Scribble Death.

by Franz Kamin

In what has been called a post-modern Gothic experimental novel, Franz Kamin interlaces dream-narrative with death-event vignettes and revelations concerning the composition of the text. He links the scribbling of children, artists and dreamers with the hopes and terrors of obsession and delirium. Through all of this one may almost detect a somber chuckling from the authorial domain. In a Baudelairean sense, Kamin extends the comic to new ranges of the grotesque.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Taken from Wikipedia:

Franz Kamin (May 25, 1941 – April 11, 2010) was a prolific American author, composer, and pianist whose works were modelled on topology, general systems theory, meditational processes, and chance operations.[1]

Born in Milwaukee, Kamin studied composition at the University of Oklahoma with Spencer Norton, and at Indiana University with Roque Cordero, where he also studied piano with Alfonso Montecino. While at IU, Kamin, together with fellow composer James Brody organized FIASCO, an experimental collective which meet weekly in Bloomington from 1966 to 1972. Among his compositions from this period was "The Concert of Doors", a synaesthetic work in which a number of doors, each of vastly differing design, some found, some constructed, ranging from comical to mysterious, were set on a path through a woods to be traversed by the audience-participants.[2] Kamin moved to New York in the 1970s and collaborated with cellist Charlotte Moorman, a fixture in the downtown avant-garde scene at that time. He eventually settled in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he remained for the rest of his life.[3]

Kamin is published in two books (1980's Ann Margaret Loves You & other psychotopological diversions and 1986's Scribble Death) by Station Hill Press. Several of his shorter works, musical scores and an LP recording of Behavioral Drift II and Rugugmool have also been published.[4]

He was killed in a car crash in Roseville, Minnesota when a car driven by James Brody, who also died, left the road, jumped a curb, and hit a tree. The two composers were returning from a SEAMUS festival in St. Cloud, Minnesota.[5][3] Their names were released on April 12, 2010, by the Ramsey County medical examiner's office.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I am the spider’s risk”

Franz Kamin’s oneiric forms as a composer and poet—the invented languages, conceptual mythologies, poetry and fiction, memoir narratives, musical compositions, theatrical intermedia events—and the innovative flyers, invitations, gifts, and books that helped propel his endeavors through communities in St. Paul, New York City, and Baltimore—hypnogogically maneuver the waking world in an effort to be awake inside the imagination. Franz’s experiments in redefining the limits of creativity function similarly to the way space and time interact with matter: by warping and being warped. If creativity is a kind of ship for altering space and time, Franz’s ship threads through the self and its worlds leaving nothing intact, terraforming the inner and outer environments including the spacetime through which it travels, populated by the people who supported his vision and the work itself—the forms he invented to fly.

I accompanied Mad Scientist & myPoem tENTATIVELY, a CONVENIENCE on part of his documentary movie project commemorating the life and work of his friend Franz, who died in a car crash in April 2010 with his longtime collaborator James (Sarmad) Brody. tENTATIVELY first became aware of Franz’s work in 1974 at the 11th Annual Avant-Garde Festival in New York City where he encountered “A RITUAL EMBEDDING of the SPIDER’S RISK into non-HAUSDORF M-SPACE,” a wholly original page of text that tENTATIVELY had me read aloud for the documentary while he was filmed feverishly manhandling Franz’s books and other artifacts. The text describes, among other mysteries, the “UNDEAD: when two people are together under an emotional bond, their globals tend to combine into a ‘fluid couple’ within which they are both embedded….when these two part the entire fluid couple becomes the new global of each of them separately…the residue of the ‘other’ in each of the two globals is the UNDEAD, & maintains an elemental life of its own not similar to the virtual behavior of its former person: yet, it is dangerously mistaken for a true global being.”

“…you suddenly realize you’re hearing the world’s last love story.”—Robert Kelly in his blurb to Franz Kamin’s Scribble Death

In the blurb to my book, iEpiphany, Lyn Hejinian says the book “might easily have been titled Pleiades, after the constellation one can see only as an elusiveness and by not looking at it directly.” Similarly, planets not normally visible can be detected by seeing a nearby star wobble. Through seeing Franz without ever having met him by way of the documentary movie project—which includes interviews and conversations with those who loved and supported him—and by way of his books given to me by his friends and publishers George and Susan Quasha and Mitch Highfill, I know what it’s like to discover a planet. (And its solar system….)

