But I will anyway. This is the original disclaimer I attached to it:

I have done some things in this assignment in an attempt to emulate House of Leaves – the word house appears in blue, some footnotes don’t exist. Furthermore the essay itself is written in a pseudo-Zampanò style; pretentiously grand and with the use of uncommon and untranslated (at least by the essay-writer) foreign phrases. It is as fervently impressed with House of Leaves as Zampanò is with The Navidson Record, and similarly dismissive of the opinions of quoted others. The ‘aside’ footnotes are a response to this style in the same way Johnny Truant responds to House of Leaves in the footnotes. There are intentional typographical errors in both. A third ‘voice’ is present in the form of ‘editors’ who make useful notes and corrections on the piece à la House of Leaves. These three are distinguished using different fonts as in the original. It is essentially part-essay, and part-creative piece.

Now, in its online form all the fancy-schmancy colouration and font abuse (not to mention the simplicity of reading the footnotes) is totally erased. So I urge you to view the PDF, which keeps all the original formatting, and gives a much clearer impression of what I was trying to do. The PDF also contains the bibliography, which is very important but too long to bother with here. So hit the jump to read the dodgy version, or download the PDF and make me happy.

The Many Storeys of the House of Leaves

The first thing you read in House of Leaves is a warning. Actually, that isn’t entirely true; several other things come first as part of a preamble that is markedly different from ‘normal’ novels – but that only becomes apparent later on. The first time you read it, the first steps you take into this enigmatic house, you only notice the warning: This is not for you.

It’s a pretty audacious beginning to what is in fact a very audacious novel. Mark Z. Danielewski’s first, and ten years in the making, it disregards everything the reader expects from a novel and drops them into new and uncharted territory. The warning acts in the same way as the cartographers’ hic sunt dracones[1] of old; quite simply, beyond this point it is dangerous to go.

The plot, ostensibly, centres on the character of Will Navidson, a Pulitzer prize winning photographer[2] who moves to the Virginia countryside with his partner Karen and their two young children. Navidson affixes camcorders to the walls of most rooms in the house with the goal of making a simple film about family life – a home movie on the scale you might expect from such a renowned visual artist. His project takes a turn for the sinister upon the perturbing discovery that the dimensions of his new house are larger on the interior than the exterior, a fact which is clearly ‘impossible.’[3]

The discrepancy is initially only a quarter of an inch, but it soon becomes much more, as a yawning black hallway appears in Navidson’s house. He invites his brother Tom, and friend Billy Reston to help him investigate. Together, and later with the addition of three other men, they discover that this impossible hallway leads into a vast structure; a labyrinth of such enormous proportions that when it is at one point measured it is found to be greater in dimension than the very Earth itself[4].

The most obviously audacious aspect of the novel is the manner in which Danielewski chooses to relate the story: as a pseudo-documentary film called The Navidson Record, described in great detail in the form of an essay written by a character known only as Zampanò. Furthermore, Zampanò himself is dead, leaving the duty of relating the story to a third character by the name of Johnny Truant. In short: it is not a standard piece of prose. The question thus is, why?

Why has Danielewski risked complicating his story with these additional characters? It is clear from a cursory glance at the text[5] that multiple entwined narratives are not the only apparently-unnecessary aspects of the book. The typography is dauntingly elaborate, with maze-like footnotes as well as strange symbols and colours permeating the text. So again, why?

This brief essay will attempt to answer these questions. I will study each of these unusual aspects of House of Leaves in turn to reveal how they combine to create an awesomely complex and multi-layered novel; how Danielewski masterfully re-defines the concept of what a novel is and can be. How these bold decisions allow the book to affect the reader in ways traditional stories rarely can. How Danielewski is able to take you inside the House of Leaves.

As previously mentioned, House of Leaves is broken into three separate narratives; Navidson’s, Zampanò’s and Johnny Truant’s. Each narrative is related to the other in a linear fashion – Zampanò writes about The Navidson Record, and it is through his writing that Johnny Truant experiences the story. This idea can be expanded by the inclusion of the ‘editors’ who footnote Truant’s version of Zampanò’s book and make various corrections as well as elaborating on confusing sections of the book – even if only to shrug their shoulders and say, ‘don’t look at us.’ It could even be possible to suggest that a fifth narrative exists in the form of the finished novel as it is on your bookshelf / in your hand.

