ㅤㅤㅤㅤI can suddenly imagine the cracked voice I never heard. Lips barely creasing into a smile. Eyes pinned on darkness: “Irony? Irony can never be more than our own personal Maginot Line; the drawing of it, for the most part, purely arbitrary.”
ㅤㅤㅤㅤIt’s not surprising then that when it came to undermining his own work, the old man was superbly capable. False quotes or invented sources, however, all pale in comparison to his biggest joke.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤZampanô writes constantly about seeing. What we see, how we see and what in turn we can’t see. Over and over again, in one form or another, he returns to the subject of light, space, shape, line, color, focus, tone, contrast, movement, rhythm, perspective and composition. None of which is surprising considering Zampanô’s piece centers on a documentary film called The Navidson Record made by a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who must somehow capture the most difficult subject of all: the sight of darkness itself.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤOdd, to say the least.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAt first I figured Zampanô was just a bleak old dude, the kind who makes Itchy and Scratchy look like Calvin and Hobbes. His apartment, however, didn’t come close to anything envisioned by Joel-Peter Witkin or what’s routinely revealed on the news. Sure his place was eclectic but hardly grotesque or even that far out of the ordinary, until of course you took a more careful look and realized—hey why are all these candles unused? Why no clocks, none on the walls, not even on the corner of a dresser? And what’s with these strange, pale books or the fact that there’s hardly a goddamn bulb in the whole apartment, not even one in the refrigerator? Well that, of course, was Zampanô’s greatest ironic gesture; love of love written by the broken hearted; love of life written by the dead: all this language of light, film and photography, and he hadn’t seen a thing since the mid- fifties.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤHe was blind as a bat.

ㅤㅤㅤㅤAlmost half the books he owned were in Braille. Lude and Flaze both confirmed that over the years the old guy had had numerous readers visiting him during the day. Some of these came
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Pub: 03 Jun 2026 12:53 UTC

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