#william navidson

[selfish-solace]

lineup of all of my hol designs for now theyre subject to change or whatyever

[nodutra19]

Johnny and Echo

A bit ago I was reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton and got to the myth of Echo, and I started drawing non-existent parallels.

Like Echo, Johnny can only repeat what was last said: in spite of his copious notes, his main task is reassembling Zampanò's reconstruction of The Navidson Record. Hera, the greatest cuckquean in history, cursed Echo to always have the last word but for that word to never be hers, and in the case of Narcissus, she inadvertently repeated a part of what he said which bound her to him, and she withered away.

Likewise, echoes of the film reverberate in Johnny's life, and always altered to some extent, like the shitty father and lemon meringue pie.

Likewise, Johnny inevitably alters what Zampanò said. While some of it is willful, it should be noted that Johnny, even if he never went out of his way to alter the text, would never fully reassamble Zampanò's writing, even if he had all the shit spilled with ink and such.

As the novel goes on, we eventually lose Johnny, in much the same way Echo is lost to all and never considered, hence why the baby dies. After all, most people disregard Johnny and see him as a side piece. Like Echo, he's dismissed and forgotten for Narcissus (God? The house? Navy? Who knows) and his flowers.

[solovelyanddry]

I took the 10 options with the highest vote totals from the previous three polls. Position on the poll was determined randomly.

Link to the results of part one

Link to the results of part two

Link to the results of part three

[the-bar-sinister]

Our Fandoms, Sources, and ships

(work in progress)

fandoms:

Anime & Manga

Sailor Moon

(ships: muti, poly)

Yugioh

(ships: multi, poly)

80s/90s anime

Video Games

Silent HIll

(ships: Harry x Heather, f/o crush: James Sunderland)

Fatal Frame

Final Fantasy

(ships: Squall x Seifer)

Legend of Zelda series

(ships: zelda x ganon, zelda x link, link x ganon x zelda, ganon x dark link)

Red Dead Redemption series

(ships: John x Arthur)

Fallout 

(ships: Courier x Benny, f/o crush: Doctor Dala)

Pokemon

Star Wars: KOTOR

(ships: Revan x Carth. f/o crush: Canderous Ordo)

Bioshock: Infinite

(ships: lutecest)

Detroit: Become Human

(ships: Hank x Connor)

Undertale/Deltarune

(Ships: Undyne x Alphys, multi, poly)

The Stanley Parable

(ships: Stanley x Narrator)

Mario Bros.

(ships: mario x luigi f/o crush: wario)

Elden Ring, Bloodborne

(ships: f/o crush: White Mask Varre)

Animal Crossing

(ships: f/o crush: Raymond)

indie/rpgmaker horror games (Ib, Mad Father)

Comics

Batman

(multiship/polyship, f/o crush: the riddler)

Sandman

(ships: dream x desire)

Archie Sonic the Hedgehog

TV shows & Cartoons

ABC’s Lost

(ships: sawyer x juliet, sun x jin, f/o crush: Ben Linus)

NBC Hannibal

(ships: Will x Hannibal)

Adventure Time

(ships: Bubblegum x Marceline)

Invader Zim

(ships: Zim x Dib)

Star Trek

(ships: multi, poly, f/o crush: Bones)

Beetlejuice

(ships: Beetlejuice x Lydia, f/o crush: Beetlejuice)

80s/90scartoons

Novels & Film adaptations

Lord of the Rings

(ships: gimli x legolas x aragorn, eowyn x grima, f/o crush: grima)

House of Leaves

(ships: navidson x karen)

William Gibson

Bruce Sterling

Twilight

Sherlock Holmes

(ships: Sherlock x John)

American Psycho

General

Monster High

Doll collecting

Occult & Paranormal

Noir/crime genre

creepypasta

cyberbpunk genre

Monster girls genre

Musicals genre

Kintype sources: Assume multi and poly shipping for all. NOTPs will be listen instead

Peter Pan    

(NOTPs: Hook x Wendy. Peter x Anyone)