So many narratives cause many effects, but the most prominent is the distinct lack of trust the reader develops for the accuracy or ‘truth’ of the story. Each character is entirely unreliable – Navidson’s film is released as popular entertainment and thus, much like The Blair Witch Project, may be entirely fictional yet presented in a realistic manner for artistic reasons. This possibility is dwarfed by the fact that The Navidson Record does not exist[6] – neither in our world nor that of Johnny Truant. Whatever Zampanò believes (or thinks he believes) about the existence of the film is rendered irrelevant by the fact that he is blind and thus incapable of actually watching it.

Truant himself admits to poly-drug use as well as intentionally altering lines within Zampanò’s text:

Is it just coincidence that this cold water predicament of mine also appears in this chapter?

Not at all. Zampanò only wrote “heater.” The word “water” back there – I added that.

Now there’s an admission, eh?

Hey, not fair, you cry.

Hey, hey, fuck you, I say.[7]

This clearly represents a wanton disregard for the sanctity of the original text. Furthermore Truant’s mental state clearly deteriorates over the course of the novel, a fact which is bolstered by the revelation in the accompanying Whalestoe Letters that Truant’s mother Pelafina is confined to a mental institution. When we take into account the complete anonymity of the ‘editors’ we are left with very little to trust at all.[8]

This is a skilful technique. Without a distinct ‘voice of truth’ upon whom to rely, the reader is left disorientated and unable to anticipate exactly where they are and where they are headed. The fear of the unknown is already beginning to take effect.

Danielewski also does something else by intertwining these narratives – or more specifically, by intertwining them in the form of an essay with footnotes. As we follow one narrative through the book, another vies for our attention. We are then faced with a difficult decision; continue with the first narrative and return to the second later, or halt our progress with the former and investigate the latter immediately. The decisions the reader are forced to make are identical to those that the characters in The Navidson Record have to make – in both cases avenues of pursuit are presented in the form of a forked road within the labyrinth, and the sense of disorientation that is pervading their mind makes it extremely difficult to know which of these roads is the ‘correct’ one to take. In this way the reader is reduced to a basic motor survival level: instinct takes over, and the brain is placed into a primal ‘fight or flight’ mode of high alert, and paranoia[9].

Multiple narrators are also a way of giving different and interrelated stories built around a central premise: the House of Leaves – whether it be Zampanò’s book or Navidson’s actual house. In her article ‘What Has Made Me? Locating Mother in the Textual Labyrinth of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves‘ Katharine Cox asserts the argument that by building these relationship around the theme of a house, the book is inherently about familial relationships. This flawed but well presented case offers an interesting perspective; Cox’s belief that ‘Will and Karen confront the secret at the heart of their relationship and at the heart of the labyrinth’[10] is mirrored by Truant’s relationship with his mother holds some water. As Cox puts it;

The fragmentation and later reconciliation within the family unit offered by the Navidsons act as an analogy for the tortured and mysterious story of Truant and Pelafina; they too mask a secret that is confronted and finally resolved in the space of the labyrinth.[11]

The idea that personal relationships define the nature of what the labyrinth is – a physical representation of the unrepresentational metaphysical[12] – is an interesting one. How does one navigate the un-mappable and ever-changing landscape of social interactions? Danielewski would therefore be claiming that within the labyrinth of the family, everyone finds their own routes, and some are more successful than others. It’s a novel suggestion, and perhaps another dimension to this already heavily-layered work.

Moving on; the typography of House of Leaves is at first sight utterly bizarre in places, and approaching the unfathomable in others. Here is a novel punctuated with footnotes – footnotes which often have footnotes themselves. There are hidden codes within the text; the word house is, as it is here, represented in blue. The struck out passages are coloured red (appearing thus) and so is the word ‘minotaur’. In one edition of the book the colour purple[13] is also used. This is not to mention of course the textual formation upon the page itself, where passages occupy small corners of the rectangle, or words are crammed into small shapes or distributed, sometimes in complex patterns and at other times haphazardly.

