Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000 — Chapter XV
Karen shows a short cut of the house footage to famous writers, scholars and artists. Most of the interviewees are real people; all their words here are invented.
Heine (1797–1856) was a German poet. The lines come from his cycle “Die Heimkehr” (The Homecoming) in Buch der Lieder. They mock a philosopher: “with his nightcaps and the rags of his dressing-gown he stops up the gaps in the structure of the world.”
Freud quoted these lines in The Interpretation of Dreams and in a 1908 letter to Jung. The footnotes play on who “he” is: “Heine?” then “Freud. — Ed.”
XV Mit seinen Nachtmiitzen und Schlafrockfetzen Stopft er die Liicken des Weltenbaus. — Heine???
Karen speaks from a bench in New York's Central Park in February. The Gulf War (January–February 1991) fixes the date; the world's big events “hardly seem to matter here”.
Karen Green sits on a park bench in Central Park.
Reddish-brown.
She wears a russet sweater and a black cashmere scarf.
Do something as if it were a favour one is too important to do.
All around her we see people milling about, enjoying one of those sparkling February days New York City sometimes deigns to deliver.
A shortened version of a work.
More than likely, an eight minute version of Karen’s abridgment became the second short now known as “Exploration #4.”
An invented book on grass-roots film distribution. It suggests that someone who received Karen's tape copied it, and that five minutes were cut before it spread as “Exploration #4”.
Vallombrosa is a real abbey in Tuscany, famous from Milton's Paradise Lost, where fallen angels lie “thick as autumnal leaves” in its brooks.
However, it remains a mystery who cut out five minutes (which must have included Holloway’s suicide) before distributing it. Kevin Stanley in “What Are You Gonna Do Now, Little Man?”
A duplicate, a copy.
… Man?” and Other Tales of Grass Roots Distribution (Cambridge: Vallombrosa Inc., 1994) points out how easy it would have been for one of the professors or authors who received a copy to make a dupe.
Heine: “With his nightcaps and the rags of his dressing-gown he stops up the gaps in the structure of the world.”
Not asked for.
… to everyone | could think of too—professors, scientists, my therapist, village poets, even some of the famous people Navy knew. [Coughs again] Anne Rice, Stephen King, David Copperfield, and Stanley Kubrick actually responded to unsolicited copies of the video | sent them.
Cut out a part.
Without further ado then, here is what everyone had to say about that house.?25 oooo0 A Partial Transcript Of What Some Have Thought by Karen Green» though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green’s own ineptitude: “She simply must have misstated the length of the tape.”
Explain something as caused by.
Without further ado then, here is what everyone had to say about that house.?25 oooo0 A Partial Transcript Of What Some Have Thought by Karen Green» though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green’s own ineptitude: “She simply must have misstated the length of the tape.”
Lack of skill.
… is what everyone had to say about that house.?25 oooo0 A Partial Transcript Of What Some Have Thought by Karen Green» though, five minutes were excised, Stanley unconvincingly chalks up to Karen Green’s own ineptitude: “She simply must have misstated the length of the tape.”
Miramax was a major independent film company run by the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein. A press junket is an event where journalists meet a film's makers. The quote about cutting Karen's piece from the wide release is invented.
However when Miramax put the film in wide release, What Some Have Thought was absent.
A publicity event where journalists meet a film's stars and makers.
At a Cannes press junket, Bob Weinstein argued that the section was too selfreferential and too far from “the spine of the story” to justify its inclusion.
The footnote leaves blank lines for two people who saw the hallway and made no comment; the rest is crossed out. Johnny says it was crossed out with something like black crayon and tar.
Stern, Karen's psychiatrist, seems invented. Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was a Russian-French painter of dreamlike scenes. Elaine's was a famous Manhattan restaurant where writers and celebrities ate, and a table was hard to get.
Leslie Stern, M.D.
Required; expected as usual.
Well lit, Chagal print on the far wall, requisite couch.
An invented engineer who speaks very fast in St. Patrick's Cathedral. She asks practical questions: what ground could carry such a building, what the walls are made of, how the loads move. She finds the house a “structural impossibility”.
