DC'S
The blog of author Dennis Cooper
Please welcome to the world …
Mutations by Gary J. Shipley &
Devin Horan (Infinity Land
Press)
JULY 7, 2020 / DC / 10 COMMENTS
With an introduction by Steve Finbow
Standard Edition
Softbound with flaps, 128 pages, 148 x 206
Collector’s Edition
Book + original artwork
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/mutations
“Mutations is a rewriting of the Real, a reimagining of the Imaginary, a
shocking virus of words that transfigures our perceptions of good and evil, a
contagion of collages that fixes our gaze even when all we want to do is look
away.”
– Steve Finbow
“Gary J Shipley’s writing has a way of making every form he works within
advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read,
no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy, and never more convincingly
than in Mutations.”
– Dennis Cooper
These letters and images create, by their forms and the mutations of these
forms originating in the body, a fluctuating picture that must correspond
objectively to a transcendental collagic representation of the final and
highest realities. Whoever says “loss of identity” also says Mutations,
metamorphosis, transvaluation, poetic creation. Between the two there is a
distance, a dangerous journey. What is the risk? Bewilderment, madness,
suicide. Mutations is not striving for another being, but for another mode of
being. It is more than anything something which transforms the body. It is
the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the
body of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating collages
through which the texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate
each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically
one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition.
You are not the diagnosis. Everyone in the room will want you to be, but it
won’t happen. The doctor will say the MRI scan was… problematic. She will
pause like that. She will be reluctant to use the word tumour. Reluctant
because cancer spreads, it doesn’t roam. And this was moving around inside
your head. Appeared independent of the tissues of your brain. But that
couldn’t be right. They will need to do another scan, but you will refuse. You
will know already what you need to know. You will drum your fingers on the
desk, and you will say: “In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm.” The
remark will be met with consternation. Nobody will talk for at least twenty
seconds. As you get up to leave the room, the doctor will also rise from her
chair. You will hear her entreating you to come back as you close the door
behind you. Once you leave the building you will never go back.
To be between mutations is to be an even purer possibility. You will feel it. You
will feel it like a headache of someone recently decapitated, like the headless
part of that equation. Your head is so sweet you can barely swallow it. The
facts of the people in that room, the lightbox on the wall, the shining
pamphlets, the mannerisms of the auto shop, have degraded in the hours
since you left. For your “confectionery head / that draws the cup of fever / is
the suicide of truth”. What a thing it is, to just be what you are and nothing
else; what an accursed state, what a sterile immutability, what a faded god.
You will dream of plagues. Your eyes will barely function from lack of sleep.
You will hear them open and close. Like Saint-Remys you will know that “even
destroyed, even annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to [our]
very marrow, […] we do not die in our dreams, that our will operates even in
absurdity, even in the negation of possibility, even in the transmutation of the
lies from which truth can be remade”. As long as you refuse to wake up you
will not die. You will wonder if you have ever woken up—even during those
times when it seemed as though a bulb of the harshest, nastiest light had
been switched on inside your head and would not go out, when you’d seen the
outside bathed in that sick glow for months, for years, that perhaps even then
you had not really come around. Perhaps even then death had not been near
enough to smell you. The women with their faces cut off for fun: perhaps they
didn’t feel it happen. And the eyes: who’s to say they ever saw anything.
You will find eyes distributed about your rooms. An eye will look out from a
wall. You will not ever see it blink. You will come to see the eyes as yours. But
it won’t be through them that you’ll see what it is you’ll come to see. It will not
ingratiate itself to light or the dimensions inseparable from vision. You’ll see it
without seeing it. Its outline will move and fade and militate against its being
one. Anomalous, it will have “no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is
rather that of a mutant”. If it is to be thought of as tentacled, those tentacles
will reach inward—as if to pull itself apart. You will fill a bathtub full of sick
from the prolonged unlocatedness of this, from the swell of every durative
thought.