Scribble Death (Station Hill Press, 1986) is a book of blurred forms. Writing autobiographically through the narration of his dreams, the waking world, and the collisions between in a series of “novelettes,” which contain stories, lived experiences, poems, re/definitions, and more, Franz seeks human connection through his explorations into consciousness, imagination, love and friendship, and self knowledge. In one overtly self-reflexive section, Franz asks the reader to have the following “closure” read to them or to record their own voice reading the closure while giving ample pauses between word groups. If the suggestion is too impractical or if the reader is lazy, Franz writes, then the reader can read the closure silently, then aloud, then silently and rapidly. In one closure he describes walking in the city. As he walks he sees people he knows and they begin to know him. They begin walking together, and soon the reader is walking with him, getting to know him, knowing the others, becoming known. The closure is a spell for intimacy, and in any other context it might provide an emotionally satisfying albeit theoretically flimsy framework for interpreting its themes: the reader and writer, self and other. However, in the context of Scribble Death, where violent and disturbing dream imagery co-mingles with experiences lived through language aware of itself as a medium—as well as the sophisticated Blakean re/definition system and formal experimentation animating all of Franz’s work—walking together constitutes more than a simple celebration of humanity; it illustrates the subterranean ironies of the work’s classification as “Fiction.” Are his dreams fiction? Or is his fiction dreaming? If we walk with Franz as he walks with others, if we connect and commune, we will eventually be walking (and waking) in Franz’s dreams, which are sometimes nightmares.

These nightmares include the step-by-step narration of the inch-by-inch burning of a baby’s body, the graphic murder of a young child while being sexually molested by an old woman, and the detailed dismemberment of a couple while they are having sex. In less physically violent but equally haunting scenarios, people are shuttled like cattle into rooms where they, in terrifying accounts of both willing and non-willing subjugation, become victims of dystopian rituals:

"The man touches her lightly on the shoulder, and she kneels down so he is standing directly behind her. I can see her head and most of her shoulders. The man places the wedging instrument device carefully behind her neck, and taps it with the mallet. (Thud.) She gasps. What I see is a flash of dull ghost-like light in which an illuminated image of a skeleton falls off to the right, a messy figure made up of mouldy organs and tubes and stuff falls off to the left, and a beam of wavery light shoots up directly from the top of her head. All this passes very quickly. She rises somewhat unsteadily but does not seem to be much worse off than before."

What makes these nightmares so powerful is not only that they are presented alongside waking-world narrative strategies such as the writer addressing the reader—is this the dreamer desperately startled awake?—and only to find they are still in the book? (like waking from a nightmare only to discover you’re still dreaming?)—but also the storyboard detail to which the brutality is described. These are professionally-narrated nightmares situated within a formal structure that serves the project’s larger aims: to blur the boundaries between dream and reality, imagination and cognition. Waking-Franz and dreaming-Franz appear to be the same “character,” further superinducing reality onto dreams and dreams onto reality as Franz the author, narrator, and character coalesce through his cross-genre pollination of forms.

Not all of the dreams in Scribble Death are nightmares. Franz encounters people who explain concepts that seem to serve as descriptions for creativity and the book itself:

“'Listen,' he said. 'Before you leave I better tell you about the appendoma.' (I didn’t know the word. He seemed to have lost his dialect.) 'You see,' he went on, taking a pencil and small pad of paper from his pocket 'the generalized life-course looks like this.' He started scribbling loops on the pad. He scribbled around in a curve until the two ends joined. It looked like a two-dimensional loop-scribbled do-nut. 'Notice the open space in the middle… This is what an individual system looks like.' He scribbled a much smaller do-nut outside the larger one. The small one intersected and coincided with a number of loops of the big one. 'See, it moves into coincidence here, and out here. The area out here is called the endire. There are lots of these:' He rapidly scribbled more of the small do-nuts. 'Soon there are so many of these that they have to occur in here.' He was now scribbling inside the hole of the big do-nut. 'But they keep on forming until no further formation is possible. Notice how they all touch.' (He continues scribbling.) 'See what this looks like; even a child knows this, until they make him forget. When a certain level of saturation is achieved then it is in a prepared state for entrainment.' The whole page was now covered with scribbles. He looked up at me. I must have looked blank. He looked down at the paper and went on. 'I guess you don’t know about that either. Vibratory systems entrain each other. If seven old pendulum-type clocks are hung on a wall, and all seven pendulums are started at different speeds, within an hour they will all be moving at the same speed. They entrain each other. If you go to a pond at dusk, you’ll hear the frogs start to sing a few at a time. Eventually, as it grows darker, all the frogs will be singing in a mass chaotic chorus. Within an hour they’ll all be in syncopation. They don’t have to meditate; they don’t have to think; it always happens.' He tapped the scribbled paper with the eraser of the pencil. Something went wrong with my eyes for a moment; the scribbling seemed to straighten itself out into a clearly defined complex pattern. I shook my head. 'Uh-huh,' he said, 'Well, ‘ventually you’ll get it.'"

Directly following this passage the reader is asked to wait four minutes before moving on to the next page, to “make a Gap” not thinking. Franz says the reader can wait for more than four minutes, that the reader can get to the rest of the book the following night, even. He says the reader is free to do anything, but he himself is waiting four minutes. I waited four minutes.

The meta-memoir heightens in the last section, “Scribble Death IV: From the Diary of Joe Flek,” where Franz relates a story of a destitute man stealing Franz’s Scribble Death manuscript along with other belongings from a car. Months later Franz receives a package in the mail containing the stolen manuscript; the diary of the man, named Joe Flek, who stole his manuscript; a newspaper clipping telling of Joe’s death; and a note from the sender, who found the package addressed to Franz containing the manuscript and diary in Joe’s bedroom. The diary, which Franz transcribes in Scribble Death, describes how Joe discovered Franz’s manuscript, read it, and became terrorized by hallucinating and conjuring its characters, nightmares, and scenarios into his life. Joe claims to have had conversations with Franz in bars around town (where Franz doesn’t recognize him as the man who stole his manuscript). Joe becomes hunted by a giant moth that appears in Scribble Death. When Joe’s diary ends we see the text from the newspaper clipping of his death, which tells how his corpse was found mutilated over a gigantic moth. In the last paragraph of the book, Franz claims he doesn’t remember having conversations with Joe in bars, and he doesn’t “feel his ‘dead.’” He doesn’t “feel anyone’s ‘deads,’” but:

"…I do feel the dyings….As a matter of fact, he is the same person as me….There is only one person on earth, and I am that person, you are that person, and he is that person."

However, unlike the optimistic version of this idea that flourished in the earlier walking closure, here humanity doesn’t escape the trauma of loneliness and self destruction:

"There is only one person; And that person is alone on earth. Lives alone, dies alone. You can lie about it if you want. And that person has not yet discovered how to stop torturing itself as it kills itself."

But haven’t they?, I have to ask. Despite this ending that was most likely related to Franz’s crippling alcoholism discussed openly in Scribble Death and by himself and his friends, it seems “that person” has “discovered how to stop torturing itself as it kills itself” by living an exploratory, examined life of (self)witness. Dreams, in Franz’s written work, are contextualized through the study of the self, which is always recalibrating, sometimes abruptly in the way a dream suddenly recalibrates by creating histories that were not previously at play. In the series of pictures of Franz taken by Chuck Stein that appear as illustrations for the book’s cover as well as each section, we see Franz from the back walking in a country setting, walking further away with each picture, which are processed to look darker and then lighter toward the end. The last picture is a bright, white exposure. We never see his face in the pictures, but we don’t need to. We see his face and face our own. His confessional impulses are complicated by the multiplication of the self through the forms his writing takes. Thus the self is a mutable medium—not merely a static point of view—in Franz’s work. For example, in “Black New York (Programming Story for Behavioral Drift II),” a section in Ann Margret Loves You (Station Hill Press, 1980), published six years earlier than Scribble Death, the self is simultaneously contained and innumerable:

"…as we laugh and talk and no longer can see any shore silently…we can see quite clearly as I realize that sometimes I am I and she is a perfect sailor and sometimes I am her and she is an ancient sea captain or someone else who is not present with us or I am an ancient sea captain and Marie, and no one is I…"

I (no one) get the sense that no one is also I when I encounter Franz’s extensive re/definition system, which remaps the precincts of conceptual, physical, and creative space:

"AUTOSKREELIA: writing about what you are writing about as you are writing it"

"GORPLE: the semiconscious activity comprised of tiny repetitious movements which may portend contact with that miasmic subcosm in which minuscule vermicular messages are located and found to be so interlinked as to be unintelligible to most."

