Foreword

## Pt. 1 - Foreword

The **Foreword** is a message from The Editors that the First Edition of the House of Leaves was privately distributed and did not contain Chapter 21, Appendix II, Appendix III, or the index. The Editors emphasize they made every effort to accurately translate and credit all sources, and will "gladly correct" all errors brought to their attention.

## Commentary.

First of all, life is bullshit. I want you to keep that fact in mind as you read this, and keep reciting that it's bullshit all the way through, cause remembering that life is bullshit will help you understand the hunger of the Minotaur. Plus, I can't deny that it segues nicely to my next point:

The Navidson Record is real.

Is it a real depiction of events in the early 1990s? I'm not saying that. But it's a fucking real film. Terrible viewing material for a grown-ass man with a generalized anxiety disorder smoking cigarettes at 3 AM at your computer. The best I can put it, think of it like watching an episode of a show you've seen before. You know the plot structure, the framing, and where each line of dialogue leads - until suddenly you don't. Maybe Jim doesn't come back from Stratford, or Pam marries Roy, or Phyliss gets diagnosed with early onset dementia. You know this isn't how it's supposed to go; it's too real; it's not real enough; it's a joke in poor taste; it's a loud fart at a funeral; it's a familiar house that never ends.

I first came across The Navidson Record on a message forum dedicated to lost media around 2010 or something. It was just a .gif of several seconds from the movie and made nearly unwatchable from compression artifacts. Just a random moment when Navy peers through the lens of his camera down the endless throat of the house. I had no idea what I was watching, and I would have forgotten about it entirely had I not stumbled across a link to The Navidson Record on a website known as 4chan about one or two years later. The link was posted in a thread about Bitcoin with no comment from the poster, this was back when crypto users were criminals and tech-addicted entrepreneurs, which led to a YouTube video with only a few views. The title of the video was just a random string of numbers and letters ending in .mp4. And then I watched.

I had never heard of the now-famous study of the film itself, House of Leaves, by Zampanò. The Navidson Record I watched was roughly eight minutes in length, give or take. I have no idea what happened to the putative five extra minutes missing from the original cut, and to be honest, I'm not quite sure it exists.

I wish I had downloaded the video when I had the chance. But two days later, my disciplinary boards came back and I was expelled. Too bad, because I was in a rare moment of lucidity, one better than any drug could deliver. I had to pack my shit and exit the campus stage left, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

"What the fuck?" my dad asked when I got home. "What the fuck? What the fuck?"

I knew he spent a lot of money on my tuition. I knew I let him down, but I felt, maybe for the first time in years, that I was strong enough to do the things I needed to do.

~ Michael Levy-Gauss, "Commentaries on *House of Leaves*", 3 *Spiti* 7 (2017).

## References

1. ↑ Minotaur (Mythical Character)
2. ↑ "I think a message too often overlooked in the film is the deceptive concept of being destroyed by the Minotaur. To be captured and eaten inside the House *feels* like it would be significant, meaningful, to the story but it's not. What a taurus devours becomes bull shit." An apocryphal quote attributed to author Stephen King about watching The Navidson Record. I see it recycled on the internet, but I have failed to find an original source.
3. ↑ *The Office*, created by Greg Daniels and Roger Nygard, Deedle-Dee Productions and Universal Media Studios, (2005-2013).
4. ↑ I'm fairly certain a lot of people have seen this before, they just don't know it's significance, which is fucking ironic given the gravity, and the levity, and the humdrum banality of the House.
5. ↑ Zampanò, *House of Leaves*, ed. by Johnny Truant & Mark Danielewski et al. (2000).