These different techniques may at first appear to be arbitrary; whimsy on the part of Danielewski, but they are in fact an extremely clever method of converting the fictitious events of The Navidson Record into a genuine experience for the reader. This works most obviously with the footnotes, as already mentioned above – but when the typography is taken into account as well, the effect is markedly more distinct. This is most apparent in chapter IX of House of Leaves, commonly referred to as ‘The Labyrinth’. Between page 107 and 152, footnotes weave forwards and backwards creating paths through the maze; sometimes leading to dead ends that force the reader to retrace their steps and sometimes taking them back to places they have been before. For example, footnote 139[14] is itself footnoted to footnote 135[15], which itself is footnoted to footnote 129[16]. Of course as the main body of the text refers to footnotes 135 and 129 as well we begin to get an extremely confusing system of circular references, bamboozling the reader and causing them to turn the pages backwards and forwards in an attempt to find a way out.

As if this wasn’t enough, Danielewski throws in quotations that are at face-value related to Zampanò’s text, but on closer inspection are related to the reader. For example, the aforementioned footnote 139 includes the phrase: ‘This is what happens when you hurry through a maze: the faster you go, the worse you are entangled’ – ostensibly referring to the reader who dismisses the actual number of the footnote in the assumption that it must at all times lead forwards in the narrative instead of reverse. The frustrating reality for that reader upon the realisation that the footnotes are now leading off in both directions is the distressing possibility that it could have been this way all along, and important paths through the labyrinth have thus been overlooked.

Furthermore, the citations within the footnotes are an uneven mixture of genuine pieces of literature and entirely non-existent texts[17]. Sometimes the authors are real and sometimes they are not, but once again a palpable sensation of distrust is created. On top of this it is an additional layer to the depth of Danielewski’s ‘mirroring’ effect; it represents another potential path through the labyrinth – those who follow the pursuit of these books to the library or bookshop will sometimes be successful, and other times meet a dead end.

The layout of the words upon the page works in a far more visual sense – the reader is confused, and along with the lack of premonition such innovations create, scared. This is an unexpected structure – it should not be this way and we cannot comprehend it. This of course is the labyrinth. When the characters are racing through it, so are we, turning pages every few seconds to keep up with the action as it speeds by, one word at a time[18]. When the characters enter confined rooms the letters themselves squeeze into confined spaces on the page. It is no coincidence that we refer to individual letters as ‘characters’ – the words have become the very thing they are describing, and in doing so the reader is thrust into the experience alongside them.

At this point it would be understandable if some readers, particularly those who do not like their preconceptions of what books are ‘allowed’ to do to be challenged, closed the book and exited the house. So of course this technique is not without its detractors. Emane Slaf vehemently asserts that the use of footnotes in House of Leaves is not only lazy writing, but an embarrassing failure:

Der Versuch, Fußnoten im Das Haus als Instrument zur Wirkung psychologischen Reaktionen in Der Leser ist sehr roh. Danielewski meidet Subtilität, um seine Kraft Unsere Kehlen: ‘SIE SIND IN A KATAKOMBE!’ Es ist, trotz alles andere, faul.[19]

He writes a passionate case but his conclusions do not merit a repeat here. Slaf is not the only critic of Danielewski’s techniques of course, but that is not to say he is without admirers too. In the more balanced article ‘Return to the Beginning’, Sudha Shastri praises the use of footnotes in House of Leaves as a method to ‘dispel a comfortable belief in one single beginning.’22 The (correct) argument being that, without a tangible sense of a ‘start’ the novel is breaking down expectations (and thus creating fear) before it has ‘begun’.

The use of colour is perhaps the most confusing aspect of House of Leaves. The fact that it is so extraordinarily oblique, contrasting even with the concept of ‘text mirroring plot’ (in so far as Navidson’s house is colourless, yet the symbol representing it is one of the few words in the novel that isn’t) makes this Danielewski’s most exciting code of all.

It is certainly one of the few aspects of the book that hasn’t been properly explained by the author or figured out definitively by scholars. Danielewski has said that it relates to the blue-screen technique used in the film industry23, but other than that theories are pretty thin on the ground. In his piece ‘The Digital Topography of House of Leaves’ Mark B. N. Hansen suggests that Danielewski is making a ‘pseudoserious reference to the blue highlighting of hyperlinks on Web pages’24 – that this ‘transforms this keyword into something like a portal to information located elsewhere, both within and beyond the novel’s frame.’25

These two things are, for all intents and purposes, identical. Before the advent of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ the standard HTML formatting made all hyperlinks appear blue and underlined. Seeing a blue word amongst the sea of black on a webpage would act as a marker; here is a pathway. By clicking on the hyperlink you would open another avenue to explore – essentially, to travel further into the maze. The choice to take this path is entirely optional, although depending on your requirements it could be a necessary choice. Once taken, this path can lead to a wealth of further information (and a multitude of additional corridors to explore) or conversely it can lead to a dead end, either by taking you to irrelevant information or indeed a page that has changed in the time between the creation of the hyperlink and the action of clicking it. In this regard in particular it is identical to the house, where a doorway that leads to a particular room on one day will not lead there again in the future due to the ever-changing nature of the labyrinth. Another possibility is a literal dead-end in the form of a ‘404’ page – a placeholder indicating that the desired location does not exist.

