Reza Negarestani - Cutting humans with alien life

Cyclonopedia by Iranian mysterious philosopher Reza Negarestani is one of the best and most unusual books ever written. Part fiction part philosophy it is mostly an essay, but in such an outrageous mode that all nearby solar systems are stopping their circulations to take a look.

This is a publisher's description:

"Cyclonopedia is theoretical-fiction novel by Iranian philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani. Hailed by novelists, philosophers and cinematographers, Negarestani’s work is the first horror and science fiction book coming from and written on the Middle East.

'The Middle East is a sentient entity—it is alive!’ concludes renegade Iranian archaeologist Dr. Hamid Parsani, before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The disordered notes he leaves behind testify to an increasingly deranged preoccupation with oil as the ‘lubricant’ of historical and political narratives.
A young American woman arrives in Istanbul to meet a pseudonymous online acquaintance who never arrives. Discovering a strange manuscript in her hotel room, she follows up its cryptic clues only to discover more plot-holes, and begins to wonder whether her friend was a fictional quantity all along.
Meanwhile, as the War on Terror escalates, the US is dragged into an asymmetrical engagement with occultures whose principles are ancient, obscure, and saturated in oil. It is as if war itself is feeding upon the warmachines, leveling cities into the desert, seducing the aggressors into the dark heart of oil ...
At once a horror fiction, a work of speculative theology, an atlas of demonology, a political samizdat and a philosophic grimoire, CYCLONOPEDIA is work of theory-fiction on the Middle East, where horror is restlessly heaped upon horror. Reza Negarestani bridges the appalling vistas of contemporary world politics and the War on Terror with the archaeologies of the Middle East and the natural history of the Earth itself. CYCLONOPEDIA is a middle-eastern Odyssey, populated by archeologists, jihadis, oil smugglers, Delta Force officers, heresiarchs, corpses of ancient gods and other puppets. The journey to the Underworld begins with petroleum basins and the rotting Sun, continuing along the tentacled pipelines of oil, and at last unfolding in the desert, where monotheism meets the Earth’s tarry dreams of insurrection against the Sun."


Here are some blurbs, but this time even blurbs are falling short:


‘Incomparable. Post-genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new and necessary codex.’ (China Miéville)

‘Reading Negarestani is like being converted to Islam by Salvador Dali.’ (Graham Harman)

‘It is rare when a mind has the courage to take our precious pre-conceptions of history, geography and language and turn them all upside down, into a living cauldron, where ideas and spaces become alive with fluidity and movement and breathe again with imagination and wonder. In this great novel by Reza Negarestani, we are taken on a journey that predates language and post dates history. It is all at once apocalyptic and a beautiful explosive birth of a wholly original perception and meditation on what exactly is this stuff we call “knowledge”.’ (E. Elias Merhige, director of Begotten)

‘Cyclonopedia is an extraordinary tract, an uncategorizable hybrid of philosophical fiction, heretical theology, aberrant demonology and renegade archaeology. It aligns conceptual stringency with exacting esotericism, and through its sacrilegious formulae, geopolitical epilepsy is scried as in an obsidian mirror.’ (Ray Brassier)

‘Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia is rich and strange, and utterly compelling. Ranging from the chthonic mysteries of petroleum to the macabre fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, and from ancient Islamic (and pre-Islamic) wisdom to the terrifying realities of postmodern asymmetrical warfare, Negarestani excavates the hidden prehistory of global culture in the 21st century.’ (Steven Shaviro)

‘The Cyclonopedia manuscript remains one of the few books to rigorously and honestly ask what it means to open oneself to a radically non-human life – this is a text that screams, from a living assemblage known as the Middle East, “I am legion.” Cyclonopedia also constitutes part of a new generation of writing that refuses to be called either theory or fiction; a heady mixture of philosophy, the occult, and the tentacular fringes of Iranian culture – call it “occultural studies.” To find a comparable work, one would have to look back to Von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the prose poems of Olanus Wormius, or to the recent “Neophagist” commentaries on the Book of Eribon.’ (Eugene Thacker)

‘Western readers can expect their peculiarly schizoid condition to be ‘butchered open’ by this work. Read Negarestani, and pray.’ (Nick Land)

"Partly genius, partly quite mad ... To sum up: a weirdly compelling read." (Peter Lamborn Wilson)


Last 30 pages of the book are pure philosophical LSD, mechanism of lenses for seeing the monstrous layers of our openness to butchering Outside, Aliens that are eating us. But the most surprising approach that Negarestani is deliriously describing here is that we need to be open to that massacre, to that alien culinary feast. We are here not to resist but to comply with being butchered and eaten. We have to be spiritually and physically clean so that we could be a good meal.