"COUNTERDIMENSIONAL: psychotopology, a situation in which there exists singles and/or families of dimensions which coexist within some universal cover family of dimensions and which cointerpenetrate without having any or at least one point in common."

"PSYCHOTOPOLOGY: a branch of applied mathematics which makes use of topological principles and formats in order to describe states and occurrences within the realm of mental (etc.) behavior."

FRANZ’S RE/DEFINITIONS MUTATE into a combinatory language called DAKMOO that was invented by himself, his friends, and his two girlfriends of the time, Eve Rosenthal and Kathy Bourbonais, the latter for whom his poem and intermedia performance piece RUGUGMOOL (LOVE OF MOON) is dedicated:

"Graag dak Moo Rak lungs Maag:
nokaLair (leds oaganFlob) ubits Wolt.
Raidz aRom, benor dak Saag buggerfried
(wumoowougWaip a Maig aRugugMool fuur fr Spygr.)
Rak *rudj dakOm nok.kairborg whudaK ower Seedz,
[ummerstaing den Laizer, buggerfried nowSerpers, kairgredZy lemaingurds, rudjedzOm nod Kairdak]
Padz dakBearg (aschreel) angGlowr ahax
breflagg vomWurr, Droksdak Moo."

"Grab that Moon Rat Runs Mad:
Not aware (less so than Frog) of its Worth.
Race along, ignore that Sad Butterfly
(One who would wait to make a Love of Moon full for Spider.)
Rat*rushes on not caring what that Owl sees,
[understands the reason, Butterfly now circles, carelessly arranges, rushes on not caring]
Past that Bear (asleep) and Grown perhaps
Afraid of Wolf, Drops that Moon."

ABOUT RUGUGMOOL FRANZ WRITES THAT HIS FAVORITE POET JACKSON MAC LOW: couldn’t understand why he would write such a complex and beautiful poem and then translate it into a language that could only be understood by an idiot!

I FELT THE SCRIBBLES: Franz continues to inspire in the people who love him.

IN NEW YORK CITY: as the guests of Steve Clay at Granary Books, we marveled at Franz’s friends’ collections of his charming musical scores, invitations to events, paper-gifts, etc., all laced with repeating imagery from his personal mythology of animals, angels, and more.

PIERRE JORIS AND tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE SPONTANEOUSLY: read one of Franz’s early poems together, a piece published by Joris in the 1970s. I filmed the reading.

KIMBERLY LYONS SPOKE PASSIONATELY: about Franz’s friendship and the emotional impact of his work on her and others.

MITCH HIGHFILL WORE A FLARF BUTTON: on his backpack and talked lovingly of Franz and his performances. Mitch gave us copies of Franz’s chapbook that he published, Hotel (Prospect Books, 1986), which presents four windowpanes of text on each page that sometimes break at the right margin between words. Like Scribble Death and Ann Margret Loves You, Hotel effortlessly invokes different scales of textuality and reality. In a subatomic drill-down (in the typographical framework described above, not replicated here), the reader is asked:

"…But, what is the hotel? Is it this booklet? Are you now holding the hotel in your hands? Or is it this specific page? Is it in the words, or is it the words? Is it these 828 character spaces in the form of a window? Is this a description of some hotel someplace? Or is the hotel only in my mind? Is it my mind? Is it I? Am I the hotel? Or is it as it is now in your mind? Is it your mind? Are you the hotel?..."

EARLIER, IN NEW JERSEY, BRAINPANG: and his wonderful family hosted us while Brainpang was interviewed about helping with some of Franz’s performances.