Blue-screen is a relatively common cinematic tool whereby the physical action is filmed against the blue-screen and the resulting footage is treated in post-production to erase the blue elements and replace them with another image. This can be used for reasons as simple as making it appear that an actor is standing in an exotic (and cost-prohibitive) location when he is actually in a studio, or as complicated as placing Elijah Wood on the borders of the non-existent land of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. Either way the physical blue-screen acts as a symbol for something that is there in a virtual sense and absent in the physical sense. In this way it is the same as a blue hyperlink – to look at it, it appears as a door, an indication that there is something behind it; when this door is opened by the special effects team we see what is behind it projected onto the cinema screen26.

And so it is that the word house, in blue, becomes a symbol27. It represents something that is more than the sum of its parts, something that is larger on the inside than can be expressed on the outside. Like Navidson we are looking at a house (literally) and seeing something that is not supposed to be. Our understanding of what a novel is does not prepare us for this bright colouration, in the same way that Navidson’s understanding of the laws of physics cannot prepare him for the fact that there is a labyrinth inside his house.

We have come back to this point again: Danielewski has transgressed the self-imposed limitations we have placed upon the form of the novel. He has not done this out of spite for the form, but because he wants to show it for all it is capable of being:

[B]ooks don’t have to be so limited. They can intensify informational content and experience. Multiple stories can lie side by side on the page… Passages may be found, studied, revisited, or even skimmed. And that’s just the beginning. Words can also be colored and those colors can have meaning. How quickly pages are turned or not turned can be addressed. Hell pages can be tilted, turned upside down, even read backwards… But here’s the joke. Books have had this capability all along… Books are remarkable constructions with enormous possibilities… And you can carry this magical creation with you, write in it, and never need to hunt down conversion software to find out what you wrote and read years ago. But somehow the analogue powers of these wonderful bundles of paper have been forgotten. Somewhere along the way, all its possibilities were denied.29

This attitude – the approach of redefining structure and looking at what a novel actually is – is one of the most daring aspects of House of Leaves. Essentially we still read novels moving from left-to-right and down the page as we go; from page 1 to the end, but through the lens of postmodernity Danielewski is able to transgress these mores. We are thus reading a novel that is more than a novel. Yet at the same time it is, more than any other book, just words on a page30. Even when it isn’t just words on a page (such as page 310) it still manages to say more than most books ever can.32

Danielewski plays with the reader too – the novel is entirely untrustworthy. The reliability of the narrators are further weakened by the fact that we are receiving this story at the end of an elaborate line. As such, outside of the ‘real’ truth that Danielewski wrote it all himself, there is also the possibility that Johnny Truant is making it up himself – that he fabricated Zampanò and perhaps even all of his own experiences. Zampanò is an entirely unseen character, yet he is an integral part of Danielewski’s game. The author’s full name is of course Mark Z. Danielewski, his unrevealed middle name tantalisingly close to the other author of House of Leaves.

In fact there seem to be several iterations of the book – from Zampanò’s version to Truant’s, to Danielewski’s. Are they indeed the same book? There is a moment in House of Leaves where Navidson, within the house at the time, begins to read a book33. Its title? House of Leaves. And when Johnny is searching for Navidson’s house towards the end of the book he encounters a band who show him their own home-printed copy of – House of Leaves34. That brings the total number of versions of the book to five – not including the one that is available to buy in shops.