Here is an excerpt:

In both Drujite and Lovecraftian polytics of radical exteriority, omega-survival or strategic endurance is maintained by an excessive paranoia that cannot be distinguished from a schizophrenic delirium. For such a paranoia - saturated by parasitic survivalism and persistence in its own integrity - the course of activity coincides with that of schizo-singularities. Paranoia, in the Cthulhu Mythos and in Drujite-infested Zoroastriansim, manifests itself as a sophisticated hygiene-Complex associated with the demented Aryanistic obsession with purity and the structure of monotheism. This arch-sabotaged paranoia, in which the destination of purity overlaps with the emerging zone of the outside, is called schizotrategy. If, both for Lovecraft and the Aryans, purity must be safeguarded by an excessive paranoia, it is because only such paranoia and rigorous closure can attract the forces of the Outside and effectuate cosmic akienage in the form of radical openness - that is, being butchered and cracked open. Drujite cults fully developed this schizotrategic line through the fusion of Aryanistic purity with Zoroastrian monotheism. The Zoroastrian heresiarchs such as Akht soon discovered the immense potential of schyzotrategy for xeno-calls, subversion and sabotage. As a sorcerous line, schizotrategy opens the entire monotheistic culture to cosmodromic openness and its epidemic meshworks. As the nervous system of Lovecraftian strategic paranoia, openness is identified as 'being laid, cracked, butchered open' through a schizotrategic participation with the Outside. In terms of the xeno-call and schizitrategy, the non-localizable outside emerges as the xeno-chemical inside or the Insider.
... 'If openness, as the scimitar blade of the outside, seeks out manifestations of closure, then in the middle-eastern ethic it is imperative to assuage the external desire of the Outside by becoming what it hungers for the most' (H. Parsani)."


As you see, not an easy read, but it just means that you have to dedicate next 10 years of your life to digest it - as it eats you from within, of course. So what? Do you have any better plans? If you can imagine a hybrid of film Begotten, Deleuze's culinary writtings, Lovecraft's diary, David Lynch's letters from afterlife and Joyce's verbal acrobatics, hurry up - feed yourself with this monstrous book. It will set you sealed.

Lara Glenum: Organic surrealism galore

Gently Read Literature on Maximum Gaga by Lara Glenum:

"A phrase that popped into my head after reading Lara Glenum’s MAXIMUM GAGA for the first time was ‘post-apocalyptic porno poetry’. Post-apocalyptic because the land of these poems is populated with post-human creatures that are strange mutations of animal and machine. Porno because the land of these poems is riddled with extreme sex acts and meat and teeth and perverse modes of consumption and bodily fluids galore.

Another thought that occurred to me is how it seemed strangely apt that I could abbreviate the title’s collection as MAX. GAG. In a way, this collection seemed like a vomitous outpouring of grotesque hybrids in which misshapen chunks were hacked up into different pieces, also misshapen."

And from Blake Butler:

"In 110 pages Lara Glenum has calcified the remains of what she might have in her sleep licked out of the head of one of the 1500 brains that died trapped inside the body of Gilles Deleuze's suicide, flushed from the spewmater of Lewis Carroll's brain damaged brother's long-rotten LSD baked corpse, and churned together with the sugars of recalled candy wiped out whole middle schools in Japan.
These are poems that as they create their world among the lines become banned inside the created land as soon as the land therein hears itself.
The terrain of the book is filled with malformed sexual machines, Sade-ian cartoon demons with child names like Minky Momo and Seven Cunt Mary and the Bull. There is a stage play that seems implicating in and on the poems as if by quasi-candied-dictatorial reign, which then scourges itself in and of the poems as if it is one of them."

