Bøger af Gary J Shipley

Schism Press presents Serial Kitsch: Like the best conceptual work, Serial Kitsch shows its innards, the way the work works. Like the best poetry, it guts itself for our aesthetic pleasure and contemplation. Like the best killers, it does all this using its words. - Vanessa Place It is strangely and disconcertingly fitting that Serial Kitsch starts out with a quote from Andy Warhol because this is really a book about art. It is a disturbing book that enters into the tricky and troubling relationship between art and violence by taking on (and taking in) one of the most frightening, influential and ridiculous figures of the 20th century: the serial killer. The serial killer's "kitsch" - his letters, his corpses, his appearance ("But he looked just like an average person!") - does not so much "blur" the line between fiction and reality, violence and art, as show an intimate bond between these, a bond we might call "media." Conceptual poetry has long bragged about "killing poetry"; here the actual poetry finally goes gothic. You may not want to read the results; it's a disconcerting but lyrical book: "I spoke to him as if he were still alive/how beautiful he looked." - Johannes Göransson Gary J Shipley's brilliant and necessary poem, Serial Kitsch, follows in the grand tradition of Aron the Moor's final words in Titus Andronicus--"...I have done a thousand dreadful things/As willingly as one would kill a fly, / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed / But that I cannot do ten thousand more"--and plunges this sentiment into the era of YouTube, when the faces and words of Dahmer and Wuornos can be pulled up and organized like a playlist. Reading this book allows language to fulfill its ultimate purpose: to disperse the diseased miasma of the human soul, or what's left of it, to the ends of the earth. - David Peak The figure of the serial killer has always captured the attention of the public and in recent television and film the figure has been domesticated ("Dexter") and celebrated ("Hannibal") in equally disturbing ways. Gary J Shipley allows the words of serial killers to speak here in this epic poem. What we see is not easily put into a comforting or entertaining narrative, but is unflinching in forcing us to confront human evil that goes far beyond individual crimes. - Anthony Paul Smith

The death by suicide of Gary J Shipley's close friend, Conrad Unger (writer, theorist and amateur entomologist), has prompted him to confront not only the cold machinery of self-erasure, but also its connections to the literary life and notions surrounding psychological bewitchment, to revaluate in both fictional and entomological terms just what it is that drives writers like Unger to take their own lives as a matter of course, as if that end had been there all along, knowing, waiting. Like Gérard de Nerval, David Foster Wallace, Ann Quin and Virginia Woolf before him, Unger was not merely a writer who chose to end his life, but a writer whose work appeared forged from the knowledge of that event's temporary postponement. And while to the uninitiated these literary suicides would most likely appear completely unrelated to the suicide behaviors of insects parasitized by entomopathogenic fungi or nematomorpha, within the pages of this short study we are frequently presented with details that allow us to see the parallels between their terminal choreographies. He investigates what he believes are the essentially binary and contradictory motivations of his suicide case studies: where their self-dispatch becomes an instance of necro-autonomy (death as solution to an external thraldom, or the zombification of everyday life as something requiring the most extreme form of emancipation), while in addition being an instance of necro-equipoise (death as solution to an internal thraldom, or the anguish of no longer being able to slip back comfortably inside that very everydayness). The deadening claustrophobia of human life and achieving a stance outside of it: both barbs on the lines that can only ever detail the sickness, never cure it. Through extracts and synopses of Unger's books, marginalia and underscorings selected from his extensive library, and a brief itinerary of his movements in that last month of exile, a picture of the writer's suicidal obsession begins to form, and it forms at the expense of the man, the idea eating through his brain like a fungal parasite, disinterring the waking corpse to flesh its words.

Schism [2] Press rereleases Gary J. Shipley's first novel Crypt(o)spasm is a fiendish formula for any vitalist utopia: The elimination of death or the so-called immortality is equal to life as the ceaseless permutation of a ghoulish emptiness. Rather than sensationally portraying this unfortunate utopia in frosty gray, Shipley brilliantly depicts it in a color-frenzy that corresponds with the livor mortis of the worldly flesh, detailing it with a prose that positively degenerates on an exponential decay curve. A monstrous book. I love it. - Reza Negarestani CRYPT(O)SPASM explores the idea of the novel as an impossible object. Its themes are myriad and drunken, sprawling and wretched and philosophic - and then the inescapable synonymy of the final two. It gives us death as it takes it away. And there are herds and there are individuals: zeros piled up end on end on top of zeros. Questions are asked of men living out their own thought experiments. Answers are lived in consecutive intervals sucked of death while framed in its disappearance. A coded message is hidden and then revealed. Others are buried, their insides clogged, and they are not found. The book is ill with itself. Its origins and aspirations bleed like sweat stains under its author's arms. The coast is old, feckless, and dying. The coast is falling into the sea. Its legs have varicose veins and crumbling bones. Its mouth is a grave. There are no teeth left to bite the world. Self-delusion is the only essential art. And there becomes an author - literary snide, paranoid, arsehole, xenophobe, visionary, pissant - and the book is his, and he is eaten up with the words he's borrowed. And there's a man whose wife is dead and living inside another woman. And all this to make sense of evil and literature - and literature as evil - as two philosophers squabble over a self they each made from incompatible materials, and murderers murder, and animals suffer (cats and dogs and birds coiled up inside each other like barbed wire), and children die more than once. And there is something to be done, instructions to be carried out, a hole to find and crawl into and through and out the other side, which is the same side, which is no side at all.