Trying to get a table at Elaine's is hard enough. [Pause] What do you think it means? Jennifer Antipala.
Nervous and easily upset.
Antipala: [Very high-strung; speaks very fast] The things that came to me, now | guess this is just the way my mind works or something, but the whole house prompted these questions, which | guess, like you …
A large number.
Antipala: Oh god, a whole slew of them.
Bearing capacity is how much weight the ground can carry before it fails. Hard volcanic “trap rock” carries far more than sedimentary shale or sandstone, and soft clay carries little.
Anything from what the soil bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh.
The largest load per area that the ground can carry safely.
Anything from what the soil bearing capacity of a place like that would have to be to, uh, say, well uh.
Dark, hard volcanic rock such as basalt.
That’s a very complicated question. | mean, look “massive rock” like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, will crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter.
Rock formed from layers of sand, mud or shells pressed together.
That’s a very complicated question. | mean, look “massive rock” like trap rock for instance can stand up to 1000 metric tons per square meter while sedimentary rock, like hard shale or sandstone for instance, will crumble with anything over 150 metric tons per square meter.
Hofstadter (born 1945) is an American cognitive scientist at Indiana University. His book Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979) links mathematics, the art of M. C. Escher, Bach's music and self-reference, with dialogues between Achilles and the Tortoise.
Here he talks at a piano, as fits the book.
… surrounded by space, then its mass is still great enough it’s gonna have a lot of gravity, driving it all inward, and what kind of material then at its core could support all that? Douglas R. Hofstadter.
Five major science-fiction writers. Hofstadter says they all “love this stuff”: worlds where space and reality do not behave.
Hofstadter: Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, William Gibson, Alfred Bester, Robert Heinlein, they all love this stuff.
A short organ piece (BWV 591) long credited to J. S. Bach, which wanders through distant keys before it comes home. Hofstadter used it as the title and model of a dialogue in Gödel, Escher, Bach.
expedition, reminded me of Bach's Little Harmonic Labyrinth.
A change from one key to another in a piece of music.
Some of the thematic modulations, | mean.
Zeno of Elea (5th century BC) made paradoxes about motion. The version Hofstadter explains, halving the distance forever so the arrow never arrives, is the “dichotomy” paradox; Achilles who never catches the tortoise is a close relative.
M. C. Escher (1898–1972) drew impossible buildings and endless stairs. All three fit a house that is bigger inside than outside.
Achilles and the tortoise, Escher, Zeno’s arrow.
Paper printed with five-line staves for writing music.
Hofstadter: [illustrating on a scrap of staff paper] Oh it’s very simple.
An invented playwright who talks at La Fortuna café and flirts with Karen at the Plaza Athénée hotel (a real luxury hotel). He calls the house a “semiotic dilemma” and says the monster “needs work”.
He quotes “another famous British playwright” on St. Sebastian dying of heartburn; the joke turns the martyr killed by arrows into a comic death.
Well the fun starts when you realize you can keep dividing up space forever, paring it down into smaller and smaller fractions until . . . well, the arrow never reaches B. Byron Baleworth.
About signs and symbols and how they make meaning.
You've created a semiotic dilemma.
Andrew Ross (born 1956) is a Scottish-born scholar of cultural studies, then at Princeton. He works out with a medicine ball and calls the monster “purely American”: edgeless, a mean House Keeper who keeps the house empty.
For Pete’s sake, is that thing on?! Andrew Ross.
Make smaller by cutting away bit by bit.
Thin crinkled fabric, black crepe being the cloth of mourning.
Quite a few Brits you know still prefer their ghosts decked in crepe and cobweb, candelabra in one hand.
A collection of many different things in one.
Edgeless for one thing, something a compendium of diverse cultures definitely requires.
Crazy.
It's a maid gone absolutely nutso.
A wall that holds up the weight of the building above it.
Antipala: And what about the walls? Load-bearing?