Slayers    

NOTPs: Xelloss x Fillia)

Metal Gear   

(NOTPs: huey x anyone)

GTA 5   

Jem and The Holograms

Great Ace Attorney

Ace Attorney

(NOTPs: Manfred Von Karma x anyone)     

Urusei Yatsura    

Steven Universe    

Digimon Adventure 01/02   

Pathologic    

Resident Evil

Fire Emblem    

Danganronpa    

Marvel Comics   

Homestuck    

Girls Frontline    

Persona

[tudoacabaemtorrada]

My guy that's a picture of you through the lens of award winning photographer William Navidson

Oh 𝔽𝕌ℂ𝕂! You didn’t tell me you had a beast in your House.

[athena-hyena]

I made this goofy collage for one of my favorite books, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It started out as a birthday card for my boyfriend, but this is what it turned into. I just used a bunch of stuff from around my house, and bought the shadow box at Wal-Mart or something. I painted it black. 

Explanation of each object under the cut. (Spoiler warning, I guess, for those who haven’t read the book.) 

I wanted to do so much more with it, but ran out of time and/or materials. Maybe I’ll do more later. 

Johnny Truant:

(Fake) Drugs: I made obviously fake E out of mints and fake coke out of flour. For all of Johnny and Lude’s partying. 

Dice: Just remind me of Johnny. He’s a gambler for sure. I made the dice land on seven. The other die I just found and thought it belonged here.

Buttons and thread: For when Johnny is getting better and sews the buttons back on his coat with lots of thread. 

Pennies: “Give me your pennies. It’s only a copper answer anyway.” (page 504)

Condom and “I’ve never been to Texas” from all of Johnny’s sexual experiences, specifically when he couldn’t remember Ashley and confused “Texas” for “Tex’s”. 

Tattoo needles: Johnny’s tattoo parlor job.

Bugs Bunny stamp: I wanted to find something for Thumper and this was the closest I had. I also wanted a stamp for all of Johnny’s mom’s letters. 

Pills: Some of my old medication I found lying around (yikes, I know). I wanted pills for when Johnny tried to trick the reader into thinking he was getting better. 

I put a cat in there for Zampanò. I wanted to put some braille in there too, but couldn’t find any in time. 

Tape measures: obviously.

Navidson:   

Keys: for the house.

Matches: For when they were exploring the hallways/ staircase. And when Navy was running out of matches in the final exploration.

Chad and Daisy’s door drawing: I tried to make it as black as possible, and I made it an accordion shape to show it can expand and contract.

Hairbrush: Karen’s hairbrush that she liked so much.

Broken compass: (Well, I tried very hard to break it, but it wouldn’t crack) from the explorations. 

Maze: I drew a little maze.

Blood: (Fake)

Video camera and tape reels: For Navidson’s obsession/ career. And Karen’s later attempts to understand camera work (and Navidson).

An Elk tooth: I imagine a Minotaur would have Elk-like teeth? And it was the only expendable tooth I had handy.

Animal Fur: (from my black cat) for the Minotaur. 

Army man: For Navidson’s past.

Tape Measurers

Stairs: The little yellow accordion-looking things were supposed to be stairs going sideways and such.

I burned the last page of Dante’s Inferno down to the last lines: there are many allegories to Dante’s Inferno. And I wanted to reference Navy trying desperately to finish his book as it burned.

Book (General) 

Dante’s Inferno quotes about the Minotaur

The House of Leaves poem found on page 563

“This is not for you” is the best dedication I’ve ever read in a book. 

I included a very old skeletal leaf to convey the fragility expressed in the book, and for the obvious title reasons. 

[miswaken]

excerpts from House of Leaves that I just think are neat + inform my portrayal of Alice

---------------------------------

      Of course, [Will] Navidson’s pastoral take on his family’s move hardly reflects the far more complicated and significant impetus behind the project -- namely his foundering relationship with longtime companion Karen Green. While both have been perfectly content not to marry, Navidson’s constant assignments abroad have lead to increased alienation and untold personal difficulties. After nearly eleven years of constant departures and brief returns, Karen has made it clear that Navidson must either give up his professional habits or lose his family. Ultimately unable to make this choice, he compromises by turning reconciliation into a subject for documentation.