“Thus there will come strange jolts, paradoxical mutations, flights that are
returns.”15 And you will find yourself back where you started, with torsos
shuffling across ceilings and vulvas blooming on withered plants. You will
remember the oncologist talking about the finger-like spread of a
hypoattenuating peritumoral edema in the white matter that surrounds it.
Cracks will appear in walls, in windows, in the floor. Your rooms will fall away
beneath you. You will look down at your feet as if down a lift shaft. The world,
then, when it returns will do so in bits, in horrific fragments of itself come
together in some aleatory nightmare of ever more spasmodic forms. What
available light there is will eat your eyes out of their sockets. You will look out
from this nowhere of vermicular digestion and vomit your organs into your
lap. When your sight returns you will see your vomit is also made of worms,
and those worms are made of worms, and so on downward, inward, until you
are sick again, and more worms and more sick and so on until your bulimic
interiority will speak—and you cannot speak.
“The ‘worm’ constructs itself out of various previously autonomous systems
[…] until it coincides—at its most abstract—with a potential for pure
contagion. It specializes in nonspecialization, assembling itself out of
everything it infects, its nature continuously mutating as it assimilates new
material.”16 But then the worm must ask itself: How to infect yourself with
everything and once infected turn away from it—to have this aggregation
somehow turn away from itself. To live inside this suiciding. To know
everything about what it is to know nothing: expert in your own disinterest, in
the broad strokes of your ignorance, in the painstaking detail of it. The
impossibility of being this meticulously oblivious, this assiduously weary. You
will welcome your voided acumen with a kiss. You will that your infinitude
become contagious.
You will imagine returning to the hospital, to the oncology ward, your legs
giving out from under you in the waiting room, looking up at all the “wanfaced pseudo mutants with eyes like blind fish” tepidly waiting for their
treatments. However scared you get you will not suffer the indignity of that.
“Mutants built their own shelters out of saliva and ash”; they do not need
their gamma knives and radiotherapy, their shunts and their chemo, their
considered prognoses and statistical variance. Mutation like life is dangerous.
Mutation is the noise of the message conveying its own message. There is no
such thing as a managed end, only an end to management, a wilful
relinquishment of control. “Stop sending your ships through the narrow
cosmo-logical corridor. Stop making them climb the extreme walls of the
world. Let them jump over the cosmic barrier and enter into the hyperspace
of the Universe. Cease having them compete with light, for your rockets too
can realize the more-than-psychic, postural mutation, and shift from light to
black universe which is no longer a color; from cosmic color to postural and
subjective black. Let your rockets become subject of the Universe and be
present at every point of the Remote.” The ziplock bag in the kitchen
cupboard with your ovaries inside, you can eat them whenever you like.
Your skin will turn the grey of Margate beach. The grey of the forgotten
economy-meat-eating patrons of its greasy spoons. The grey of faded
newspaper print and burnt-down cigarettes and 60s Brutalist high-rise flats.
The grey of the diseased matter in your head. The grey of the dream you have
of somewhere else. And as for the colours that aren’t grey—because for all its
symbolic felicity no seaside town is shaded so homogenous—they are the
greyest versions of themselves, and could not be greyer without thereby
ceasing to be examples of variance, however nugatory. Just to smell you is to
sense the spiders getting fat.
What happens next is dictated by the process. It cannot be documented in
advance, and any stipulations around it must remain tentative at best, as “the
initial escape from form is represented by a process of unpredictable
mutation”. You see snakes caught in webs the rats have made. You see them in
the intestines of a suspended horse. The severed heads in a row in front of
you wear the same expression. All the disembodied organs are similarly fetal.
Every fragment dismembers; every dismemberment fragments. Then it’s all a
blur. There are fleeting resemblances. You’re choking: there’s a cock in your
mouth facing the wrong way. You’re surrounded by desert. Its contours are
reflected in the sky. The vision is particulate and strained and discharged of
belonging. There are areas of blackness scratched at to establish flimsy
increments of light. “Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness,
belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an
inherent morphological trajectory.”
The six-legged men will gather among the trees and masturbate each other
with their broken teeth. The world is ending tomorrow and the drunks are
drunk. Old women are groping at a child. Ice cream is melting down its arm. At
the edge of what you can see: translucent worms eating eyeballs out of heads.