Dead load: the fixed weight of the structure. Live load: changing weight and forces such as people, wind and earthquakes.
And I’m thinking right now of the shifting that goes on, so that means we're not talking dead loads, which means a fixed mass, but live loads which must deal with wind, earthquakes and variance of motion within the structure.
Antipala's formula is roughly the real one for wind pressure: half the air density times wind speed squared, times shape and gust factors. Dead loads are the fixed weight of a building; live loads change (people, wind, earthquakes).
… something like, uh, oh yeah, P equals one half beta times V squared times C times G, uh, uh, uh, that’s it, that’s it, yeah that’s it, or something like that, where P is wind pressure on the structure’s surface .
Forces along the length of a member (axial) or from the side (lateral).
… yeah that’s it, or something like that, where P is wind pressure on the structure’s surface . . . or do | have to go someplace else, look at wall bending or wall stresses, axial and lateral forces, but if we’re not talking wind, what from then and how?
Paglia (born 1947) is an American critic known for bold claims about sex and culture. Her book Sexual Personae (1990) came out in paperback from Vintage in 1991.
Here she reads the house as the “feminine void” and speaks of “womb envy”, and she flirts with Karen at the Bowery Bar.
So | start looking for another angle. [Moves closer to Karen] Camille Paglia.
In Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove (1964), a mad general fears for his “precious bodily fluids” and speaks of “purity of essence”. Paglia borrows the word to mock men's need to find the essence of the house.
They’re haunted by that infinite hollow and its sensemaking allure, and so they crave it, desire it, desire its end, its knowledge, its—to use here a Strangelove-ian phrase—its essence.
Of the uterus (womb).
They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any 357
The phrase echoes the Beatles song “Carry That Weight” on Abbey Road (1969). Antipala means it as an engineer.
A hollow; a hollowing (a rare word).
creative life-yielding physiological incavation.
Anne Rice (1941–2021) wrote Interview with the Vampire. She calls darkness only the absence of light. George Foreman was a heavyweight boxing champion. Bats find their way by echolocation, so light matters less to them than noise.
Are you busy this afternoon? Anne Rice.
Of the retina, the light-sensitive layer in the eye; here, depending on sight.
It’s the absence of light, which is important to us because we are all retinal creatures who need light to move around, sustain ourselves and protect ourselves.
Bloom (1930–2019) was an American literary critic. The Anxiety of Influence (1973) argues that poets fight the great poets before them; “Kenosis” (Greek, “emptying”) is one of his six moves by which a poet empties himself to break free.
He reads the empty house as the artist's way to escape all influence.
What matters more to a bat is whether or not FM frequencies are jamming its radar. Harold Bloom.
Disorder, mess.
General disarray.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher. His short book Repetition (1843) asks if one can live the same thing again. Bloom quotes it to lead into repetition in the house.
Bloom: My dear girl, Kierkegaard once wrote, “If the young man had believed in repetition, of what might he not been capable?
Depth of inner, spiritual life.
What inwardness he might have attained.”
Three invented critics read the house as mother, womb or father. Keplard calls it an “unresolved Oedipal drama”: Freud's idea that a boy wants his mother and competes with his father. Exler rejects the mother reading.
The press names (Emunah, Nescience, Pavernockurnest) are invented; nescience means “not knowing”.
329Melissa Schemell in her book Absent Identification (London: Emunah Publishing Group, 1995), p.
Of Freud's Oedipus complex: a child's desire for one parent and rivalry with the other.
It represents the unresolved Oedipal drama which continually intrudes on his relationship with Karen.”
“Emptying”: in theology, Christ emptying himself; in Bloom, a poet's move to empty himself of a master's influence.
This is from the chapter on Kenosis: The unheimlich, or “unhomely” as the “uncanny,” is perceived wherever we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action.
“Unhomely”: uncanny, strangely familiar and frightening.
This is from the chapter on Kenosis: The unheimlich, or “unhomely” as the “uncanny,” is perceived wherever we are reminded of our inner tendency to yield to obsessive patterns of action.
Driven by an inner force or spirit beyond control.
