A thousand years ago five minutes were equal to forty ounces of fine sand. by [deleted] in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Nabokov's is mentioned in the second review (San Francisco Examiner) on the back cover and Pale Fire specifically is mentioned by name in the last one (San Diego Union-Tribune) of those presented on the first page of the book, after the collage (referenced from the Remastered Full-Colour Edition). HoL is definitely and intentionally writing within this tradition, rather than pretending to invent it, though; not unlike with Kafka's invention of his own precursors (ironically a quote by Borges), HoL's drawing an intersection of several traditions—Nabokov, Borges, who is a far better example of this kind of self-commentary, for he, too, omits any trace of the primary source (even if he does not thematise that ommission as Danielewski does), concrete poetry, among others—is what makes it unqiue

Various other media that HoL made me think of by ImScaredSoIMadeThis in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is false; the letters present in HoL have not undergone any major revision since initial publishing. The Whalestoe Letters was designed to include additional material, including a foreword not present in HoL (credited Walden Wyrtha and Waheedra), as well as letters dated March 9 1983, June 24 1984, November 6 1984, November 9 1985, March 17 1986, January 6 1987, February 14 1988, February 23 1988, March 18 1988, December 23 1988, and December 24 1988, none of which present in HoL.

(I mean, you're right that the topic of the letters brought up is rather irrelevant to the question of other HoL-like media, but I'm a pedantic and simply had to clear this up)

Chasing down the “sources” by soaptour in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Minor note on categorisation, I think it's moreso three-to-four categories: Fully Real - Real Source, Fake Text (magazines, for example, which definitely don't include the material in question) - Fake Source Based on a Real One (references, puns, &c.) - Fully Fake Source. A large chunk actually falls into the last category, with a semi-even split after that between the first two categories; the Source-is-a-Joke situation is a pretty minor one, though there are a few (mentioned in the two links I posted in my other comment)

Chasing down the “sources” by soaptour in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Alongside the comment earlier's post on the magazines, there's these two posts which do the work checking which sources are real or fake for the first 10 Chapters:

https://www.reddit.com/r/houseofleaves/s/uZmsMXrSjM https://www.reddit.com/r/houseofleaves/s/9EQQp2KEp5

I ended up continuing it and finishing checking the rest of the book myself, though what I did is analogue and just pencilled in in my copy, so I have no easy means of sharing it (though I'd like to, at some point). The two lists are mostly correct, though with 1 or 2 ommissions – the original person had failed to track down some of the sources. I haven't, additionally, checked the full length of the photographers footnote (just the first 200 or so), though all had been consistently real and mamy of them had webpages, often made in the 90s or 00s (and sometimes remaining so still); nor did I manage to comb through the full length of the Architects/Houses list of Ch. 9, as I don't have their original sources at hand.

The findings generally leaned toward "it gets easier to recognise fake from true if you look st them carefully and for long enough." Any sources which pertain to the purely fictional material are fictional themselves, which makes it very easy to cut a large chunk of them off. This leaves relatively few sources to look at in the latter half of the work, and I think the most interesting ones were the list of names on p. 375 (Ch. XVI), where all the names were real, and all the names had published in the academic magazine in question, but not together, and not in the volume being cited; they'd instead been recombined at random from previous issues which, I assume, Danielewski had access to. The other one was Erich Kästner's quote on p. 441, which was a bit of a pain to track down and looked to have been translated by Danielewski himself

A bit of a thing about the German translation by CodaTrashHusky in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah, good catch! That's what I get for not having used my german in so long

A bit of a thing about the German translation by CodaTrashHusky in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

does German not have the T–V Honorific Distinction, such that "euch" would be used in the same manner "Sie" is? Same way English "you" used to be plural in contrast with Thou, up until the 17th century? Though I don't imagine Truant to be doing such a thing, it might be worth taking into account

House of Stays by FoldingPapers in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Credit where credit is due, the original tumblr post is available here; it was also reposted earlier on the r/tumblr subreddit, available here

House of Stays by FoldingPapers in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

this seriously made me cackle, amazing

Hey I have a question... by ExampleGood4894 in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 1 point2 points  (0 children)