IN BARRYTOWN, NEW YORK, GEORGE QUASHA AND I STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF STATION HILL DRIVE AT 2:33 A.M. EST ON DECEMBER 21, 2010 TO SEE THE LUNAR ECLIPSE, WE SAW A DARK UNIFORM LINE MOVE STEADILY ACROSS THE SKY INCLUDING THE MOON BUT WELL BEYOND IT, tENTATIVELY WAS NEARBY FILMING THE MOON, SUSAN QUASHA WAS GETTING HER TRIPOD AND SOON JOINED US, THE INEXPLICABLE LINE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN A PENUMBRA BECAUSE IT MOVED ACROSS THE ENTIRE SKY—GEORGE’S AXIAL STONES AND DRAWINGS AND POETICS MIGHT BE COUNTERDIMENSIONAL GORPLE CENTERS OF GRAVITY—SUSAN’S ART LIGHTS UP—A MANDALA ROOM IS THE IDEAL PLACE TO FILM A DOCUMENTARY AS WELL AS tENTATIVELY’S PERFORMATIVE RESPONSE TO WHAT POETRY IS, ART IS, MUSIC IS, MYTH IS, AND PEACE IS—A STAINED-GLASS STUDIO IS THE IDEAL PLACE TO SEE A JEWELLED CROWN—CHUCK STEIN TALKED ABOUT HAUSDORF AND NON-HAUSDORF TOPOLOGICAL SPACE—GEORGE INTERVIEWED ME ON TAPE FOR OVER AN HOUR ABOUT POETRY—ROBERT KELLY READ FROM FRANZ’S WORK AND LATER ASKED ME TO READ ONE OF MY POEMS TO HIM—WE VISITED PETER LAMBORN WILSON/HAKIM BEY AND SINCE THE NOVELLA I AM WRITING IS SET IN THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONES IT WAS LIKE WAKING TAZ

IS FRANZ KAMIN: dreaming TAZ?

ON THE WAY BACK WE WENT TO THE MARCEL DUCHAMP EXHIBIT AT THE PHILEDELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART WHERE I BOUGHT A SILVER TIME-TRAVELER COAT BECAUSE tENTATIVELY SAID IT WAS BEAUTIFUL, WE GOT LENTICULAR POSTCARDS OF DUCHAMP’S “ÉTANT DONNÉS,” THE WEATHER WAS ALWAYS PERFECT & IT WAS WINTER, DRIVING HOME THE SKY WAS A CLEAR BLUE AND BEGAN PINKING AGAINST THE TALL BRANCHING TREES WITHOUT LEAVES

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Franz Kamin's Scribble Death
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 25, 2012

Franz Kamin was a friend of mine. I performed in some of his pieces. At my suggestion he joined GoodReads, so he's an author here, but he never posted anything. He died in a car crash along w/ his old friend & mine, James "Sarmad" Brody", in 2010. I spent 7 mnths from October, 2010 to May, 2011 making a documentary about him called "DEPOT (wherein resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin". I've screened this in Minneapolis, NYC, & Milwaukee as of March 2012. I have a briefcase filled w/ things relevant to him.

As I approach closure in my memorialization of him, I've been planning to finally file away this briefcase. In order to do that I felt like I 'needed' to either read for the 1st time or reread his main bk, Scribble Death & write a review about it here. Reading it was somewhat strange. I've probably had it for decades - maybe since it came out - & parts of it were very familiar for various reasons.. BUT, as far as I can tell, I'D NEVER READ IT IN ITS ENTIRETY BEFORE. & that's what was strange: How cd I've been friends w/ Franz for so long & had this bk for so long & NEVER READ IT ALL?!! After all, I read ALOT & reading this bk didn't take long - it's only 171pp.

I know there was a time when some reason or another was floating around in my head for not reading this: Now, tho, it's hard for me to imagine sd reason being a very good one. &, yet, I know that friends of mine have bks of mine that they've never read - that they've had them for decades. I know they're afraid of them, afraid of the intensity. When choosing between escapist entertainment & a bk by me, there's no contest. But I usually adamantly avoid being in such a light-reader context. In fact, I've read many, MANY bks far more challenging & disturbing than Franz's. After all, I've read de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, eg. Franz doesn't come anywhere close. So I didn't avoid reading this b/c of its content exactly, I avoided reading it b/c it was Franz's & I LIKED FRANZ VERY MUCH. Strange.