Overruling the pleasure principle, the daemonic in oneself yields to a “repetition compulsion.”
An urge to repeat painful experiences or patterns again and again.
Overruling the pleasure principle, the daemonic in oneself yields to a “repetition compulsion.”
Acts of tearing apart.
A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before.
In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny” Freud says the uncanny (unheimlich, “unhomely”) is something familiar that repression has made strange, and that it often comes with repetition. The repetition compulsion is the urge to repeat painful patterns beyond the pleasure principle.
A man and a woman meet, scarcely talk, enter into a covenant of mutual rendings; rehearse again what they find they have known together before, and yet there was no before. Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety.”
Unhealthy; linked to disease or death.
Freud, unheimlich here, in his insight, maintains that “every emotional affect, whatever its quality, is transformed by repression into morbid anxiety.”
Bloom's list: Dante's journey through Hell; a saying credited to the Roman orator Cicero, “A room without books is like a body without a soul”; Milton's abyss of Chaos before creation in Paradise Lost; and Nietzsche's world after the “death of God”.
A bit like Dante’s house after a good spring cleaning.
Zampanò traces “uncanny” to Old English cunnan, “to know”: un-cann-y means “full of not knowing”. He cites the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), an invented book from the real publisher Verso, and a real study: Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny (MIT Press, 1992).
In the words of Perry Ivan Nathan Shaftesbury, author of Murder’s Gate: A Treatise On Love and Rage (London: Verso, 1996), p.
Never harmed or broken; kept pure.
183: “It is therefore sacred, inviolate, forever preserved.
A Germanic verb type whose present tense has the form of an old past tense (e.g. “can”).
Black volcanic glass; very dark and smooth.
But that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Mary’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever …
Forcing things to fit a fixed shape by violence, after Procrustes.
But that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Mary’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing …
In Jewish legend, a clay figure brought to life by magic.
But that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Mary’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing poetic independence no matter how lonely, empty, and agonizing …
Procrustes, in Greek myth, stretched or cut his guests to fit his bed. The golem is a clay figure brought to life in Jewish legend. Jacob wrestled all night with an angel (Genesis 32). Mary Shelley's Frankenstein made a creature.
Bloom calls the monster a featureless thing of this kind, made to wipe out everything before it.
… that lightless fire leaving the walls permanently ashen and, to my eye, obsidian smooth is still nothing more than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Mary’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing poetic independence no matter how lonely, empty, and agonizing the final result may be.
A figure of speech or a common theme in writing.
… than the artist's Procrustean way of combating influence: to create a featureless golem, a universal eclipse, Jacob’s angel, Mary’s Frankenstein, the great eradicator of all that is and ever was and thus through this trope succeed in securing poetic independence no matter how lonely, empty, and agonizing the final result may be.
A young poet who writes without capital letters and reads a short prose poem about being lost in the dark “on line”. The odd spacing “Poe t” recalls Edgar Allan Poe; readers also connect it with the singer Poe, the author's sister.
My dear girl, is it that you are so lonely that you had to create this? A Poe t. 21 years old.
The equation did not print: instead we see a Microsoft Word field code, “EMBED "Equation" \* mergeformat”, left when an embedded object fails. Hofstadter's idea: influence = 1/a, so with infinite influences it falls to zero, which he compares to the empty house.
Hofstadter: Similar to Zeno’s arrow, consider the following equation: 1/a =O EMBED "Equation" \* mergeformat 000 where 1/% = 0.
“There it is!”
Stephen King (born 1947) is the American horror novelist. He says the white whale in Melville's Moby-Dick is a great symbol but “also just a whale”.
Stephen King.
“Symbols shmimbols”: repeating a word with “shm-” mocks it as unimportant.
King: Symbols shmimbols.
Wozniak (born 1950) co-founded Apple Computer and built its first computers. He compares the house to a program icon for a bridge (card) game: a symbol, and also just the thing itself. He later calls it a giant chip.
Steve Wozniak.
