ok. speed reading. i will start taking photos of the post its. although. i used a number of them to jot down notes for a dinner party -- so there may be some random food related notes. also. my partner and i are currently remodeling our house and he's ripping out a wall and i'm getting terrified that a hallway will appear in the middle of the house. as someone who doesn't measure twice and cut once --- more like measure once and cut five times...i can see how i might not notice weird measurement discrepancies...but Scott (partner)...this is the thing he fears the most.
Hhahahaha. MO - the other night I was dyeing scarves in the basement and then realized I'd have to turn out all the lights and walk up the stairs in the dark and that that would be terrifying. So I ran up the stairs and locked the door from the kitchen with the dead bolt. Mike didn't understand why I'd done that because he hasn't started reading yet.
Tonight I will post a suggested next stopping point for this coming weekend.
It is unfortunate that the reading of this book coincides with me essentially living in the basement dyeing these scarves. At least the dog hangs out with me down there so I don't have to be totally terrified.
Another grump from me is that I'm not scared by this book at all. I even heard a weird noise outside on a dark and stormy night and had to go investigate it with a flashlight (curious if it was a critter under my house).
So I was shining a light into the inky darkness under my house and expecting to see some eyes shining back at me, and I was thinking "I guess this is the kind of situation where I'm supposed to feel scared because I'm reading that book," but I was 0% scared.
Long ago there was an art installation at the student gallery at Chico State that terrified me and I was pretty sure was stolen directly from HoL, which I was reminded of by the quote on pg 115: "this is what happens when you hurry through a maze: the faster you go, the worse you are entangled".
Only one person could go into the gallery at a time. Inside the student had built another little room comprised of a hallway spiraling toward the center of the structure. The walls were made of white fabric fixed at the top but loose at the bottom. It became progressively darker as you walked toward the center, and in the center of the spiraling hallways was a completely black closet, which presumably a normal soulless human like diane would just go stand in nonchalantly. When I got to the closet I turned and booked it like a ninny, and when I ran the fabric walls started flapping behind me, which freaked me out even more.
The best thing about this reading group is that it has shown us who among us is a horrible robot with no human feelings
I just want to note that the whole point of "Frankenstein" is to present a cautionary tale about what horrible things a person is capable of if they have no sense of supernatural dread. Victor's biggest mistake, early on, is revealed when he brags about how the darkness holds no terrors for him; he's a scientist and has no imagination for the Beyond. This is why he is able to stitch together a gigantic humanoid figure out of the dead rotting bits of other people's corpses and bring it to life. Something nobody with a healthy appreciation for the scientifically-unquantifiable aspects of life would even dream of doing.
I'm the person who specifically asked to be assigned the "most haunted" room when staying in an old castle in Germany. They put me in this watch tower all by myself, cut off from the rest of the castle. Slept like a baby.
It was different when I was younger. I remember being middle school aged and reading some Poe stories one night and being super freaked out and having to sleep in my mom's bed.
I also used to get really scared when I would have to take the garbage cans out at night. But the older I got, when the ghosts just never showed up, I was like "Oh, they never will" and I just stopped be afraid of spooky stuff.
However, if I even begin to think about the end of my life, I drop right into an extreme panic attack. I guess it's related, because I'm so sure I won't be a "ghost" of any form that I'm super freaked out by the final curtain.
As an adult in America, the main thing I'm scared of now is being in a Home Depot or Costco or somewhere like that when a deranged shooter comes in.
This hit close to home when my mom was about to enter Clackamas Town Center a couple years ago when people started streaming out and told her that there was a shooter in the mall. She hightailed it back to her car and then heard like a thousand sirens.
Eeeep. I always think of shooters when I have to go to the mall to buy underwear or something.
I'm talking about fear of the unknown, not fear of ghosts and boogey men. The dark is just a handy waking life reminder of deep, dark existential dread and the abysmal.
