2023-03-21 15:23

Ann Margret Loves You and Other Psychotopological Diversions

Ann Margret Loves You and Other Psychotopological Diversions
by Franz Kamin
Station Hill Press

A collection of pieces that could be called experimental, though is that what they are? Closer to that than many things labeled "experimental" though less of an experiment and more of a didactic (at times) laying-out of various systems. Might say quasi-mathematical explications of dream-logical sort-of nightmare systems. But when I say nightmare, also funny, so light and dark, darkly funny, a little creepy, a little perverse.

Formalized language, personal glossaries...

AUTOSKREELIA (AS_i): writing about what you are writing about as you are writing it; for instance, right now I'm writing about what I'm writing about as I'm writing it (some do nothing else)

Particularly in "A RITUAL EMBEDDING OF THE SPIDER'S RISK into non-HAUSDORF M-SPACE"

2-TOYS: these are the objects of perception, conception intuition and dream... they are usually locally nameable... examples: withrdrawel pains, goat's milk, depots, mathematical formulae, little barely notice clouds of color in the back of the mind, blow jobs, chewing gum, undeads & salvation...

 

MIASMAS: a well-defined collection of 2-toys is called an 'activity' or 'occurrence' or 'feeling'... if all of the 2-toys are removed from such a situation, the ineffable glue in which they were embedded (see 2-toys) is the miasma... miasmas can neither be spoken nor thought about...

Miasmas as I understand my understanding of Kamin's understanding of them are fundamental to his writing and/or his experience, sometimes in an alcoholic fugue state if I'm not mistaken and/or other issues with his self-location of his self in the world and among the other humans. We see miasmal metaphors in scenes of people and animals lost or trapped in various dream-logic-defined systems.

From "DISTANCE FUNCTION":

Railway Stations

It has to do with the sadness of trains and railway stations and whether or not there exists a measurable distance between certain objects, or these can only be distinguished by way of the disjointedness of their neighborhoods, or whether these objects cannot be shown to be separate at all, and yet there exists a 'distance function' (non-measurable)... (another distance function) the only quantifier of which is melancholia (that of railway stations in the mid-afternoon)... My claim is that, on the basis of this quantification, each of all things is at least 2 relative to itself (which may tend to blow the doctrine of non-duality all to shit).

I'm tempted to classify these experimentations (are they experimental?) as existential, or that his concerns are existential at root, that is, concerned with the human within the system (the human system, the animal system, the mind system) rather than humans negotiating the inter-human dynamics per se if that makes sense. "Or not" as they say.

Slightly reminded of some of J.G. Ballard's writing, well, the writing isn't similar at all, but it's the methodology, the construction of formal pseudo-mathematical systems in Kamin's case, or the appropriation of formal systems (surgical case studies and others) in Ballard's. I'm also thinking of some of Julio Cortazar's short stories, I should probably also be thinking of some of Cortazar's literary ancestor Jorge Luis Borges. But particularly Cortazar's story 'With Justifiable Pride' as another perfectly crafted system, a closed loop.

Dipping into Ann Margret Loves You to write this post, I'm inspired to also return to Kamin's Scribble Death, which I think of as a novel, but is it? It's also a collection but it's sort of a more ordered collection with a sort of narrative and a sort of beginning middle and end. Sort of. And I'm also interested in looking into his artworks in other media, installations, video, music. I may report back.

Updated: 2023-03-23 13:48