Evan Isoline, Deadmath, 11:11 Press, 2022
DƐVDMVTH is a
mythographical-rhetorical work, a book of flowers, of arcadian
theophanies & semiopathic assaults. In sur-rendering its totems &
mementoes of Western arcana to the agency of their own dissolution,
DƐVDMVTH brings the dead into rebellion, constructs a monument to an
uninterpretable key in a ruin of obsolete modes.
LIKE A RECOVERED PYRAMID TEXT IN WHICH ALL THE ANCIENT MYTHS WE
THOUGHT WE UNDERSTOOD HAVE BEEN RECAST, EVAN ISOLINE’S DƐVDMVTH IS
A DISORIENTING PHANTASMAGORIA OF GENRE-SHATTERING FORMS AND STYLES,
TEARING LIKE BLITZKRIEG THROUGH ITS UNHINGED IMAGINATION OF THE
UNCONSCIOUS SPACE BEHIND ALL TIME. SPASTIC, BATTY, UNRELENTING,
ABSURD, PROVOCATIVE, INCANTATORY, AND PROFANE ON EVERY PAGE, CONSIDER
MAKING THIS THE LAST GIFT YOU EVER GIVE THE PEOPLE YOU CALL YOUR
PARENTS. —BLAKE BUTLER
Evan Isoline, Philosophy of the Sky, 11:11 Press, 2021
PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SKY is not a work of philosophy in an academic or traditional sense.
It is, however, highly philosophical, totemic, and personal. In the
book, Evan uses the sky as an abstract philosophical concept, like a
cinematic backdrop, to explore conceptual associations between
selfhood, objecthood, the body, apocalypticism, masculinity,
masturbation, and self-destruction.
The text, symbol,
and glyph are partially augmented by chance cut-up processes such as
language translators, Markov chain generators, and AI natural
language generators for the purpose of eliminating narrative
preconception, discovering subconscious visual realms, and
spotlighting a point of tension between natural and artificial
aesthetic forms. The formatting of text becomes an important
cinematographic framing tool.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SKY is not a work of philosophy in an academic or traditional sense.
It is, however, highly philosophical, totemic, and personal. In the
book, Evan uses the sky as an abstract philosophical concept, like a
cinematic backdrop, to explore conceptual associations between
selfhood, objecthood, the body, apocalypticism, masculinity,
masturbation, and self-destruction.
The text, symbol,
and glyph are partially augmented by chance cut-up processes such as
language translators, Markov chain generators, and AI natural
language generators for the purpose of eliminating narrative
preconception, discovering subconscious visual realms, and
spotlighting a point of tension between natural and artificial
aesthetic forms. The formatting of text becomes an important
cinematographic framing tool.
LIKE AN ARTAUDIAN
SET OF MAPS SKETCHED OUT FROM THE TOPOGRAPHIC EXPLORATION OF A SELF
WHICH LOST ITSELF IN DATA AND CONSTELLATIONS, PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY
BECOMES A MIRROR IMAGE OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL ABYSS. ISOLINE’S SKY
REFLECTS THE BLACKHOLESNESS OF WRITING AS IT UNVEILS ITSELF AS THE
ATTRACTOR OF CONJUGATION, MUTATION AND REMIX —A CATACLYSMIC BLANK
SPACE INSINUATING THE SILHOUETTES OF MONSTERS AND THE DISORIENTING
TURBULENCE THAT ANTICIPATES THE ABERRANT DIRECTION OF THEIR WHIMS.
