In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine

I am going to take a series of photographs, black and white, soft focus, of people looking into the middle distance blankly while holding vaguely abstract poses and pissing on each other.  They will be numbered nonsequentially under the title Micturotica, and will make my reputation.

Unrelated: the idea I had here, to which I cannot directly link because there don't seem to be links to individual comments, and which I therefore reproduce verbatim:

Douglas Hofstadter and I, in an essay I wrote for my 12th-grade English class on The French Lieutenant's Woman, thankyouverymuch. It was about multiple endings or some such crap.

Another way to do it would be to write your book in continuation passing–style: at the end of each page, a note saying which is the next page, so that the progression of the book would come apart from the progression of physically consecutive pages. If the book were of a decent length, this might prevent one from being able to tell based on purely physical characteristics how close one was to the end (you'd be able to tell that you've seen some facing pages before, or the like, but it would hard to keep everything straight enough to have the sort of immediate indication the diminution of thickness on the right-hand side offers will-you or nill-you). On the other hand, it would be annoying to read.

, is, I think, pretty great (though the reference to continuation-passing style, which is so hyphenated (not en dashed), is perhaps not technically correct).  One way to improve matters: have both a novel and a short story (beginning on page 2) in the same volume, just to prevent the reader from counting pages. 

Somewhat related to this post: the teacher for whom I wrote the abovementioned essay (very short thing, it was in-class) claimed, marginally, on the basis of the introduction in which I adduced the fact of the continual shortening of the right-hand side, that she could imagine me writing for the NYRB—rather unlikely, I should think.  I'd be pleased, though, if I could regain some of the rhetorical excess that occasionally informed this humble blog and humble comments left elsewhere in times past.

Comments

[A White Bear]

And why not Ben Wolfson at the Review? And why not?

For God's sake, something has to happen there.

[Kriston]

Mark Danielewski wrote your irritating book already. It even features Croquemitaine. Okay, not really, but an abyss and the Minotaur.

It's quite a bad read.

[ben wolfson]

Is that really how one reads House of Leaves? I've flipped through it and didn't see any gotos. It goes without saying, of course, that if I did this, it would be good.

[eb]

A History of Bombing, not a novel, looks like it has a narrative structure like this, only with multiple routes.

[Rah]

I've had no luck with Danielewski, but Julio Cortázar was quite a bit ahead of him; Hopscotch came out in 1963. The description of its structure here is fine (you might want to skip the plot summary below if you're picky about spoilers). The paperback translation is apparently still in print.

[ben wolfson]

Ah HA! That would explain why that Ben guy at Weiner's site suggested calling a book written according to such a method Hopscotch.