      None of this, however, is immediately apparent. In fact it requires some willful amnesia of the more compelling sequences ahead, if we are to detect the subtle valences operating between Will and Karen; or as Donna York phrased it, “the way they talk to each other, they way they look after each other, and of course the way they don’t.”

-------------------------------

      In the living room, Navidson discovers the echoes emanating from a dark doorless hallway whish has appeared out of nowhere in the west wall. Without hesitating, Navidson plunges in after them. Unfortunately the living room Hi 8 cannot follow him nor for that matter can Karen. She freezes on the threshold, unable to push herself into the darkness towards the faint flicker of light within...

      This is the first sign of Karen’s chronic disability. Up until now there has never been even the slightest indication that she suffers from crippling claustrophobia. By the time Navidson and the two children are safe and sound in the living room, Karen is drenched in sweat.

--------------------------------

      Navidson was no longer around, except of course Karen still saw him every day and in a way she had never seen him before -- not as a projection of her own insecurities and demons but just as Will Navidson, in flickering light, flung up by a 16mm projector on a paint-white wall.

-----------------------------------

      Leslie Stern, M.D.: More importantly Karen, what does it mean to you?

      Funny how out of this impressive array of modern day theorists, scientists, writers, and others, it is Karen’s therapist who asks, or rather forces, the most significant question. Thanks to her, Karen goes on to fashion another short piece in which she, surprisingly enough, never mentions the house, let alone any of the comments made by the glitterati.

      It is an extraordinary twist. Not once are those multiplying hallways ever addressed. Not once does Karen dwell on their darkness and cold. She produces six minutes of film that has absolutely nothing to do with that place. Instead her eye (and her heart) turn to what matters most to her about Ash Tree Lane; what in her own words... “that wicked place stole from me.”

      ...Karen gives her piece the somewhat faltering title A Brief History Of Who I Love...

-------------------------------

      There are only 8,160 frames in Karen’s film and yet they serve as a perfect counterpoint to that infinite stretch of hallways, rooms and stairs. The house is empty, her piece is full. The house is dark, her film glows. A growl haunts that place, her place is blessed by Charlie Parker. On Ash Tree Lane stands a house of darkness, cold, and emptiness. In 16mm stands a house of light, love, and colour.

      By following her heart, Karen made sense of what that place was not. She also discovered what she needed more than anything else. 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 reconciliations.

      Of course she had no idea what that would entail.

      Or how far she would have to go.

-----------------------------

      “He’s still alive,” she tells Reston over the phone. “I heard him last night. I couldn’t understand what he said. But I know I heard his voice.”

      Reston arrives the next day and stays until midnight, never hearing a thing. He seems more than a little concerned about Karen’s mental health.

      “If he is still in there Karen,” Reston says quietly. “He’s been there for over a month. I can’t see how there’s any way he could survive.”

      But a few hours after Reston leaves, Karen smiles again, apparently catching somewhere inside her the faint voice of Navidson. This happens over and over again, whether late at night or in the middle of the day. Sometimes Karen calls out to him, sometimes she just wanders from room to room, pushing her ear against walls or floors. Then on the afternoon of May 10th, she finds in the children’s bedroom, born out of nowhere, Navidson’s clothes, remnants of his pack and sleeping bag, and scattered across the floor, from corner to corner, cartridges of film, boxes of 16mm, and easily a dozen video tapes.

      She immediately calls Reston and tells him what has happened, asking him to drive over as soon as he can. Then she locates an AC adapter, plugs in a Hi 8 and begins rewinding one of the newly discovered tapes.

      The angle from the room mounted camcorder does not provide a view of her Hi 8 screen. Only Karen’s face is visible. Unfortunately, for some reason, she is also slightly out of focus. In fact the only thing in focus is the wall behind her where some of Daisy and Chad’s drawings still hang. The shot lasts an uncomfortable fifteen seconds, until abruptly that immutable surface disappears. In less than a blink, the white wall along with the drawings secured with yellowing scotch tape vanishes into an inky black.