THROUGH ABSTRACT IMAGES EXTIRPATED FROM CHAOS AND THEN FLOWCHARTED,
AND GRAMMATICALIZED DESPAIR SAMPLED OUT IN GRAPHICAL TEST TUBES,
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY IS BOTH A CAREFUL ESSAY ON THE GEOMETRY OF
WRITING AND A VISIONARY COLLECTION OF ATTEMPTS TO CRYSTALLIZE A
LOVABLE SELF FROM THE RUINS OF A COLLAPSING UNIVERSE.— GERMÁN
SIERRA
THERE ARE A FEW
BOOKS I’VE READ THAT FELT LIKE THEY WERE DIRECTLY ANSWERING THE
CALL MADE BY ROBBE-GRILLET IN TOWARDS A NEW NOVEL. SLOW SLIDINGS BY M
KITCHELL IS ONE, APPARITIONS OF THE LIVING BY JOHN TREFRY ANOTHER. I
FELT EXCITED WHILE READING EVAN ISOLINE’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY
BECAUSE IT WAS CLEAR I’D FOUND ONE MORE. THE LANGUAGE IS SPARE YET
RELENTLESS, THE FORM EXACTLY AS EXPERIMENTAL AS IT NEEDS TO BE TO
PULL THE RUG OUT FROM YOU AGAIN AND AGAIN. A COMPLETELY UNIQUE AND
REWARDING EXPERIENCE. — GRANT MAIERHOFER
WHEREAS DANIEL
SCHREBER GAVE US TESTIMONY FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SUN, AND NERVAL
TOOK CONTROL OF THE MOON, EVAN ISOLINE’S DEBUT WANTS TO GRASP THE
ENTIRE SKY, TO FOLD ITS HIDDEN ASPECT INTO A SECRET WEAPON AND BLOW
OUR BRAINS OUT ACROSS THE HEAVENS. WITH A NERVE-LOGIC MADE HIS OWN,
ISOLINE’S DEMENTED EMPIRICISM HALLUCINATES A SPRAWLING, ONANISTIC
ONTOLOGY: WE DISCOVER HOW THE SKY IS ALSO THE SEA (THE SKY THAT FELL
TO EARTH), THE BEACH A DESERT, AND HOW IT WAS ONCE SWALLOWED BY A
SHARK (WHOSE ATTACKS NOW CONSUMMATE THE ULTIMATE SEXUAL UNION). A
LOVE LETTER TO IMAGINATIVE EXCESS AND THE FAILURES OF REALITY, THIS
TOO REAL SIMULATION WILL DRY HUMP YOUR LEG LIKE IT WAS THE LAST GLORY
HOLE OF GOD, AND YOU’LL BE GLAD OF THE ATTENTION. — GARY J
SHIPLEY
SEBALD'S "I"
IS INEXTRICABLY HIM, YET IS SO UNSPECIFIC AND ETHEREAL AS TO BECOME
ALL OF US. ISOLINE'S "I" IS NOT HIM, NOT EVEN A HUMAN--"I
AM THE NEW WORD OUTSIDE ITSELF"--NOT EVEN A WORD. WRITERS USE
THE "I" FOR MANY REASONS... URGENCY, VULNERABILITY,
AUTHENTICITY. ISOLINE USES IT TO MAKE US AWARE THAT WE DON'T EXIST.—
JOHN TREFRY
VAST HELIXES STREW
THE PAGE, EVOLVING HERETICALLY. WHERE PERCEPTION IS TECHNOLOGIES OF
REFRACTED LIGHT, THE CELESTIAL “ETERNAL RETURN” IS A THROW OF
ONANISTIC DICE. GOD’S-EYE TELEOLOGIES TURN TO EXPIRED CELLULOID,
THE OBESE MYTHEMES OF DIALECTICIANS TURN YVES KLEIN BLUE. ONCE UPON A
TIME, PROTO-INDOEUROPEANS BUILT A MIRROR IN THE SKY & CALLED IT
DYEUS, THE GREEKS ZEUS, THE ROMANS DEUS. CINEMA BY ANY OTHER NAME.