And this is from Maximum Gaga:

"The vagina is found in divers Manners, and with divers Ornaments. Many of them provide the finest Articulations, and Foldings, for the Wings to be withdrawn, and neatly laid up inside. Occasionally the petiole embraces the branch from which it springs. The Empalement, which commonly rises out of a membranous vagina. The embryio dracunculi, it is sad, will quit the body of the vaginaless parent worm. Sometimes soldiers lie together like teeth crouching in a perfect labia. The fibers of their leg muscles are then distinguished by crenellated or adipose septa, as by so many peculiar vaginae. The vagina's variants in North America alone are innumerable, the most important being the entrance to heaven, snapping doors."

And this is Lara Glenum's manifesto:

Manifesto of the Anti-Real

1. Art is neither a form of consolation nor a butler to hegemonies. Even in its most discreet moments, art explodes.

2. The Anti-Real does not deny the Real.* The Anti-Real knows that everything is in annihilation in the Sublime. The Anti-Real is that which seeks to manifest itself through the secret side-door to the Sublime rather than through the mock world of realism.

3. Realism is the bordello of those who would have their perceptions affirmed rather than dilated. When the door of fascism is opened, Realism will be seen lounging like a whore in its inner sanctum.

4. The Apocalypse is a way of thinking. Only the Apocalyptic clock announces from atop the grotesque pile of refuse, 'The Kingdom of Heaven is now.'

5. Irony is not a device. It is a state of being.

6. To be Anti-Real is not to be Surreal. The achievement of Surrealism lies in displacing correspondences, in the poem not arriving. In the Anti-Real, all assumptions are disabled, too, with one difference: the Anti-Real displaces causal logic with a totalizing logic of violence.

7. ‘Defile! Defile!’ shriek the Obliterati as they vandalize the museum of language.

8. Sentimentality is a form of exploitation, a connivance with official lies. Hang sentimentality on the gallows of Emergency.

*Even though the Real does not exist

"Singing chorus of fetuses" doing lap dance, screaming of desire comes across the mutant sky. Prepare for the joy of the worst!

Shane Jones vs. February

Shane Jones, Light Boxes (Publishing Genius, 2009)

Ken Baumann on Light Boxes by Shane Jones: "I feel it’s hard today to find a work of art that is earnest, that is compassionate. (Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody comes to mind). I was startled by Shane Jones’s novel because it is so painfully both; it bleeds itself, and bleeds for others. Light Boxes is a story about a community, about a man’s quest to rid his community of February, a bitter and long spell of cold that haunts the the town and its people."

Shane Jones is in his early R.E.M. phase, indie star goes big (he signed a deal with Spike Jonze and Ray Tintori, so Light Boxes the movie will be made + Penguin is going to republish it and make it planetary).

Although it seems very "magical" and surrealistic while you are reading it, Light Boxes actually grows into a fairy tale about compassion. Like Shane said in an interview at Bookslut: "I want my characters to feel like real people that would act compassionately like I would. What I know and how I would act is all I can go on really to connect characters to readers. I also don’t want to read about characters that are doing terrible things really. Making them do things outside of what I would do, just kind of loses it for me. I’m having trouble explaining it. I think in Light Boxes the characters are all compassionate people and as a reader I hope they feel compassionate towards them. I really like compassion I guess."