Derrida (1930–2004) was the French philosopher who founded deconstruction. His answer about “the other” is a parody of his difficult style. Antonin Artaud was a French writer and theatre theorist; a large Artaud drawings show opened in New York in 1996.
Despite its weight, its magnitude, its mass . . . in the end it adds up to nothing. [Moving away] Jacques Derrida.
Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome, Justinian's Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Abbot Suger's Saint-Denis (the first Gothic church), the hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall by Hugh Herland, and Christopher Wren's dome of St Paul's in London.
Each sparks awe and still makes sense once one does the math. The house, she says, never does.
The state of holding together as a unified whole.
There would be more cohesion.
Paglia answers Baleworth's “why Virginia?”: great stories place the supernatural in real local settings. Dante was from Florence in Tuscany; Hawthorne's story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) sends a Puritan into a dark New England forest.
You should have asked him why Dante’s entrance to hell was in Tuscany?
Penis (vulgar).
Baleworth’s just jealous and besides he can’t write a screenplay to save his pecker.
Make a sexual or romantic advance to someone.
Baleworth’s just jealous and besides he can’t write a screenplay to save his pecker. [Pause] And incidentally I’m not afraid to tell you that | did make a pass at you.
Mosley (born 1952) is an American crime novelist (the Easy Rawlins mysteries). Fresh Kills on Staten Island was then the world's largest landfill. He sees the house as a mystery with “plenty of clues but no solutions”.
So are you free this afternoon? Walter Mosley.
Completely confused.
Strange, very strange. [He looks up, genuinely baffled] | don't know.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were the most famous American TV film critics, known for “thumbs up / thumbs down”. Stern jokes about her own size (Ebert was heavy).
Stern: Im no Siskel and Ebert—though I've been called Ebert before.
Kiki Smith (born 1954) is an American artist known for sculptures of the human body and its insides. Fittingly she speaks in a hospital emergency room and talks about the “body-sense” of the house.
King: You didn’t make this up, did you? [Studying Karen] I'd like to see this house. Kiki Smith.
An artist who shows real people and things, not abstract forms.
Kiki Smith. Figurative Artist.
Felt deeply in the body, not reasoned.
Down to the construction, the interior experience, the body-sense there, which—well gosh—what makes the whole thing so visceral, so authentic.
Thompson (1937–2005) was the “gonzo” journalist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, famous for drugs and wild behaviour. The comedy is that he, of all people, tells Karen to stop taking acid.
Hunter S. Thompson.
A frightening experience on a psychedelic drug.
What I'd call a bad trip.
Psychedelic drugs: LSD and a drug from the peyote cactus.
What I'd call a bad trip. | never thought I'd hear myself say this but lady you need to lay off the acid, the mescaline, or whatever else you're snorting, inhaling, ingesting ..
A clinic for treatment of drug or alcohol addiction.
… a bad trip. | never thought I'd hear myself say this but lady you need to lay off the acid, the mescaline, or whatever else you're snorting, inhaling, ingesting .. . check yourself into rehab, something, anything because you’re gonna be in abad way if you don’t do something fast.
Kubrick (1928–1999) directed 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, and was known as a private man who rarely met the press. His typed review criticizes the poor image and sound but ends: “I'd say the whole thing really happened.”
Do you think | could spend the night at your place? Stanley Kubrick.
The leaving out of a part.
The elision of many details contributes to insufficiently developed characters.
Move unsteadily, as if about to fall.
And finally the overall structure creaks and teeters, threatening at any minute to collapse.
Copperfield (born 1956) is an American stage magician. In a famous 1983 TV illusion he made the Statue of Liberty “disappear”; here it vanishes behind him again. He calls the house a riddle.
David Copperfield.
Rising in the air with no visible support.
A levitation without wires.
Hofstadter's one-line answer: the infinity sign ∞ looks like an 8 lying on its side.
Hofstadter: A horizontal eight.
At old Disneyland the “E ticket” gave entry to the best rides, so “E ticket” came to mean the best thrill; “The Happiest Place on Earth” is Disneyland's slogan.
