i love having like a single mutual for each of my niche interests its like being a president with a cabinet. and what news from my Secretary of House of Leaves today
Jean Dubuffet. Jardin d’hiver. 1968-70.
Installation view at Centre Georges Pompidou.
Source: archive.org
rereading house of leaves, once again i think johnny truant can read in a very interesting trans man narrative. the explicit lies/exaggerations about how stereotypically masculine he is (virility, ability as a tattoo artist, how much women love him, how strong and brave he is) in order to separate himself from femininity, and the way this degrades as he becomes more consumed by the story. the fear of femininity and the inescapable nature of it. the way his mother looms over the story even before you know she’s present, and the way johnny is repeatedly compared to being more similar to his mother than he wants, and unable to escape the things they share in common no matter how hard he tries to throw her off (this also ties into his fears of inheriting his mom’s schizoaffective disorder but that’s not relevant here). johnny removing his name in the obituary and being implied to have changed it in the whalestoe letters despite him having already introduced himself to us as johnny.
there’s a lot of criticism of the segments of johnny’s writing as being misogynistic (specifically that he as a character acts w/ misogyny not that house of leaves itself is misogynistic) which i absolutely feel holds ground, but it should also be remember that before anything else johnny truant is a liar and cannot be taken at his word as a narrator. his best friend’s name is a club drug. HIS name is johnny TRUANT. the ending of the book specifically contradicts itself to show that he’s a liar. with that lens, and especially with how as the story develops, johnny becomes increasingly distanced from the exploits he mentions early in the books, revealing a quiet and deeply unhappy man (who doesn’t really seem interested in any of the things he writes about doing at all), even textually it’s clear he’s writing all that to appear masculine and rugged in a way he thinks masculinity should be. when johnny’s character is actually revealed (in glimpses between his own ramblings about strippers and coke use), he reveals himself again to be more prone to his mother’s poetics and fails again and again to separate himself for that
Decorated pages from the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University
I think its wild that this post is already written somewhere in the library of babel.
home that’s hell
“how’d your parents die again?” by fatimah asghar / p.t. / anatomy by kitty horrorshow / skinamarink by kyle edward ball / house of leaves by mark z. danielewski / silent hill 4: the room / heck by kyle edward ball
thinking about ariadne calling the minotaur her brother
"In truth I snatched you from your tumbling in the middle of the whirlpool of death, and decided it was better to lose a true brother than fail you, treacherous man, in your moment of crisis. For which I will be given as spoils for the birds and beasts to tear apart, and, dead, will not be buried in scattered earth." (Catullus 64.149-53)
Really interesting here is that Ariadne calls the Minotaur germanus, which not only means brother, but specifically "full brother" or "true brother" and is sometimes even used to refer to twins, when technically the Minotaur is a) her half brother and b) considered a monster. Like this quality that killing the Minotaur was a mistake, and that in the end the 'monster' who was her brother meant more and she shared more with than Theseus, who for all appearances is a good and heroic man, but in his abandonment and deceit is monstrous; and how that for that she thinks she's doomed to die alone (familyless! no one to bury her!), stranded forever on Naxos.
"I have for some time now been haunted by the Saami vision of the underland as a perfect inversion of the human realm, with the ground always the mirror-line, such that ‘the feet of the dead, who must walk upside down, touch those of the living, who stand upright’. The intimacy of that posture is moving to me – the dead and the living standing sole to sole."
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey
i was stressed earlier so i spent like 45 minutes painstakingly constructing a labyrinth in rollercoaster tycoon that takes about seven weeks to walk through and pisses everyone off by the time they reach the park entrance. and i feel better now
“The important thing is to look away from the wall that’s blocking you; when you look back, you might find it’s not there anymore.”
—Srikanth Reddy, author of Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), on writer's block.
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Building a bonfire. The photo did not have a photographer but had a patron: “There is something fascinating about the a structure designed with the intent to destroy itself. An interesting twist on “form follow function;” the architecture of imminent demise.”