Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 — Chapter IX
Epigraphs, the Minotaur, Derrida's center, Doob's maze-walkers; Johnny meets Tatiana and loses Natasha.
“Inextricable wandering”: a straying you cannot get free of. Error in Latin means wandering as well as mistake.
IX Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error — Virgil laboriosus exitus domus laboriosa ad entrandum — Ascensius — Nicholas Trevet* *«Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering” Aeneid 6.27.
“Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error”: “Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering.” The line describes the labyrinth of Crete, carved by Daedalus on the doors of Apollo's temple at Cumae.
The chapter takes three of its key words from this line: labor, house (domus) and error (wandering).
IX Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error — Virgil laboriosus exitus domus laboriosa ad entrandum — Ascensius — Nicholas Trevet* *«Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering” Aeneid 6.27.
“A house difficult of exit, difficult to enter”, joined from two old commentaries.
IX Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error — Virgil laboriosus exitus domus laboriosa ad entrandum — Ascensius — Nicholas Trevet* *«Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering” Aeneid 6.27.
Two old commentators on Virgil and Seneca. Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) was a Flemish scholar-printer in Paris; Nicholas Trevet (c. 1258–c. 1334) was an English Dominican scholar. The Latin line joins their glosses: the house is “difficult of exit” and “difficult to enter”.
IX Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error — Virgil laboriosus exitus domus laboriosa ad entrandum — Ascensius — Nicholas Trevet* *«Here is the toil of that house, and the inextricable wandering” Aeneid 6.27.
Notes written in the margins of ancient texts by early scholars (singular scholium).
Thomson’s “Fragments of Ancient Scholia on Virgil Preserved in Latin Glossaries” in W.
A list of hard words with their meanings; medieval glossaries explained Latin words.
Thomson’s “Fragments of Ancient Scholia on Virgil Preserved in Latin Glossaries” in W.
A real scholarly book on medieval word lists. W. M. Lindsay was a Scottish classicist; H. J. Thomson wrote the chapter on old notes (scholia) to Virgil. Zampanò cites it to look learned.
M. Lindsay and H.
A real study of labyrinths from Greek and Roman times to the Middle Ages, by a Canadian professor of English. Johnny says Zampanò copied his Latin sources straight out of it, to seem to know the primary texts. Zampanò quotes Doob openly on p. 113.
Andrews University Publications, 1921).!20 Win fact all of this was moked dixectly from Penelope Reed Doob’ s The os h D TERRA Cornell University Prana 1990) Dp.
One of the readers and scribes who helped the blind Zampanò. She still has book lists he asked for from the library, and gives Johnny her notes on the word “labor”.
Actually a woman by the name of Tatiana turned me onto that bit of info.
A person who writes things down for someone else.
She’d been one of Zampand’s scribes and—“lucky for me” she told me over the phone— still had, among other things, some of the old book lists he’d requested from the library.
Impossible to doubt or attack.
… hand, and at the same time mind you, finding myself absolutely terrified, if not of something in particular—there were no particulars as far as I could see—then of the reaction itself, as undeniable & unimpeachable as Zampand’s black trunk.
To move very fast and hard, without control.
… its lane, flatten a stop sign, desperately try to slow, momentarily redirect itself, and then in spite of all the brakes on that monster, all the accompanying smoke and ear puncturing shrieks, it still barreled straight into me.
A pair of two things taken together.
Suddenly I understood what it meant to be weightless, flying through the air, no longer ruled by that happy dyad of gravity & 107
Johnny compares his fear to the trunk that held Zampanò's papers, seen in the Introduction: a real, solid thing he cannot deny.
To damage a car so badly that it cannot be repaired.
… just in time to watch the truck, still hurtling towards me until it was actually slamming into me, causing me to think, and you’re not going to believe this—’*I can‘t believe this asshole just totaled my fucking car!
A woman's top held up by a strap around the neck, leaving the back and shoulders bare.
She wore black Spandex shorts and a pink athletic halter top which was very tight but still could not conceal the ample size of her breasts.
Jack Daniel's whiskey mixed with Coca-Cola.
… over the reading lists she’d compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she’d made relating to the etymology of “labor.* When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke.
To sit or stand with one leg on each side of something.
As I straddled her, she unbuttoned my pants.
Zampanò now turns from echoes (Chapter V) to the labyrinth: a structure of convolution and confusion. Tatiana's notes on “labor” and the epigraph both prepare this turn.
She happily handed over the reading lists she’d compiled on his behalf and even dug up a few notes she’d made relating to the etymology of “labor.* When she offered me a drink, I jokingly suggested a Jack and Coke.
The forming of ideas.
However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction.
A twist or coil; something very complicated and folded.
However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction.
Without a center, or away from the center.
However, in order to consider how distances within the Navidson house are radically distorted, we must address the more complex ideation of convolution, interference, confusion, and even decentric ideas of design and construction.
German for “building plan”, as the Editors note. In biology the word also means the basic body plan of a group of animals.
It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan+for the house.
“Building plan.”
It would be fantastic if based on footage from The Navidson Record someone were able to reconstruct a bauplan+for the house.
Instead of.
Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.
Wordplay: a schematic is a plan diagram; schismatic means split apart. The film gives a split-up picture, not a plan.
Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.
Never changing.
Consequently, in lieu of a schematic, the film offers instead a schismatic rendering of empty rooms, long hallways, and dead ends, perpetually promising but forever eluding the finality of an immutable layout.
A maze whose walls are thick, clipped hedges.
Curiously enough, if we can look to history to provide us with some context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages.!22 For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul.
A large hedge maze at Longleat House in Wiltshire, England. It was planted in 1975, although the text says it was made to amuse garden party guests.
Curiously enough, if we can look to history to provide us with some context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages.!22 For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul.
A pharaoh of Egypt's 12th Dynasty (19th century BC). Herodotus and Pliny described a huge “labyrinth” beside his pyramid at Hawara, near Lake Moeris; it was probably his mortuary temple.
… history to provide us with some context, the reasons for building labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages.!22 For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul.
An Egyptian temple built for the worship of a dead king.
… labyrinths have varied substantially over the ages.!22 For example, the English hedgerow maze at Longleat was designed to amuse garden party attendants, while Amenemhet III of the XII dynasty in Egypt built for his mortuary temple a labyrinth near lake Moeris to protect his soul.
A small gland under the male bladder.
… oil soaked finger against my asshole, circling, rubbing, until finally she pushed hard enough to exceed the threshold of resistance, slipping inside me and knowing exactly where to go too, heading straight for the prostate, the P spot, the LOUD button on this pumping stereophonic fuck system I never knew I had, initiating an almost unbearable scream for (and of) pleasure, endorphins spitting through my brain at an unheard …
A chemical the brain makes that reduces pain and causes pleasure.
… to go too, heading straight for the prostate, the P spot, the LOUD button on this pumping stereophonic fuck system I never knew I had, initiating an almost unbearable scream for (and of) pleasure, endorphins spitting through my brain at an unheard of rate, as muscles in my groin (almost) painfully contracted in a handful of heart stomping spasms—not something I could say I was exactly prepared for.
Real works: Paolo Santarcangeli's book of labyrinths (Italian original Il libro dei labirinti), Hermann Kern's Labirinti (a large history of labyrinth images), W. H. Matthews' Mazes and Labyrinths (1922), Rodney Castleden's The Knossos Labyrinth (1990), W. W. Rouse Ball's Mathematical Recreations and Essays (with a chapter on solving mazes), and O. B. Hardison Jr.'s Entering the Maze (1981).
122For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santarcangeli’s Livre des labyrinthes; Russ Craim’s “The Surviving Web” in Daedalus, summer 1995; Hermann Kern’s Labirinti; W.
These titles are probably invented and mixed in with the real books: Russ Craim's “The Surviving Web” (in the real journal Daedalus), Stella Pinicker's Double-Axe, Harold Sieber's Inadequate Thread, Robinson Ferrel Smith's Complex Knots—No Simple Solutions, and Patricia Flynn's Jejunum and Ileum.
The jejunum and ileum are the coiled parts of the small intestine, so the last title is a joke: the gut is a labyrinth inside the body. The double axe (labrys) is a Minoan symbol often linked with the word “labyrinth”.
122For further insight into mazes, consider Paolo Santarcangeli’s Livre des labyrinthes; Russ Craim’s “The Surviving Web” in Daedalus, summer 1995; Hermann Kern’s Labirinti; W.
Greek myth: King Minos of Crete had Daedalus build the labyrinth to hold the Minotaur, a creature with a bull's head, born to his wife Pasiphaë and a bull. Athens had to send young men and women to be fed to it, until the hero Theseus killed it.
Zampanò struck this passage out, and Johnny recovered it. In the struck footnote 123 Zampanò argues that the “monster” was really Minos' deformed son, hidden away out of pride.
To lock in prison.
Not allowed by law or custom.
A cow or bull; of cattle.
A figure of speech; a common image or idea used in stories. From Greek tropos, a turn.
Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder and Wax Hook continue down the enormous stairway. Zampanò lists possible purposes for the place: a warp in space, a giant topiary maze, a tomb, a prison for a monster or for an innocent.
However, even as Holloway Roberts, Jed Leeder, and Wax Hook make their way further down the stairway in Exploration #4, the purpose of that vast place still continues to elude them.
Something that goes away from the normal way.
Is it merely an aberration of physics?
Hedges and bushes clipped into shapes; a topiary labyrinth is made of cut hedges.
Or just a topiary labyrinth on a much grander scale?
Of or like a funeral; dark and sad.
Perhaps it serves a funereal purpose?
Given or ready when needed; “not forthcoming” means not given.
As the Holloway team soon discovers, answers to these questions are not exactly forthcoming.
An oily liquid used to thin or remove paint.
… SUCCES OT CO WOE TT OO CE Pate Fat Ove EPO StH a . : Note: Struck passages indicate what Zampand tried to get rid of, but which I, with a little bit of turpentine and a good old magnifying glass managed to resurrect.
Matthews (see fn 122) describes a small labyrinth with Theseus and the Minotaur, said to be of tenth-century work, in the church of San Michele Maggiore, a Romanesque church in Pavia, Italy. There the Minotaur is shown with a human head and a beast's body, like a centaur.
126 ‘ “1° ‘a at £iih, 1, Ae Pree | cs Michele Maga 34 Daas TE TE TE ETE tT Tv ee TE TOF Ot tt b 4 bette be of tone pons te TO TT Cette COSTES Caehieboesl jy ni asa Pee ere re merc …
A famous 1966 lecture by the French philosopher Derrida, printed in L'écriture et la différence (1967; English, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 1978). It argues that a structure's “center” limits the free play of its parts, and that the center is, strangely, both inside and outside the structure.
Zampanò quotes the French; Johnny gives his own English version. The idea suits a house whose center, if it has one, nobody can reach.
… dete li ca 4 tof Mra Jin ih, a £ hic. +h, PEERS RTE EELS SECELET OPEL CEEOL PEE OE TE Te OO CPO HT tite presente’ Or THs ett !29Strictly as an aside, Jacques Derrida once made a few remarks on the question of structure and centrality.
Zampanò's own supposed article on the Minotaur, in a flyer called Sonny Won't Wait (1968). Johnny's note gives a different title, flyer and year. Johnny says the change looks deliberate, and he cannot find the flyer to check.
An invented play about a gentle, misunderstood Minotaur and a grieving King Minos, which Zampanò's article supposedly inspired. The footnote places it at the Seattle Repertory Theatre (a real company) in 1972, before an audience of eight.
Ovid tells how Minos, once feared by all nations, grew old and weak and did not dare act against the young Miletus, son of Phoebus (Apollo). The translation is by Horace Gregory, a real American poet. Zampanò struck the whole note.
