Post 1: Shadowblog

10 March 2025 // Pages 01-29

This is a Shadowblog. It’s not a real blog; it’s not a review; it’s not coherent, or won’t cohere in the ways you might expect it to. I’m going to read Michael Lentz’s Schattenfroh, translated by Max Lawton, in chunks dictated by my schedule, mood, ballet rehearsals, piles of ungraded papers, and subconscious desires. You have to read it next to the relevant parts of the book, though you could read it without as a kind of kabbalistic midrash that fits well with the spirit of the thing, but might drive you or me or both of us insane.

If you have read pages 1-29 you can imagine the wing of the bird on the hat you are wearing is Dürer’s bird wing, because it’s so very Hochdeutsch to imagine that and Scattenfroh himself has told you speak German, the infinite combinatorical noun-language of thingness, -keit suffix there IYKYK. Anyway here’s the wing I see on the hat:

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My tongue was replaced by a fish louse long ago, you know that if you’ve read me, so actually this isn’t so weird, being stuck here at the tabula that’s the exact inverse of the tabula rasa, the wax diptych infinitely refracted into Derridean traces. From my brainpan to yours, to the narrator’s and back again, because words entail worlds layered on top of each other. Books that predict and predicate themselves are fun this way.

Wunderblock? When the mass of this book came to my mailbox it promised that, in material heft at least. I did not know it was an induction into the Frightbearing Society. I was not supplied with a parakeet-green silk ribbon to pin to my grubby sweatshirt. But I was predisposed to inwardness, the self-reflexive tendency of any writer that Lentz’s narrator shares, the script-world-script backloop 404 page not found of the self; I am Nobody as instructed. Nobody is maximalist because the category of everybody is probably implicit in nobody.

Scripts; languages; writers as enciphering and deciphering apparatuses are what the novel now promises, a Leibnizian game. But also: look at this engraving.

Alphabet -- also a promise, of the eventual omega tagging along after alpha and beta are done. In this case it’s one by by Jacques Hurtu in in the early 17th century, which I get a creeping sense is Scattenfroh’s real century as much as ours, all that indexicality and replication. It’s blackwork engraving, a technique with particular deep relief that was transferred from goldsmithing in this period. “For what we possess in black and white/ we can take home for good”? That seems too simple. I have to wrap a cold stylus chain around my neck as I write this to think about that promise. I have a feeling Scattenfroh is just about to get to images... and the fickleness of language as a promise in the first place.

Stack it up, palimpsestic. Let’s go.

-- A.V. Marraccini

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