask you, how do you think this interview is changing the world or how do you think you’re changing my world, or your own world etc. etc…

Hmmph…That’s an interesting question, I like that one. I’ve never had that one before. Actually, we’ve gotten through a lot of stuff I’ve never gone through before. It’s been gratifying. The thing about changing the world is that we’re always changing the world. We change the world in every moment, so already we’ve changed the world. We’ve added a different thread, we’ve found something new. Even despite this process involved in the sterility of pure repetition there’s been an invention here, a creation, and a swerve in what might be anticipated. In terms of its sort of causal relationship to everything else, we don’t really know and that in itself becomes one of the questions in Sam and Hailey’s journey. It’s how much of the world has changed? In some ways and the way in which the book answers that is that the world is contained within each. As much as they don’t destroy it and maybe this is something that can’t be put into the interview because this is really about the ending. In the beginning they say they are going to destroy the world, in the middle they sort of get attached to it and by the ending there is this strange notion that they will preserve the world and that they aren’t going to follow through on their God like threats to burn it to the ground. In some ways they do by killing themselves. They do destroy the world because the world is intact, and whole within them. There’s an old story, I think it’s from the Talmud. It’s about rabbis who discover that the way you can change the entire world is by moving a stone in the right way. And I think I am a believer in that, even the smallest motions can have the most profound effects. I think it’s similar to the butterfly effect, with chaos theory that these small little things can have enormous effects later on. I think the point of this parable of sorts is that it’s the way you engage the world that unlocks a new world. It doesn’t necessarily have to be confirmed by a revolution or an atom bomb going off or a sudden renegotiating of all things political. It can simply re-instantiate a different pathway in yourself and the way you see the world and share the world. Cause this world is infinitely delightful and infinitely pleasurable. There is nothing that can compete with the reality around us. The point is to just dig towards a narrative that doesn’t exclude so much of the world.

Your book is open to so many different interpretations. It has your voice in it, but I think because of its nature it really depends on what the reader decides to bring to it and how they decide to read it. Roland Barthes’ essay, death of the author really comes to mind. It really is what you bring to the book yourself.

Nothing would make me happier if that were true. It isn’t a book that’s about me. It’s a book that is about creating a place where the reader can encounter themselves and still encounter the idea of someone that is outside them. It’s a book that I know is challenging. It presents and prevents all sorts of reading. I will say on a personal note that I’m very proud of it. I think it’s going to be around for a long time.

I’d like to ask one more question. I had just thought of it as we were talking. It seems like you’re really in touch with your fans. With Only Revolutions you asked your fans to submit things and you had the art contest which was cool because in the paperback you used every piece of art. Can you talk about what the fans mean to your work or maybe you could talk about whether you’ve ever thought about doing a piece of work that will involve even more fan input.

I don’t have the answer to what the next phase will be, but I definitely think that it is important to be open. It’s tricky though because too much openness can invite a different type of challenge. In the book it made sense because it was so much for me about getting outside of myself, getting beyond myself, enacting the death of the author and maybe even minding myself or my spirit revitalized in the spirit of these two kids. Part of the way of doing that was getting out of my house, going out and talking to people, whether it was at a coffee shop or the gas station. What was there favorite historical moment? What was their favorite car? Had they ever been in love and gone on a road trip when they were sixteen. Those type of things. So for me it was a process that was always a part of the book from the very beginning. It certainly developed early on when I was on tour for House of Leaves. I was encountering so many people. And then I was on tour with my sister and we were opening for Depeche Mode then it was thousands of people telling me different stories and I would make notes of them. I would write them on cards and eventually a lot of that, the jobs they had, things that they did, were sort of incorporated into the book. In fact, when you were telling me that story of paving driveways it’s just a wonderful image. If we had this conversation before Only Revolutions that would have definitely been one of their jobs at some point in St. Louis because it’s so vivid and it’s a part of that transportation theme. There is still part of my brain that still hears things that thinks, “That would have worked for Only Revolutions. It was just a logical move from people I actually met to people I randomly encounter to the actual website to other forms as well and invite that kind of participation. It was very gratifying in that sense. It was also appropriate for Only Revolutions itself. How that would fit with the next project? I’m not sure. It would have to make sense. It couldn’t be forced. I find that there is a certain organic element, certain types of things present themselves, certain kinds of dialogue take place in public and then suddenly you think to yourself that maybe someone could do that, not for a whole book, but they can have an input here that would be interesting or maybe they get you to ask, “How does that work?” It’s an ongoing exploration for me, but I think there’s an importance to remaining connected in some fashion.

You really caught my attention when you said that a story has to be organic because actually in another interview the person said the same thing. A director, Jeffrey Blitz, felt that stories were meant to go where they please and aren’t intended to be forced. Is this a quote I am missing or just pure coincidence?

I think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s been rephrased in a bunch of different manners. I think organic is common because it applies to any sort of interior. Interior’s also kind of a tricky word. Any kind of structure that perpetuates itself like a story that is driven by its own internal rules. It’s not organic if you have Sam and Hailey walking along and something comes over and picks them up and throws them out over Russia. Obviously, something from the outside is affecting them in an enormous way. If they happen to be running out of gas and they happen to be in St. Louis at that point and they’re shy of money and they going to get a job, it makes sense. You start listening to more what the characters are doing than any sort of outside plan. And that’s very important. The thing that was different with Only Revolutions is that there is this mechanism which they inhabit, the whole 360 page, 360 words per page sort of clockwork. The point of that is how did this organic journey, this love story, this tragic expression of adolescent affection, how does it finally free itself from this mechanism? It’s like I chained them up and they had to vie against that. I was constantly surprised by them. You know, once they escaped the Creep and the party. They tie him up with his own rope. You can view that in so many ways, that he’s a pedophile that is literally tied up or you tie him up by his own grandiosity, whatever you want to do, however its imagined that they met that they ultimately bind him up with his own tools and flee. What was a total surprise to me was when they were getting out of the hospital they suddenly decided they had to let the Creep go because they aren’t about tying anything up. As soon as they tied him down, they would be tying themselves down. For me, it was just this moment where you say, “That’s not what I would do,” and it’s not what you would do, but that’s what they did and it surprised me. It was completely organic because it derived from them, from their personality and identity.

[Ambulance siren in the background]

I guess that’s really all I have for questions. I appreciate you taking a full hour out of your time. I’m always a little worried going into interviews. It was just great that you were willing to give me that time and I appreciate that.

I appreciate your questions. I felt like they were quite good. I felt like we got somewhere a little new and I look forward to seeing the piece you come up with.

I hope to have a copy of it for you on October 2^nd when you visit Boston.

It would be great to see you. If you’re there just stop by and say hello. It would be fun to shake hands.

Awesome.

Okay, well take care of yourself man.

You too.

Alright, bye.

Bye.

[Hang up the phones]