“The play”: Derrida's term for the free movement of the parts of a structure.
… pour fonction non seulement d’orienter et d’équilibrer, d’organiser la structure—on ne peut en effet penser une structure inorganisée—mais de faire surtout que le principe d’organisation de la structure limite ce que nous pourrions appeler le jeu!37 de la structure.
A Norwegian architectural theorist. In this book he says people always imagine a center of the world: a tree or pillar (the axis mundi), Delphi's “navel” stone (omphalos), Rome's Capitol, or the Kaaba in Mecca.
278-279. '31Conversely Christian Norberg-Schulz writes: 112
Doob's key idea: a person inside a maze sees confusion, while a person above it sees a beautiful pattern. Zampanò answers that nobody ever sees the house from outside, so all understanding must come from within. He says the same is true of the film.
Penelope Reed Doob avoids the tangled discussion of purpose by cleverly drawing a distinction between those who walk within a labyrinth and those who stand outside of it: [M]aze-treaders, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted …
“Axis of the world”: a pillar, tree or mountain seen as the center joining earth and sky.
In many legends the ‘centre of the world’ is concretized as a tree or a pillar symbolizing a vertical axis mundi.
“Navel”: the stone at Delphi that marked the center of the world.
The ancient Greeks placed the ‘navel’ of the world (omphalos) in Delphi, while the Romans considered their Capitol as caput mundi.
“Head of the world”: a name for Rome.
The ancient Greeks placed the ‘navel’ of the world (omphalos) in Delphi, while the Romans considered their Capitol as caput mundi.
The act of making something or someone holy.
To ‘reach the centre is to achieve a consecration, an initiation.
Not holy; ordinary, worldly.
To the profane and illusory existence of yesterday, there succeeds a new existence, real, lasting and powerful.’
A Romanian historian of religion. Norberg-Schulz quotes him: the center is hard to reach, reaching it is an initiation, and “every life … can be taken as the journey through a labyrinth.”
18 in which he quotes from Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans.
The note adds physics: Newton's gravitational constant G (about 6.67 × 10⁻¹¹ N·m²/kg²) and the balance organs of the inner ear (semicircular ducts, utricle and saccule), which anatomists call the “labyrinth”. Gravity gives us up and down before we have words for them. Einstein's work on gravity is also named.
132What Derrida and Norberg-Schulz neglect to consider is the ordering will of gravitation or how between any two particles of matter exists an attractive force (this relationship usually represented as G with a value of 6.670 X 10-!!
The force by which all masses attract each other.
132What Derrida and Norberg-Schulz neglect to consider is the ordering will of gravitation or how between any two particles of matter exists an attractive force (this relationship usually represented as G with a value of 6.670 X 10-!!
The fluid inside the inner ear that moves when the head moves, giving the sense of balance.
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are …
A small ridge of sensory cells at the base of each semicircular duct of the inner ear.
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned.
One of three curved tubes in the inner ear that sense turning of the head.
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned.
Very small hair-like parts on cells.
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned.
Small patches of sensory cells in the utricle and saccule (singular macula).
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned.
Two small sacs of the inner ear that sense gravity and straight-line movement.
Thanks to the slight waver of endolymph on the ampullary crest in the semicircular duct or the rise and fall of cilia on maculae in the utricle and saccule, gravity speaks a language comprehensible long before the words describing it are ever spoken or learned.
Johnny sees a “Lissitzky and Escher theme”. El Lissitzky was a Russian avant-garde artist whose “Proun” works float shapes in space with no fixed up or down. M. C. Escher was a Dutch printmaker famous for impossible buildings and stairs, as in Relativity (1953). Johnny cites other pages of the book that he thinks bear on this.
Albert Einstein’s work on this matter is also worth studying, though it is important not to forget how Navidson’s house ultimately confounds even the labyrinth of the inner ear.!33 I3~his gets at a Lissitzky and Escher theme which Zampand seems to constantly suggest without ever really bringing right out into the open.
Pliny's Natural History (Book 36) describes the Egyptian labyrinth: passages that wind back and forth, and doors placed to trick the visitor into walking his own tracks again. The Editors translate the Latin.
Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change.!34 Unfortunately the dichotomy between those who participate inside and those who view from the outside breaks down when considering the house, simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its …
A division into two opposite parts.
Our perception of labyrinths is thus intrinsically unstable: change your perspective and the labyrinth seems to change.!34 Unfortunately the dichotomy between those who participate inside and those who view from the outside breaks down when considering the house, simply because no one ever sees that labyrinth in its entirety.
The plastic that old film was made of; film itself.
From the outset of The Navidson Record, we are involved in a labyrinth, meandering from one celluloid cell to the next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, …
To pass down, or to break down into a simpler or worse state.
… the next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along eee cb into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend.!35 In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to rewind, …
Serious talk or writing on a subject; in theory, a whole way of speaking about something.
… next, trying to peek around the next edit in hopes of finding a solution, a centre, a sense of whole, only to discover another sequence, leading in a completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along eee cb into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend.!35 In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to rewind, and …
Winding paths or roundabout ways (from Latin).
… completely different direction, a continually devolving discourse, promising the possibility of discovery while all along eee cb into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend.!35 In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to rewind, and then open up again, whether in Navidson’s house or the film—quae itinerum ambages occursusque ac recursus inexplicabiles !3>—we should look to the etymological inheritance of a word like …
Pliny: “passages that wind, advance and retreat in a bewilderingly intricate manner.”
… into chaotic ambiguities too blurry to ever completely comprehend.!35 In order to fully appreciate the way the ambages unwind, twist only to rewind, and then open up again, whether in Navidson’s house or the film—quae itinerum ambages occursusque ac recursus inexplicabiles !3>—we should look to the etymological inheritance of a word like ‘labyrinth’.
A 12th-century theologian in Paris who wrote treatises on Noah's ark as a picture of the soul and of the Church. Zampanò says the ark, a place of rest, is the opposite of the labyrinth, a place of work. The Editors point back to Tom's Story (Chapter VI).
We cannot relax within those walls, we have to struggle past them. Hugh of Saint Victor has gone so far as to suggest that the antithesis of labyrinth—that which contains work—is Noah’s ark!38—in other words that which contains rest.* 134Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity …
The exact opposite.
Hugh of Saint Victor has gone so far as to suggest that the antithesis of labyrinth—that which contains work—is Noah’s ark!38—in other words that which contains rest.* 134Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* …
An invented self-help style study, cited on the “right to wander” (daydream, free-associate). Part of the quotation is struck out.
… contains work—is Noah’s ark!38—in other words that which contains rest.* 134Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g.
An old, rare spelling of “fantasize”.
… Of The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
“Thus”: shows that an odd spelling in a quotation is in the original.
… The Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
French philosopher of science and imagination. His The Poetics of Space (1958) studies how we dream in houses, cellars, attics and corners. Hortz points to him on daydreaming.
… Antiquity through the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
Moving from subject to subject; also, reasoning by argument.
… Cornell University Press, 1990), p.1* 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
The state of being made of many different kinds of things.
… 135At least, as Daniel Hortz lamented, “By granting all involved the right to wander (e.g. daydream, free associate, phantasize [sic] etc., etc.; see Gaston Bachelard ) that which is discursive will inevitably re-appropriate the heterogeneity of the disparate and thus with such an unanticipated and unreconciled gesture bring about a re-assessment of self.”
Coming from the same root word as another word.
… intervals to suggest deceptively the way ahead and to force the visitor to go back upon the very same tracks that he has already followed in his wanderings.”—Ed.] * 137 Labi is also probably cognate with “sleep.”
Pliny: doors are set in the walls to trick the visitor into going back over his own tracks.
Zampanò links Latin labor (work, toil) to labi (to slip, slide, fall) and even to “sleep”. Modern dictionaries do not support these links; the Greek word labyrinthos is probably not Latin at all. The point is thematic: in a labyrinth you must keep working or you slip and stop.
It cannot be forgotten that the problem posed by exhaustion—a result of labor—is an inextricable part of any encounter with a sophisticated maze.
Labor: work, toil, hardship. Labi: to slip, slide, fall.
It cannot be forgotten that the problem posed by exhaustion—a result of labor—is an inextricable part of any encounter with a sophisticated maze.
Covering every possible part; complete (and here also: tiring).
We must be quick and anything but exhaustive.
The Roman Stoic writer Seneca, in his moral letters to Lucilius: “This is what happens when you hurry through a maze: the faster you go, the worse you are entangled.”
Yet, as i Stag warned in his Epistulae morales 44, going too fast also incurs certain risks: Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus: ipsa illos velocitas inplicat.'39 Unfortunately, the anfractuosity of some labyrinths may actually prohibit a permanent solution.
Seneca: “This is what happens when you hurry through a maze: the speed itself entangles you.”
Yet, as i Stag warned in his Epistulae morales 44, going too fast also incurs certain risks: Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus: ipsa illos velocitas inplicat.'39 Unfortunately, the anfractuosity of some labyrinths may actually prohibit a permanent solution.
Winding, twisting quality; a winding passage.
Yet, as i Stag warned in his Epistulae morales 44, going too fast also incurs certain risks: Quod evenit in labyrintho properantibus: ipsa illos velocitas inplicat.'39 Unfortunately, the anfractuosity of some labyrinths may actually prohibit a permanent solution.
“Other” with a capital O is a term from psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan) and philosophy: the great outside authority that seems to know and see everything. Zampanò says nobody, not even such a figure, understands the whole maze.
More confounding still, its complexity may exceed the imagination of even the designer. !40 Therefore anyone lost within must recognize that no one, not even a god or an Other, comprehends the entire maze and so therefore can never offer a definitive answer.
In philosophy and psychoanalysis: a great outside power or person that seems to know and judge everything.
More confounding still, its complexity may exceed the imagination of even the designer. !40 Therefore anyone lost within must recognize that no one, not even a god or an Other, comprehends the entire maze and so therefore can never offer a definitive answer.
Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French thinker: “If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.” Zampanò found it in Allegories of Reading (1979) by Paul de Man, a Belgian-American literary critic of the deconstruction school. A fitting warning for this chapter.
Words worth taking to heart, especially when taking into account Pascal’s remark, found in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading: “Si on lit trop vite o& trop doucement, on n’entend rien.”
Pascal: “If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing.”
Words worth taking to heart, especially when taking into account Pascal’s remark, found in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading: “Si on lit trop vite o& trop doucement, on n’entend rien.”
Ovid: “So Daedalus filled countless ways with wandering, and could hardly find the way back himself, so deceptive was the building.”
… in Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading: “Si on lit trop vite o& trop doucement, on n’entend rien.” [If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing. — Ed.] !35 140. | ita Daedalus implet innumeras errore vias vixque ipse reverti ad limen potuit: tanta est fallacia tecti.”
Daedalus built so many winding paths that he himself could hardly find the way back to the entrance. The Editors give two translations, the second by Horace Gregory. In a struck passage Zampanò adds: no one can help you; every way is different.
… n’entend rien.” [If one reads too quickly or too slowly, one understands nothing. — Ed.] !35 140. | ita Daedalus implet innumeras errore vias vixque ipse reverti ad limen potuit: tanta est fallacia tecti.” Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII.
Sexually aroused; from Priapus, a Greek fertility god.
Of course the downside is that this new discovery has left me practically beside myself, by which I mean priapic.
Johnny's circle, from earlier notes. After the night with Tatiana his panic eases for a while. He calls Tatiana, Amber and Kyrie with no luck, and ends up drinking cider with Lude at a bar called Red.
I called Tatiana but she wasn’t home. Amber’s machine picked up but I didn’t leave a message.
