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.

The Death of Conrad Unger

Biographies & Memoirs

Shipley, Gary J.

Arts & Literature

Punctum Books

A collection of philosophical and critical essays on the television series True Detective. "Traditionally, the detective genre deals with the problem of epistemology – how to know something that one doesn't know. There are some things we cannot know, and some things we should not know. Sometimes clues just give way to more clues, and epistemic tedium rules the day. These essays reveal knowledge becoming an enigma to itself, revealing the brilliant futility of the epistemological project." – Eugene Thacker, author of In The Dust of This Planet "The television event of the year - I would say many years - is without doubt True Detective. One deserving of forensic, unflinching, and unrelenting philosophical treatment." – Simon Critchley "The most intelligent series in TV history has opened strange crypts for explorers. This excellent essay collection reveals just how far the dark tunnels lead. Let it coax you from the comforts of death and fear, into detection of the guttering nightmare that is life, coldly seen." – Nick Land CONTENTS I. Black Stars Gary J. Shipley – Monster at the End: Pessimism’s Locked Rooms and Impossible Crimes Edia Connole – Contemplating the Crucifixion: Cohle and Divine Gloom Nicola Masciandaro – I Am Not Supposed To Be Here: Birth and Mystical Detection II. Separate From Itself Fintan Neylan – The Labour of the Pessimist: Detecting Expiration’s Artifice Paul J. Ennis – The Atmospherics of Consciousness Ben Woodard – Nothing Grows in the Right Direction: Scaling the Life of the Negative III. There Was A Videotape Niall McCann – True Detective, Jean-Luc Godard and Our Image Culture: ‘This May Well be Heaven, this Hell Smells the Same’ Daniel Fitzpatrick – ‘True Dick’ . . . The Accelerated Acceptance and Premature Canonisation of True Detective IV. It’s Just One Story Scott Wilson – The Nonsense of Detection: Truth Between Science and the Real Erin K. Stapleton – The Corpse is the Territory: The Body of Dora Kelly Lange in True Detective Caoimhe Doyle &amp; Katherine Foyle – The Flat Devil Net: Mapping Quantum Narratives in True Detective Daniel Colucciello Barber – Affect Has No Story V. And Closure–No, No, No Dominic Fox – koyntly bigyled Charlie Blake, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Edia Connole, Paul J. Ennis, Gary J. Shipley – Bird Trap Edge to Edge Caoimhe Doyle &amp; Katherine Foyle – The Chole Story

True Detection

Masciandaro, Nicola

Connole, Edia

Fitzpatrick, Daniel

WILSON, SCOTT

Woodard, Ben

Neylan, Fintan

Ennis, Paul J

McCann, Niall

Stapleton, Erin K

True Crime

Schism

"The Face Hole is at once a testimony and a dossier, a metaphysical mystery of discarded anatomies, a cavernous and patient document of Ballardian estrangement. Here Shipley's writing enters a kind of austerity — narrative stripped down to an elemental level, filled with the detritus of everyday life, flecks of flesh and nuanced glances, stray motives and oblique intentions, the most familiar of objects quietly vanishing — all of which induces in the reader a dread as vast as it is subtle. A welcome edition to Shipley's ongoing experiments with the limits of language and bodies." - Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet

The Face Hole

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Science Fiction

Copeland Valley Press

"DREAMS OF AMPUTATION reads like the nightmares Derek Raymond might have experienced if he'd written cyberpunk. An exceptionally strange work, but a smart and thoughtful one as well. Disturbing, haunting, and inimitably weird, this is a book like no other." - Brian Evenson

Dreams of Amputation

Volume 5 of the journal Glossator. Contents: What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece’s Addresses - Eileen A. Joy Plato’s Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet - Gary J. Shipley On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy’s “L’amour en éclats [Shattered Love]” - Mathew Abbott The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore Tearsong: Valentine Visconti’s Inverted Stoicism - Anna Kłosowska

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary: On the Love of Commentary

Politics & Social Sciences

Hancock, David

MacKendrick, Karmen

Kirk, Jordan

Moore, Michael Edward

Klosowska, Anna

Joy, Eileen A.

Philosophy

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Schism[2] press brings you an exercise in sensory overload from the minds of Gary J Shipley (Theoretical Animals, Dreams of Amputation, The Face Hole, etc.) and Kenji Siratori (Blood Electric, Acidhuman Project, Mind Virus, etc.) that pushes the limits of both human expression and that which can be assimilated in terms of socially-sanctioned pattern-recognition. Self-referring, auto-cannibalistic texts that hover and shimmer around the borders of the asemic, yet still retain a vivid relevance to the current post-human cultural landscape. A cyberpunk katabasis beyond Burroughs or Guyotat. Appendix by Reza Negarestani.

Necrology

Literature & Fiction

Siratori, Kenji

Literary

This is unlike a typical graphic novel or illustrated book, which relies on recognisable pictures and legible text. A Kick In The Eye is a multiple-authored graphic novel containing only abstract images and illegible asemic writing.

A kick In The Eye: A Collaborative Graphic Novel

Comics & Graphic Novels

Giovenale, Marco

Gaze, Tim

Appel, Rosaire

Skinner, Christopher

Burhouse, Tony

Hopkins, Gareth A

Kaikkonen, Satu

Tarczynski, Lin

Uzal, Sergio

Graphic Novels

Schism press brings you its first anthology, edited by Nicola Masciandaro and Eugene Thacker. A collection of essays on beheading and cinema, with full color interior. Contents: Dominic Pettman, "What Came First, the Chicken or the Head?" - Eugene Thacker, "Thing and No-Thing" - Alexi Kukuljevic, "Suicide by Decapitation" - Alexander Galloway, "The Painted Peacock" - Evan Calder Williams, "Recapitation" - Nicola Masciandaro, "Decapitating Cinema" - Ed Keller, "Corpus Atomicus" - Gary J Shipley, "Remote Viewing." Photography by Leighton Pierce.

And They Were Two In One And One In Two

Keller, Ed

Williams, Evan Calder

THACKER, EUGENE

Pettman, Dominic

Galloway, Alexander

Kukuljevic, Alexi

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.

Crypt(o)spasm

Religion & Spirituality

Dostoyevsky Wannabe presents Abstract Slavery These charged poems are masterful. The velocity with which they move is intoxicating. In Abstract Slavery, Shipley and Miller pilot words philosophically, surrealistically, anarchically. Indeed: “Loony signs of wonder stamp altars on their customers.  Uche Nduka, author of Nine East  This book is like an ulcer oozing poetry. There’s nothing redeeming about these poems. Which feels like exactly what some of us might need right now.  Nick Demske, author of Nick Demske  As much as I hate that fucking glazier, Abstract Slavery updates Paris Spleen for me. Mind Puckering . . . I mean Mind Fuckering. John D. Morton, musician, founder of electric eels and X_X

Abstract Slavery

Miller, RC

Poetry

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