Ok I started! Already I laughed because in the very beginning of Zampano's work of film criticism, I had the thought "actual film scholarship would never include this much narrative content" and then immediately there was a footnote that said like "for the question of why so much narrative content appears in a supposedly critical film exegesis see note 67" HA HA HA
In order for it to be a "novel" with a compelling story, he's gotta get actual description of the story, feel, characters in the film, but he also knows that's not how film scholars actually write. Pretty cool if you ask me. Also note 67 doesn't explain anything, it's just a story about how a film student who did his transcriptions used to get mad at how much story he made her write down.
Already I'm annoyed by the characterization of Karen
It must be so fun to write a crazy-ass pomo (or whatever) novel like this and get to experiment with all these different written voices
This time around I am trying to be more conscious of what exactly scares me while reading this book. I am surprised by how frightening I find the blue text for "house." Anybody have any thoughts on this? Why is it so creepy to always put "house" in blue? Is it like you feel like something outside of the text is influencing it (the text) in a way that the author(s) aren't aware of or something? Since this book is an attempt to literalize the unconscious (labyrinth hidden in a normal space, containing monsters and your worst fears and stuff) I wonder if the blue text does something similar. Like it's cuing us to have an unconscious terror surrounding the word "house" before we even learn anything about the house in question.
RE ladies in HoL: they are ALL hot. They are mostly emotional or kittenish coquettes. I keep wondering whether that's intentional on the part of MD as a description of the narrators, or whether MD can't write women.
House in blue is scary. Somehow the blue is alive and just subtle enough to convey, subconsciously, a power.
What creeps me out:
empty spaces - in chapter eight when he starts slowly introducing the weird punctuation in both Zampano's and Johnny's writings. It's like background noise that could just be ignored but is lurking. Maybe that's the part of house being blue that is eerie... like is should just be fine background noise, but you realize that it's just a regular thumping thump of something bigger and darker. The tiny open squares on page 100 freak me out.
The check mark on bottom right page 97??!
The part where footnotes start disappearing and I think I'M crazy.
The black/white square combo on pages 144/145. Again, I think it's a pacing thing and somehow the frequency is ominous.
And, so much of HoL about losing touch with reality, which is terrifying to me. Logic and the ability to reason and try to understand the world as a system with rules is one of the few things that keeps me from crushing despair.
Yeah, I could see how the blue "house" text is kind of like those early scenes in The Shining where Danny is just riding around without anything happening. It sets you up a bit.
I'm really annoyed by how Karen is portrayed. That's part of what I find corny. The writing just isn't very *good*!
Just read KAREN's post too. Yeah, that's what I've been bothered by like "These women are written so badly? So is he just trying to say these two (or one) guys themselves can't write women well? THAT JUST SEEMS LIKE A COP OUT FOR BAD WRITING."
To be fair, the men are sort of one-dimensional also. The hero, the other hero, the drunken womanizers. Or just heroes and wannabe heroes and failed heroes.
I switched back to reading a little more of Amy Pohler's book, but it's so boring, y'all! Tine Fey's was good, but Amy's is zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. One chapter she "takes a break" and Seth Meyers writes the chapter, but it's basically just ass-kissing Amy the whole time.
Karen, I love your thoughts on what exactly is creepy in this book!! Spot-on. The lurking power, the things that make you doubt your sanity. The things that make the book seem alive, like it's playing tricks on you. Or the things that make it feel like there's something outside the book, looking through the book AT YOU.
the portrayal of the women is grim. I think Danielewski is a precocious dude who hasn't challenged himself very much. He strikes me as one of those dudes who drops out of Harvard because he "was smarter than all his professors," which is something that only people who are smart, but fundamentally lazy and smug (and white and male), really ever say/believe. So he's like mastered the basics of certain rhetorical styles but he's not challenged himself to THINK DEEPLY about stuff.
In many ways it's a very surface-y book. The book itself--the typography, the footnotes, the interlocking puzzle of it all--is super complex and tightly woven and brilliant, but at a deeper level it is sort of lacking, I think. Which is not the case with something like Infinite Jest, which he's clearly inspired by--IJ has all the insane brilliant surface complexity but also conceptual and poetic DEPTH. Does House of Leaves have depth? I'm trying to pay attention to this question as I'm re-reading. What do you guys think?