BLEU DU CIEL. THUNDER & LIGHTNING. OZONE. ORGONE. NIETZCHE’S
LAUGHTER AT MIDDAY. WEIRD THEREMIN MUSIC. PRONOUNS OF BLUE PEYOTE. WE
ARE IN THE SKY AS THE SKY IS IN US. DARK MATTER STRUNG IN FILAMENTS
THROUGH THE HEAVENLY BODY. ALL OF SPACE & TIME IS POETRY.—
LOUIS ARMAND
I MEAN THIS IN THE
MOST APPROBATORY SENSE OF THE WORD: EVAN ISOLINE'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SKY IS CHILDLIKE IN THAT THE WORLD PRESENTS ITSELF TO THE NARRATORS
AS AT ONCE WONDROUS, TERRIFYING, DIZZYING, AND COMPLEX; AS A PLANE OF
INFINITE INTERPRETIVE POSSIBILITY WHERE MYSTIC STRUCTURES UNDERPIN
EXPERIENCES OF THE EMBODIED SELF, DESIRE, AND THE ATMOSPHERE.
SUBLIME, OBSESSIVE, SENSUOUS, AND PSYCHEDELIC, THIS IS AN EXCITING
FULL-LENGTH DEBUT FROM ONE OF THE US'S FOREMOST INNOVATORS OF THE
ORTHODOX SURREAL. DO YOU FEEL LIKE SHIT? BUY THIS BOOK. DO YOU FEEL
GREAT? BUY THIS BOOK. DO YOU FEEL AMBIVALENT ABOUT MOST THINGS? BUY
THIS BOOK. — LOGAN BERRY
PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SKY NAVIGATES THE HUMAN BODY AS AN ABSTRACTED AND FOREIGN MACHINE. IT
IS DRIVEN WITHOUT FULL UNDERSTANDING OF ITS MECHANICS. ITS NEURAL
INTERIOR IS EXPLORED WITHOUT A PRECURSORY KNOWLEDGE OF WHERE EACH
THREAD WILL LEAD. THE GROOVES OF THE BRAIN ARE SURVEYED AS AN ALIEN
TOPOGRAPHY. LANGUAGE IS CORPOREALIZED INTO AMORPHOUS BLOBS. PROBED,
INVESTIGATED, EXPERIMENTED UPON. ISOLINE PRESENTS THE BOOK-OBJECT AS
AN AUTONOMOUS ENTITY. IT DOES NOT NEED US. IT GROWS, MUTATES, WRITHES
WHETHER OR NOT WE ARE LOOKING. THE PAGE-MATTER THRIVES AND GROWS.
SPREADING LIKE MOSS OR MOLD. AN ESOTERIC "I" (PERHAPS THE
TEXT ITSELF) ANIMATES THE INANIMATE, MAPPING A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF
WHAT A BOOK CAN BE THROUGH ITS FORMAL INNOVATION AND INTIMATE
SCRIPT.— MIKE CORRAO
Historically, within
literature, philosophy, and psychology, the notion of self has been
explored in terms of verbs — thinking, acting, and other spins such
as shopping (courtesy Barbara Kruger’s 1987 critique of
consumerism). Then there are other ways of defining the self. One
includes Freudian notions of layering of the ego, its entanglement
with Eros and Thanatos. Another methodology of defining the self is
vis-a-vis the Other, as, for instance, in the philosophy of Hegel who
finds the Other intertwined within the act of defining the Self. A
third can be taken from the poeticism of the self in that the “I”,
and poetry’s relationship with it, is an eternal theme of
literature. Arguably the most well-known example is Walt Whitman’s
Song of Myself, but, really, there are countless examples
Evan Isoline’s
volume of poetry, Philosophy of the Sky, could be understood as a
philosophy of the self — as if to say I Sky, Therefore I Am (Self).
The book makes a poetic impact on all such existing ways of defining
the self and engaging with it. In Isoline’s craft, one sees Walt
Whitman’s energy in the song of oneself (think his famous words “I
celebrate myself, and sing myself”), albeit updated for
twenty-first century conditions of wandering in and out of a self
that is crowded, disrupted, and interrupted by multiple forces (for
example, social media). Although Isoline does not explicitly claim
any relationship with Whitman, the association stands out in various
bits, pieces, and in lines throughout the book. There are many, but
here is one:
I’m at the edge of
the world and the world is what I am.