      Since Karen faces the opposite direction, she fails to notice the change. Instead her attention remains fixed on the Hi 8 which has just finished rewinding the tape. But even as she pushes play, the yawn of dark does not waver. In fact it almost seems to be waiting for her, for the moment when she will finally divert her attention from the tiny screen and catch sight of the horror looming up behind her, which is of course exactly what she does when she finds out that the video tape shows...

-----------------------------

      nothing more now than the mere dark. The tape is blank.

      Finally when Karen does turn around to discover the real emptiness waiting behind her, she does not scream. Instead her chest heaves, powerless for a moment to take anything in or expel anything out. Oddly enough as she starts to retreat from the children’s bedroom, it almost looks as if something catchers her attention. A few minutes later, she returns with a halogen flashlight and steps towards the edge.

      Hanan Jabara suggests Karen heard something, though there is nothing even remotely like a sound on the Hi 8. Carlos Ellsberg agrees with Jabara: “Karen stops because of something she hears.” Only he qualifies this statement by adding, “the sound is obviously imagined. Another example of how the mind, any mind, consistently seeks to impose itself upon the abyss.”

      As everyone knows, Karen stands there on the brink for several minutes, pointing her flashlight into the darkness and calling out for Navidson. When she finally does step inside, she takes no deep breath and makes no announcement. She just steps forward and disappears behind the black curtain. A second later that cold hollow disappears too, replaced by the wall, exactly as it was before, except for one thing: all the children’s drawings are gone.

      Karen’s action inspired Paul Auster to conjure up a short internal monologue tracing the directions of her thoughts. Donna Tartt also wrote an inventive portrayal of Karen’s dilemma. Except in Tartt’s version, instead of stepping into darkness, Karen returns to New York and marries a wealthy magazine publisher. Purportedly there even exists an opera based on The Navidson Record, written from Karen’s perspective, with this last step into the void serving as the subject for the final aria. 

      Whatever ultimately allows Karen to overcome her fears, there is little doubt her love for Navidson is the primary catalyst. Her desire to embrace him as she has never done before defeats the memories of that dark well... In this moment, she displays the restorative power of what Erich Fromm terms the development of “symbiotic relationships” through personal courage.

      Critic Guyon Keller argues that the role of vision is integral to Karen’s success:

I believe Karen could never have crossed that line had she not first made those two remarkable cinematic moment: What Some Have Thought and A Brief History Of Who I Love. By relearning to see Navidson, she saw what he wasn’t and consequently began to see herself much more clearly.

      Esteemed Italian translator Sophia Blynn takes Keller’s comments a little further:

The most important light Karen carried into that place was the memory of Navidson. And Navidson was no different. Though it’s commonly assumed his last [recorded] word was “care” or the start of “careful,” I would argue differently. I believe this utterance is really just the first syllable of the very name on which his mind and his heart had finally come to rest. His only hope, his only meaning: “Karen.”

      Regardless of what finally enabled her to walk across that threshold, forty-nine minutes later a neighbor saw Karen crying on the front lawn, a pink ribbon in her hair, Navidson cradled in her lap.

------------------------------------------

      As to what happened after Karen disappeared from view, the only existing account comes from a short interview conducted by a college journalist from William & Mary:

Karen: As soon as I walked in there, I started shivering. It was so cold and dark. I turned around to see where I was but where I’d come from was gone. I started hyperventilating. I couldn’t breathe. I was going to die. But somehow I managed to keep moving. I kept putting one foot in front of the other until I found him.

Q: You knew he was there?

Karen: No, but that’s what I was thinking. And then he was there, right at my feet, no clothes on and all curled up. His hand was white as ice. [She holds back the tears.] When I saw him like that it didn’t matter anymore where I was. I’d never felt that, well, free before.

[Long pause]

Q: What happened then?