Those screams you're hearing are philosophy being awoken from its dogmatic slumbers with a stark brutality rarely matched in the history of intellectual anomaly. If there's a more intense sleep-killer compilation out there somewhere, it's concealing itself well. - Nick Land, author of Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time (Urbanatomy, 2014) Serial Killing leaves behind the analysis of the serial killer as a romantic anti-hero, diagnostic category of psychopathology or sociological symptom to offer a collection of essays that infuses the conventional delusions of critical distance with the passionate, homicidal embrace of loving neighborliness. The theoretical, photographic and fictional essays in this volume take the serial killer as an object of both philosophical speculation and spiritual contemplation. In a brilliant cornucopia of styles and obsessions, serial killing becomes, among many other things: the touchstone of common in-humanity, a form of sacrifice and mystical rite, a leisure activity, a kind of bloody ikebana, a kaligraphic and auto-graphic mode of self-portraiture and flesh inscription, the meta-relational emanation of immanent suffering, a form of kleptomancy, an expression of neoliberal love, an ascetic practice of cosmic joy. It is properly mad. - Scott Wilson, Kingston University, author of Stop Making Sense (Karnac, 2015) One of the deepest and darkest truths in psychoanalysis is about the serial nature of the object. We pretend that it is unique, irreplaceable, singular, but it isn't, and it always exists as part of a multiple whose secret truth, to our real horror, is the emptiness or nothing at the center of this excess. In this fascinating collection of essays edited by Edia Connole and Gary Shipley we find out about this serial perversion of everyday life. - Jamieson Webster, Eugene Lang College, author of Stay! Illusion (Vintage, 2014) We simultaneously love and hate serial killers: we dread them, and yet we are fascinated by them. Both in reality, and in books and television shows, serial killers seem to stand at the very edge of what is possible, or of what is human. The essays in this volume push to the extremes of philosophy, and of art and literature, in order to speak to our uneasy relationship with what we both desire and abhor. - Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University, author of The Universe of Things (UMP, 2014)

A narrator is trapped inside a house, where their search for an exit ends up only adding to its walls, its ceilings, its floors, its rooms.The House Inside The House of Gregor Schneider is a conceptual nouveau roman constructed almost entirely from appropriated writings on the work of Gregor Schneider, primarily encounters with Die Familie Schneider and Haus u r. The texts come from various sources, including Schneider himself. All names and second-person references have been replaced with the first-person. Past and future tenses have become present-tense. 'House' is sometimes replaced by 'room.' Words have been pluralised, singularised, or erased wherever necessary. For both the conceptualist writer and practitioners of the nouveau roman, objects take on a position of prominence. For the former, words are objects. For the latter, objects come to the fore as plot and character are made subsidiary. In merging these theoretical standpoints (while also mirroring Schneider's own artistic practice), THITHOGS places words/objects behind or in front of each other until they are no longer tools of orientation but disorientation. There are only the objects and the narrator's/artist's subservience to them. There is only the coalescing of objects/words and our being lost inside them. There is no around or through or retreat, only deeper inside the ever-growing yet ever-shrinking surface.

"Absurdist horror at its best. Gary Shipley had me hooked from beginning to end." - Carlton Mellick III, author of Quicksand HouseSomething is horribly wrong with my wife. She doesn't move anymore. When I try to lift her I can't. It's like she's glued to the floor, or impaled on something. But her body keeps randomly appearing around the house in contorted positions: facedown in the hallway, at the end of our daughter's bed, and on the ceiling of the main room, her feet, hands and backside flat to the plaster.There is a cold translucent slime coating her skin. The scent of her is intense and repugnant, and yet I am finding myself increasingly drawn to her. I have a burning desire to merge with her. The children, too, want to be near her. Sitting on top of her brings them comfort as they stare at their tablets and phones. We stop going to work or to school. We feed from her. We begin to change. And we are not the only ones...The Unyielding is a darkly surreal tale that details what happens to a family when one of its members becomes an immovable: an entity that while corpse-like is also spatially-inconstant, oddly nutritious, and excessively seductive to surrounding humans. If you've ever wondered what philosophical pessimism looks like in the flesh, it looks like this.