Johnny has with him a short piece Zampanò wrote about a “Natasha” (the footnote points to an appendix). He now thinks she comes from Tolstoy's War and Peace, whose young heroine Natasha Rostova is famous for her life and charm. That night he sees a real Natasha in the bar.
For some reason I had with me a little bit Zampand wrote about Natasha (See Appendix F).
Short for “situation”.
No doubt an attempt to save the sitch.
A pretence that is easy to see through.
He continued the charade, smiled quickly and departed.
Friendly American word for a man, like “buddy”.
“Sorry Hoss," Lude said as he sat down, unaware that the scene had turned me to stone.
El Coyote Cafe is an old Mexican restaurant on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, opened in 1931. Muse was a restaurant nearby. The Australian woman's story of famous people there is gossip; the book does not name them.
Heading east, I passed by Muse and stopped in at El Coyote where I drank tequila shots until an Australian gal started telling me about kangaroos and the Great Barrier Reef and then ordered something else, potent and green.
The 1980 arcade game whose round yellow hero opens and closes its mouth. Johnny's crude simile.
Complaining, whining.
In a strongly critical way. The text has “censorially”.
Lude gave Natasha a piece of writing and told her Johnny wrote it; it was Zampanò's, and Zampanò was blind. Johnny then calls himself “the blind man of all blind men”.
… myself as that white? car, her car?, sped off, bye-bye Natasha, whoever you are, wondering then if I would ever see her again, sensing I wouldn't, hoping senses were wrong but still not knowing; Love At First Sight having been written by a blind man, albeit sly, passionate too?, the blind man of all blind men, me,—don’t know why I just wrote that—though I would still love her despite being unblind, even …
Dry and slightly mocking, often with a twisted smile.
… couldn’t remember exactly where, and me not caring, just squinting, staring at the white? car as the window rolled down and a lovely face appeared, tired perhaps, uncertain too, but bright nonetheless with a wry smile on those sweet lips—Natasha leaning out of her car, “I guess love fades pretty fast, huh?"14?
Although.
… whoever you are, wondering then if I would ever see her again, sensing I wouldn't, hoping senses were wrong but still not knowing; Love At First Sight having been written by a blind man, albeit sly, passionate too?, the blind man of all blind men, me,—don’t know why I just wrote that—though I would still love her despite being unblind, even if I had all of a sudden started …
A thin mattress placed on the floor or a low frame.
… her door, all those stairs to the second story, the clatter we made making our way down the hall, never turning on the lights, the hall lights or her room lights, falling onto the futon on her floor.
A four-line ditty Johnny writes after the night. No known source.
The rest I’m sure I don't remember though I know it went on like that for a while. Up in the sky-high, Off to the side-eye, All of us now sigh, Right down the drain-ae, Just a ditty.
A short, simple song or poem.
Up in the sky-high, Off to the side-eye, All of us now sigh, Right down the drain-ae, Just a ditty.
To go slowly along a winding route.
Wax and Jed do not object, and soon enough, they are all wending their way through the maze.
Holloway marks the path with neon arrows, neon paint and fishing line. Jed chips samples of the black-ashen wall into jars that Billy Reston supplied.
He constantly tacks neon arrows to the wall, sprays neon paint on corners, and metes out plenty of fishing line wherever the path becomes Later, I don’t even know how much later, she said we’d been great and she …
To give out, hand out (here: fishing line).
He constantly tacks neon arrows to the wall, sprays neon paint on corners, and metes out plenty of fishing line wherever the path becomes Later, I don’t even know how much later, she said we’d been great and she felt great even though I didn’t.
Johnny plays on the two words “wind”: a gust of air, and to wind (turn, coil) a clock or spring.
… had the gall to still call a home—never again—was her face, that wry smile, Natasha’s, seen but unknown, found in a restaurant, lost on a street corner, gone in a wind of traffic—as in “to wind something up.”
Look at the first letters of the odd phrase on p. 117: “a wild ode mentioned at New West hotel over wine infusions, light, lit, lofted …”. The initials spell a hidden message: A WOMAN WHO WILL LOVE MY IRONIES.
Exploration #4 breaks apart; lists of buildings and builders fill the margins; Johnny's ghost.
Holloway stops marking the path and moves faster and faster, “deaf to Seneca's words” (p. 115): the faster you go in a maze, the worse you are entangled.
Obviously deaf to Seneca’s words.
A metal grille through which warm air enters a room.
But Holloway just scowls and keeps 144Not only are there no hot-air registers, turn air vents, or radiators, cast iron o ther, or cooling systems—condenser, heat coils, heating convector, damper, pushing forward, in what appears concentrator, dilute solution, hea’ to be a determined effort to find exchanger, …
An invented paper from an invented conference with a joke title, “Three Blind Mice and the Rest As Well”, reprinted in Fisker and Weinberg (1996, also invented). Its line “Insides and in-ness never inside out” sums up the house: every wall only leads to another inside.
As Gerard Eysenck famously described it: “Insides and in-ness never inside out.”!43 This desire for exteriority is no doubt further amplified by the utter blankness found within.
The quality of being outside; an outside.
As Gerard Eysenck famously described it: “Insides and in-ness never inside out.”!43 This desire for exteriority is no doubt further amplified by the utter blankness found within.
Reynolds (1723–1792) was the first president of Britain's Royal Academy; his lectures to students are the Discourses. He argued that a painter should show the general, not the particular: cloth in a great painting is simply “drapery”. Zampanò finds the house the same: only corridors and rooms, with no particular detail.
In part because not one object, let alone fixture or other manner of finish work has ever been discovered there.!44 Back in 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses On Art argued against the importance of the particular, calling into question, for example, “minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery ...
Cloth hanging in loose folds, as painted in a picture.
… has ever been discovered there.!44 Back in 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses On Art argued against the importance of the particular, calling into question, for example, “minute attention to the discriminations of Drapery ...
John Updike, the American novelist, wrote about Jorge Luis Borges in The New Yorker (1965). The line appears to be Updike's own English for a sentence in one of Borges' labyrinth stories. The exact source is not certain.
… for Navidson’s house which despite its corridors and rooms of various sizes is nothing more than corridors and rooms, even if sometimes, as John Updike once observed in the course of translating the labyrinth: “The galleries seem straight but curve furtively.”
Secretly, as if trying not to be seen.
… corridors and rooms of various sizes is nothing more than corridors and rooms, even if sometimes, as John Updike once observed in the course of translating the labyrinth: “The galleries seem straight but curve furtively.”
Heating, ventilation and air conditioning.
However, considering the constant shifts, the seemingly endless duct with perforated inner liner, insulation, nd outer shell; no HVAC system at all, ven a crude air distribution system—there re no windows—no water supplies, OA side from the practical aspect of fishing line—a readily available and cheap way to map progress through that complicated …
In the struck words: Minos' daughter Ariadne gave Theseus a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. The note goes on: thread stands for the umbilical cord, for life and for destiny. The Greek Fates (Moirai) and Roman Fates (Parcae) spin the thread of each life and cut it. In Orphic cults (a Greek mystery religion) thread stood for semen.
The Greek Fates (called Moerae) or the Roman Fates (called Fata or Parcae) spun the thread of life and also cut it off.
The Fates of Greek and Roman myth, who spin, measure and cut the thread of life.
The Greek Fates (called Moerae) or the Roman Fates (called Fata or Parcae) spun the thread of life and also cut it off.
Helping you find things out by trying and learning.
143Gerard Eysenck’s “Break Through (not a) Breakthrough: Heuristic Hallways In The Holloway Venture.”
Footnote 144 is a framed list that runs through the chapter, in a blue frame on the front of each page and mirrored on the back. It names, in trade jargon, everything missing from the house: heating, ducts, plumbing, fire sprinklers, wiring, hundreds of kinds of light bulbs, floors, woods, nails, glass, roofs, and all classical and medieval parts of a building.
The only detail it grants is the stairway: risers, treads, newel posts, a banister and balusters. In one place a struck line mocks the reader: “Picture that. In your dreams.” Near the end the box turns dark and empty.
When several hours pass and there is still no sign of him, they make a brief foray into the area, calling out his name, doing everything in their power to locate him and bring him back.
An invented critic who says the changing house follows Palladio's rules, working through every possible layout forever, because no one lives there to stop it. The book runs to page 2,865. The surname belongs to a real French architectural historian, Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos.
… gnibnsie\msee bavot 10 ,[svo ish 99T MTzolot bas ,Joub .moisiueni zsnil t9ani botstotieq diiw toub lis 3s moteye DAVH on ;llode 193u0 bas p19dj—motleye noitudineib 1is sbut9 & neve zsilqque 19isw on—ewobniw on 918 Sebastiano Pérouse de Montclos, however, has written a sizable examination on the changes within the house, positing that they in fact follow Andrea Palladio’s structural derivations.
Palladio (1508–1580) was an Italian Renaissance architect of symmetrical villas near Venice, such as Villa Badoer, Villa Emo, Villa Poiana and Villa Zeno. In the 1970s George Stiny and William J. Mitchell wrote a “shape grammar”: a set of rules that can generate Palladian villa plans. The eight steps in the text come from that work.
… bas p19dj—motleye noitudineib 1is sbut9 & neve zsilqque 19isw on—ewobniw on 918 Sebastiano Pérouse de Montclos, however, has written a sizable examination on the changes within the house, positing that they in fact follow Andrea Palladio’s structural derivations.
A porch with a roof held up by columns.
Principal entrances—porticos and exterior wall inflections 6.
A bend or change of direction in a wall.
Principal entrances—porticos and exterior wall inflections 6.
To describe or mark out exactly.
Termination!49 Pérouse de Montclos relies on these steps to delineate how Navidson’s house was (1.0) first established (2.0) limited (3.0) sub-divided and (4.0) so on.
“To infinity”: forever, without end.
He attempts to convince the reader that the constant refiguration of doorways and walls represents a kind of geological loop in the process of working out all possible forms, most likely ad infinitum, but never settling because, as he states in his conclusion, “unoccupied space will never cease to change simply because nothing forbids it to do so.
Mitchell, a professor at MIT, explains design rules and shape grammars. Palladio's own treatise (1570) was translated into English by Isaac Ware in 1738; Dover reprints it.
The continuous internal alterations only prove that such a house is necessarily uninhabited.” !50 149For an exemplary look at Palladian grammar in action, see William J. Mitchell’s The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994), p.
The popular name of Palladio's Villa Foscari on the Brenta canal near Venice. “Malcontenta” means “the discontented woman”, a fitting name for a restless house.
150Sebastiano Pérouse de Montclos’ Palladian Grammar and Metaphysical Appropriations: Navidson’s Villa Malcontenta (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1996), p.
An invented critic who tests the house against Le Corbusier's real “Five Points of Architecture” (pillars, free plan, free facade, long windows, roof garden), with the Villa Savoye and the Dom-ino House as examples.
Also see Aristides Quine’s Concatenating Corbusier 120
To link things together in a chain.
Also see Aristides Quine’s Concatenating Corbusier 120
Footnote 146 lists hundreds of real buildings and styles that the house is not like, moving back in time: from Post-Modern and Brutalism (the Pompidou Center, the Louvre Pyramid, the Guggenheim, Fallingwater) through Art Nouveau (Gaudí's Sagrada Família), the 19th century, Neo-Classicism, the Baroque and Rococo, the Renaissance, Gothic cathedrals, Romanesque and Byzantine churches, Rome and Greece (the Pantheon, the Parthenon), to the Pyramids of Giza, the Neolithic village of Skara Brae, the Lascaux cave and the Terra Amata hut.
It stops at the Palace of Minos at Knossos, “which seems like a good place to end though it cannot end there”. The list is itself a maze that never reaches a center.
Winnett, however, remarks on one Curiously enough, despite the similarity of intonation and pitch, the pattern does not even remotely resemble the three short — three long — three short SOS signal heard by the Navidsons.
