Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a massive novel about, among other things, a house that is bigger on the inside than the outside. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a collection of poems about, among other things, the expansiveness of America itself.
What happens when these two works are remixed with each other? It’s not such an odd question. Though separated by nearly a century, they share many of the same concerns. Multitudes. Contradictions. Obsession. Physical impossibilities. Even an awareness of their own lives as textual objects.
To explore these connections between House of Leaves and Leaves of Grass I have created House of Leaves of Grass, a poem (like Leaves of Grass) that is for all practical purposes boundless (like the house on Ash Tree Lane in House of Leaves). Or rather, it is bounded on an order of magnitude that makes it untraversable in its entirety. The number of stanzas (from stanza, the Italian word for “room”) approximates the number of cells in the human body, around 100 trillion. And yet the container for this text is a mere 24K.
There are three distinct source texts for House of Leaves of Grass. As its title suggests, House of Leaves of Grass remixes Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (the “deathbed edition” of 1891-1892). Key words and phrases were selected from these two works according to either frequency of appearance or thematic significance and then algorithmically remixed into couplets based on seven templates. The third source text for House of Leaves of Grass is its electronic literature forebear, Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between (2011). Sea and Spar Between provided inspiration (and the underlying platform) for House of Leaves of Grass, though the two works are dramatically different in terms of content and tone.
House of Leaves of Grass is available online at http://fugitivetexts.net/houseleavesgrass/. The work displays properly in any modern computer-based browser, such as Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. A keyboard and mouse are required to explore the work. (I prefer using the arrow keys to navigate, and the mouse wheel—or the multi-touch equivalent—to zoom in and out of the work.
While the instructions for reading House of Leaves of Grass provide some details about the work, here is more background about the data sources and tools I used:
Platform
- Modified version of Javascript-based Sea and Spar Between, by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Data Sources
- Mark Z. Danielewksi, House of Leaves (2000 full color 2nd edition, scanned and OCR’d)
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1891-1892 edition, from Project Gutenberg)
- Spreadsheet of word frequencies, n-grams, and other data, generated from the texts above using the tools below
Tools
- N-Gram Extraction Tools for extracting two-, three-, and four-word sequences from the texts
- Voyant Tools for extracting word frequency counts
- Stanford Named Entity Recognizer for extracting proper names and places from the texts
MT @samplereality: no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/k7ySdcdR0L
MT @briancroxall Thrilled to see @samplereality’s House of Leaves of Grass (which I showed off at #futuresofthebook): http://t.co/OKEoFyj8ky
the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass — http://t.co/LomSgqHqXN
100 trillion stanzas long… @samplereality’s latest amazing work of e-lit http://t.co/YJ78Zqoxye
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/FG2wIgT8Nb #toremember
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/bwT40dLfUz #GreatIdeas
108 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass (out of 100 trillion). Deets: http://t.co/j24TkIAKiI http://t.co/US65P3q1L7
@ReginaMarie920 Seen this yet? http://t.co/vDKwgcIbc2
“The number of stanzas… approximates the number of cells in a human body, around 100 trillion” Via @samplereality http://t.co/JHDpLf2KWr
Mix&mash RT@samplereality 108 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass (out of 100 trillion) Deets: http://t.co/ypRDBa0wtx http://t.co/T1qpB8wEtB
MT @samplereality: no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/Ok26EUqEtu #elit
» no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass SAMPLE REALITY http://t.co/YqxK7RUIkB
MT @samplereality: For the night crowd: I remixed House of Leaves and Leaves of Grass into a poem of [many] stanzas. http://t.co/kct7chcUof
no life no life no life no life …
http://t.co/iZssVFqXSB
the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/DIlAcmrioq
The number of stanzas also equals the number of potential sonnets in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Is this a coincidence?
Cool text project from @samplereality using Voyeur Tools http://t.co/BsRelKtQ5D – thanks to @kevindriscoll 4 the share! #Whitman
House of Leaves of Grass – a fantastic experiment http://t.co/VSsNC9xEJR
[…] What miracle is this? This giant tree. It stands ten thousand feet high But doesn’t reach the ground. Still it stands. Its roots must hold the sky. […]
[…] We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine, and it talks about how you might approach crafting your response to Mark Sample‘s “House of Leaves of […]
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass by @samplereality http://t.co/D0dmxLv1QI
♥ collision of STEM & poetry MT @jessifer: 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass by @samplereality http://t.co/pRnESkXOzo
[…] my project House of Leaves of Grass as an illustrative example. As I explain in my artist’s statement, House of Leaves of Grass is a 100 trillion stanza-long mashup of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass […]
House of Leaves of Grass: a Danielewski/Whitman mashup by @samplereality. Brilliant. http://t.co/uuRiNbpuOQ #digitalhumanities
As many stanzas as blood cells in the body http://t.co/7Pf0bMmR7p
Mushing together two works: House of Leaves and Leaves of Grass http://t.co/y0GMF5mrCO #thatcamp 24K of code only!
no life no life no life no life: the 100,000,000,000,000 stanzas of House of Leaves of Grass http://t.co/jkEJECH2Np
Holy smokes. House of Leaves of Grass has @kottke written all over it. http://t.co/4qFH3ITD2M via http://t.co/vT9z9chBSx by @samplereality
Par l’artiste Mark Sample, voir ce qu’il en dit ici : https://t.co/iRC9ylPyH1
@the_blochian @collinsactually Here it is! https://t.co/kGxl5DNW3n and some background: https://t.co/OCuFNQyS26 #scms17