10 Essential Books That Capture Los Angeles in All Its Sublime, Beautiful Darkness Literary Hub
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A physical library provides new encounters with ourselves and the world – it's also an ideal space for relaxation and study. When you first experience The Meridian at Lake San Marcos, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve entered a five-star resort rather than a retirement community. Seniors enjoy elegant surroundings, a vibrant atmosphere, luxurious amenities and exquisite service — all designed around the needs and desires of independent living, assisted living, and memory care. Located next to Lake San Marcos in a stunning area of San Marcos, CA, the community boasts easy access to upscale shopping and dining, historical destinations, and more.
Minor characters
The video for "Hey Pretty" also features Mark Danielewski reading from House of Leaves (pp. 88–89), and in House of Leaves, the band Liberty Bell's lyrics were also songs on Poe's album. In the beginning of the book, Truant appears to be a normal, reasonably attractive young man who happens upon a trunk full of notes left behind by the now deceased Zampanò. As Truant begins to do the editing, however, he begins to lose the tenuous grip he has on reality, and his life begins to erode around him. He stops bathing, rarely eats, stops going to work, and distances himself from essentially everyone, all in pursuit of organizing the book into a finished work that, he hopes, will finally bring him peace. The explorations, already challenged by the maze's inhospitable, vast, and ever-shifting nature, finally led to disaster when one of the crew turned on the rest.
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In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience, exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag. Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet. In part, House of Leaves is also about obsession, a trait it demands from its readers; to simply finish the book, with its deliberately complex structure, is an act of dedication – for some more than others. Though Pelafina's letters and Johnny's footnotes contain similar accounts of their past, their memories also differ greatly at times, due to both Pelafina's and Johnny's questionable mental states.
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Peters had no idea there was a blind character in House of Leaves before he started it, and says the book’s use of sound, rather than visual descriptions, made it a unique reading experience for him. “We always read about visual descriptions of characters, places and objects, but what literature does not understand is, though sight is an important sense, it is one of five,” he says. House of Leaves was accompanied by a companion piece (or vice versa), a full-length album called Haunted recorded by Danielewski's sister, Anne Danielewski, known professionally as Poe. The two works cross-pollinated heavily over the course of their creations, each inspiring the other in various ways.
You can almost smell the Metro bus exhaust, taste the Modelos and cigarettes. So often Los Angeles is depicted as history-less, its people lacking authenticity. This is a city filled with Bukowski haunts, it’s where Didion once lived, and human connection can be found in a Jon’s grocery parking lot talking with a stranger, or on a solitary hike in Griffith Park—or just in glimpsing a neighbor in their bedroom.
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Though Truant attributes Zampanò as the author of The Navidson Record, Truant offers few concrete details about Zampanò's character or past, citing only information learned from his former acquaintances. These include neighbors and various students and social workers, exclusively female, who volunteered as readers for Zampanò's research. Unable to even determine Zampanò's full name, Truant only confirms that Zampanò became blind some time during the 1950s, and was approximately eighty years old at the time of his death. Truant also learns that Zampanò was erratic and capricious in his lifestyle and writing habits, diagnosing him with graphomania. In support, Zampanò cites or quotes articles, journals, symposia, books, magazines, TV programs, and interviews, many supposedly dedicated to this film.
In the maze, they recorded footage of a multitude of corridors and rooms, completely unlit and featureless, with smooth ash-gray walls, floors, and ceilings. The maze is said to be silent save for the sound of a periodic low growl, which is never fully explained. Rather than Danielewski, the title page of House of Leaves credits two men named Zampanò and Johnny Truant as its authors.
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Johnny Truant is a tattoo shop employee living in Hollywood who frequently drinks, uses drugs, and has sex with women. He and his friend, Lude, discover The Navidson Record in the room of a recently-deceased man named Zampanò. Johnny takes the manuscript home and begins reading it, becoming more and more obsessed with it as time goes on.
Will Navidson is described as having become a successful war photographer thanks to an early military career in war-torn regions, though haunted by his role as an impartial documentarist of war. Navidson is said to be a Pulitzer winner and recipient of prestigious arts grants, who has jeopardized his relationship with Karen due to years of prolonged absences while working overseas. As a conciliatory gesture, Navidson commits to prioritizing family over work by moving to the countryside. After promising Karen not to enter the hallway, he sends a crew in his stead to explore the maze, but privately chafes at this prohibition and breaks his word behind Karen's back.
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When the disconsolate Billy meets the unstoppable Bunny, comedy takes a dive into the tragedy it always wanted to be. “I would describe [myself as] totally blind,” says Timothy Peters, a fan of the book who has a genetic eye condition called Leber congenital amaurosis. Due to its structure, House of Leaves doesn’t work well as an audiobook, but Peters listened to a bootleg version on YouTube before he discovered a braille copy around 1,400 pages long. The album Haunted also draws heavily from the novel, featuring tracks called "House of Leaves", "Exploration B" and "5&½ Minute Hallway", and many less obvious references.
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The text is further marred by missing pages, missing footnotes, missing supplemental documents, and text accidentally or deliberately destroyed by Zampanò, Truant, or unknown causes. Many fixate on movie stars’ graves, rock clubs, surf beaches and food trucks. Some, like the 2021 “People’s Guide to Los Angeles,” another UC Press project, refreshingly tout landmarks of ethnic minorities and labor activism. It documents, for example, the former Black Panther headquarters raided by police and a sweatshop that imprisoned immigrant workers. After decades of enthusiastically giving Los Angeles tours to out-of-town friends and family, and even co-authoring a walking guide to the city, I’m all too aware that things have changed.
A brilliant sendup of the pervasive insanity that commands our lives, it spews a black hilarity bordering on farce that, until the play’s final and--ironically--tenderest moments, hides the ferocity of the vision. Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. Karen returns to New York with the children, but Will stays for several months in Virginia. Anecdotally, young men hold a particular reverence for the novel – perhaps for this reason. “I think Danielewski wrote this for everyone, but I think a lot of men who weren’t necessarily raised with the same toolset with regards to emotional intelligence many women have should be able to find something valuable there, in terms of dealing with their grief and trauma,” says Muir.
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