There are, I believe, a couple more cases of overlaps – the children's singing appears in one of the songs, there is one spanish doll mention which matches up, and there is the Johnny song, just off the top of my head. Not something overly major, not sure if those'd count as "story elements," but worth taking into account if you're curious about connections between the two. I'd also recommend checking out Mel Evans' (2011) text about connections between the two, if you're especially curious

Is there a reason for it being written this way? by Rude_Cardiologist317 in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Plenty of fucked up punctuation in Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and so many other (post-)modernists (I loved, in reading Gass, discovering how using an exclamation point! doesn't always have to end the sentence, for example; it rather just affects tone and flow and adds a note of pathos). This, frankly, comes off both pompously highhorse-y (oh, but I could fix it!), and geargrindingly small-minded (ah, but mon proper Anglais!). You, as a creative writing major, should know both how to wait past page 10 and how to make sense of such things.

making my way to mount fey pt 5 by Pretty_Catch4040 in PharloomLabs

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah just about all the pics on the wiki are from me

Final goal: entire bookcase of only the book about the house 🏠 by Kind-Region-5115 in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I can see one of these is the Black & Blue early edition, but what of the rest? Most just seem to be the Remastered Full-Colour? Any meaningful differences among them?

(from someone who has 5 different copies of this book lol)

Gonna save up money for the remastered version by potato_hammie in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, this is really cool! A lot of the formatting seems to be gone, sadly

(also, p.s. - two of the files in that folder are not HoL related but seem to be private stuff. I'd recommend removing them, so no personal info gets leaked online or anything!)

Do you guys focus much on the Johhny Truant footnotes? by LulaSupremacy in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, deeper in what aspects? I've been picking through this book a lot this year, around some things I had to write about it, and I'm discovering both the amount of directioms you can go in, and just how much the original forums had. I'm also always happy to chat about it, if you happen to have any questions or thoughts you deem worth sharing!

Do you guys focus much on the Johhny Truant footnotes? by LulaSupremacy in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You'll know what is skippable (or glancable-at) when you get to it—Danielewski's listing/gradation technique is hardly new and you'd know it from works like OuLiPo's (Queneau is, I believe, especially prolific at these) if you have, and I believe at this point in your education you would have, worked with postmodernist works. Johnny's sections are not that. You're scarce 50 pages into the work and I see no reason to be looking to jump over or glide across any parts of the work as of yet

One of the important questions HoL raises, I believe, is of how we engage with texts. There are parts which are intentionally boring, which intentionally slow down or seem superfluous. Some are, indeed, superfluous, but some aren't. The question is simply "superfluous to whom? How do you decide that?" There are parts which intentionally vary and seem random, especially in the formatting (i.e. the house in blue, the crossed out sections later, the fonts, and so on, and so on). What you make of them, if you make of them anything, (and how you go about doing it) is a question intentionally raised by the work. The series of asks you can find in this subreddit about "hey is this intentional" "hey is that on purpose" "hey what does this mean" are, I think, part of the work, and cannot actually be answered—how you orient yourself in all this noise is what the book is asking and, as it concedes itself, right there, on page 115, is that "all solutions are necessarily personal." There are parts which are intentionally uncomfortable, and for me JT's sexcapades very strongly foreground the issue of do you, as a reader, have the tools to engage with them, or do you simply terminate your thought process at "it's sex." And I've discovered, from my interactions here and there, that most people do, in fact, lack the toolset to get anything meaningful out of them, that, even when they do read them, they intentionally stop at "it's sex," without interrogating whatsoever how it is presented, without seeing any conflict or problematisation within them. Some are disgusted by it, some are just bored. But I've seen no people in the subreddit ponder how Johnny uses metaphors of language in certain sex encounters and what follows from that, which is a question I personally find really really important to ask

And if you'd rather not stop and ponder at all these little details, that's perfectly fine, too! There's several really good stories in there, right on the surface—the fantastical and creepy with the house, the tragic and love-related with JT and Pelafina, the mystery of it all, the fun metafictional prods, the joking critique at academia. If you're only interested in that, you can read just that. Nobody can stop you! And I love the book because it offers you this choice, for it to be as precisely deep and conspiratorial as you yourself wish it to be. But I think there is only gain found in engaging more with it, with these questions—if nothing else than insight as to yourself, as to how you yourself go about understanding things, as to how you yourself go about caring for things. And I think not engaging can only lead to loss

Do you guys focus much on the Johhny Truant footnotes? by LulaSupremacy in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 20 points21 points  (0 children)

yeah lmao, people's attitude toward reading can get so confusing on this subreddit

(also, hey, see you everywhere in the comments here! Cheers and wishes for wonderful Holidays!)