The footnote only says “See Exhibit One”, one of the exhibits printed elsewhere in the book.
148See Exhibit One.
Jesus' words to his disciples in the Gospel of John. Navidson alludes to them in a letter to Karen (the footnote points ahead to Chapter XVII). Zampanò says to read them literally and ironically: whose house is this?
… rinking] ‘snuaaag ‘snospung fo snaopoyody ‘OZUND ‘2141 aq Odpad ‘OUDSIg DION ‘(dq ) 4a8ng 1099 ‘S1Dq40,P ubvat ‘(q) jaupisoD ap papusag doysig ‘QAQUIQNOTT ap uvat ‘suag fo wnnpiM ‘uDwuysysuq ay) UIDITTIM ‘sauday ap Cauayy In my Father’s house are many rooms: if it were not uit, wireways, bus ducts, underfloor ducts, ‘qjanax Aauay] ‘sudung 14aqoy so, I would have told you.
In a way that means the opposite of the words, or with a painful twist.
Something to be taken literally as well as ironically,!53 (New York: American Elsevier, 1996) in which Quine applies Corbusier’s Five Points to the Navidson house, thereby proving, in his mind, the limitations and hence irrelevance of Palladian grammar.
An invented, “far more controversial” article that treats the house-shifts as a mechanical and linguistic model.
Finally consider Gisele Urbanati Rowan Lell’s far more controversial piece “Polypod Or Polylith?: The Navidson Creation As Mechanistic/ Linguistic Model” in Abaku Banner Catalogue, v.
Coined words: “many stones” and “many feet”.
Finally consider Gisele Urbanati Rowan Lell’s far more controversial piece “Polypod Or Polylith?: The Navidson Creation As Mechanistic/ Linguistic Model” in Abaku Banner Catalogue, v.
A real paper in Developmental Psychology by Patricia Greenfield and Laurel Schneider on how children build hierarchical structures with toy parts. Zampanò offers it as a point of reference.
For a point of reference see Greenfield and Schneider’s “Building a Tree Structure.
Temperature 32°F ± 8 (about 0°C); no light; complete silence except the growl; no air movement; true north “DNE” (does not exist).
151Which also happens to maintain a curious set of constants.
“Does not exist”, a mathematician's shorthand.
Silence: complete* Air Movement (i.e. breezes, drafts etc.): none True North: DNE *With the exception of the ‘growl’.
Jacob's words after his dream of a ladder to heaven at Bethel: “this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Here “dreadful” means awe-inspiring and frightening.
… is the terror Jacob feels when he encounters the territories of the divine: “How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” (Genesis 28:17) 121 ‘profudyy weonyiM ‘onjdog osoig ‘opnsip oso1g “alan 4a1ag ‘uasnpysing uoA SuD_T ‘Suaqsunag uoa yoiauiay] UazI1doy jazjuay ‘UasUIsUy uoAd YI14]/) dafoysuny s10¢ ‘Wajasq SNDJONN ‘uupujazurayy poauoy ‘pay Iyipauag ‘UDJIDW OzuaLOT ‘onquind Ip ofjousp ‘uouDJUoH] …
Footnote 147 prints upside down and must be read backwards through the pages, from p. 135 to p. 121. It says no building can be thought of without “such names as” — and then lists real architects, moving back in time: Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Russian constructivists, Gaudí, Palladio, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Alberti, the master masons of Gothic cathedrals, Apollodorus of Damascus, and finally the mythical Daedalus.
At the end the names of builders “fade into the names of Patrons (P)”, bishops and kings, “eventually myth, and finally time”.
A hidden store of supplies.
… Second Renaissance Revival, Beaux-Arts Classicism, Chateauesque, Richardsonian Romanesque, the Shingle Style, Eastlake Style, Queen Anne Style, Stick Style, Second Empire, High Victorian Italianate, High more than eight hours to reach the first of these caches, it ends up taking them nearly twelve hours.
Of an unhealthy pale yellow colour (of skin).
Holloway, however, remains uncharacteristically sallow, revealing what critic Melisa Tao Janis calls “a sign of [his] deepening, atrabilious obsession with the unpresent.”!4 Nevertheless, the climb still proceeds smoothly, until Holloway discovers the remains of one of their foot long …
An invented essay in an invented collection, The Anti-Present Trunk, from Phaidon (a real art publisher). It calls Holloway's mood an “atrabilious obsession with the unpresent”. A hollow newel is the open center of a spiral stair.
Holloway, however, remains uncharacteristically sallow, revealing what critic Melisa Tao Janis calls “a sign of [his] deepening, atrabilious obsession with the unpresent.”!4 Nevertheless, the climb still proceeds smoothly, until Holloway discovers the remains of one of their foot long neon markers barely clinging to the …
Gloomy and bad-tempered; from “black bile”, the old cause of melancholy.
Holloway, however, remains uncharacteristically sallow, revealing what critic Melisa Tao Janis calls “a sign of [his] deepening, atrabilious obsession with the unpresent.”!4 Nevertheless, the climb still proceeds smoothly, until Holloway discovers the remains of one of their foot long neon markers barely clinging to the wall.
A coined word: not present, absent.
Holloway, however, remains uncharacteristically sallow, revealing what critic Melisa Tao Janis calls “a sign of [his] deepening, atrabilious obsession with the unpresent.”!4 Nevertheless, the climb still proceeds smoothly, until Holloway discovers the remains of one of their foot long neon markers barely clinging to the wall.
The removal of things thought bad or offensive.
Emily O’Shaugnessy points out in The Chicago Entropy Journal the importance of this discovery: “Here at last are the first signs—evidenced ironically enough by the expurgation of a neon sign and the team’s provisions—of the house’s powerful ability to exorcise any and all things from its midst.”
An invented article in an invented Chicago Entropy Journal (oddly, published in Memphis). She says the torn marker and the gutted cache are the first signs that the house can “exorcise” things from itself. An emetic is a drug that makes you vomit.
F Emily O’Shaugnessy, “Metaphysical Emetic” in Chicago Entropy Journal, Memphis, Tennessee, v.182, n.
A medicine that makes you vomit.
F Emily O’Shaugnessy, “Metaphysical Emetic” in Chicago Entropy Journal, Memphis, Tennessee, v.182, n.
A powerful hunting rifle cartridge made by the American company Weatherby, and a bullet designed by Nosler to hold together in large game. Holloway, a hunter, answers the unknown with a weapon.
Kneeling beside his pack, we watch as he pulls out his Weatherby 300 magnum and carefully inspects both the bolt and the scope mounts before loading five 180 grain Nosler Partition® rounds in the mag- ‘JADSUDPW S1ODUDLT ‘assolg ap uowojos “aladauaT sanboog ‘sp3q anbiaugq ‘spiqnaivap ap …
A cartridge or gun more powerful than normal for its size.
Kneeling beside his pack, we watch as he pulls out his Weatherby 300 magnum and carefully inspects both the bolt and the scope mounts before loading five 180 grain Nosler Partition® rounds in the mag- ‘JADSUDPW S1ODUDLT ‘assolg ap uowojos “aladauaT sanboog ‘sp3q anbiaugq ‘spiqnaivap ap osuojp ‘SsqaLy …
The sliding part of a rifle that loads each round; the fittings that hold a telescope sight on the rifle.
Kneeling beside his pack, we watch as he pulls out his Weatherby 300 magnum and carefully inspects both the bolt and the scope mounts before loading five 180 grain Nosler Partition® rounds in the mag- ‘JADSUDPW S1ODUDLT ‘assolg ap uowojos “aladauaT sanboog ‘sp3q anbiaugq ‘spiqnaivap ap osuojp ‘SsqaLy posuoy ‘YISjaLy, urjsiaq|Y SfiOM 9O4L 140N …
A unit of weight for bullets and powder (about 0.065 g).
Kneeling beside his pack, we watch as he pulls out his Weatherby 300 magnum and carefully inspects both the bolt and the scope mounts before loading five 180 grain Nosler Partition® rounds in the mag- ‘JADSUDPW S1ODUDLT ‘assolg ap uowojos “aladauaT sanboog ‘sp3q anbiaugq ‘spiqnaivap ap osuojp ‘SsqaLy posuoy ‘YISjaLy, urjsiaq|Y SfiOM 9O4L 140N olsiaaj py ‘Inuyoy Zvfiuog ‘uadup upa qoove azine.
To load a cartridge into the firing chamber of a gun.
As he chambers a sixth round, a glimmer of joy flickers across Holloway’s features, as if finally something about that place has begun to make sense.
So special that it cannot be copied.
… vIsiivg IUUDAOLD ‘1UlWOLOg OISAIUDAY ‘DUOJAOZ Dp Ola ‘0zZ0q vaipup ‘1y9Jadg o4pupssalp ‘punjuod OAD) ‘1410S DOIN ‘QUO]]1A OpADUusag ‘paavane oddiiy ‘MULIDND OULADND uluny, ‘oounig walls, though soon enough they all oaummuiojouAng begin to detect that inimitable growl,!55 like calving glaciers, far off in the distance, which at least in the mind’s eye, inhabits a thin line where rooms and passageways must finally concede to become a horizon.
Of a glacier dropping large blocks of ice into the sea with a loud noise.
… OISAIUDAY ‘DUOJAOZ Dp Ola ‘0zZ0q vaipup ‘1y9Jadg o4pupssalp ‘punjuod OAD) ‘1410S DOIN ‘QUO]]1A OpADUusag ‘paavane oddiiy ‘MULIDND OULADND uluny, ‘oounig walls, though soon enough they all oaummuiojouAng begin to detect that inimitable growl,!55 like calving glaciers, far off in the distance, which at least in the mind’s eye, inhabits a thin line where rooms and passageways must finally concede to become a horizon.
An invented essay in an invented collection, The Many Wall Fugue. A fugue is a musical form in which voices chase one another, and a fugue state is a form of amnesia.
… gentle rumble, slowly growing louder as it descends, until finally it’s all around you, sweeping over you, and then past you, until it’s gone, a mile away, two miles away, impossible to follow.” !5¢ Esther Newhost in her essay “Music as Place in The Navidson Record” provides an interesting interpretation of this sound: “Goethe once remarked in a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann {March 23, 1829]: ‘I call architecture frozen …
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said this to his secretary Johann Peter Eckermann on 23 March 1829 (the German is in fn 157). Esther Newhost uses it to say the house's shifting walls release that music.
… follow.” !5¢ Esther Newhost in her essay “Music as Place in The Navidson Record” provides an interesting interpretation of this sound: “Goethe once remarked in a letter to Johann Peter Eckermann {March 23, 1829]: ‘I call architecture frozen music.”!57 The unfreezing of form in the Navidson house releases that music.
Low murmuring or rumbling, as of a stomach.
Mortals cannot help but fear those curmurring walls.
A sound or word spoken.
Upon seeing the torn marker and their lost water, he seems to transfigure the eerie sound into an utterance made by some definitive creature, thus providing him !55[n describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.”
Pliny (Natural History 36) says that in the Egyptian labyrinth, when the doors open, one hears a terrible sound like thunder. Zampanò sets it beside the growl.
Upon seeing the torn marker and their lost water, he seems to transfigure the eerie sound into an utterance made by some definitive creature, thus providing him !55[n describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.”
Navidson's interview, cited here for his description of the growl as a mountain wind moving through trees.
… into an utterance made by some definitive creature, thus providing him !55[n describing the Egyptian labyrinth, Pliny noted how “when the doors open there is a terrifying rumble of thunder within.” * 156The Last Interview.
Goethe: “I call architecture frozen music.”
157 Jch die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.
To push someone to act by teasing or insulting them.