It was suggested by Steven Poole that at its most simple, House of Leaves is a satire of academic criticism35. If that is true then perhaps it is foolish for anyone to be writing academic criticism about the book. Are we falling into a trap set up Danielewski? Has he created an endless number of corridors for us academics to wander down, looking for answers? And faced with that black emptiness, finding them where there are none purely because it is easier to do so than to accept that they don’t exist? Danielewski never explains what the house is, yet it is his creation. He has given us questions instead of answers, and thus we feel an urge to answer those questions ourselves. This is his trap, and we all fall into it. But as Navidson himself says, if we do not try, ‘then what do we have?’36

The repeating series of House of Leaves within House of Leaves acts like a sort of fractal; to everyone who encounters this story these three words are the only common denominator. Suddenly the ‘truth’ of your purchased version is called into question – you look at the preamble to the book, with the date and place of publication and version history, and think of Danielewski’s efforts to warp our perceptions of what a book is. Where does it begin? What can I trust?

And then we see again that distant warning at the start of the book, and this time we wonder if we should have heeded it. Those five simple words, written by Danielewski, or Johnny Truant, trying desperately to tell you that beyond this point things are not as they should be. That the things on the other side of this door are unlike the things inside any other House of Leaves you may have entered. And once you go in, there’s no coming back.

And then, the nightmares will begin.

[2] Appendix I.

[3] Danielewski, Mark Z., House of Leaves, (London: Doubleday, 2001) p.30.

[4] Danielewski, 305.

[5] Appendix II.

[6] Oh, that small fact.

[7] Danielewski, 16.

[8] The implication being that it’s ever possible to trust something written by a stranger, who may or may not be in hospital, prison, the nude or any combination of the above. It sounds like he’s missed the obvious: when you get a book from the fiction section, you don’t need ‘trust’ to know that it didn’t really happen.

[9] What? You would have to be on a high dose of the best acid available to actually find yourself in a heightened state of reality simply by encountering a footnote in an essay. Which is appropriate because he stole that bit about ‘basic motor survival’ from Hunter S. Thompson anyway.

[10] Cox, Katharine, ‘What Has Made Me? Locating Mother in the Textual Labyrinth of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves’, Critical Survey, 18 (2006) p. 5.

[11] Cox, p. 6.

[12] Huh?

[13] Another book-within-a-book, I suppose?

[14] Danielewski, p. 115.

[15] Ibid p. 114.

[16] Ibid p. 111.

[17] For a list of fictional works cited in House of Leaves, please refer to this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_books#Works_invented_by_Mark_Z._Danielewski

[18] For example see chapter X (The Rescue (Part 1)) (pp. 153-245) – in particular pages 194-238.

[19] Slaf, Emane, ‘Den Falschen Weg: Lügen, Zitaten und Bibliographien’²⁰, Entschuldigungen, 13 (2002) 145-169 (p.145.)²¹

²⁰ ‘The False Path: Lies, Citations and Bibliographies’

²¹ Something along the lines of, ‘Danielewski abandons subtlety to ram his point home: ‘YOU ARE IN A MAZE!’’

22 Shastri, Sudha, ‘Return to the Beginning: House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski’, Atenea, 26 (2006) 81-94 (p. 85.)

23 This is incredibly vague. ‘Danielewski has said’ – where has he said? It comes across like he’s trying to make it sound as though he went and asked Danielewski himself. The only reference I can find to the author mentioning blue-screen is here: http://www.flakmag.com/books/house.html – which is a review of the book, and even here he only says ‘something to do with how blue is used in film.’ In fact there’s no evidence that Danielewski even said that, and it’s the author of the review who makes the connection to blue-screen.

24 Hansen, Mark B.N., ‘The Digital Topography of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves‘, Contemporary Literature, 45 (2004) 597-636 (p. 598.)

25 Ibid.

26 Really clutching at straws here. Bluescreen and hyperlinks being the same thing? And there was me thinking it was just a coincidence that they were both blue. Anyway don’t they use greenscreen just as much as bluescreen? Leaves are green I suppose. Actual leaves I mean, not Danielewski’s ‘leaves’.

Although you can buy green paper too.

27 Danielewski’s colouration has been maintained throughout this essay as removing it would strip the word of its metaphoric power. In blue, ‘house’ represents more than could ever be written about it in pieces such as this.²⁸

²⁸ Huh? It sounds to me as though this is a feeble attempt to hijack whatever vague sense of meaning Danielewski managed to inject into the word by giving it a colour. ‘Represents more than could ever be written about it’ – then why write about it at all? Cop-out.