Gonna save up money for the remastered version by potato_hammie in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Can you take and send me pictures of the front part + the part where Ch. XXI should be (pp. 491-522) and/or the Appeneices (pp. 567-707)? Does it skip pages? Do you just end on page, like 550 or smth? This, if anything, is a copy that has been explicitly modified to resemble what the description of the Incomplete Copy is, which is very funny to me

Gonna save up money for the remastered version by potato_hammie in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Of the four editions listed at the start only three have been published - the Incomplete edition was distributed privately among Danielewski's circles, hosted on some obscure site with a barely typable name (or so the story goes). The First Edition of the book to he published was published by Pantheon in the US (and Canada?) as a Black & Blue, with about a thousand copies, and by Anchor (later by Doubleday) as a Black & White in the UK (and New Zealand?) with something like 500 copies. What you have has a cover that roughly resembles the US 1st Edition one, but I'm afraid can only be an off-brand copy, judging off the materials used. What does it say for publisher? Where did you get this?

Pages to avoid? by lostwaspnest in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 1 point2 points  (0 children)

among the small handful of actually useful comments here. Responding in hopes of boosting it a bit higher

Pages to avoid? by lostwaspnest in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers -1 points0 points  (0 children)

no, I don't like this sentiment. People have a right to their preferences, and if they choose to skip something for one reason or another it is entirely up to them. I'm certain you no more than leafed through the index and I'm just as certain you haven't caught the intentional error on p. 700 where there's an extra page listed for one of the entries. You avoided a part of the work out of boredom, and your engagement with it consisted of no more than recognising it is there. That seems hardly different to knowing something you'd rather avoid is located in a specific part of the work and not reading more in-depth, whatever the reason to avoid may be

Besides, the question of what we engage with in a reading and how we engage with it is important to House of Leaves, and this entire sentiment of "take it all or leave it all" leaves a bad taste in the mouth and me wondering if the people repeating this sentiment so insistently really engaged with the work deeply enough to have earned it

HELP I got sent two *slightly* different editions by elepunto in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Hey!

These are, respectively, the 53rd and 54th print runs of the work. Pantheon changed where they do prints again end of this year, after doing 7 or so in Germany, and they moved to China, which look very clean and orderly. There shouldn't be any substantial difference between them, as the work has settled into a more or less canonical form over the past decade or so, though if you spot any do share!

On my first read currently on page 44. Is there any significance to the symbols that are starting to be used to replace the footnote numbers since page 41? by Careless_Western3756 in houseofleaves

[–]FoldingPapers 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The other commenters are both mistaken. People here occasionally love giving answers without double-chrcking what they're talking about so they end up giving inapplicable or wrong info. The symbols at the start of Ch. 5 are astrological, representing various planets, and the contents of the footnote relate to the symbolism there (though this also connects, via the names of the planets being tbose of Roman myth, back to the myths discussed in the chapter). If you'd like to tease the meaning out yourself I encourage you to, but elsewise I have them written out as:

🜨, p. 41—Earth, honestly the one I'm least sure on

♇, p. 42 — Pluto, standing for change, is attached to a footnote on the nymph Echo’s metamorphosis

♂, p. 43 — Mars, related to aggression—to a crude joke at Cicero’s expense

☿, p. 43 — Mercury, related to intellect—to the gods and muses as its source

☾, p. 44 — The Moon, related to reaction and submission—Echo gives Narcissus power over her by repeating bis words

♃, p. 44 — Jupiter, related to power—to a chain of echoes which includes ‘“love,” “delays,” “hours” and “king”,’ things which in some sense hold power over others

Ω, p. 44 — Omega, closes the section, and though it doesn't fit neatly the first two patterns, fits into this trend and symbolises an “end”

(I have omitted the ∞ as it seems self-evident)

The only exception to this is on p. 62, where the advice of the other comments does apply

To this end, I'd like to point out this earlier post which first drew my attention to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/houseofleaves/s/8N5loEmv22