Anyone else read House of Leaves , Danielewski?

[Antonin Scriabin]

Great book, highly recommended. Others have praised it better than I can,
just wanted to throw in my $0.02
On Oct 5, 2014 6:28 PM, "Mark Thibodeau" <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com> wrote:

> Just picked it up on all y'all's folks' recommendations. Looks hefty and
> fine.
>
> Thanks!  And who said the Internet was a false and useless thing? :-)
>
> YOPJerky
>
> On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 8:23 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nice reading....thanks for taking the time to communicate it to
> us....may have convinced me to read it.
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> >> On Oct 4, 2014, at 7:42 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> >>
> >> I'm just finishing House of Leaves. A dark provocative and structurally
> intriguing work of literary fiction, simulated literary and film criticism,
> poetry, and myth.
> >>
> >> What I come back to as the theme that captures my own interest is the
> question of what is journalism or scientific research and what establishes
> the credibility of a valid record. It is harder than we admit. Couching the
> quest for reliable stories or even reliable data as science can be as
> problematic as submitting the difficulties to religious or political or
> scholastic authority. Again and again, pre-existing prejudices, and imbibed
> mythic models built over a life or career serve both to enlighten and
> prejudice our understanding of an event. We can easily end up confirming
> something we don't seriously believe rather than live with our questions
> and perhaps lose security. People line up as skeptics concerning anything
> suggesting and mount their outraged scientific arguments, but their seeming
> confidence in scientism is eroded by the ambiguities of actual science, by
> uncooperative data, and the unanticipated consequences of logical
> scientific solutions.  In fact horrors approach as much from modern physics
> and chemistry as religious and political invocations of evil or heroism.
> >>
> >> Most people seem to acquire a limiting sense of what can be real  and
> draw sharp lines of defense. But darkness eats at every limit,  as
> nothingness is the negative ground that allows every substance . Mr
> Danielewski follows the nothingness and disintegration palpably and  in
> layers of experience and of interpretations of those experiences and
> interpretations of the photographic records of the experience. To read
> House of Leaves was for me to  continue to renew a long abandoned interest
> in horror as an artful cauldron.  Sadness and danger, terror, fear,
> violence, loss and death seem the most real commonality of our time. Again
> and again the airwaves bend toward anger or war though for seemingly
> opposite reasons, but mistrust and fear abounds, death multiplies. It
> cannot help but touch us all.  Ordinary pleasures are tainted by distant
> but constant violence and disaster.
> >>
> >> Danielewski invokes these and more personal existential  fears as a
> house which inhabits and invades a seemingly normal house, doors open,
> hallways lengthen, closets lead to endless passageways.  The photo
> journalist who has bought the house as a refuge from a marriage-fraying
> career tries to document these experiences. The filmed documentary ( the
> Navidson Records)is interpreted by critics and writers from many
> disciplines, some real contemporary writers. But not only is the movie
> fiction to us the readers, it is fiction to the discoverer of a
> disconnected manuscript that summarizes the reviews and offers its own POV.
> Johnnie Truant, who recovers the manuscript from a blind writer when he
> dies,  then adds his own biographic and autobiographic notes as he
> assembles the bits and pieces of the House of Leaves.
> >>
> >> There is something about multidimensional fiction that overlaps with
> real people, events and ideas that few writers beside Pynchon do really
> well. This is one.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> -
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