Holloway first promises to investigate just a little while longer, then resorts to goading, calling them anything from “fucking pussies” and “cowards” to “jackholes” and “come-guzzling shit-eating cunts.”
To make oneself firm and brave for something hard.
Suffice it to say this last comment does not steel Wax and Jed’s resolve to hunt the great beast.
To take out the insides; to destroy the strength of.
Their nerves have been eviscerated by the constant darkness.
A small, far camp at the edge of explored land.
Easily as much attention has been given to Holloway’s use of the word “abort” as to Navidson’s use of the word “outpost.”
Critics study Holloway's word “abort” as closely as Navidson's word “outpost”. “Abort” implies a goal not reached: a prey not killed, a peak not climbed. Holloway has changed his goal from reaching the bottom to hunting.
To shout angrily and wildly.
For a while, he rants and raves, screaming profanities at a blue streak, until finally and abruptly, he just storms off by himself, vanishing into the blackness.
Fast and without stop (to swear or talk).
For a while, he rants and raves, screaming profanities at a blue streak, until finally and abruptly, he just storms off by himself, vanishing into the blackness.
A burst of gunfire along a whole line; here, a burst of curses.
A sudden enfilade of “fuck you’s” and “shit-heads” followed by silence.
A short trip into an unknown or enemy area.
When several hours pass and there is still no sign of him, they make a brief foray into the area, calling out his name, doing everything in their power to locate him and bring him back.
An invented study of the guilt Jed and Wax felt when they turned back without Holloway.
No sign of Holloway, a terrifying shortage of supplies, and a very ugly decision to make. Hank Leblarnard has devoted several pages on the guilt both men suffered when they decided to head back without Holloway.'© Nupart Jhunisdakazcriddle also analyzes the tragic nature of their action, pointing out that in the end, …
An invented critic with an absurdly long name, published by the invented Apophrades Press. “Apophrades” is Greek for “unlucky days”, when the dead return to their homes; the critic Harold Bloom used the word for the return of dead poets in later writers.
Hank Leblarnard has devoted several pages on the guilt both men suffered when they decided to head back without Holloway.'© Nupart Jhunisdakazcriddle also analyzes the tragic nature of their action, pointing out that in the end, “Holloway chose his course.
The largest known cave chamber in the world, in Gunung Mulu National Park, Malaysia, found by British cavers in 1981. The explorers thought they were following a winding passage, and learned the true size only when they walked straight out into the dark; one of them had an attack of agoraphobia. The quotation comes from Underground Worlds, a real Time-Life book in the “Planet Earth” series.
Consider what happened to an explorer entering the Sarawak Chamber discovered in the Mulu mountains in Borneo.
Fear of open or public spaces.
The sudden awareness of the immensity of the black void caused one of the cavers to suffer an acute attack of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces.
Strong grey cloth tape (also “duct tape”).
Strips of velcro have fallen off his parka, shoe laces have shredded forcing him to bind his boots together with duck tape.
A big, fast drink.
Wax is back for a second chug, when the crack of a rifle drops him to the floor, blood immediately gushing from his left armpit.
An elastic bandage (Ace is an American brand).
Jed has a medical supply kit loaded with gauze, ace bandages, disinfectant, ointments, and some painkillers.
French: “an honorable political solution”. Johnny calls the French pretentious and says nothing about Holloway's choice is political.
For whatever reason, departure suddenly became Holloway’s only choice. Une solution politique honorable.\*2 Jed does not get very far with Wax before two bullets smash into a nearby wall.
“An honorable political solution.”
For whatever reason, departure suddenly became Holloway’s only choice. Une solution politique honorable.\*2 Jed does not get very far with Wax before two bullets smash into a nearby wall.
Very small, a fraction.
Unfortunately another shot instantly answers this fractionary bit of vision, the bang echoing over and over again through the pitch.
Here: the pitch-black darkness.
Unfortunately another shot instantly answers this fractionary bit of vision, the bang echoing over and over again through the pitch.
To make a rough, harsh sound.
Occasionally we hear the faint crack of a rifle shot in the distance, causing Jed to push ahead even faster, darting through as many chambers as possible, until his breath rasps painfully in and out of his lungs and he : forced to put his friend down, unable for the moment to go any arther.
The quality or colour of a sound.
Barely caught in the frame, we can just make out Jed’s fist rapping incessantly against the floor, which as it turns out, has the exact same timbre as those knocks heard back in the living room.
Three invented critics: Alan P. Winnett's Heaven's Door (University of Nebraska Press, real), Carlos Avital's pamphlet Acoustic Intervention (Berklee College of Music, real), and Marla Hulbert's “Knock Knock, Who Cares?”. Avital thinks the house carried and interpreted the signal; Hulbert says the silence of the team was already a distress signal.
Alan P. Winnett, however, remarks on one Curiously enough, despite the similarity of intonation and pitch, the pattern does not even remotely resemble the three short — three long — three short SOS signal heard by the …
The international Morse code distress signal: three short, three long, three short. Jed's knocking has the same sound as the knocks the Navidsons heard in the living room, but not the same pattern.
Winnett, however, remarks on one Curiously enough, despite the similarity of intonation and pitch, the pattern does not even remotely resemble the three short — three long — three short SOS signal heard by the Navidsons.
A steady beating or tapping; a drum signal.
… eighth day, the absence of any word from Holloway’s team was already a distress signal in and of itself.”!6 Regardless of its meaning and the reasons behind its transfiguration, Jed only produces this strange tattoo for a short time before returning to the needs of his badly wounded friend.!
Too long and wordy.
Also see Carlos Avital’s widely read though somewhat prolix pamphlet Acoustic Intervention (Boston: Berklee College of Music, 1994) as well as Marla Hulbert’s “Knock Knock, Who Cares?”
The knocking reminds Johnny of a “ghost”: a girl's voice saying his name in a noisy school dining hall. He learns only later that the domed ceiling carried a whisper from the far side of the hall, like a whispering gallery. He also tells more about his scars and his “Counselor For Disaffected Youth”.
… Music, 1994) as well as Marla Hulbert’s “Knock Knock, Who Cares?” in The Phenomenology of Coincidence in The Navidson Record (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). l649nce, in the dining hall of a certain boarding school—it was my second and nothing fancy—I met a ghost.
A person who eats greedily.
all the seven o’clock din, the place being packed with fellow gorgers, it was almost impossible to hear much of what anyone said, unless you shouted, and we weren’t shouting because our conversation had to be kept secret.
A person sworn to keep silent or to keep order and silence.
… anywhere, whether redwood, treated western hemlock, yellow pine, cedar, wood-polymer, Engelmann spruce, ‘UY OW Uajoy SapADYD ‘poomip SapADYD ‘poay paofaayiny Wnngyi A all numb & stupid and dazed too I guess, a pretty spooky silentiary for matters I knew by heart but could never quite translate for anyone I knew let alone myself.
Unhappy and no longer loyal to a group or system.
At least the same guy who explained my attachment to junk, The Counselor For Disaffected You—I mean Youth—, helped me see how influenced I remained by my past.
Said as a joke, not seriously.
Unfortunately it was a lesson delivered tongue in cheek, as he ultimately believed I’d made most of my past up just to impress him.
Johnny mocks one of the invented stories he has told about his scars. The truth, he says, is a pan of hot oil when he was four.
See, not nearly as dramatic as a Japanese Martial Arts Cult run by Koreans in Indiana. Idaho.
A front cutting tooth.
… arcaded loggia of the Belvedere in Prgaue, Wawel Cathedral in Cracow, the town hall at Augswhite one intersecting my eyebrow, another obvious one still evident in my broken, now discolored front tooth, a central incisor to be more precise, and some even deeper than all of the above, telling a tale much longer than anyone has ever burg, Schloss Johannesburg, Aschaffenburg, the court facade of the Ottheinrichsbau of the …
Johnny's daydream of describing the northern lights (aurora borealis) to a girl from the deck of a ship.
… daydream, one I was willing to revisit constantly, a pretty vivid one too, of a girl, a certain girl, though one I’d yet to meet or even see, whose eyes would sparkle just like the Northern sky I would describe for her when once while sitting ona splintered deck heaving on top of the black-pitch deck of the world, I beheld all the light not of this world.
Shockingly, very noticeably.
Quite the contrary, their voices were pitched in some egregiously felt debate .
An invented article in Film Quarterly (a real journal). Printed upside down, it answers people who see other films haunting The Navidson Record: The Shining, Vertigo, 2001, Brazil, Lawrence of Arabia, Poltergeist, The Amityville Horror, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Carpenter's The Thing, Labyrinth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Das Boot, Taxi Driver, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Repulsion, Fantastic Voyage, Forbidden Planet, Man Bites Dog (C'est arrivé près de chez vous) and The Abyss.
Rosenblum says each film finally explains its horror as some delusion (ghosts, madness, aliens, a monster), and that The Navidson Record refuses all such explanations.
The woman who left Johnny a message (fn 125). She lives in Venice, a beach district of Los Angeles. She remembers him from Texas; he says he has never been to Texas.
I finally hooked up with Ashley.
A flickering light over marshes at night; anything that leads you on and cannot be caught.
An invented essay (in an invented Harvard book) lists real books that people find in the house: Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher”, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Stephen King's “The Breathing Method”, Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations, John Fante's The Road to Los Angeles, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, Pynchon's V. (with its alligator patrol in the sewers), Borges' “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Sartre's No Exit, Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Lem's Solaris, Rand's The Fountainhead, James' The Turn of the Screw, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lovecraft and Melville, among others.
168A side from cinematic, literary, architectural, or even philosophical ghosts, history also offers a few of its own.
Of calendars; here, regular like a date that must arrive.
… watching the day come, one hand kneading her dress, the other hand under her dress needing herself, her blonde hair covering her face, her knees tightening around my ribs, until she finally met that calendrical coming without a sound—the only sign—and then even though I had not come, she kissed me for the last time and climbed out of the hammock and went inside.
Horizontal beams that hold up a floor; sloping beams that hold up a roof.
But the sound of distance brings little comfort to either one. ricks, whether split paver or red bullnose. lor wall studs, firestopping, or braces, no vidence of floor joists, end joists, o ledgers, bridgings, girders, double plate able studs, ceiling joists, rafters, kin posts, struts, side posts, ridge beams, colla ties, gussets, furring strips, or bed moldin (at least the stairs offer some …
The main post at the end of a stair rail; the small posts that hold up the rail.
… girders, double plate able studs, ceiling joists, rafters, kin posts, struts, side posts, ridge beams, colla ties, gussets, furring strips, or bed moldin (at least the stairs offer some detail: risers, treads, two large newel posts, one at the top nd one at the bottom, capped and con4 nected with a single, curved banister supported by countless balusters) though among other things no wallpaper, veneer plaster, Baldwin locks, any sign …
A standard American first-aid handbook for climbers, published by The Mountaineers of Seattle. The long quotation describes mild, moderate and severe shock after blood loss, the state Wax is now in.
"The following definition is from Medicine for Mountaineering, 3" edition.
Weak and thin, hard to feel.
52° < od S 2 & og Sims ‘thready.’
To move or redirect to another place.
In addition, blood flow < axgstes sone ses to the kidneys is reduced as the FS yer Tes 5 Fee 5 g § available blood is shunted to the Fi Saye SOFT S RECS a Fy heart and brain and the urinary wo a = Ss 2 8 x FY 5 &.
Of the brain.
Reduced cerebral blood flow initially produces restlessness and agitation, which is followed by confusion, stupor and eventually coma and death, Diminished blood flow to the heart can produce abnormalities of the cardiac rhythm.”
A state of near-unconsciousness.
