Review: Only Revolutions

Yesterday, I finished (and for that matter, started) Mark Z. Danielewski's second novel, Only Revolutions. I fell in love with his first and most popular work, House of Leaves, earlier this year for its atmospheric feel, innovative layout, and challenging text. Never before had a book made me feel so outright frightened or borderline insane. It was definitely a rush, but I could see how people would judge Danielewski as pretentious or gimmicky. In the end, though, it's the gimmick that made me latch onto the book as something genuinely unique.

Only Revolutions can be considered a mash up of quite a few things. Its writing style isn't quite poetry, isn't quite narrative, isn't quite jazz/hip-hop inspired rhyme. It's pretty much whatever the author felt like, with a few very strict rules to follow. For one, each page of text has one hundred and eighty words on it - ninety of them oriented one way and ninety the other. If one counts all words on both pages of the open book, then, it totals precisely three hundred and sixty.

The book, without spoiling, evokes in both its text and in its design the cyclical nature of everything in life. Periods of happiness and sorrow, the birth, rise, fall, and death of each generation and paradigm. What intrigued me most, though, were the changes that every object, person, and setting in the book seemed to undergo (references change the nature of bracelets the characters wear, the cars they drive, the scenery).

During a segment of the book, the lovers are stranded and work in a diner for money. Even their work shifts seemed to be in flux - with Sam and Hailey's shifts floating toward one another and then slowly moving away. When they escape this drudgery, they are off just as they had been before, without care or explanation, but it just makes sense in that way. No one wants to be imprisoned in their own boredom.

There were very few constants in the tale of Sam and Hailey. The American landscape was key, here, the roads they traversed and the vehicles they used to do the traversing. The fact that no matter what, the landscape, the stone, and the sky, would be there long after any insignificant reproach of our species had passed. One could say that love was constant throughout the majority of the book, but the progression of the love the two characters had for one another was also in flux. Sam would cheat, Hailey would be tempted, they would hardly see each other throughout some stints of their work. Their relationship grew until it became lifelong.

The ending changes everything, and then restarts it down the other side; it's perfectly feasible to read one side of the story and flip the book, then read the other as if it was a sequel. I found it to be as evocative as any piece of literature I'd read, particularly a portion dealing with the threat of the loss of a loved one:

"Butchering their prejudice. Patience. Their Value. Because I'm without value. I'm the coming of every holocaust. Turning no lost. Rending tissue, sinew and bone. Excepting no suffering. By me all levees will break. All silos heave. I will walk heavy. And I will walk strange. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am Only Revolutions of Ruin."

This in particular reminds me of a very child-like feeling, that feeling of tremendous loss that draws all your attention, forces you to focus. That kind of loss that turns you into a whirlwind of anger and misguided rage. We, as we grow, learn to shrug this feeling off in favor of doing something more productive, but as a child (sixteen and freeeeee), we would destroy the world to get back what we had lost.

Schedule for Week Ending 11/21

Monday - 12:00 to 23:00 (11 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 20:00 (19 hours)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 20:00 (27 hours)
Thursday - 12:00 to 24:00 (39 hours)
Friday - 12:00 to 16:00 (43 hours)

Schedule for Week Ending 11/14

Monday - 11:00 to 15:00 [driving] and 17:00 to 24:00 (11 hours)
Tuesday - 17:00 to 24:00 (18 hours)
Wednesday - 11:00 to 15:00 [driving] and 15:00 to 20:00 (27 hours)
Thursday - 08:00 to 16:00 (35 hours)
Friday - 08:00 to 13:00 (40 hours)

Where I End and You Begin

There's a gap in between
There's a gap where we meet
Where I end
And you begin

I'm sorry for us
The dinosaurs roam the earth
The sky turns green
Where I end
And you begin

I'm up in the clouds
I'm up in the clouds
And I can't, I can't come down
I can watch but not take part
Where I end and where you start

I will eat you alive
There will be no more lies.

Magenta

Magenta doesn't exist. Really, it doesn't.

Mindblowing conclusions abound here, but I figured I'd write about this topic since it's so damned interesting. Okay, there's a light spectrum, that runs from red to violet. You probably know this, and it looks like this:

Red is the longest wavelength and violet is the shortest, with lengths of about 750 nm down to 380 nm. The perception of color in your eye has to do with the three types of "cones" in your eye. Each type of cone has peak sensitivity in a different wavelength - generally separated into red, green, and blue. In actuality, however, these are closer to yellow, green, and violet; perception of the other colors are due to differences in perception in different type of cones. For example, cyan (the light blue between blue and green) has no particular cone cell particularly for it. When the violet cone and yellow cones give roughly the same response to the brain, and the green cone is a bit higher, the brain concatenates this information and creates cyan. Thus, all colors are perceived as a mixture of wavelengths.

Here's another bit of an experiment. Stare at the little black dot in the middle of the yellow and cyan circles below and then stare at the black dot to their right.


For yellow, you should see its opposite in the afterimage: violet. For cyan, you should see red. This is due to cone cells getting "tired" in your eye. Look at it like this:

When you stare at the yellow circle, the yellow cones get very tired, the green cones get pretty tired, and the violet cones don't get very tired at all. The color white is made up of all the constituent colors; violet and yellow and green, it essentially stresses all the cones equally. Since the yellow cones are really tired, they drop out of the equation for a second or two; same goes, to a lesser extent, for the green ones. That chiefly leaves the violet cones to express white to the brain, and the best they can do to pure white is violet. Hence, why the afterimage appears to us as violet.

Now try it with this one:

This time, green receptors get very tired, yellow quite tired, and violet not so tired at all. But if you look at the spectrum above again, you'll notice that green is closer to violet than yellow is, so the violet receptors get a bit more tired than with yellow. Just as with yellow and cyan, one would expect the complement of the color should be perceivable when you stare at the black dot on the right. For green, that complement is magenta, the color halfway between red and violet.

But hold on a second. Try and find magenta on the spectrum:

You'll find it's not on there. What gives? Well, in a lot of image processing programs, the spectrum is like a big circle, with the left side looping back to red eventually.

As previously mentioned, the red-to-violet spectrum goes from longest to shortest wavelengths of light. It's a line, not a wheel, and at its respective ends we have other types of electromagnetic radiation: infrared and ultraviolet. The "northeast" region of the wheel above is actually not on the spectrum. So how can we see it?

When the brain perceives violet and red light wavelengths coming from the same object, it has to process them somehow. It could, similar to what it does for colors like blue or cyan, is just take the "average" of the color and just pick something in the middle. In the linear spectrum, that would cause it to process the color into a shade of green. The other option is just to invent a color with no actual wavelength. The brain takes the second option, and perceives this as magenta, even though magenta has no wavelength.

Schedule for Week Ending 11/7

Hurf durf.

Monday - 13:30 to 24:00 (10.5 hours)
Tuesday - 12:00 to 17:30 (16 hours)
Wednesday - 12:00 to 22:00 (26 hours)
Thursday - 07:30 to 16:00 (34.5 hours)
Friday - 07:30 to 13:00 (40 hours)

Woop.