Karen: I held him. He was alive. He made a sound when I cradled his head in my arms. I couldn’t understand what he was saying at first but then I realized the flashlight was hurting his eyes. So I turned it off and held him in the darkness.

[Another long pause]

Q: How did you get him out of the house?

Karen: It just dissolved.

Q: Dissolved? What do you mean?

Karen: Like a ad dream. We were in pitch blackness and then I saw, no... actually my eyes were closed. I felt this warm, sweet air on my face, and then I opened my eyes and I could see trees and grass. I thought to myself, “We’ve died. We’ve died and this is where you go after you die.” But it turned out to be just our front yard.

Q: You’re saying the house dissolved?

Karen: [No response]

Q: How’s that possible? It’s still there, isn’t it?

END OF INTERVIEW

--------------

      In Passion for Pity and Other Recipes For Disaster (London: Greenhill Books, 1996) Helmut Muir cried: “They both live. They even get married. It’s a happy ending.”

      Which is true. Both Karen and Will Navidson survive their ordeal and they do exchange conjugal vows in Vermont. Of course, is it really possible to look at Navidson’s ravaged face, the patch covering his left eye, the absence of a hand, the crutch wedged under his armpit, and call it a “happy” ending? Even putting aside the physical cost, what about the unseen emotional trauma which Muir so casually dismisses?

      The Navidsons may have left the house, they may have even left Virginia, but they will never be able to leave the memory of that place.

[grandhotelabyss]

Thanks, great question! I don’t react all that viscerally to fictional prose these days. I also agree with Lovecraft when he writes in Supernatural Horror in Literature about how true horror requires a metaphysical dimension, what he calls “cosmic horror.” This disqualifies from the truly frightening merely human evil unless connected with this horror-from-beyond. For this reason, I’d separate “most frightening,” which for me implies Lovecraft’s stricture, from “most disturbing,” which can be more purely material or human-scale. A few answers, then:

When I was a child, around 11 or 12, the most frightening book was definitely The Exorcist, which I read in one day and then didn’t want to have in the same room with me: my dad’s old crack-spined purple paperback movie tie-in edition from the ’70s with the hardcover’s out-of-focus demon-girl face on the front bisected by a banner with some boasts about the film. 

I found the book almost more frightening than the movie (which I’d seen in a TV-redacted version when my age was in the single digits) because more detailed and portentous. From the tortured epigraphs forward, the last three words on the epigraph page being “Dachau  Auschwitz  Buchenwald,” the whole modern world seems possessed as far as Blatty was concerned. Obviously the movie is the superior work of art and the novel in fact practically a screenplay. James Baldwin’s quip, “I forced myself to read The Exorcist—a difficult matter, since it is not written,” is fair. But these aesthetic niceties didn’t comfort me in childhood. Whether the novel will have the same effect on adults not raised Catholic, I’m not sure. 

Since I brought it up, I find James Baldwin’s aforementioned celebrated critique of the movie a bit small-minded. His hostile plot summary is admittedly very funny, but a skilled writer can do that to any narrative. And especially insofar as Baldwin’s denunciation also encompasses Ken Russell’s The Devils, I detect an iconoclastic Protestant dislike of Catholic phantasmagoria beneath the political bluster of the essay’s peroration, which just amounts to the usual leftist admonition that art must be about social injustice. To give Baldwin his due, though, this sentence is justly immortal:

For, I have seen the devil, by day and by night, and have seen him in you and in me: in the eyes of the cop and the sheriff and the deputy, the land­lord, the housewife, the football player: in the eyes of some junkies, the eyes of some preachers, the eyes of some governors, presidents, wardens, in the eyes of some orphans, and in the eyes of my father, and in my mirror.

But I digress. The most unsettling thing I ever read in a novel as an adult must be the central narrative, “The Navidson Record,” in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. The rest of the book isn’t that good, as I complain in this review written in a comic vein. But Danielewski’s vertiginous pit-of-the-stomach play with the invasion of cosmic scale into private life recalls Borges, whose own stories, come to think of it, don’t get enough credit for creating a real frisson of metaphysical terror.

