Who has never killed an hour?
House of Leaves
These amazing quotes are from my reading last night for the next House of Leaves podcast episode. Not only is this book ergodic architecture in itself, as I have discussed on the podcast, but the language and deep, intertwined storytelling is so powerful. The first quote struck me in relation to this: it’s not only gorgeous, but it’s one of the narrators talking about the other narrator who initially collated the found footage story and the research around it, and at the very the same time the found footage story continues to unfold…
The second quote has stayed with me since the first time I read House of Leaves so many years ago. This is how amazing Mark Z. Danielewski is at capturing human emotions, especially those that don’t have a name, or those we don’t often talk about. Plus, this quote punches home that this novel and its companions The Whalestoe Letters and Poe’s album Haunted were created to express the complicated grief that Mark and his sister Poe felt around the death of their father. I’ve discussed this on the podcast, but…read that second quote again with grief in mind, with that staring at the wall, “I don’t know what to do now, or even next week” feeling. Phenomenal. To take all that and pour it into the story of a blind man telling the impossible story (Tiresias?) of a found footage film of a house in Virginia that is bigger on the inside. A house that haunts its occupants.
If you haven’t listened to my series yet (the new episode will be my sixth), the list is in the post below. Enjoy! This one is going to be good; I was reading during our fifth or sixth thunderstorm of the week last night and I frightened myself.
