Breathing House of Leaves Tattoos

Everybody knows how much I love Six Feet Under and, after five incredible seasons, its finale and last sequence with Claire driving cross-country and time passing on relentlessly. And I love the song that plays over it and have listened to it so many times but I just came around to see the actual music video of it for the first time: Sia - Breathe Me

Why does it remind me of House of Leaves so much? Along with the video, I think, the song reverberates much much more with the book than Poe's Haunted or Angry Johnny.

Talking about House of Leaves, I came across this book cover art by Bas Alberts, which made 3rd place in the 50 Watts' polish book cover contest:

Since I liked it so much, I altered it and put it on a shirt. It's under a creative commons license and I only have to give the designer's name, which I did above and will tell everybody who asks me about the shirt.

Note: The blue leaves are actually navy-blue and the square next to the word House is exactly 5/16 of an inch big + the whole thing and therefore the words are mirrored. Then I made something up for the back, too.

I still need some suggestions for a House of Leaves inspired tattoo. Shouldn't be as big as these:

Or maybe something Bret Easton Ellis?

or David Foster Wallace?

Why couldn't I find a pic of a thumper tattoo barely an inch from a shaved pussy? This is the internet! Has nobody got such a tattoo? I can hardly believe that.

World of Leaves

Enjoying literature is not an easy thing to do. At least not if you try to lead a normal life, that is, whatever that is. Because there is so much of it around. Nothing but letters in endless combinations. Sometimes I wonder if I would go mad or start a philosophical or armed war in Borges's Library of Babel, engage in bare-knuckle-fights, bludgeon the skulls and smash the brains of fellow searchers with uncreased spines of books that have never been opened. Would I take a pencil with me and scribble in the margins, multiplying the already infinite number of possible texts further or would I stab my own eyes and pierce my tongue and throat with it to free myself from the curse of written and spoken language? I would have to pierce my eardrum as well as my own brains, too, writing my last unreadable message with lines of dripping blood.

Having just finished Cosmopolis, I am confronted with choices that I can hardly grasp. Every step from now can lead me in the wrong direction. What should I read next? Should I go back to DeLillo's beginnings and read him in chronological order or rather go directly to Underworld? What about Pynchon? Gravity's Rainbow or start with V.? What about the still not finished Barthelme and Barth? Robert Coover's Universal Baseball Association, because DFW mentioned it in some interview? And DFW himself. Besides Infinite Jest and The Pale King and some of his journalism, I haven't read anything else. What about rereading Infinite Jest? And Don Quixote, the new 70,- € German translation is still waiting for me, as well as Bolano's 2666 and Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Paul Auster after The New York Trilogy, another round of House of Leaves, Catcher in The Rye or turn to Franny & Zooey and Salinger's other writings? Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is waiting on my bookshelf for the last 6 years or so. Maybe 8. I was a totally different being back then (well, not so radically different as I wished I would be.) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or some more Vonnegut or Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, what about Proust and Nabokov and every single Sherlock Holmes story? William Gibson, James Ellroy, William Gaddis, Zadie Smith and Flannery O'Connor. Toni Morrison. I could go on for days, literally, and weeks, losing much of the precious time I would otherwise spend reading some of that (or other) novels. One thing at least seems to be pretty clear to me: After finishing Franzen's self-indulging The Discomfort Zone, he will be off my reading list for a long, long time.

DFW, Karen Green and MZD

I just found this in a Newsweek article considering the David Foster Wallace archive at the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas:

After his suicide, Nadell drove out to join Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, who was eager to move out of a haunted house.

What struck me immediately upon reading Infinite Jest (upon a myriad of other things) - I had read House of Leaves before that - was the connection between Wallace's superdrug DMZ and Danielewski's initials MZD. Infinite Jest is, through its footnotes, framed inside a network of drugs. House of Leaves - through Johnny's introduction - also dives right into it. The other thing is the Karen Green connection.

Does anyone know more about if Wallace and Danielewski knew each other or what each other's work meant to them? Did Karen and Dave already know each other before House of Leaves was published? This Guardian article about Karen gives at least the hint that they first met after he published "The Depressed Person" in Harper's Magazine in 1998, which would later become part of his short story collection "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men". With House of Leaves being first published in 2000 this gives definitely time for character name corrections on MZD's account.
In that article is something else, very remarkable I think, in it:

Green became an amateur expert on the diagrammatic language of psychiatric records: "That's a depressed person's brain," she says of a little grouping of Technicolor splashes. "It's coded differently."

And it reminds me of how DFW always used to speak and write about the hardwiredness of clinical depression and addiction. Karen Green also says this, which I will leave without a comment (although, isn't the bare fact that I say I will give no comment, a very strong comment in itself? Whatever, the autopsy report is right here):

"What do you do when your husband's autopsy report is on the internet and is deemed a subject worthy of fucking literary criticism?"

Regarding publishing of the unfinished The Pale King, she remarks:

"The notes that he took for the book and chapters that were complete, were left in a neat pile on his desk in the garage where he worked. And his lamps were on it, illuminating it. So I have no doubt in my mind this is what he wanted. It was in as organised a state as David ever left anything."

and also:

One of Green's many fears for the publication of The Pale King is that it will be read as an extended suicide note, as an explanation for the ending that Wallace gave himself.