{"id":379,"date":"2009-03-01T22:30:54","date_gmt":"2009-03-02T03:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=379"},"modified":"2009-03-01T22:33:26","modified_gmt":"2009-03-02T03:33:26","slug":"379","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/?p=379","title":{"rendered":"MZD Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

As much as I enjoyed House of Leaves<\/em>, paying as close attention as I could to all the details regarding Johnny, Navy, Zampano, Pelafina, etc., as well as paying attention to the dense layers of “reality,” there was one layer of the book that eluded me while reading it that now I realize, after reading the interview with Danielewski, should have been glaringly obvious. I mentioned in a previous post that I didn’t think once of MZD the entire time I read HOL. But now I’m wondering… well, the story of Navidson gives us insight into the character of Zampano, the treatment of and reaction to Zampano’s text gives us insight into Johnny Truant, and by the same logic, this work of fiction (as all works of fiction, do to some extent) should give a lot of insight into who MZD himself is, and that has me wondering if that wasn’t the point all along. I don’t mean who he is as a writer, but who he is a person… his history, his fears, his hopes, and in particular his relationship to his father and how it has shaped him.<\/p>\n

I’m almost tempted to reread the book (ha) with this new layer, the ultimately real (or “real” or Real) layer, firmly in my mind. Hearing about MZD’s father, his childhood, finding out that the Pelican Poems are as much\u00a0 MZD’s\u00a0 (insofar as MZD writing them years before when traveling in Europe as a kid) as they are Truant’s (or were these Zampano’s poems? I forget) , made me realize how much of the book is very much about MZD and makes me feel like he was trying to tell me that all along through the story within a story within a story device.<\/p>\n

I also found it interesting that Danielewski didn’t expect the readers to read the letters to Truant from his mother until after. In other words, he thought that most readers would wait to read them rather than stop in the middle of the Navidson Record to check out the letters at the end. In the interview, he said that there’s two different entrances to the text based on what you choose.<\/p>\n

By the way, I also just added La Strada to my netflix queue, to delve deeper into the character of the mysterious Zampano who may be transplanted from another work of fiction by a different author, which makes the character simultaneously more and less real at the same time.<\/p>\n

Having no had no feel for who MZD really is prior to my reading this interview (except that he had a somewhat famous sister), I found the whole thing fascinating. It really read to me as a continuation of HoL<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As much as I enjoyed House of Leaves, paying as close attention as I could to all the details regarding Johnny, Navy, Zampano, Pelafina, etc., as well as paying attention to the dense layers of “reality,” there was one layer of the book that eluded me while reading it that now I realize, after reading … Continue reading MZD Interview<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-week-6-mzd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=379"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2009\/660\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}