"Last year when I read Light Boxes it had just been published by Publishing Genius Press, a small independent press in Baltimore, and I knew I was reading an extraordinary book. Only a few months later the book was optioned for film by Spike Jonze (whose film Where the Wild Things Are is similar to Light Boxes in many ways) and then got picked up by Penguin. That the book has caught the attention of so many people is hardly a surprise.
Light Boxes is a contemporary fable set in a small town where an endless February has become something of a plague of cold and gray, draining life of color and happiness. Anything to do with flight (including flight itself and flying objects) has been banned and eradicated, and this ban is enforced by a sect of priests who stalk about the town with axes, ready to destroy any violation. The story is narrated through short sections, usually just a page, alternating points of view a la Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. Additionally, author Shane Jones uses various tools to add texture to the already fantastic and imaginative story: a list of missing children, transcriptions of found handwritten notes, the distillation of a report from the priests who’ve been spying on the townspeople, and even different fonts and font sizes.
The main character, Thaddeus Lowe (based very loosely on the self-made scientist/inventor/aeronaut from the Civil War era), is an ordinary man who just wants to live with his wife, Selah, and his daughter, Bianca. The increasingly tense and dreary atmosphere makes this difficult, and Thaddeus finds some relief by keeping a contraband kite that he lets his daughter fly while watching for priests in the woods.
Before long for the reader (but eons for the characters), February has burst beyond its usual 28 or 29 days and does not seem to be nearing an end. Moreover, children begin to disappear: “Evie Rhodes—taken from her bed on February the 127th. . . . Jessica Chambers—vanished while walking with her dogs on February the 312th.” Eventually some of the townspeople are coaxed into action to break February’s stranglehold on their lives. The catalyst for this subversive action is a mysterious group of figures wearing colored bird masks. The reluctant hero Thaddeus says,
'The Solution came to my window last night. They had on their bird masks and black top hats. They wore a single brown scarf around their necks. I said I understood the need to rebel and protect our town against February. I reminded them of the tactics used last year.
Most important, they said, think of your daughter, Bianca.'
Indeed, one of the missing children is Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca.
In an effort to deny February’s extended deep freeze, the people declare war on the second month. They attempt to undermine February’s crushing power by acting as though warm weather has arrived, and when that does not work they boil water and throw it on the snow. The titular light boxes come into play as part of a scheme to produce ultraviolet light to help rouse people from their stupor.
Though not necessarily surreal, Light Boxes is decidedly non-realist. The townspeople often see a child’s feet dangling from a hole in the sky, and at one point a plague of moss overtakes the town.
'To watch the way those horses died. To have felt the waves of their muscles contracting and shaking under that skin of mushy green. It was too much for me. The floor and walls were covered in moss. The dog was covered in moss but was still alive, and he ran around the home barking green-colored clouds. Thaddeus was tearing out fistfuls from the walls.'
Despite the white of the snow, the green of the moss, and the multi-colored bird masks, the most integral color in Light Boxes is gray. This color of vagary and indistinction suffuses Jones’s entire book, and this characteristic is part of what makes the story so compelling. The beginning of the story borders on cliché, yet Jones succeeds by taking familiar plot into misty gray territory.
As the story moves along, February becomes more than a month, more than a name for the cold heart of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. February becomes increasingly anthropomorphic until he is a distant, godlike entity who is said to be responsible for the frigid atmosphere of misery and apathy, as well as abducting the children. One character concretizes it by speaking of “the sadness inside us that is February.” Not much later, we read a “List Written by February and Carried in February’s Corduroy Coat Pocket”:
'I am not a bad person. I have enjoyed June, July and August like everyone else.
I’m so confused it almost feels calm.
I am guilty of kidnapping children. I am guilty of Bianca and causing great pain to Thaddeus and Selah and the town.
I want to be a good person, but I’m not.'
Later, February is sitting in a cottage with a girl he calls “the girl who smelled of smoke and honey.” It is here that we first see February incarnate, as a very human being whose own sadness is the source of the prolonged gray season:
'The girl was telling him that she was tired of being around someone who carried so much sadness in his body. February drew his kneecaps to his eye sockets.
February apologized. He rocked back and forth. When he stretched his legs back out the girl was smiling and running in place. February asked what she was doing. The girl who smelled of honey and smoke said it was to cheer him up.'
Jones also uses differing font sizes to brilliant effect. After Thaddeus suffers another terrible loss, he sits in the street, defeated, motionless, emotionally destroyed and numb. The townspeople gather around him and ask what he plans to do next, how the campaign against February will continue, and he calls off all wars against February. Thaddeus withdraws into himself. At this point, each page contains only a line or two isolated in a snowy whiteness, the words almost smothered in silence:
'The left side of my body is Bianca, and my right side is Selah. With no body I have no reason to move from this spot.
And Thaddeus’s mind spirals into itself, into strange thoughts, giving the sense that the lines are those thoughts that are not actually verbalized in one’s mind, but are the feelings just before language. Thaddeus continues:
Tell me everything won’t end in death. That everything doesn’t end with February. Dead wildflowers wrapped around a baby’s throat.
I’m going to move my hand today.
I vomit ice cubes.
There’s a ghost next to me.
Get up, Dad.'
The last line, tiny and alone on the page, raises the hair on the back of my neck. The font (maybe 8 point compared to 11 or 12) produces the effect of sensing a still, small voice, and it is that pinpoint of an emotional wallop that accelerates the energy of the story on to its inevitably tragic and, somehow, hopeful end.
Shane Jones weaves words and images in Light Boxes with an innocence that is deceptively simple. The book is succinct as well as fantastic and imaginative, at turns tender, funny, incredibly sad, and spirited. I applaud Penguin for publishing this strange and moving book. Light Boxes is the complete package of literary innovation as well as an accessible, engaging, and moving story that traverses human emotion while creating new experiences in narrative fiction." - Josh Maday