I press play on
myself.
Cumulatively, such
lines bring about a deja-vu: readers of poetry have experienced such
deep meditation on the self and the world/nature around it: Whitman’s
singing of himself, Tennyson’s Ulysses saying “I am become a
name”, Emily Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” and so on.
An awareness of such similarities offers a great entry point into
Isoline’s unusual book that brings together all kinds of literary
matter: blank pages, different kinds of fonts, experiments in
typography, inclusion of shapes, experiments with visual space (for
example, the insertion of boxes, which make parts of the book look
like a “student-friendly” textbook), and layouts that border on
looking like diagrams. All of which makes Isoline’s unpaginated
book a curiosity. It’s a wonderland in which readers might choose
to take the Whitmanian pill to explore and, to some extent, it might
even help. In Philosophy of the Sky, both the self and the sky are
not clearly unitized entities. There are no landmarks, nothing to
help one navigate the expanse. But Isoline’s visual and textual
features add variety and lend an experimental interpretation to his
expression of the self. Devoid of these elements, the book might look
like a long document. However, these features compliment the poetry
and, in some instances, are the poetry in themselves. Isoline’s
unique way of blending the visual and the verbal binds the volume.
The book has nine
parts, but they don’t necessarily stand out as distinct units that
are thematically or stylistically separate from each other. Instead,
they flow into one another and are expansive — one almost holds the
other within itself. To understand Isoline’s musings on the self,
one must approach them with two metaphors and entities that cannot,
themselves, be understood in terms of smaller, reductionist units:
the ocean and the sky.
The ocean, as an
idea, is scattered throughout the work and, at each point, reveals
something about the self and the body. The “speaker” or the self
in the poem refers to intimacy with the ocean in different ways: “a
sort of hallucinated sex”, “ocean as alive with its own new sex”:
The ocean is my
desert.
A self-inflicted,
objectifying, unalterable, subject-causing,
uncontrollable/causal
object of desire.
The ocean and the
self are one:
It is the ocean that
is swimming in my mouth
the images will be
there to satisfy my mind and my soul until there is nothing left.
And when the speaker
urinates on themselves, “the warmth and the ammonia smell are
irrevocably matched in my mind with a cinematic image of the ocean.”
It is fascinating to see the self emerge in such intimacy, especially
in the parallels that Isoline draws between self and nature, body and
ocean.
Similarly, the sky
is present in different spaces throughout the book, but it takes a
little longer for the connection between this meditation on the self
and the sky to be distinctly received — especially given the fact
that “the sky” is promised in the title. But then, there it is,
as freedom, and the connecting link between the two appears on page
66 — about one fourth into the book:
I want to be free
for us
The word freedom
is in the sky
Isoline offers a
theory, an image, a knowing: here, philosophy of the sky is the
philosophy of the self because nothing else captures the idea of
freedom that is required to understand both. Both are incorporeal,
physically intangible, and yet both, the self and the sky, are
everywhere. They are inescapable and all-consuming:
I am obsessed with
looking at the sky. Wherever I am, I just walk around aimlessly and
look at the sky. I love the sky. It scares and excites me. I never
understood that by obsessing over something, I was bringing that
thing closer to me . . . I like very much to think of the sky as an
object. A singular form or ‘thing’, like the spherical objects it
endomes. I am attracted to thinking of the sky as an object because
it continuously, and automatically, falls outside of this
classification.
To the shape of a
shadow, the easily recognised silhouette that comes to mind when we
think of self or body, Isoline brings a sense of disruption by
suggesting the sky as a being. It is not a reductive, idyllic
container of clouds or rain to be romanticised through poetry, but it
is, for Isoline, something solid: something with a sense of agency
that refuses to be defined or something that has a shape. These
possibilities come alive in passages such as this one where Isoline
offers some clarity of the book’s title:
I like to think of a
relationship between the sky’s refusal to be defined and
instinctual fears of physical annihilation and dismemberment.
