The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus

Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by Izkata on Saturday December 04, 2021 @03:21AM (#29439542)

Huhm, the one that came to mind for me is <blue>House</blue> of Leaves, though I guess it's only 21 years old. It's (almost) fully legible English, but the pages are all sorts of messed up: Text goes forward, backward, sideways, meanders outside standard directions (including through the page), the footnotes span multiple pages and have their own multiple-page footnotes (all telling multiple storylines in parallel) (also one of the footnotes is editing the book as you read it), there's one section written in a simplistic code...

There's some pictures of the pages of this book in these reviews:

http://www.cornerfolds.com/2014/08/book-review-house-of-leav...

https://stingingfly.org/2016/11/01/house-leaves-mark-z-danie...

https://www.horrorbuzz.com/2015/09/13/house-of-leaves/#

http://www.thefeedbacksociety.com/television/house-of-leaves...

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by aasasd on Saturday December 04, 2021 @07:51AM (#29440529)

Those tricks are kinda obvious and have been around since the sixties at the least, in various combinations. See e.g. Principia Discordia, or Infinite Jest for footnotes. By the 2000s, this stuff was in popular magazines on videogames, specifically Russian ‘Game.exe’.

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by aasasd on Saturday December 04, 2021 @01:31PM (#29443062)

To elaborate a bit on the difference: many of the ‘weird’ books mentioned here play with the form and the sequence, i.e. they tie the medium into their weirdness—and thus depend on it. The reader is presented with a complex piece, through which they must struggle to get more of the message.

‘Codex’, to my knowledge, doesn't do such tricks and is a rather straightforward book of illustrations—the difficulty is only that its contents aren't readable at all and the illustrations are completely foreign to our world. Unless you know its language, there's just no way for you to get any of the writing.

The former kind of books are high- or mid-brow cultural exercises, whereas ‘Codex’ is a pure surrealist dream.

Opening the article, I was actually worried that the author would begin talking about the meaning of the book, but thankfully he went the same route as David Lynch: while telling some secrets of the production, he said nothing about the content.

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by i_am_proteus on Saturday December 04, 2021 @12:45PM (#29442607)

Arno Schmidt began work in "this" style, culminating with Zettel's Traum in 1970.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/ZT_EA_Do...

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by User23 on Saturday December 04, 2021 @12:22PM (#29442362)

The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester[1] is a good proto-cyberpunk example from the '50s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by aardvark179 on Saturday December 04, 2021 @06:42AM (#29440255)

Although House Of Leaves is odd it is not even the oddest thing Mark Z Danielewski has written, and there’s pretty strong competition from others. Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany is more restrained in its typography but has a strange looping narrative that starts and ends in the middle of the same sentence; Lanark by Alasdair Gray has incredible typographic feats and certainly a strange story; and the works of B S Johnson probably have them all beat.

And then there are things like Cyberpositive by 0(rphan)d(rift>)…

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by mcphage on Saturday December 04, 2021 @09:52AM (#29441165)

> has a strange looping narrative that starts and ends in the middle of the same sentence

James Joyce did that with Finnegan’s Wake back in the ‘30s.

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by aardvark179 on Saturday December 04, 2021 @11:14AM (#29441754)

True, but of the two I think Dhalgren is easier to recommend to a stranger, who I only know liked House of Leaves.

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by mcphage on Saturday December 04, 2021 @02:01PM (#29443355)

I've never even read Dhalgren, but I'm sure you're right :-)

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Re:The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus by 1_player on Saturday December 04, 2021 @05:10AM (#29439893)

I remember being very annoyed I could not buy that book in ebook format on Amazon or anywhere else. It was recommended to me for the story. So when I finally caved in and bought the paper version, it all made sense.

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