The world is ending tomorrow and the horror of boredom. A woman no
longer has the bulk to keep her trousers up; she lets them drop only so far;
she plays the fistula in her arm like a penny whistle. Hurry, the sea is turning
black! Hurry, the memory is in my throat!
The sun will create a shaft of warmth and light through the room. When you
place your hands in it you will be able to feel them again. Your head inside it
will be freed of the weight of its being there. You will fill the room like smoke.
It’s your face on Sivart’s two screens. You are telling him he needs to wake up.
You are the plumes rising from his ashtray. You are the faint clouds of water
vapour coming out the mouth of the old woman. She is stroking her lap as if
there’s a cat. You will tell Travis that it’s okay for him to masturbate over
those Nilsen drawings in his book. You will order him to do it while you watch.
You will talk him through it, you will seduce him. When he’s finished you will
both be sick in your mouths and swallow it. Curling up into a ball you will hug
your own cadaver. Your eyes will float in a pool of someone else’s blood. You
are every individual part of the smoke now trailing down the hallway, down
the stairs. You will be breathed in by the baby on the ground floor so that its
head will explode when the father throws it at the wall.
You repeat to yourself how it is that “without a profound complicity with
natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and
the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of what
had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been
elevated—without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering
and torrential nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there could only be a
revolting utopian sentimentality”. And yet you cannot help feeling that in
spite of your mutability you are ascending, and that this suffering is flagrantly
unnatural—that these accumulating horrors are some bleed-through from
some other world, and syrupy too, and idyllic, for what do they stand for but a
superstructure that somehow censures this behaviour from afar. Horrors
shored up by the dream that they might not happen.
—–
Biographies
Gary J. Shipley is the author of twelve books, most recently Stratagem of the
Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard (Anthem), 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork) and
Warewolff! (Hexus). He has been published in numerous literary magazines,
anthologies and academic journals. More information can be found at Thek
Prosthetics.
Devin Horan made the films Boundary (2009), Late and Deep (2011), Grodek
(2014), Akra (2017), and The Animals Are Sick With Love (2020) and was the
editor of Pages of Natural History (Pagine di storia naturale, 2019). His collages
are an ongoing project begun in 2013 entitled Insomnia of Worlds, which will
consist of 1000 pieces. https://jesuve.tumblr.com/
Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London,
2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press,
2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead
(Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical
Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A
Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room
(Repeater Books, 2017) And Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead
(Infinity Land Press 2019). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine
Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.
——Infinity Land Press website
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/infinitylandpress/
*
p.s. Hey. ** Today the blog enacts one of its occasional hobbies of serving as an
usher to a newly born book, in this case an excellent tome by the mega-scribe
Gary Shipley and the fine artist/filmmaker Devin Horan as produced by the
unimpeachable Infinity Land Press, a fount of just about the most sumptuous
looking books out there. A win win win, in other words. Please pore through
the evidence of ‘Mutations’ and give serious consideration to the idea of
giving it a home in your home. Thanks! ** h (now j), Hi. Ah, you’ve actually
seen his films projected. That’s something. I think I only saw one of them that
way so far. So sad: that overly surgery body feeling post-eating something
sweet. It doesn’t seem fair. I guess it’s ‘god’s’ way of keep us non-obese. I’m
happy you’re enjoying the Steve Abbott book. He is much missed. Wonderful
guy too. I enjoyed my espresso, and it was a double! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I
should have and did assume(d) you’d know his films. And yes about the
Mekas. And yes, RIP Morricone. That’s a big one. Startling how much great
and varying work he did. ** Sypha, Hi. Okay, I really must read him then. Inked
into my search pad. Oh, right, the travel restrictions. But you played miniature
golf and that’s really all that matters, isn’t it? Sort of? So you’re just gonna stay
in your hood and vacation in your yard and smell the roses and so on? ** Jeff J,
Hi, Jeff. Very happy to have made the introduction. No, the Schmid post is still
upcoming. I’ve been moving it around. In the next couple of weeks. Really,
thank you a lot about ‘Zac’s Drug Binge’. Means a lot. Yeah, I’m really happy
with the new formatting. No, I don’t mess the gifs’ original timing. I do
obviously pay a lot of attention to the timings and work carefully with them
and build the sequences around the gifs’ cycling in and out of sync with their
compadres. Especially in the new novel. Anyway, yeah, thank you! I’m really
proud of it. A screenplay! Interesting. Curious form, no? I quite like working
with it too, or at least when I feel I can approach it as freely and
independently as I do any other writing form. Its conventions are so
entrenched, and it’s exciting to try to fight and reinvent them, if you know
what I mean. So that’s going well? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Excellent about
the new writing, and it’s great you have a trusted and speedy reader to
feedback for you. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha. If you had known Emshwiller’s films,
I might have literally fallen off my chair. Well, I didn’t make the puke post with
July 4th in mind, but when I realised it was imminent, I did realise that putting
it and the food one squarely in that slot might have a nice meta effect.
