Two more mp3s of MZD! I am almost done with this series! The next one up is a hugely long one, so I may put up some Tori Amos files in the meantime. The first mp3 today is very short, which I didn’t realize. The second is about Danny Elfman, and the amount of work that went into laying out the pages of Only Revolutions.

MZD Q&A 4

MZD Q&A 5

Yes?

[[How about a silent movie?]]

How about a silent movie?

[[Crowd laughter.]]

I like that! All with cards.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

[[Um, you mentioned that Danny Elfman did the soundtrack.]]

Mhm.

[[How did you get associated with him?]]

He’s just been a friend for a long time. So. It’s one of those unfair things.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

I know. It’s just like, well, Mark Danielewski is friends with Danny Elfman, that’s how that happened. Uh…You know the truth is he used to live where I used to go body board. And uh, and I would drop by his place for, for coffee. And, uh, sort of slow, slow, you know, from there we sort of became friends.

[[So he read the book.]]

Oh, I’m sure he didn’t.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

No, actually it’s, it’s, it’s more complicated than that. My, uh…In order to finish the book, uh, and some of you may have seen these photos, I actually…this is one of those dangerous things to bring up because, um…How many people have read the book? Oh, okay, then I can tell you. Huh. Congratulations. These are the only, when you start getting into some of the density of it, some people just, like, they faint, they pass out in the aisles, you know. Chuck Palahniuk, they pass over, intestines coming out the ass.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

My audiences, they pass when they hear about some of the numeric, you know, madness that’s going on. But, you know, each, there, there’s, there’re five acts that break everything up, you know. And there is a kind of musical quality. So as much as, as Act One Same is the same, and reflects what’s going on in Act One Hailey, Act One Hailey also reflects what’s going on in Sam Five, and, and Sam One also reflects what’s going on in Hailey Five. Right? So that’s kind of obvious, I guess. But then it goes further, which is that each act is actually layered upon the subsequent act. So ultimately, what I did was I used Danny’s ballroom to lay out all the pages of Act One, and then underneath it I could lay out all the pages of Act Two, all the pages of Act Three, Four, and Five. So then I could go through on page 1 and correlate it with page 73 and correlate it with one, page 144, and look at some of the sort of the musical themes and words that were kind of come- I know, more information than you needed to know.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

There you go. So Danny would always actually have this big view of the book. And so he would come in and look at it like that, and I’d be like, well, see, this goes like that, and it’s kind of this theme is being rein-reintroduced and here’s the creep theme, and the creep theme gets reinterpreted here, and maybe it’s not the creep but it’s Viazazopolis or Viapopolous or whatever he is on this, that page. So. So he sort of read it by osmosis.

[[Crowd laughter.]]

Actually, you know what, that’s totally unfair, because he read it when he heard the audio. That’s ultimately when he read it. Because then once I gave it to him with all his music, then he listened to it in the car.