Johnny Truant is so irritating. I'm always so relieved when we go back to Zampano, who seems like such a wise grownup in comparison.
I get super stressed when I can't find a footnote and have to give up looking; taking the logical structure of the book away from me as a reader wigs me out so hard.
Cool mirror D! That definitely looks like a lurking kind of place, if I were a lurking kind of spirit.
I like how so many of the exhibits referred to in footnotes are just not there, in the back of the book. Implying there's all this additional info that would help you make sense of things, but it's not been included for some reason?
Why do you think both Zampano and Johnny's mother unconsciously misspell "pieces" as "pisces" in two places?
I'm interested in the part where the dog and cat aren't able to go into the labyrinth. So it's obviously representative of the subconscious (those quotes at the beginning of the chapter re: animals not having a subconscious) but the question I'm coming up with this time as I read it is: WHOSE subconscious is it??? Just anybody's? Navidson's? Each individual person's? Is it just the concept of the subconscious?
Do you think Danielewski, being a chauvinist himself obviously, is trying to do some ham-fisted thing (re: Karen being such a dim bulb and being so adamant about Navidson not going into the labyrinth) about women being more emotional / men being more rational? Like Karen doesn't really struggle with her own subconscious because, as a dumb woman, she's more like an animal, just reacting and feeling rather than struggling with this swamp of human consciousness. Whereas Navidson wants to EXPLORE his and CONQUER it and LEARN FROM IT.
Comments
Tonight I will post a suggested next stopping point for this coming weekend.
Another grump from me is that I'm not scared by this book at all. I even heard a weird noise outside on a dark and stormy night and had to go investigate it with a flashlight (curious if it was a critter under my house).
So I was shining a light into the inky darkness under my house and expecting to see some eyes shining back at me, and I was thinking "I guess this is the kind of situation where I'm supposed to feel scared because I'm reading that book," but I was 0% scared.
- gary
What did you think of all the words that are in different colors
Only one person could go into the gallery at a time. Inside the student had built another little room comprised of a hallway spiraling toward the center of the structure. The walls were made of white fabric fixed at the top but loose at the bottom. It became progressively darker as you walked toward the center, and in the center of the spiraling hallways was a completely black closet, which presumably a normal soulless human like diane would just go stand in nonchalantly. When I got to the closet I turned and booked it like a ninny, and when I ran the fabric walls started flapping behind me, which freaked me out even more.
The end.
I just want to note that the whole point of "Frankenstein" is to present a cautionary tale about what horrible things a person is capable of if they have no sense of supernatural dread. Victor's biggest mistake, early on, is revealed when he brags about how the darkness holds no terrors for him; he's a scientist and has no imagination for the Beyond. This is why he is able to stitch together a gigantic humanoid figure out of the dead rotting bits of other people's corpses and bring it to life. Something nobody with a healthy appreciation for the scientifically-unquantifiable aspects of life would even dream of doing.
So basically, nobody go in Diane's garage
I also used to get really scared when I would have to take the garbage cans out at night. But the older I got, when the ghosts just never showed up, I was like "Oh, they never will" and I just stopped be afraid of spooky stuff.
However, if I even begin to think about the end of my life, I drop right into an extreme panic attack. I guess it's related, because I'm so sure I won't be a "ghost" of any form that I'm super freaked out by the final curtain.
This hit close to home when my mom was about to enter Clackamas Town Center a couple years ago when people started streaming out and told her that there was a shooter in the mall. She hightailed it back to her car and then heard like a thousand sirens.
I'm talking about fear of the unknown, not fear of ghosts and boogey men. The dark is just a handy waking life reminder of deep, dark existential dread and the abysmal.
Already I laughed because in the very beginning of Zampano's work of film criticism, I had the thought "actual film scholarship would never include this much narrative content" and then immediately there was a footnote that said like "for the question of why so much narrative content appears in a supposedly critical film exegesis see note 67" HA HA HA
In order for it to be a "novel" with a compelling story, he's gotta get actual description of the story, feel, characters in the film, but he also knows that's not how film scholars actually write. Pretty cool if you ask me. Also note 67 doesn't explain anything, it's just a story about how a film student who did his transcriptions used to get mad at how much story he made her write down.