29 Cottrell, Sophie, “A Conversation with Mark Danielewski”, <Boldtype>, April 2000 <http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0400/danielewski/interview.html> [accessed 11 November 2007]

30 How can any book be said to be more ‘words on a page’-y than another?? If he’s going to take that stance I might as well claim that this sentence is the most outstanding combination of vowels and consonants since Shakespeare wrote ‘’Tis better to be brief than tedious.’³¹ And that’s only better than what I said because it’s so remarkably apt.

³¹ Richard III Act I Scene 4.

32 No shit. It’s a blank fucking page. I put it to you that Danielewski says precisely nothing on this page.

33 Danielewski, 465.

34 Ibid, 513.

35 Poole, Steven, “Gothic Scholar”, Guardian Unlimited, 15 July 2000 <http://books.guardian.co.uk/critics/reviews/0,5917,343421,00.html> [accessed 3 November 2007]

36 I can’t find that damn quote anywhere. Maybe it’s just me, I’m tired and it’s a long book. Or maybe it doesn’t exist. At least not in my version of House of Leaves… whichever one that is.

Appendix I

Navidson’s ‘Delial’ – the real life photo of a child in Sudan, taken by Kevin Carter. He later committed suicide.

Appendix II

Page 134 of House of Leaves. The typography at an extreme which lasts for several pages.

art by Rob Gonsalves

I suppose some people might describe this compilation as depressing, but I prefer to think of melancholia as being more sophisticated than that. It’s okay to get in touch with your quiet side every now and again, and a lazy rainy day provides a nice backdrop for it. Tracklisting and details after the jump.

Melancholy Music for Rainy Days

1. Miss You Too Much (Angie Pepper & The Passengers)
Nice little song from this antipodean band.

2. Weed (Bea Foote)
Oldie from the twenties. Appealed to me for obvious reasons, but understated jazz is always nice.

3. Dominoes (Syd Barrett)
Probably not his most popular song, but it’s as Syd as you can get.

4. The Sound Of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel)
What do you mean, you’ve already heard it?

5. Love Will Tear Us Apart (Pribata Idaho)
Great cover by this Spanish band. Stays true to the original while still managing to sound different.

6. Psylocybe (The Mad Violets)
Straight from my garage rock revival vaults. Psychedelic and floaty, songs like this get me every time.

7. As They Do (The Psychoviolets)
I have a real love affair with this band. They probably have more appropriate songs for a compilation like this, but I love this song too much to leave it out.

8. Pushin’ Too Hard (Falling Spikes)
This garage band do a great job of turning a fun-time anthem into something quite sad.

9. Dark Globe (REM)
Stipe’s vocals do great justice to some of Syd’s most desperate words.

10. Pink Frost (The Chills)
Once voted the best song of the eighties. They might be right.

11. Nature Boy (Philip Jackson)
Slightly different, this features samples from the classic eco-sci-fi movie Silent Running.

12. True Love Will Find You In The End (Daniel Johnston)
If Daniel Johnston needs an introduction, rent this out.

13. Hurry On Sundown (The Petals)
Classic song, and covered by a decent folk-pop outfit.

Album Art by Rob Gonsalves.

Next time I’ll probably give you an equally-esoteric but much happier album.

(Thanks to Remi for turning me on to REM’s excellent version of Syd Barrett’s Dark Globe, and for somehow remembering that I liked Hawkwind’s Hurry On Sundown.)

I have to admit I was excited when I heard about the plot for this series. I love Seinfeld, and the idea of revisiting it appealed to me more than I would have liked to admit. And then it arrived, and the actors all showed up, and they were all acutely aware of how incredibly massive the idea of them teaming up again was, and that was not thrilling television. But fine, whatever. That was all ‘behind the scenes’. The show itself – the parts of it we would actually see – would be good, I was pretty sure about that. And I tried to like it, and I suppose, really, I did, but not for the reasons they wanted me to.

It’s not that the Seinfeld scenes were un-Seinfeldian, the problem was the eleven-year gap. The actors were older, they’d clearly changed – yet here they still were, same apartment, same coffee shop. And of course, that was the only way it could ever be, but at the same time it kind of missed the point. Seinfeld was about the journey. Changes happen in life and you accept them on the fly – relationships suddenly end out of the blue one day, people quit their jobs. But when you shoehorn change there’s something false about it – something that seems written. Insert an upheaveal into the unseen years, and suddenly the same-ness of the rest of it is called into doubt.