Reduced cerebral blood flow initially produces restlessness and agitation, which is followed by confusion, stupor and eventually coma and death, Diminished blood flow to the heart can produce abnormalities of the cardiac rhythm.”
The same list names real art and ideas about space: Lawrence Weschler's Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (about the Museum of Jurassic Technology), the paper architects Brodsky & Utkin, Frida Kahlo's Blue House in Coyoacán, Diego Rivera's Nocturnal Landscape (1947), Rachel Whiteread's House (a concrete cast of the inside of a London house, 1993), Charles Ray's Ink Box, Bill Viola's Room for St. John of the Cross, the architects Robert Venturi, Aldo van Eyck and Paolo Portoghesi, and the philosophers Otto Friedrich Bollnow (Mensch und Raum, “Man and Space”) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who called depth “the most existential of all dimensions”.
Hayashi's one “carefully devised response” to all of it: “Ptooey!”
An invented essay says the house was in severe shock while the explorers were inside it and is dead without them. The sociologist Sondra Staff (also invented) called it “another sheaf of Beinhorn bullshit” in a lecture at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio (a real school).
… film and various commercial productions, it seems worthwhile to at least briefly examine what distinguishes documentaries from Hollywood releases. !6 In his essay “Critical Condition” published in Simple Themes (University of Washington Press, 1995) Brendan Beinhorn declared that Navidson’s house, when the explorers were within it, was in a state of severe shock.
The Editors note that Johnny would not say whether this page design is Zampanò's or his own.
Magellan and Hudson; can a film or a photograph be trusted?; Johnny's worst night.
Zampanò now turns to the “ghosts” of the film itself: people compare it to Hollywood productions, so he asks what makes a documentary different. The rest of the chapter is about whether images can be trusted.
And since more than a handful of people have pointed out similarities between Navidson’s film and various commercial productions, it seems worthwhile to at least briefly examine what distinguishes documentaries from Hollywood releases.
A bundle of papers.
A statement which pro- 4o4soyy ajpiaAynuyp ‘Ista84a} voked sociologist Sondra Staff to claim “Critical -1%d ‘viqniy fo aauasmn] Condition” was “just another sheaf of Beinhorn 1274 —‘100Z ‘311444 bullshit.”
A sudden violent storm.
… plang ‘W ‘Ns "T plouog ‘11Yog opavory ‘soupy Avy ‘pipoy uous ‘SsauDgq SajinyD ‘aafpapw "J [Asay ‘nojqjaunatzy fronted the unknown under circumstances of deprivation and fear only to soon find themselves caught in a squall of terrible violence.
Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1519 on the voyage that first went around the world; he died on the way. At Port San Julián in Patagonia, around Easter 1520, captains Gaspar de Quesada (the Concepción) and Luis de Mendoza (the Victoria) led a mutiny with Juan de Cartagena.
Magellan crushed it: Mendoza was stabbed and his body quartered, Cartagena was marooned, and Quesada was executed by his own servant, Luis de Molino, in exchange for mercy. Zampanò compares Holloway to Magellan: an expedition into the unknown, and a mutiny.
On September 20¢h, 1519 Ferdinand Magellan embarked from Sanlicar de Barrameda to sail around the globe.
To take control of by force.
Like a general, Magellan rallied those men still loyal to him to retake the commandeered ships.
Quick, sharp judgment.
The combination of his will and his tactical acumen made his success, especially in retrospect, seem inevitable.
An old punishment: a body cut into four parts.
… to death and then in an act of calculated good-will suspended the sentence, choosing instead to concentrate maritime law and his own ire on the three directly responsible for the uprising: Mendoza’s corpse was drawn and quartered, Juan de Cartagena was ae o8 = ° th § n SETLESTSS SL FLIES P FAS ES marooned on a barren BSQese8s 2B eSRERES ESTER SE B= 358 ERPS rele?
To leave someone alone on an island or empty shore.
… his own ire on the three directly responsible for the uprising: Mendoza’s corpse was drawn and quartered, Juan de Cartagena was ae o8 = ° th § n SETLESTSS SL FLIES P FAS ES marooned on a barren BSQese8s 2B eSRERES ESTER SE B= 358 ERPS rele?
Mercy shown by someone who has power to punish.
… F525 7 = Molino, Quesada’s BEES Pp eS ei Tweets gt ERP ee SSssgeaeargnek S&3 OR Dre s” trusty servant, was EZ Sass FS HFSS SESE O es "%8 SES we BORE OSEEES granted clemency if he & $ wv .
The sound of spitting, to show scorn.
A small open boat.
… ont to gnidion ys hodiedw Joo1 s jesggue idgion sd} goid .diootwse sh .oi-nsol gid sldsg ,bodoti .beqole .mlod ,smob Iled .s9g0 0lino .sbautor ,oilivsq .lsoinoo .yellsv-bas-qi together both men were set in a shallop and directed back to their ship, the Trinidad, to fulfill their destiny.!7!
The English explorer Henry Hudson, on his fourth try to find a Northwest Passage to Asia, sailed into the bay now named after him. His ship was frozen in for the winter. In 1611 the crew mutinied and set Hudson, his son and seven others adrift in a small boat. They were never seen again.
Zampanò quotes the phrase “a labyrinth without end” from Edgar M. Bacon's biography Henry Hudson (1907), a real book.
However unlike Magellan, Holloway’s course was in fact doomed, thus necessitating a look at Henry Hudson’s fate.
Harmless.
Despite its innocuous sounding name, back in 1610 the bay was Hell in ice.
An ancient stepped temple tower of Mesopotamia.
Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that imperial, or mansard; no westwork, ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, …
“Sun-breaker”: fixed fins or slats on a building that block the sun.
Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that imperial, or mansard; no westwork, ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, …
“Fool the eye”: painting that makes a flat surface look three-dimensional.
Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that imperial, or mansard; no westwork, ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq …
The arrangement of windows in a building.
Unlike Hudson, Holloway went willingly into that imperial, or mansard; no westwork, ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq vaulted chambers, …
The entrance hall at the west end of a church.
… imperial, or mansard; no westwork, ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq vaulted chambers, whether quadripartite or lierne vaults, or Mihrab domes, turrets| minarets, minbars, porticoes, peristyles, tablinums, compluviums, impluviums, atri; ums, alas, excedras, androns, fauces, pos; …
A curved triangle of vaulting that lets a round dome sit on a square room.
… ziggu; rat, brise-soleil, trompe l’oeil etc., fenestration, tierceron rib, coffering, tholos, strapwork, stoa, egg-and-tongue, sala ter; rena, absidiole, rotunda, revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq vaulted chambers, whether quadripartite or lierne vaults, or Mihrab domes, turrets| minarets, minbars, porticoes, peristyles, tablinums, compluviums, impluviums, atri; ums, alas, excedras, androns, fauces, pos; labyrinth.
A row of columns around a building or courtyard.
… revetments, rere; dos, flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq vaulted chambers, whether quadripartite or lierne vaults, or Mihrab domes, turrets| minarets, minbars, porticoes, peristyles, tablinums, compluviums, impluviums, atri; ums, alas, excedras, androns, fauces, pos; labyrinth.
In a Roman house: the pool in the floor, and the opening in the roof above it, that catch rain.
… flying buttresses, retablo, herm belvedere, pavillon, pastas, narthex] lunettes, dormers, cottage orné, pendentives, cheek-walls, cavetto, abutment, noq vaulted chambers, whether quadripartite or lierne vaults, or Mihrab domes, turrets| minarets, minbars, porticoes, peristyles, tablinums, compluviums, impluviums, atri; ums, alas, excedras, androns, fauces, pos; labyrinth.
On the Skylab 4 mission (1973–1974) the three astronauts, overworked by ground control, stopped work and cut radio contact for part of a day. Later accounts call it the first strike or “mutiny” in space. Zampanò uses it to show that tension grows among explorers even with food, warmth and radio.
169While mutiny is not terribly common today, consider the 1973 Skylab mission where astronauts openly rebelled against a mission controller they felt was too imperious.
Proud and giving orders as if others must obey.
169While mutiny is not terribly common today, consider the 1973 Skylab mission where astronauts openly rebelled against a mission controller they felt was too imperious.
Bancroft was a 19th-century American historian and publisher of a huge multi-volume history of western North America.
… where they were; 3) they were almost out of food and water; 4) they were operating in freezing conditions; and 5) they suffered the implicit threat of that ‘growl’.155 I0Also see The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, Volume XXVIII (San Francisco: The History Company, Publishers, 1886).
Zampanò imagines Quesada and Molino alone in the boat, and says the scene survives only in a poem whose author's name is blacked out (“Illegible”); the footnotes point to the appendix. Then he apologises for wandering and says, strangely, that he has “killed many men”. Johnny does not know how to take this.
Perhaps because history has little to do with those minutes, the scene survives only in verse: The Song of Quesada and Molino by [XXXX}.!72 1 include it here in its entirety.”!75 Then: “Forgive me please for including this.
Zampanò's image of Error as a creature coming out of a cave to eat the dead. No source is given. It may recall Errour, the monster in a cave in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and it echoes the “error” (wandering) of the epigraph.
Perhaps this is no news to you but then I have killed many men and I have both legs and I don’t think I ever quite equaled the bald gnome Error who comes from his cave with featherless ankles to feast on the mighty dead.”!73 I2Tllegible.
In a struck note, Zampanò calls youth's wandering in “The PXXXXXXX Poems” a perfect example of why errors should be cut. Johnny fills in the name, and the Editors point to the appendix.
178i .e. The Pelican Poems.!79 1799See Appendix II-B.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's long poem about a sailor whose ship is driven into the Antarctic ice, where the ice “cracked and growled, and roared and howled”. Zampanò quotes the storm and ice stanzas and the margin gloss (“The land of ice, and of fearful sounds”). The sound of the ice matches the growl.
180Though written almost two hundred years after Hudson’s doomed voyage, it is hard not to think of Coleridge’s The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, especially this fabled moment— With sloping masts and dripping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his …
Old form of “cliff”.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken — The ice was all between.
Old Scottish/English word: to know, to see.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts Did send a dismal sheen: Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken — The ice was all between.
Old form of “swoon”: a faint.
The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!
Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was trapped and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea off Antarctica in 1915. Reginald James, the expedition's physicist, wrote that the pressure of the ice sounded “like the cries of a living creature”.
Consider the diary entry made in 1915 by Reginald James, expedition physicist for Shackleton’s Endurance which was trapped and finally crushed by pack ice off the coast of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea: “A terrible night with the ship sullen dark against the sky & the noise of the …
Large mass of floating sea ice pressed together.
Consider the diary entry made in 1915 by Reginald James, expedition physicist for Shackleton’s Endurance which was trapped and finally crushed by pack ice off the coast of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea: “A terrible night with the ship sullen dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her .
Alcazaba's book appears to be invented. Jack Denton Scott was a real American travel and outdoors writer; the Playboy article cannot be confirmed.
See also Simon Alcazaba’s Historic Conditions (Cleveland: Annwyl Co., Inc., 1963) as well as Jack Denton Scott’s “Journey Into Silence” Playboy, August 1973, p.
A small amount.
Production G8§et es EsSSsadgeez value coupled with the cultural saturation of trade gossip help ensure a modicum of disbelief, thus reaffirming for the audience, that no matter how moving, riveting, or terrifying a film may be, it is still only entertainment.
A long, sideways-printed list of real documentary makers from every period and country: Robert Flaherty, Dziga Vertov, Esther Shub, Joris Ivens, Leni Riefenstahl, Walter Ruttmann, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Walt Disney, Edward R. Murrow, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Luis Buñuel, Frederick Wiseman, Albert and David Maysles, D. A. Pennebaker, Barbara Kopple, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Marcel Ophuls, and many more, ending with Bruce Brown (The Endless Summer).