Scribble Death wd've been mostly written in the early-to-mid 1980s & was published in 1986. Franz was a hardcore alcoholic during much of time & wd've gone to the Twin Cities shortly after Scribble Death came out to dry out. As far as I 'know', he stayed sober for the remaining 24 yrs of his life after that. As such, Scribble death is sortof his peak alcoholic work - &, yes, I like it very much for that. We're not talking Bukowksi here, thank the holy ceiling lite - there's very little here, formally, that reeks of alcohol. But there're plenty of autobiographical & otherwise references to alcoholism.

In the SUBWAY 2 section (pp37-38) Franz wrote:

"When I first came to the City (about 12 years ago), I didn't know as much as I do now about drug and alcohol induced hallucinations. Often I would find myself down in the subway holes staring at the same set of tracks crossing itself at right angles and wondering which way to step to get on teh train. Or find myself in some weird unknown place like Tottenville, explaining to the booth attendant that I wanted to go home but couldn't quite remember the name of the stop (Crainal or Camel or something). Or riding on the YY line, not being able to remember why. Or not finding myself at all..."

Basically, I think this is a truly great work &, yet.. at the same time, I'm not sure that I think it's as great as, say, his earlier Ann Margret Loves You and Other Psychotopological Diversions (see my review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25... ) even tho it's longer, & perhaps, more coherently structured as a bk.

I'm very glad I read this after I made the documentary. It all resonated w/ me so much more than it wd have 25 yrs ago. EG: I learned while making "DEPOT" that the tombstone on the cover of Ann Margret.. is a child's grave in the cemetery across from Station Hill Press (the publisher of this bk) where Franz often went for walks. One documentary interviewee, poet Mitch Highfill, relates that the child, Jacob Lane, was stillborn & that Franz was obsessed w/ this grave. Another interviewee, (John Beaulieu - check out the interview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xhKN3... ) talked about how he & Franz wd record walking thru the graveyard in order to use the Raudivé technique for playing back the tapes to 'hear the voices of the dead' (see Peter Bander's bk Voice From The Tapes - Recordings From the Other World) - something that other friends of mine & I experimented w/ around the same time.

Mitch also mentioned that he performed as part of Franz's piece entitled "The ERADICATION OF NEW YORK SUBWAY GRAFFITI by JACOB LANE" during the last of the Sound Poetry festivals there. So, then, I found references to this embedded in Scribble Death.

The bk is divided into "Scribble Death" sections numbered w/ Roman numerals. On p29, at the end of "Scribble Death I", there's this note:

"PLEASE STOP at this point before entering into the concluding sector. make a Gap of at least four minutes. I would prefer that you would spend this four minute Gap not doing anything and not thinking anything. of course, you are free to do what you like; but, my preference is that you do and think nothing for four minutes. You could get around to the concluding page tomorrow night, for example. However, I am going to wait for four minutes..."

I waited for a little over 4 minutes. As for not thinking? I'm not sure I ever do that. The end of "Scribble Death II" is far more developed. Such instructions to the reader remind me of Jackson Mac Low's Asymmetries 1-260 published by Dick Higgins' Printed Editions. This bk even has a section entitled "Reading & Performing Asymmetries". Jackson & Franz were friends.

The "READER'S PREFACE to the FIRST and SECOND CLOSURE" of "Scribble death II" states: "Ideally, have someone else read them to you or make a cassette of your own voice reading, and follow the instructions as given [..] The 2 'Closures' themselves (not including their prefatory introductions) are to be read in a slow, semi-expressionless, hypnotic voice with ample pauses between each word-group or phrase."

I recorded my slow reading of the 4 sparse pages of these FIRST and SECOND CLOSUREs, taking over 13 minutes, & played it back listening to it, as Franz proposed, w/ my eyes closed - trying to play along w/ the obvious auto-hypnotic suggestiveness of the process. "[V]isualiz[ing] the entire sequence" (of being a butterfly) was one of the more interesting experiences of the bk for me. As w/ so many things w/ Franz, this interest in hypnosis reminded me of my own interest along these lines 15 yrs or so before this bk was written.

Making it even better, there's a later sequence in Scribble Death where the butterfly reappears from a different perspective. Thanks to this quasi-auto-hypnosis, I had the interesting experience of being able to almost feel my identification w/ the butterfly in this section.