Now for “disturbing,” I’m afraid I have to take leave of prose, which just doesn’t cut that deeply for me (I’ve been behind the curtain, as it were). As I recalled in my essay on the graphic novel From Hell, the first time I read the chapter where William Gull spends 30 pages dismembering Mary Kelly (or some other woman in her stead) as relevant mythical archetypes and architectural motifs flicker at the edge of his awareness, I literally threw the book down in admiring revulsion. I felt Moore and Campbell had genuinely conveyed a certain kind of extreme consciousness or fugue state that disquietingly fused aesthetic achievement, political power, mystical experience, and misogynist murder into one and the same event—not how I’d choose to look at things, but useful knowledge insofar as it is how some other influential people do so choose. 

From Hell is also a work saturated in conspiracy theory, and this is the other type of reading, often online, often purportedly but disputably nonfictional, that actually disturbs me, for all its flights of fancy, for all its grains of truth. I still remember when I discovered the Rigorous Intuition blog in the early 2000s. Its counterintuitive mix of leftism with Satanic Panic—I would at that time have dismissed the latter without the former—had me afraid to leave the apartment lest Michael Aquino in his black robe (say, how am I connected to Michael Aquino?) was going to jump me in an alley. A half-silly notion—only half, though, as I do agree with Baldwin that there must be something evil, if we may call anything evil, in many if not most of the principalities and powers that be.

[actionhorse]

Awesome possum!

@some-useless-lesbian @sluggy-wuggy @i-am-the-plant

Blorbo Poll

Rules: make a poll with five of your all-time favourite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favourite.

Tagged by @powersuitup. Probably very predictable picks for anyone who knows me but whatevs.

NP tagging @tweetthang96, @coolnerdyrn, @kayliemalinza, @raaorqtpbpdy, and @thephilosophersapprentice.

[nodutra19]

ANOTHER SKETCH

In about ten minutes I drew the bastard. I picture him as an "All-American" man, somehow who belongs in an office and whose great grampappy got those 50 acres and a mule after the Civil War. I have never worked in an office. And also with a dash of Aizen and some French actor I get horny for once a year. He was a sex icon in Japan back in the day.

[monsteredboy]

TAGGED BY: no one but technically @archivedgod​

TAGGING: @demolitiongirl​, @neonnoise​, @mustscream, whoever else wants to i’m too tired to tag lots of people

NICKNAMES: kayla isn’t my real name fuckers but it’s close enough TIME RN: 11:17 pm on the west coast LAST THING I GOOGLED: whether amazon has electronic gift cards FAVORITE MUSIC ARTISTS: idk probably that one band with the goats in the name SONG STUCK IN MY HEAD: like the last 2 or 3 verses of heel turn 2 LAST TV SHOW I WATCHED: i started izombie because blair pressured me WHAT AM I WEARING RIGHT NOW: a really old t-shirt, underwear, and pajama pants WHEN I CREATED THIS BLOG: april 2015. gabe’s old as fuck THE KIND OF STUFF I POST: like 15 replies at a time and then 1 ooc post in between DO I HAVE OTHER BLOGS: nope DO I GET ASKS REGULARLY: i guess?? WHY DID I CHOOSE MY URL: [points at gabriel ramos] HOGWARTS HOUSE: i was like split between slytherin and ravenclaw last time i checked POKEMON TEAM: what the fuck is a pokemon really FAVORITE COLORS: teal AVERAGE HOURS OF SLEEP: 5 on weekdays, like 9+ on weekends LUCKY NUMBERS: pre-calculus is the only college class i’ve gotten a b in so honestly fuck numbers FAVORITE CHARACTERS: umm. amy dunne, karen navidson, mako mori, and finally [inhales] medea, grendel’s mother, abigail williams, lady macbeth, amy dunne, my Cool Girl (tm) squad subverting usual women’s roles BLANKETS I SLEEP WITH: like a sheet if it’s vegas summers or 3 blankets if it’s vegas winters

[a-genuine-threat-to-cephalopoda]

william navidson type beat

*goes here to take a five and a half minute bong rip*