This is such a rich, deep read. Some the phrasing rings so nicely: "What I realized, after The Familiar had ended, is that this sort of flat, bloodless, hardstop truth of things, this market reality, is the exact sort of tragedy that Mark Danielewski’s fiction salves." This is one I'm going to read several times. I remember reading The Familiar, volumes 1 through 4, and falling into their world, but not as deeply as I fell into House of Leaves. I wonder if there's something about when (in our lives) and where (in an author's canon of work) we first "meet" an author. The ground zero of our reading. I'd read House of Leaves first (and then a great short story of his in the now defunct Black Clock magazine) and nothing subsequent has quite resonated like those. But what if I'd read The Familiar first, and then found my way to House of Leaves? Can the heat generated by our first experience ever be matched?
Thank you for this. I'm loving your style—divergent, but returning again and again with a reverent respect to the author, their intentions, and the natures which ultimately drive the production of their work.
My favorite line: "At no point in our several hours of conversation do I feel he is unprepared to talk about aliens." Perfect.
Entertaining essay, but I have to say, the bits about the demise of Borders don't make much sense (their original sin was... negotiating favorable discounts on books?) or really ring true. It wasn't the iPod that killed Borders; it was the fact that they expanded recklessly in the 1990s and became dependent on constant growth, and outside money, to keep the lights on. Once Amazon started posing an extinction-level threat to physical bookstores in the 2000s, they had no cushion and, unlike Barnes & Noble, weren't able to hang around long enough for physical bookstores to regain a (smaller) niche with the book-buying public. It's a shame for those of us who remember the original Borders Books in Ann Arbor in the 1980s, which was basically the opposite of what the chain became after the Kmart acquisition.
I see what you're saying; the point of that passage (as I see it) was to illustrate that there's no single thing that ruined Borders, that it was more like a series of business choices that were not always *bad* choices, inherently, but happened to intersect with larger cultural factors.
The iPod decimated CD sales--OK, fine. It wouldn't have been much of a problem if the Kindle weren't simultaneously hitting their book sales; which in turn would not have been a huge deal if they hadn't outsourced their e-commerce to Amazon; which in turn wouldn't have been a big deal if they weren't alotting roughly 1/4 of floorspace and inventory to CDs...
It feels to me like a 60-page portrait of lots of different people doing their best and coming up short because they're standing at the intersection of larger factors--which, in a weird way, is what Danielewski was capturing kinda beautifully in *The Familiar*.
I envy you the opportunity to've browsed in one of those original Borders Books locations! Did those original locations at all resemble the "Superstore" versions that came later?
The original was nothing like the superstores. Imagine just a very large, well-stocked neighborhood bookstore, and that was it. It was a famously hard place to get a job (you had to take a seriously challenging English Lit exam, basically), and they prided themselves on being expert but stopping just short of snobby. Once Kmart bought them the entire original management team quit in short order. It’s a prime example of a business that could’ve lasted forever if they hadn’t grown.
My dad used to take me to the original Borders in Ann Arbor as a kid. If it’s possible, in 2025, to imagine a large store that’s a flagship for a chain but is somehow run by incorrigible, sometimes hostile snobs in the archetypal record shop mode, that was the vibe there in the first half of the Nineties. I was too young to understand it at the time, but I’m told they had a great selection, too, akin to a place like McNally Jackson today
I felt the loss that came with the cancellation of The Familiar all over again while reading this. Like so many cancelled shows, I still reserve a little hope for its return.
This is such a rich, deep read. Some the phrasing rings so nicely: "What I realized, after The Familiar had ended, is that this sort of flat, bloodless, hardstop truth of things, this market reality, is the exact sort of tragedy that Mark Danielewski’s fiction salves." This is one I'm going to read several times. I remember reading The Familiar, volumes 1 through 4, and falling into their world, but not as deeply as I fell into House of Leaves. I wonder if there's something about when (in our lives) and where (in an author's canon of work) we first "meet" an author. The ground zero of our reading. I'd read House of Leaves first (and then a great short story of his in the now defunct Black Clock magazine) and nothing subsequent has quite resonated like those. But what if I'd read The Familiar first, and then found my way to House of Leaves? Can the heat generated by our first experience ever be matched?
A very relevant moment from Gaddis's sole televised interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4u6pKcObDY
Thank you for this. I'm loving your style—divergent, but returning again and again with a reverent respect to the author, their intentions, and the natures which ultimately drive the production of their work.
My favorite line: "At no point in our several hours of conversation do I feel he is unprepared to talk about aliens." Perfect.
Entertaining essay, but I have to say, the bits about the demise of Borders don't make much sense (their original sin was... negotiating favorable discounts on books?) or really ring true. It wasn't the iPod that killed Borders; it was the fact that they expanded recklessly in the 1990s and became dependent on constant growth, and outside money, to keep the lights on. Once Amazon started posing an extinction-level threat to physical bookstores in the 2000s, they had no cushion and, unlike Barnes & Noble, weren't able to hang around long enough for physical bookstores to regain a (smaller) niche with the book-buying public. It's a shame for those of us who remember the original Borders Books in Ann Arbor in the 1980s, which was basically the opposite of what the chain became after the Kmart acquisition.
I see what you're saying; the point of that passage (as I see it) was to illustrate that there's no single thing that ruined Borders, that it was more like a series of business choices that were not always *bad* choices, inherently, but happened to intersect with larger cultural factors.
The iPod decimated CD sales--OK, fine. It wouldn't have been much of a problem if the Kindle weren't simultaneously hitting their book sales; which in turn would not have been a huge deal if they hadn't outsourced their e-commerce to Amazon; which in turn wouldn't have been a big deal if they weren't alotting roughly 1/4 of floorspace and inventory to CDs...
It feels to me like a 60-page portrait of lots of different people doing their best and coming up short because they're standing at the intersection of larger factors--which, in a weird way, is what Danielewski was capturing kinda beautifully in *The Familiar*.
I envy you the opportunity to've browsed in one of those original Borders Books locations! Did those original locations at all resemble the "Superstore" versions that came later?
The original was nothing like the superstores. Imagine just a very large, well-stocked neighborhood bookstore, and that was it. It was a famously hard place to get a job (you had to take a seriously challenging English Lit exam, basically), and they prided themselves on being expert but stopping just short of snobby. Once Kmart bought them the entire original management team quit in short order. It’s a prime example of a business that could’ve lasted forever if they hadn’t grown.
My dad used to take me to the original Borders in Ann Arbor as a kid. If it’s possible, in 2025, to imagine a large store that’s a flagship for a chain but is somehow run by incorrigible, sometimes hostile snobs in the archetypal record shop mode, that was the vibe there in the first half of the Nineties. I was too young to understand it at the time, but I’m told they had a great selection, too, akin to a place like McNally Jackson today
I felt the loss that came with the cancellation of The Familiar all over again while reading this. Like so many cancelled shows, I still reserve a little hope for its return.
I loved this but I was surprised not to get anything about the new book?