Q&A: Mark Z. Danielewski

(Credit: Ken Hivey)

Mark Z. Danielewski’s second novel, "Only Revolutions," is at its simplest, a love story. But then it gets complicated.

Sam and Hailey, two teenage lovers, race through history and across America, while their distinct voices gather in a geographic fashion on different parts of the book’s pages, forcing the reader to turn the book, quite literally, upside-down and sideways to keep up. What to make of it? We spoke with Danielewski during a recent sweltering afternoon in Los Angeles.

You’ve spoken about the “wonderful analogue qualities of paper, especially paper that is bound together in book form.”
Definitely. A book, I maintain, is still the most efficacious way of communicating and translating information. There’s an enormous amount of information available from a book. Images provide a certain type of information, but it tends to be just static information. You can see what Iraq looks like to no end in sight, but when you’re reading a book on the Iraq war, you’re getting a far denser amount of information.

In "Only Revolutions," there are a lot of lists: cars, plants, the historical events that line the left side column. Was it organic, this repetition of items and names?
The lists were always present. Think about the lists of sacred texts. Whether it’s the genealogy lists in the Bible or the laws as to what shall be contained within a certain temple. The Homeric lists: what was packed in ships, what kinds of arms were carried. You can go up to the listing present in Joyce’s work or even through modern pop culture lists: Top 20’s, Top 5’s.

Now there’s Myspace lists. Facebook lists.
Exactly. A list of friends, which alludes to them and you can actually click on the picture, send them a message. Now there’s the increased potential to allude to things which, if they cap someone’s interest, can easily be traced from, say, an i-Phone. You can handily check one of those historical columns or the relevance of a car or the kind of mythology or nomenclature around a certain type of animal or plant.

Is the new paperback of "Only Revolutions" identical to the hardback in terms of content, or are there any surprises lying in wait for repeat readers?
(Laughs) No it’s exactly the same. A couple of little things, but nothing’s different in the main text itself.

You’re writing everyday? Any rituals?
I’m a terrifyingly disciplined person. I get up very early, I go swim, work out and then I write for eight hours.

What happens at the end of the day?
Early on, as a writer, you sort of crave for some idyllic retreat in distant Montana or wherever. But the reality is you’re alone so much of the time when you’re writing. Personally, I like to go out. Try a restaurant with my girlfriend. Watch a TV show. With television it needs to be a social activity. I don’t want to just move from one screen upstairs to another screen downstairs. I try and watch television with friends, so that it’s not just the show, it’s also the dialogue about the show. But my taste for culture might change as I get older, to where I’m perfectly satisfied by just staring at fields of wheat.