Cheesecake is kind of evil. I think my kid logic was more like ‘I’m not going to
get what I want, and here’s how I’m going to adjust to that.’ ** Bill, I’m glad his
film intrigued you, obviously. Cool. Manic energy sounds like a good way to
cool down the possible overly Maddin-like problem. Okey-doke. Puking while
smirking and pretending to be bored is one of Gregg’s specialties. ** Right.
You know what’s before you today, and I hope you will welcome it into you in
some fashion or other. See you tomorrow.
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10 Comments
Scunnard
July 7, 2020 at 10:48 am
Hi Dennis, thanks for today. I’ve been hearing murmurs about
Mutations and it looks lovely and have been really impressed by
Infinity Land Press and what they are up to. Also thanks, I knew I had
seen a compiled list of online sources and online lit stuff by you
recently, so found that and is really useful. Oh and Chris Kelso has a
nice little feature over at invert/extant talking about his new project
and you also get a nice shout out in it:
https://www.invertextant.com/post/feature-chris-kelso-creativelymourning-the-novel
REPLY
Ian
July 7, 2020 at 2:33 pm
Hey Dennis. I will ask around and see if I can find some of the spit art.
I know we took lots of photos of it at the time. Just gotta track them
down.
Honeymoon was three days of camping. We went to Vietnam last
year for a month so that was our big adventure.
Take care. Ian
REPLY
David Ehrenstein
July 7, 2020 at 3:09 pm
My but this looks gorgeous and wondrous and deeply strange.
Ringo is 80 Among other things, surely one of the nicest Living
Legends it has ever been my pleasure to mee.
REPLY
Misanthrope
July 7, 2020 at 4:10 pm
Dennis, This looks good. One thing I like about the smaller presses
these days is that their output is phenomenal in both quality and
quantity. I’m thinking of Infinity Land Press, Amphetamine Sulphate,
and Snuggly Books particularly. It’s good to see in this day and age
where the big publishers seem so cautious and bottom line.
Cheesecake might just be my favorite. Though I’ll take a traditional
birthday/wedding cake slice any day too.
Hahaha, yes, you falling out of your chair…I could see that in
response.
Hmm, yeah, you know my parents pretty much gave me everything I
ever wanted and I guess I expected that to happen ad infinitum. At
some point, I realized, logically, that that was never going to happen. I
sometimes wonder if that was part of the reason my brother got
involved in drugs so heavy. Doubt it. But you never know.
REPLY
Bill
July 7, 2020 at 6:23 pm
Ha, in the last few weeks, I often think about the cover of Shipley’s
book:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18723194-dreams-ofamputation
I should start a “recontextualize” collection, with older images/texts
that have very different associations these days. Someone has
probably done that already.
Very sad about Morricone. I’ll put on some of the old chestnuts, and
maybe that John Zorn record based on Morricone themes.
Bill
REPLY
_Black_Acrylic
July 7, 2020 at 6:46 pm
I might need to spring for this one, having loved Warewolff! a whole
lot.