Already I'm annoyed by the characterization of Karen
It must be so fun to write a crazy-ass pomo (or whatever) novel like this and get to experiment with all these different written voices
This time around I am trying to be more conscious of what exactly scares me while reading this book. I am surprised by how frightening I find the blue text for "house." Anybody have any thoughts on this? Why is it so creepy to always put "house" in blue? Is it like you feel like something outside of the text is influencing it (the text) in a way that the author(s) aren't aware of or something? Since this book is an attempt to literalize the unconscious (labyrinth hidden in a normal space, containing monsters and your worst fears and stuff) I wonder if the blue text does something similar. Like it's cuing us to have an unconscious terror surrounding the word "house" before we even learn anything about the house in question.
??
House in blue is scary. Somehow the blue is alive and just subtle enough to convey, subconsciously, a power.
What creeps me out:
empty spaces - in chapter eight when he starts slowly introducing the weird punctuation in both Zampano's and Johnny's writings. It's like background noise that could just be ignored but is lurking. Maybe that's the part of house being blue that is eerie... like is should just be fine background noise, but you realize that it's just a regular thumping thump of something bigger and darker. The tiny open squares on page 100 freak me out.
The check mark on bottom right page 97??!
The part where footnotes start disappearing and I think I'M crazy.
The black/white square combo on pages 144/145. Again, I think it's a pacing thing and somehow the frequency is ominous.
I'm really annoyed by how Karen is portrayed. That's part of what I find corny. The writing just isn't very *good*!
Karen, I love your thoughts on what exactly is creepy in this book!! Spot-on. The lurking power, the things that make you doubt your sanity. The things that make the book seem alive, like it's playing tricks on you. Or the things that make it feel like there's something outside the book, looking through the book AT YOU.
the portrayal of the women is grim. I think Danielewski is a precocious dude who hasn't challenged himself very much. He strikes me as one of those dudes who drops out of Harvard because he "was smarter than all his professors," which is something that only people who are smart, but fundamentally lazy and smug (and white and male), really ever say/believe. So he's like mastered the basics of certain rhetorical styles but he's not challenged himself to THINK DEEPLY about stuff.
In many ways it's a very surface-y book. The book itself--the typography, the footnotes, the interlocking puzzle of it all--is super complex and tightly woven and brilliant, but at a deeper level it is sort of lacking, I think. Which is not the case with something like Infinite Jest, which he's clearly inspired by--IJ has all the insane brilliant surface complexity but also conceptual and poetic DEPTH. Does House of Leaves have depth? I'm trying to pay attention to this question as I'm re-reading. What do you guys think?
Johnny Truant is so irritating. I'm always so relieved when we go back to Zampano, who seems like such a wise grownup in comparison.
Cool mirror D! That definitely looks like a lurking kind of place, if I were a lurking kind of spirit.
When I give up looking for a footnote, I just google it.
it seems fucked
MY FAVORITE FORM OF DIVINATION OTHER THAN RUNES
Why do you think both Zampano and Johnny's mother unconsciously misspell "pieces" as "pisces" in two places?
I'm interested in the part where the dog and cat aren't able to go into the labyrinth. So it's obviously representative of the subconscious (those quotes at the beginning of the chapter re: animals not having a subconscious) but the question I'm coming up with this time as I read it is: WHOSE subconscious is it??? Just anybody's? Navidson's? Each individual person's? Is it just the concept of the subconscious?
Do you think Danielewski, being a chauvinist himself obviously, is trying to do some ham-fisted thing (re: Karen being such a dim bulb and being so adamant about Navidson not going into the labyrinth) about women being more emotional / men being more rational? Like Karen doesn't really struggle with her own subconscious because, as a dumb woman, she's more like an animal, just reacting and feeling rather than struggling with this swamp of human consciousness. Whereas Navidson wants to EXPLORE his and CONQUER it and LEARN FROM IT.
?? Me no know