Few drops of wonder from Light Boxes:

"A scroll of parchment was nailed to an oak tree, calling for the end of all things that could fly. Everyone in town gathered around to read it. Trumpets moaned from the woods. Birds dropped from branches. The priests walked through town swinging axes. Bianca clutched Thaddeus's leg and he picked her up under the arms and told her to hold him like a baby tree around the neck and Thaddeus ran.
Back outside their home, the balloons were spread out on the ground. Baskets hacked by axes. The priests dipped their lanterns into the fabric of the balloons"



Hearts are gonna roll in your body. All your seven wounded hearts.

Shane Jones, The Failure Six (Fugue State Press, 2010)

"A Jesse Ball magic mystery tour in a land of Calvino’s fables? With zany temporal shifts and winsome absurdities, Light Boxes, Shane Jones’s refractive first book, dispatches readers on just such a journey. Lyrical flights and evocative metaphors render the prose in poetic terms. In The Failure Six, Jones methodically dispenses with storytelling, surrendering the text to one strange and beautiful image after another:
'The teahouse was tall and narrow, consisting of nineteen floors. The furniture was all wood, made by a carpenter who was a well-known acquaintance of the owner. Each floor had different-colored wallpaper and on each wall hung large paintings of country barns. All the wooden beams in the teahouse were covered in odd patches of red fur.'
She saw a man in the nude. Yes, he was in the nude, very handsome, and she was as well, nude. Things were hazy. Fur-covered clouds were on the ceiling with little black crosses bobbing up and down.
Here, instead of a tale told from beginning to end, we have a sequence replayed five times with variations: a series of messengers are commissioned to retell an amnesiac’s life story. The message is simple: her name is Foe; she’s a linen and silk seamstress; her mother died in a car accident when she was 12; her father was killed in a duel by a man with a green mustache; and there was no one to comfort her when she began her apprenticeship. But Foe cannot or will not remember, none of the messengers are adequate to the task, and consequences follow.
You could look at The Failure Six as a parable on how memory always fails us; its central character isn’t named “Foe” for nothing. But this is no color-by-numbers morality tale. If, to quote Samuel Johnson, the true art of memory is the art of attention, then The Failure Six attends to the past’s elusive imprint, the future’s inevitable failure, to how forgetting may be a way toward unbecoming, and then toward becoming something else. It’s an exquisite memento of wildly imagined scenes, odd characters, and nightmares confused with waking life, a slipstream loop where bureaucracy and hallucination are so intertwined that you’re often confused which is the most absurd. This novella is a bright thing, something like a mostly forgotten, but still well-tooled memory that insists itself every so often." - John Madera

Eating faces with killer words

If you don't like David Ohle, Ben Marcus, Shelley Jackson, James Tate, Steve Aylett, Jesse Ball, Blake Butler, Shane Jones, Gert Jonke, John Olson, Salvador Plascencia, Richard Brautigan, HP Tinker, Flann O'Brien, Doug Rice, Oliverio Girondo, you shouldn't be here. Go away! Sentences are going to melt here and turn your brain into a cold weapon. Prepare for the best of the infraground literature. This is a pure propaganda, you will not find any common truths here - just sheer shockingly excavated future Bible heroes.

For example:

"The brother is built from food, in the manner of minute particles slowly sttling or suspended by slight currents, that exist in varying amounts in all air. There is least food-printing over the ocean and most at low levels over cities; food caused by airplanes is a serious addition to a radical new man-making practiced in versions of Detroit, and explains at least partially the heavy food-fall there"
- Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String

Is this shit or what? Is your brain still there?