The big news from Dundee today is that the DCA tweeted their
reopening plans: September 4th is when their bar, cinema and
activity areas are back welcoming visitors. Nothing booked as yet,
but I hope to be in the print studio there making future editions of
The Call zine a reality.
REPLY
Sypha
July 7, 2020 at 8:21 pm
Ah, Infinity Land Press, been awhile since I’ve ordered anything from
them… think the last one was their translation of Artaud’s
HELIOGABULUS? I’m looking forward to that big anthology they
announced yesterday on Facebook, which I think will be out in the
fall? But this new one looks very interesting as well…
Dennis, yeah, mostly staying in, aside from the mini-golfing yesterday
and going to the zoo (which we did today). Might also go CD
shopping tomorrow. We’ve been trying to get the outdoors stuff out
of the way early this week as come Thursday it’s going to become
very warm/humid. The mini-golfing was fun, it was a local course we
hadn’t been to in many years and was kind of deserted (seems
everyone who was there was spending time on the driving range).
We split up into two teams, I was with two of my brothers while my
youngest brother was with my parents. Our team won by a fairly
wide margin, and I had the 3rd best individual score, even had a hole
in one… I was playing over my head, ha ha.
As for the zoo: it was the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence,
which I have not been to since… grade school? Probably been over 25
years at least. It wasn’t too crowded, but a lot of the areas were
closed for obvious reasons. I was disappointed to find out they had
no lions or tigers, but they did have a cheetah exhibit… sadly, the
cheetahs were a no show (same for the . I did, however, briefly see a
big snow leopard, so at least I got to see ONE big cat. Anyway, we
also saw zebras, giraffes, elephants, chickens, alpacas, a miniature
donkey, goats, a very lazy harbor seal, monkeys and gibbons, a big-ass
anteater, flamingos, owls, an otter, hogs, some bald eagles, wild
turkeys, bison, pronghorns, tortoises, a wallaby, a dromedary camel,
a moon bear, auodads, cranes, red pandas, and some wildebeests.
Aside from the cheetahs, other no shows were the red wolf and the
Giant Flemish Rabbit.
REPLY
Steve Erickson
July 8, 2020 at 4:16 am
Here are my reviews of Margo Price’s new album THAT’S HOW
RUMORS GET STARTED: https://www.gaycitynews.com/margoprices-new-album-goes-back-in-time-but-keeps-it-personal/ and Bill
& Turner Ross’ film BLOODY NOSES, EMPTY POCKETS:
https://www.gaycitynews.com/bill-and-turner-ross-closing-time/.
I was amazed by how prolific Ennio Morricone was when I went
looking at his discography yesterday. His score for THE THING is a
particular favorite.
Have you heard the new albums by White Boy Scream (opera-noisepop) and the brilliantly named Feminazgul (leftfield black metal, with
instrumentation like violin and accordion)?
Have you gotten much feedback on ZAC’S DRUG BINGE outside the
blog?
REPLY
Jeffrey Coleman
July 8, 2020 at 6:19 am
Hey Dennis.
I want to get this Shipley book. I dug up Warewolff to read soon. I
haven’t read much by Shipley, but he seems cool.
Hey, I read The Sluts recently. Great book. I admittedly haven’t read
much by you since hanging out at the blog because in my mind,
subconsciously, you had gone from cool writer to friend with good
taste. Sorta. I mean, I read more of your stuff before coming to the
blog. Trying to rectify that. Read The Sluts, and now I’m reading Ugly
Man and Smothered in Hugs. With The Marbled Swarm at hand to
read soon.
Anyway, cool day, and take care.
REPLY
Jeffrey Coleman
July 8, 2020 at 6:29 am
Oh. BTW, if you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a drawing of you holding
Bret Easton Ellis’ severed head at this link, some ways down in the
interview, lol.
https://theaither.com/2020/07/05/art-talk-we-interview-italianartist-ilaria-novelli-aka-ila-pop/?fbclid=IwAR12OjHU4iySyfsc1rg_PaoirV66nTj4r1d1ysJDnsDcexmbJRzvFgD4wc
REPLY
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