On p78, Franz references the suicides surrounding the playing of the song Gloomy Sunday. This, too, was something I learned about while interviewing people for "DEPOT". Having the stories reappear in this quasi-fictionalized/quasi-alcohol-hallucination/quasi-oneiric text gave it a particularly mythic power.

"Scribble Death III" constitutes the most substantial part of the bk & is subtitled My Autobiography in the Form of a Little Anthology of Linked Deaths". This is like the Brothers Grimm updated to the 20th century. Formally, the entire bk interpenetrates itself w/ various ways of tale-telling. Here, the segues are particularly pleasing for me.

Scribble Death is permeated w/ guilt & horror over Franz's having been employed "slopping rats" for an NYU lab. His job involved both feeding & killing the unfortunate test animals. PP92-93 provide a particularly horrific description of torturing a fiddler crab. "The scientist knew that the real purpose of this and most other 'laboratory controlled' torturings was to get enough information of any kind to publish a paper. The papers were absolutely essential to the survival of the scientists. No scientist could survive as a scientist, unless he could publish papers. Publish or perish."

Each Scribble Death section begins w/ a title page w/ a picture, taken, I believe, by poet Charles Stein, of Franz seen from behind walking down a country road & getting further & further away from the fotographer. I've always found these fotos to be particularly poignant. In a very understated way, they represent Franz slipping away from the reader thru his alcoholic despair. I can relate. How sensitive humans manage to survive the emotional complexities of life is often beyond me.

Even tho this bk cd've been much, much better, there's a weird clarity to it that I find profound. I've rarely read a bk that I identify w/ so strongly. Do other readers of it feel the same way? I doubt it. Reading this almost makes me feel like I was Franz's twin brother. Franz's actual brother, not a twin, committed suicide. To roughly paraphrase what my girlfriend Amy Catanzano has sd to me: 'Only you could've made a documentary about Franz because both of you were/are so deeply multidisciplinary." & it's even more than that: Franz & I were/are like a socio-emotional Brothers Grim even tho Franz came from a wealthy family & basically didn't have to work for a living for most of his life & I come from a lower middle class family & have had to work to support myself for most or all of my adult life.

"NOMINALISM

When a 'name' is given to a process for purpose of reference and simplification (that is, so that the entire process does not have to be described), that is called NOMINALISM. Unfortunately, when the intuitive knowledge of what such a process is, is replaced by a name, the process often comes to be thought of as a thing, and thus it loses the very essence of its processuality; as in the case of 'Energy' - there is no such thing as 'Energy.' There is no such thing as 'Life.' There is no such thing as 'Love.' There has never been, nor is there now, nor will there ever be such a thing as the 'National Debt' (merely an invention of the little war-like countries called 'Governments' to rob the larger more peaceful countries called their 'Constituents." [sic - I believe this closed quotation mark is a typo in the bk]) There is no such thing as 'Music'. Music is whatever any 2 people agree to its being (too bad for Academies, the Critics, the Theoreticians, and the Avant Garde.) But, is there such a thing as DEATH? (This may be a case of INVERSE NOMINALISM; that is, what has been commonly thought of as a process, may actually turn out to be a 'thing.')"

Keep in mind the 'name': tentatively, a convenience.

[Jeffrey Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

absolutely beautiful from start to end

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Terminal Hotel is a real place. I used to walk by in the mornings on my way to work at the Chelsea Piers, before the big development, when I worked there gutting the remnants of the DMV impound and running the freight elevator for the Law and Order caterers. I met Lenny Briscoe at the catering table once. But the Terminal Hotel...one day, while I was walking by it, a town car drove by without stopping and spilled a naked black girl out the back door onto the sidewalk. Actually, she *was* wearing high heels. She got up and walked to the phone booth, and the other ladies on the corner immediately produced several pieces of clothing from their purses and she was half decent and deeply engaged in a phone call within 30 seconds. And inside, all that scribbling.... Another day, after someone had pained the Terminal Hotel sky blue with big puffy white clouds on it, a woman was climbing up the outside wall using a cable wire or something to crawl into a window. I sometimes wonder how much money was paid for all the paint, and whether the person who painted it onto the building was paid and, if so, how.