Jason Alexander did well, stepping back into George as if he’d never left. But it was really an impersonation of George at the same time; not funny because it was funny, but because it reminded you so vividly of what made that character so amusing to begin with. Jerry was much the same as he always was, and Elaine was really a non-character — ruined, perhaps, by the extreme unlikeability of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ‘off camera’. And Kramer – well, on paper he was perfect, but Michael Richards just seemed embarassed to be there altogether, and the energy he had filled that role with in the past was sadly absent.

Still, this isn’t all criticism. There was something undeniably delicious about the hyper-real, post-postmodernism of it all. Actors playing characters of themselves, playing characters: art imitating life imitating art. It really showed, conclusively, that a genuine reunion show would be a bad mistake, yet still successfully satisfied the geeky yearning for just a little more time with those characters. In that regard, it could never fail to deliver because all we needed was the set and four extremely available actors. And the desperation of it – masquerading, perhaps, as inspiration – probably belies the problems the latest episodes of Curb have been exhibiting.

Some of its strengths are becoming indistinguishable from its weaknesses. One of the best – and most surprising – moments in the finale was Larry attempting to play George. In another reality the role would certainly have been his to begin with, and it’s clear that after seven series (and one unexpectedly good performance in Woody Allen’s Whatever Works) David’s confidence as an actor has grown. But unfortunately, his greatest strength – writing – has not improved so readily. What started out as explorations of genuine social pitfalls has turned into, simply, people being unreasonable assholes. That they can be in real life is certainly true, but the situation in this episode – an acquaintance expecting a tip for a small favour, and then demanding a ridiculously unfair counter-favour in return – stretches believability. Would Larry’s friends really think that he was in the wrong here, that he had a skewed understanding of etiquette? And whilst I’ve mentioned it, the whole ‘tip’ thing in Curb is becoming farcical. I’m tired of the plot device, because it’s used in every episode and it’s always the same, and it’s always equally devoid of relatability or humour.

Susie is another tired old trope. Calling Larry a bald fuck is funny the first ten times, but now I can’t stand the sight of her petty, aggressive, selfish, Jewish-mother bullshit schtick. She has ceased to be a character, and is now just an awful, hate-filled loudmouth.

To be fair, this series has made me laugh, but I’m not convinced it isn’t just doing slightly racier re-treads of ideas it’s already explored. A lot of those ideas are, in turn, just racier versions of themes explored on Seinfeld in the first place. Larry talking about a nine year old girl with a ‘rash on her pussy’ is funny when it leads people to believe he’s some sort of incredibly-unabashed paedophile, but is it any different than the ‘Mommy, that bald man is in the bathroom and there’s something hard in his pants!’ moment in series two?

In fact, yes, it is. In the earlier episode Larry was at least aware that people would misinterpret an entirely innocent situation, but now he’s seemingly oblivious that attaching a sexualised word to a pre-pubescent girl will give people the wrong idea. It makes it entirely less realistic, less believable, which sadly makes it a cheap laugh.

I know I’ll still watch this show, if there are more episodes, but I’m not convinced it hasn’t jumped the shark. Whatever it was that made Larry David leave Seinfeld by its eighth season – when it was on, if anything, more of a high than the point when it ended for good – seems to have abandoned him on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Let’s hope it’s just because I’m completely wrong, and he still has something good left up his sleeve.

Well, I said that last time. It was ‘practice’ for my degree course, which involved writing. And I shared the link with some friends, and we all had good times blogging and commenting on each others blogs, because that’s the way the internet was in 2006. And now it’s all about twitter, which I’ve resisted forever because it seemed so utterly self-indulgent, but I caved anyway because it doesn’t matter. It’s all coincidental.

But now my old blog is top of the Google rankings for revealing search terms such as ‘Sandoz acid’ and ‘upbrixle’ and other things I don’t care to mention. It’s embarassing, more than anything. But I have a job now – writing for video games, somehow – and so I don’t have to be coy anymore. I can write for me, and it will be here, and no doubt in 2012 my inane rants about varying levels of solipsistic gibberish will be high on Google too. It’s not because I’m particularly good, it’s just probably because the system is still broken.

So if you’re in the audience this time, understand: This is all for me.

Ho ho! Then why is it public? What a jip. I’m full of shit – but that’s probably why I’m on the internet.