Thumper, the stripper from the Shop days, invites him for dinner and he says no. Then the phone company cuts his line.
“Hey Johnny,” Thumper finally purred over the phone.
Areola: the dark ring around a nipple (also “aureole”, a halo).
For a moment, I flashed on her body, imagining those beautiful round breasts with creamy brown aureolas, making saints out of nipples, her soft, full lips barely hiding her teeth, while in the deep of her eyes her Irish and Spanish heritage keep closing like oxygen and hydrogen, and will probably …
Karen's second short film: Navidson's life told through home movies and his own photographs.
The sound of a piece of music.
So in the first black frame, what greets us is not sinister but blue: the strains of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker coaxing out of the darkness the precocious face of a seventeen year old Will Navidson.
Parker (1920–1955) was an American jazz alto saxophonist, a founder of bebop. His music plays over the silent home movies of Navidson's childhood.
So in the first black frame, what greets us is not sinister but blue: the strains of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker coaxing out of the darkness the precocious face of a seventeen year old Will Navidson.
Showing adult qualities at a young age.
So in the first black frame, what greets us is not sinister but blue: the strains of Charlie “Yardbird” Parker coaxing out of the darkness the precocious face of a seventeen year old Will Navidson.
Kodak made most amateur film stock. Old home film fades to yellow or red, and it is often grainy and badly exposed, as described here.
Piece after piece of old Kodak film, jerky, over exposed, under exposed, usually grainy, yellow or overly red, coalesce to form a rare glimpse of Navidson’s childhood—nicht allzu glatt und gekiinstelt.>32_ His father—drinking ice tea.
Come together to form one whole.
Piece after piece of old Kodak film, jerky, over exposed, under exposed, usually grainy, yellow or overly red, coalesce to form a rare glimpse of Navidson’s childhood—nicht allzu glatt und gekiinstelt.>32_ His father—drinking ice tea.
A perfect, typical example of something.
Their golden retriever, the archetype for all home movie dogs, frolicking in the sprinklers, pouncing on the pale green hose as if it were a python, barking at Tom, then at their father, even though as its jaws snap …
An invented professor and book (Simon & Schuster is a real publisher). He speaks of the sadness in these fragments and the knowledge that comes with it.
As professor Erik Von Jarnlow poignantly remarked: I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the immutable sadness contained in these fragments.
Unchangeable.
As professor Erik Von Jarnlow poignantly remarked: I don’t think I’m alone in feeling the immutable sadness contained in these fragments.
Gather or pick out; here, collect tips.
At least with such sorrow must come knowledge.333 account her daisy sunglasses, her tattoos, the dollars and fives she culls while draped around some silver pole hidden in some dark room in the shadow of the airport.
Rich, famous and fashionable people (printed “gliterati”).
“Not overly polished or artificial.”
German; the Editors translate it: “Not overly polished or artificial.” It describes the rough home movies.
A simple Italian restaurant.
People mattered most to him, whether soldiers, lepers, medics, or newlyweds eating dinner at a trattoria in Rome, or even a family of tailors swimming alone at some sandy cove north of Rio.
A state of shame, poverty or ruin.
The world around only mattered because people lived there and sometimes, in spite of the pain, tragedy, and degradation, even managed to triumph there.
Hesitant, not strong.
Though Karen gives her piece the somewhat faltering title A Brief History Of Who I Love, the use of Navidson’s photos, many of them prize-winning, frequently permits the larger effects of the late 20 century to intrude.
Harry N. Abrams is a real New York publisher of art and photography books. The collection and Burke's introduction are invented.
… her piece the somewhat faltering title A Brief History Of Who I Love, the use of Navidson’s photos, many of them prize-winning, frequently permits the larger effects of the late 20 century to intrude. Gordon Burke points out the emotional significance of this alignment between personal and cultural pasts: Not only do we appreciate Navidson more, we are inadvertently touched by the world at large, where other individuals, who have …
Real places of war and crisis in the late 20th century. Every one of Navidson's pictures has a person in it; he never shot empty scenery. The contrast with the empty house is clear.