Documentaries, however, 182Obviously, the tradition of documentary filmmak-| Livia Gyaramathy, Henri-George Clouzot, Brian ing is a long and valuable one, especially when consid-| Desmond Hurst, Pursia Djordjevic, Jan Lomnicki, ering those contributions made by Robert Flaherty,| Esther Shub, Warren Wallace, Edmund …
The open courtyard inside a castle wall.
… Ellen Hovde, David Loeb stein, Jan Kucera, Heinz Seilman, Alberto Cavalcanti,| Weiss, Thorold Dickinson, Ilya Kopalin, Robert , Rouman GrigKozi ticums, peristylums, vestibules, arcades, apses, naves, naos, pronaos, opisthodomos, nymphaeum, internal crepidoma, courtards, paradegrounds, bailey, demilune, aponiere, tenaille, flank, postern, rampart, face, bastion, embrasure, curtain, keep, rattice, merlon, or battlement; nor—obvilously—pilasters, pillars, friezes, entablatures, architraves, facades, pediments, stylobates, triglyphs, scotia, torus, fillets, finials, and flutes, capitals, whether Ionic, rely …
The solid part of a castle battlement between the gaps.
… Dickinson, Ilya Kopalin, Robert , Rouman GrigKozi ticums, peristylums, vestibules, arcades, apses, naves, naos, pronaos, opisthodomos, nymphaeum, internal crepidoma, courtards, paradegrounds, bailey, demilune, aponiere, tenaille, flank, postern, rampart, face, bastion, embrasure, curtain, keep, rattice, merlon, or battlement; nor—obvilously—pilasters, pillars, friezes, entablatures, architraves, facades, pediments, stylobates, triglyphs, scotia, torus, fillets, finials, and flutes, capitals, whether Ionic, rely on_ interviews, Doric, or Corinthian, with volutes, aba inferior equipment, uses, rosettes, acanthus …
The horizontal band carried by classical columns, and its lowest and middle parts.
… GrigKozi ticums, peristylums, vestibules, arcades, apses, naves, naos, pronaos, opisthodomos, nymphaeum, internal crepidoma, courtards, paradegrounds, bailey, demilune, aponiere, tenaille, flank, postern, rampart, face, bastion, embrasure, curtain, keep, rattice, merlon, or battlement; nor—obvilously—pilasters, pillars, friezes, entablatures, architraves, facades, pediments, stylobates, triglyphs, scotia, torus, fillets, finials, and flutes, capitals, whether Ionic, rely on_ interviews, Doric, or Corinthian, with volutes, aba inferior equipment, uses, rosettes, acanthus leaf, or metopes, and virtually no …
The spiral scroll at the top of an Ionic column.
… face, bastion, embrasure, curtain, keep, rattice, merlon, or battlement; nor—obvilously—pilasters, pillars, friezes, entablatures, architraves, facades, pediments, stylobates, triglyphs, scotia, torus, fillets, finials, and flutes, capitals, whether Ionic, rely on_ interviews, Doric, or Corinthian, with volutes, aba inferior equipment, uses, rosettes, acanthus leaf, or metopes, and virtually no ttas, mutules, acroterions, dentils, a effects to document real events.'8!
A real study of American “direct cinema”. Mamber's definition: the filmmaker removes technical, procedural and structural barriers between subject and audience, and refuses to tamper with life. Zampanò says this is almost exactly how Navidson made his film.
Any kind of cinema is a process of selection, but there is (or should be) all the difference in the world between the cinema-vérité aesthetic and the methods of fictional and traditional documentary film. Stephen Mamber, Cinema Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1974), p.
“Cinema of truth”: documentary filming that records real life with little interference.
A second list, printed mirrored, of real documentaries: Man with a Movie Camera, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, Triumph of the Will, Olympia, Las Hurdes, The Plow That Broke the Plains, Titicut Follies, Gimme Shelter, Chronique d'un été, The Sorrow and the Pity, Hearts and Minds, Crumb, Hotel Terminus, the Lumière brothers' first films, and many others.
… zonias eb JopinoDd hind woh Sli YO zisns2% zsbwh AOL binboM 6 tio ndinoD 1K bovanind cain 1ST loioH agviA oT sloinow) mow lish svi woilliM 00% oT vod Yo ziok Of course, no documentary is ever entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the …
Everything placed in front of the camera: set, actors, lighting, arrangement.
… tio ndinoD 1K bovanind cain 1ST loioH agviA oT sloinow) mow lish svi woilliM 00% oT vod Yo ziok Of course, no documentary is ever entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of “reenactment.”
A name or title.
… is ever entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of “reenactment.”
A performance that repeats a past event for the camera.
… entirely absolved from at least the suspicion that the mise-en-scene may have been carefully designed, actions staged, or lines written and rehearsed—much of which these days is openly carried out under the appellation of “reenactment.”
An early, famous documentary about an Inuit family. Flaherty staged several scenes for the camera, for example a walrus hunt with old weapons the family no longer used.
Similar accusations in Nanook for the camhave been made against America’s like Funniest Home Videos.
An American TV show (since 1989) of viewers' home-video clips, some of them accused of being staged.
Similar accusations in Nanook for the camhave been made against America’s like Funniest Home Videos.
Surrounded and attacked on all sides.
… the field do their best to police, or at Zora nm 32293 Sabo sap = ipa Or nAy & Se2s «85 =| Ves Sang = oe Beebe o paleo] oS 4 2EeEves SELZOR Yeozs besieged art form.
A wedge-shaped stone of an arch; the triangular space between an arch and its frame.
… ‘oyuakapay A ‘apfapyp apse TRIODIN “AOWISBIID 1aBI9g rches, most probably resembling bas andle though without any sign of a key modillions, or even trefoil, Tudor, stilted horeshoe, ogee, lancet, or equilatera stone, pier, spandrel, voussoir, springer, 0 a h import.
Grundberg was the photography critic of The New York Times. He predicted that readers would soon see news pictures as illustrations, because nobody could tell a real image from a manipulated one.
… ‘UIsOSoy jouor] ‘uOTMWIID URrp ‘yoOdsny ‘SSPQ LEY ‘steussy urepy ‘quioosdrT ‘yloM, sey0T pur uafH yes ‘Sunjnog Aoy ‘pats atuuoD “juaw|D Quay “BIoqUIAG UOA Jasof ‘sUI9qOY [ILA ‘APYORAOY In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote: “In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware 'p that they can no longer distinguish between …
The reporting of news, or a report of real events.
… “BIoqUIAG UOA Jasof ‘sUI9qOY [ILA ‘APYORAOY In 1990 in The New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote: “In the future, readers of newspapers and magazines will probably view news pictures more as illustrations than as reportage, since they will be well aware 'p that they can no longer distinguish between a genuine image and one that has been manipulated.
The Canadian media theorist (Understanding Media, “the medium is the message”). The quotation says the phrase “the camera cannot lie” hides the many lies told in its name.
All of which reiterates in many ways what Marshall McLuhan already anticipated when he wrote: “To say ‘the camera cannot lie’ is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practiced in its name.”
Alabiso was a photo executive at the Associated Press who spoke against altering news photos. The National Press Photographers Association is the US professional body of photojournalists; its code says accurate representation is the basis of the profession.
A year later, the NPPA (National Press Photographers Association) also recognized the power of electronic imaging techniques: OLAVDOAH oa AS wo > SwnZAXE i S; Zesocase2 SGOvFV aD ES oO eae 5 & Amo.2 O-5 & rs) ye" O …
Darkroom methods to make parts of a photographic print darker (burning) or lighter (dodging).
A journalist who tells news with photographs.
“As photojournalists, we have the responsibility to document society and to preserve its images as a matter of historical record.
Mitchell (see p. 120) argued that digital imaging would let people expose the weak points of photography's claim to objective truth.
185 Then in 1992, MIT professor William J. Mitchell offered this powerful summation: “Protagonists of the institutions of journalism, with their interest in being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for provably reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith …
Leadership or control by one group or idea over others.
… their interest in being trusted, of the legal system, with their need for provably reliable evidence, and of science, with their foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image—but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of …
A point of doubt or contradiction that cannot be resolved.
… foundational faith in the recording instrument, may well fight hard to maintain the hegemony of the standard photographic image—but others will see the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.”
Hardened and unable to change.
… imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.”
A book on photojournalism by the head of the Black Star photo agency.
… the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.” '85See chapter 20 in Howard Chapnick’s Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism (University of Missouri Press, 1994).
To officially declare something true or approved.
Ironically, the very technology that instructs us to mistrust the image also creates the means by which to accredit it.
An invented author, spelled two ways, who divides technology into “Rumpled” (cheap, available and dangerous) and “Slick” (expensive, able to create anything). In a struck note Zampanò imagines “Documentary Detectives” who would guard the truth of films, and leaves that tale to a novelist.
2 = CabaASseeaeeG ag star 186Murphy Gnuner’s Document Detectives (New York: Pantheon, 1995), p.
Johnny plays on the initials: “Truth And Truth” becomes TNT, trinitrotoluene, the explosive (the text gives its chemical formula). Then “Technological Neural Transmitters”, and Lude's “Tits And Tail”. He ends with the ampersand, &, that joins two truths.
37,187 ¥ or TNT. Truth And Truth therefore becoming another name for the nitrating of toluene or C7H5N30¢—not to be confused with C,¢H,;)N202—in other words one word: trinitrotoluene.
TNT, a strong explosive.
Truth And Truth therefore becoming another name for the nitrating of toluene or C7H5N30¢—not to be confused with C,¢H,;)N202—in other words one word: trinitrotoluene.
Philip Marlowe, the private detective of Chandler's novels (The Big Sleep), with his rumpled clothes and old hat. The viewer trusts the shabby.
144 As author Murphy Gruner once remarked: “Just as is true with Chandler’s Marlowe, the viewer is won over simply because the shirts are rumpled, the soles are worn, and there’s that ever present hat.
Creased and untidy.
144 As author Murphy Gruner once remarked: “Just as is true with Chandler’s Marlowe, the viewer is won over simply because the shirts are rumpled, the soles are worn, and there’s that ever present hat.
American electronics store chains of the 1990s, where anyone could buy a camcorder.
“Rumpled Technology —capital M for Marlowe—hails from Good Guys, Radio Shack or Fry’s Electronics.
George Holliday filmed Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King from his balcony with a home camcorder. The acquittal of the officers in 1992 set off the Los Angeles riots. The tape showed the power of cheap “rumpled” technology.
One needs only to consider The George Holliday Rodney King Video to recognize the power of such lowend technology.
A woman who gives massages.
Digital manipulation allows for the creation of almost anything the imagination can come up with, all in the safe confines of an editing suite, equipped with 24 hour catering and an on site masseuse.”’!86
To pull up by the roots; to remove from its natural place.
As Grundberg, Alabiso and Mitchell contend, this impressive ability to manipulate images must someday permanently deracinate film and video from its now sacrosanct position as “eyewitness.”
Too important or holy to be questioned.
As Grundberg, Alabiso and Mitchell contend, this impressive ability to manipulate images must someday permanently deracinate film and video from its now sacrosanct position as “eyewitness.”
Not allowed as evidence in court.
The perversion of image will make The Rodney King Video inadmissible in a court of law .
A thriller in which a security video of a murder is digitally altered to frame the wrong man.
Anything fro ton’s Rising Sun, to Tricks, or Lisa Ma er’s Confession of a into the increasing of a digital univer “True Grit”, Anth e New Yorker clai the most difficult e ct and will always e dio magician.
Two invented works named as examples of stories about the “protean nature of a digital universe”.
Anything fro ton’s Rising Sun, to Tricks, or Lisa Ma er’s Confession of a into the increasing of a digital univer “True Grit”, Anth e New Yorker clai the most difficult e ct and will always e dio magician.