… we appreciate Navidson more, we are inadvertently touched by the world at large, where other individuals, who have faced such terrible horrors, still manage to walk barefoot and burning from the grave.*35 Each of Navidson’s photographs consistently reveals how vehemently he despised life’s destruction and how desperately he sought to preserve its fleeting beauties, no matter the circumstances.
Soldiers' field uniforms.
The first image—purportedly taken by a famous though now deceased photojournalist—shows him when he was a young soldier in South East Asia, dressed in battle fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with howitzer shell casings stacked on a nearby trunk marked “VALUABLES.”
A type of artillery gun that fires shells in a high curve.
The first image—purportedly taken by a famous though now deceased photojournalist—shows him when he was a young soldier in South East Asia, dressed in battle fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with howitzer shell casings stacked on a nearby trunk marked “VALUABLES.”
Karen ends with two images of Navidson himself: a young soldier crying beside howitzer shell casings, and a Super 8 clip of him with the children in the snow. The Super 8 film is so overexposed that all three vanish in light.
… though now deceased photojournalist—shows him when he was a young soldier in South East Asia, dressed in battle fatigues, sitting on an ammunition crate with howitzer shell casings stacked on a nearby trunk marked “VALUABLES.”
Zone Books is a real New York publisher; the book is invented. It says a weak heart kept Tom from the draft, while Navidson enlisted.
From this heart-wrenching portrait, Karen ever so gently dissolves to the last shot of her piece, actually a clip of Super 344According to Melanie Proft Knightley in War's Children (New York: Zone Books, 1994), p.
Compulsory military service; being called up.
110, a weak heart prevented Tom from getting drafted.
Join the armed forces by choice.
Navidson had gone ahead and enlisted.
Careful and steady effort.
All three of them vanish in a burst of light. oooo0 The diligence, discipline, and time-consuming research required to fashion this short—there are easily over a hundred edits—allowed Karen for the first time to see Navidson as something other than her own personal fears and projections.
In South Africa, a poor urban area for black residents under apartheid.
While Navidson’s work has many remarkable images of individuals challenging fate, over a third captures the meaning of defeat—those seconds after an execution, the charred fingers found in the rubble of a bombed township, or the dull-blue look of eyes which in the final seconds of life could still not muster enough strength to close.
A 14-line poem; here, a short, carefully shaped work.
In her filmic sonnet, Karen includes a shot of Navidson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph.
Kevin Carter was a South African photojournalist. His 1993 photo of a starving Sudanese child with a vulture behind her won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and was also attacked as cruel; the St. Petersburg Times called the photographer “another vulture”. Carter took his own life in July 1994.
The Editors note that Navidson's prize photo is clearly based on it. On the back of Navidson's print, Karen finds one pencilled word: “Delial”.
As the world remembers, the renowned image shows a Sudanese child dying of starvation, too weak to move even though a vulture stalks her from behind.236 Not only does Karen spend twenty seconds on this picture, she then cuts to a ten second shot of the back of the print.
Sound film runs at 24 frames a second, so 8,160 frames are about 5 minutes 40 seconds, the “six minutes” of Karen's film. Zampanò sets this small, full, bright film against the endless empty house.
… on the lower right hand corner, until her subject finally becomes clear: there, almost lost amidst so much white, lie six faintly penciled in block letters cradled in quotes— “Delial” oo0o0 There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as the perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs.
A contrasting element that sets off another.
… there, almost lost amidst so much white, lie six faintly penciled in block letters cradled in quotes— “Delial” oo0o0 There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as the perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs.
Praise and awards.
Carter enjoyed many accolades for the shot but was also accused of gross insensitivity.
A secret romantic relationship.
She stopped seeing Fowler, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, selling the house, and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliation.
Making peace again after a separation or quarrel.
She stopped seeing Fowler, cut off questionable liaisons with other suitors, and while her mother talked of breaking up, selling the house, and settlements, Karen began to prepare herself for reconciliation.