Lane is a real film critic of The New Yorker; the article is invented. He says “grittiness” is the hardest thing for a studio to fake, and that Navidson has it. The title borrows the name of the John Wayne western.
Anything fro ton’s Rising Sun, to Tricks, or Lisa Ma er’s Confession of a into the increasing of a digital univer “True Grit”, Anth e New Yorker clai the most difficult e ct and will always e dio magician.
Rough, raw quality that makes an image look real.
Anything fro ton’s Rising Sun, to Tricks, or Lisa Ma er’s Confession of a into the increasing of a digital univer “True Grit”, Anth e New Yorker clai the most difficult e ct and will always e dio magician.
Tom Bradley was mayor of Los Angeles (1973–1993). After the 1992 acquittal he said, in substance: our eyes did not deceive us; we saw what we saw, and it was a crime.
Grit, redible as it may s Mayor Bradley’ r eyes did not w what we saw as a crime.”
Able to change shape easily (from Proteus, a Greek sea-god).
Nor is original — predicm Michael CrichDelgado’s Card rie “Slit Slit” Bad Porn Star delve ly protean nature se.4] In his article ony Lane at Th ms “grittiness is lement to constru lude the finest stu however, does no t elude Navidson.”
Traces of Death (1993) is a “shockumentary” of real death footage, including a tourist killed by lions. Eraser (1996) is an expensive Arnold Schwarzenegger action film in which villains are eaten by alligators. Real grainy footage frightens; costly effects can look ridiculous.
… to constru lude the finest stu however, does no t elude Navidson.” {Consider the savage scene captured on grainy 16mm film of a tourist eaten alive by lions in a wildlife preserve in Angola (Traces of Death ) and compare it to the ridiculous and costly comedy Eraser in which several villains are dismembered by alligators.!90 \88Which also stands for Technological Neural Transmitters (TNT) !39 — another pun and another story …
A split into two branches.
… up with myself, where I’ve gone and where I haven't gone and what I better get back to, may very well have not been a pun at all but plain and simple just the bifurcation of truth, with an ampersand tossed in for unity.
Old word for “between”.
A sperm twixt another form of similar unity, and look there’s an echo at haand.
Jennifer Kale is one of Zampanò's readers (invented). She taught him film words “straight out of Christian Metz”, the real French theorist who applied linguistics and semiotics to cinema.
Straight out of Christian Metz and the rest of that crew.
A way or mode in which something exists or is done.
A 1968 essay by the French critic Barthes: realist writing includes useless details (his example is a barometer in Flaubert) only to signal “this is real”. Mitchell uses the idea for “grit” in images.
191Roland Barthes’ “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today ed.
Turan is the real film critic of the Los Angeles Times; the quotation is invented. He claims the stretching room is the work of Industrial Light & Magic, the real special-effects company founded by George Lucas.
… offers an alternate description of “grit” when he highlights Barthe’s observation that reality incorporates “seemingly functionless detail ‘because it is there’ to signal that ‘this is indeed an unfiltered sample of _ the real,’1917192 Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane’s conclusion: “Navidson has still relied on F/X.
Special effects in film.
… reality incorporates “seemingly functionless detail ‘because it is there’ to signal that ‘this is indeed an unfiltered sample of _ the real,’1917192 Kenneth Turan, however, disagrees with Lane’s conclusion: “Navidson has still relied on F/X.
Real American film critics (Taylor, Champlin, McCarthy, Insdorf, Maslin), plus one invented name, G. O. Pilfer (“pilfer” means to steal small things). All of them, says Zampanò, step around the question.
Grit’s just grit, and the room stretching is all care of Industrial Light & Magic.” Ella Taylor, Charles Champlin, Todd McCarthy, Annette Insdorf, G.
A keen, well-informed fan.
However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or “live-footage,” despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of The Navidson Record, cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.
Truthfulness.
However, even serious aficionados of documentaries or “live-footage,” despite expressing wonder over the numerous details suggesting the veracity of The Navidson Record, cannot get past the absolute physical absurdity of the house.
An invented review in the real San Francisco Chronicle: were it not a “supreme gothic tale”, he would have believed it all. He later estimates the effects would cost at least $6.5 million.
As Sonny Beauregard quipped: “Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we’d have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker.”!% !93Sonny Beauregard’s “Worst of Times” The San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1995.
To make a quick, clever remark.
As Sonny Beauregard quipped: “Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we’d have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker.”!% !93Sonny Beauregard’s “Worst of Times” The San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1995.
Completely (to believe a lie).
As Sonny Beauregard quipped: “Were it not for the fact that this is a supreme gothic tale, we’d have bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker.”!% !93Sonny Beauregard’s “Worst of Times” The San Francisco Chronicle, July 4, 1995.
An invented art-house film, praised at Sundance and Cannes, that turned out to be a real snuff film: the filmmaker had really killed the child it showed. Zampanò sets it against The Navidson Record: one looks slick and is real, the other looks rumpled and cannot be real.
Difficult to ignore here is the matter of that recent and most disturbing piece of work La Belle Nicoise et Le Beau 147 Chien.
Art that is strange, ugly and disturbing, often mixing horror and comedy.
As many already know, the film portrayed the murder of a little girl in such comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Bufuel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it …
Real artists of the grotesque and disturbing, in film, painting and writing, named as the invented film's company.
… comic reality it was instantly hailed as the belle of the ball in the palace of the grotesque, receiving awards at Sundance and Cannes, earning international distribution deals, and enjoying the canonical company of David Lynch, Luis Bufuel, Hieronymus Bosch, Charles Baudelaire, and even the Marquis De Sade, until of course it was discovered that there really was such a little Lithuanian girl and she really was murdered and by …
A film that shows a real murder.
It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick.
A Serbian-Bosnian director's wild, black-comic film about Yugoslavia from World War II to the 1990s wars. It really won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1995. The footnote says it “replaced” the invented film as winner.
It was a slickly produced snuff film sold as an art house flick. Emir Kusturica’s Underground finally replaced Nicoise as the winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully fictive.
“Golden Palm”: the top prize of the Cannes Film Festival.
Emir Kusturica’s Underground finally replaced Nicoise as the winner of the Cannes Palm d’Or; an equally absurd and terrifying film though gratefully fictive.
Made with very little money.
The Navidson Record \ooks like a gritty, shoestring documentary.
The best proof that the film is real: the tax records show Navidson and the others never had the money for such effects, not even with the Guggenheim Fellowship and NEA grant (real American arts awards).
Perhaps the best argument for the authenticity of The Navidson Record does not come from film critics, university scholars, or festival panel members but rather from the I.R.S.
Quick and not careful.
Even a cursory glance at Will Navidson’s tax statements or for that matter Karen’s, Tom’s or Billy Reston’s, proves the impossibility of digital manipulation.!%4 They just never had enough money.
The value of property you own after debts are paid.
Taking into account the total received for the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA Grant, everyone’s credit limit on Visa, Mastercard, Amex etc., etc., not to mention savings and equity, Navidson comes up five and a half million dollars short.
An invented article in an invented Seattle Photo Zine that made the tax records public.
194The records were made public in the Phillip Newharte article “The House The I.R.S.
Johnny notes that Zampanò said in Chapter I he would not discuss whether the film is fact or fiction, and has now done exactly that.
… of its own reality. !95 Spespite claiming in Chapter One that “the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film,” Zampand has still wandered into his own discussion of “the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank” within The Navidson Record.196 TI have no idea whether it’s on purpose or not.
A contradiction between two things that both seem true.
… its own reality. !95 Spespite claiming in Chapter One that “the more interesting material dwells exclusively on the interpretation of events within the film,” Zampand has still wandered into his own discussion of “the antinomies of fact or fiction, representation or artifice, document or prank” within The Navidson Record.196 TI have no idea whether it’s on purpose or not.
An obscure story Johnny half-remembers, about a man who saw four asses “winnow the air” with their hooves. No source is known; it turns up again in his nightmare on p. 151.
Which, in case you didn’t realize, has everything to do with the story of Connaught B. N. S. Cape who observed four asses winnow the air ..
To blow the husks away from grain; to beat or fan the air.
Cape who observed four asses winnow the air ..
Sound word for something falling heavily.
… only be one conclusion, no matter the labor, the lasting trace, the letters or even the faith—no daytime, no starlight, not even a flashlight to the rescue—just, that’s it, so long folks, one grand kerplunk, even if Mr.
The Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard was a large music shop. Pink Dot was a Los Angeles grocery delivery service. Loveline was a call-in radio show on KROQ about sex and relationships, hosted by Dr. Drew Pinsky and the comedian Adam Carolla.
Thoughts blazing through my mind while I was walking the aisles at the Virgin Megastore, trying to remember a tune to some words, changing my mind to open the door instead, some door, I don’t know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was …
To smoke marijuana in a pipe.
… mind to open the door instead, some door, I don’t know which one either except maybe one of the ones inside me, which was when I found Hailey, disturbed face, incredible body, only eighteen, smoking like a steel mill, breath like the homeless but eyes bright and pure and she had an incredible body and I said hello and on a whim invited her over to my place to …
Johnny's echo of Prince's song and film Purple Rain (1984).
A few days later, I heard her on KROQ’s Love Line, this time drenched in purple rain, describing to Doctor Drew and Adam Carolla how I—‘“this guy in a real stale studio with books and writing everywhere, everywhere!
An echo of Revelation 20:11: “him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away.” Johnny turns God on the throne into a thing walking in darkness towards his door.
It was about to splinter its way through the Hall door, my door, Walker in Darkness, from whose face earth and heaven long ago fled.
To make fear or doubt smaller.
I imagined some world-weary travelers camped on the side of some desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder & wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines …
Dry material that catches fire easily.
… of some desolate road, in some desolate land, telling a story to allay their doubts, encircle their fears with distraction, laughter and song, a collective illusion of vision spun above their portable hearth of tinder & wood, their eyes gleaming with divine magic, born where perspective lines finally collude, or so they think.
Suddenly and without reason.
Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of “trope” and it means “turn.”
Greek tropos means “a turn”; a trope is a figure of speech, a turn of words. Johnny links puns, turns of the mind and the turns of a maze.
Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of “trope” and it means “turn.”
“A turn”; the root of “trope”.
Not even the seeds of one pun are left to capriciously turn the mind aside and tropos is at the center of “trope” and it means “turn.”
A four-line song Johnny imagines the travellers singing by their fire. No known source.
Though here’s a song they might of sung: Mad woman on another tour; Everything she is she spits on the floor.
To record or keep the memory of something.
Battery levels are running low and there is not much desire on Jed’s part to exert any energy towards memorializing what seems more and more like a trek toward his own end.
Last but one.
The penultimate clip finds Jed huddled next to Wax in a very small room.
A book of drawings by the Romanian-American cartoonist of The New Yorker, full of lines that wander and loop. The Editors note a typo (“from” for “for”) and that no full stop should appear after Jed's last shot.
(No punctuatio & Brothers, 1960) n point should appear here) See also Saul Steinberg’s The Labyrinth (New York: Harper 15]
The Editors print an e-mail from Hailey, sent after the first edition went round the Internet. She gives her side of the night and asks what happened to Johnny.
Zampanò closes the chapter with a list of real architecture books: Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn, R. Furneaux Jordan, Spiro Kostof, Herbert Pothorn, Nikolaus Pevsner's A History of Building Types (spelled “Prevsner”), the History of Private Life series, Labelle Prussin on African nomadic architecture, Jack Travis, David Watkin, Marcus Whiffen and Nelson Ikon Wu. For film, he says, the sources are “too numerous to list here”.
Bibliography Architecture: Brand, Stewart.