The sky is often
thought of as either flat or round. Flat as in a theatrical backdrop,
and round as in a planetarium.
Both appeal to me in
sexual and violent ways.
Sex and violence. In
the book, the coming together of these two things is a union that
informs many of the opposites and paradoxes that underline Isoline’s
perspective of “myself” or my self. For example:
I will eat myself
because I will starve
I will starve for
the love of the thing that will kill me.
Or:
I think of a kind of
sex that I couldn’t have
a suicidal form of
masturbation
I’m sick of being
with myself, the monster of me I have reproduced nothing but my own
discontinuity (the reason why I want to be killed is because I do not
want to be killed) If I kill him, I kill myself
I have
hermaphroditically negated myself with a word I made a word into a
gesture”
A sense of strange
circularity looms over such lines. The act of starving to an extent
that one eats oneself, or loving-nurturing that thing that ultimately
reciprocates the care by killing the self, is a case in point. Such
lines begin with a setting out of self but come back with the idea of
unexpected violence. Self, in this sense, like the sky, is a space
that lives between the starting and ending points of Eros and
Thanatos — what is pleasure is also pain.
Indeed, in other
words, as Isoline puts it: “Inviting irony is the value of my
love.” And it emerges beautifully, indeed lovingly, throughout the
book. Once when Isoline talks about desire to touch oneself and the
nausea that follows that desire. Another time when he writes: “Clean
things with your mouth. Spit on things.” And then, furthermore,
through the instruction: ”Write a poem./Put it down and give it the
middle finger.” (Giving poetry a middle finger – that’s a break
from poetry itself!) Isoline seems to love these extremes. Writing
poetry, and even loving it, on the one hand, and then shrugging it
off completely by showing it a middle finger.
Then, there is the
other extreme — the self is just too much or too many:
But the longer I am
around him, the more I want to kill him because he becomes more and
more like me
He is like a shadow
a reflection a double of me I call him my friend, my son
but he has quickly
become my enemy
because I hate
myself, for what I have become
I am him and he is
me
and two is too many
Bringing all these
notions together is, perhaps, what vouches for the ‘philosophy’
in Isoline’s title and poetry. The blurb of the book claims that
Isoline doesn’t aspire to write philosophy, in the academic sense;
however, this does not mean that philosophy, poetry and, indeed, the
self can be separated from each other in academic or non-academic
senses — and Isoline knows this. The philosophy Isoline articulates
is an interesting form — captured in poetry, visuality of shapes,
and the guiding concept of the sky — and is, perhaps, an apt one to
describe the self in all its complexity. For the readers who are
keenly aware of their experiences of love, hatred and pain for, and
fear of, the self, Isoline’s poetry will offer useful
approximations of the vocabulary needed to meet them peacefully and
poetically. - Soni Wadhwa
https://www.full-stop.net/2022/04/27/reviews/soni-wadhwa/philosophy-of-the-sky-evan-isoline/
“A Book Is a
Different Kind of Riddle Altogether”: Evan Isoline in Conversation
with Vi Khi Nao about PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY
Vi Khi Nao: I really
love your name, Evan Isoline. It reminds me of a waterbottle company
from Greenland or something. Though probably a country that fits your
book more would be blueland, to match your intoxicating love for the
sky. The contents of your collection—their subtitles have exquisite
titles such as “CHYMICAL WEDDING,” “THE BLOOD HYPHEN,”
“BLADES OF NOON,” “CUBICULUM/SHARK ATTACK”—all reflective
of the empyrean, pelagic range of your imagination—though I am
curious how you decide to land on the obvious PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY?
Evan Isoline: Thanks
so much! I can totally see the connection to the Nalgene bottle, or
some sort of plastic, chemical or mathematic term. It’s actually an
altered version of the Italian for “small islands” which I always
kind of liked. Thank you for the kind words regarding the titles for
the 9 parts of the book. The titles of these parts were indeed
designed to signify a far-reaching personal relationship with the
symbol of the “sky”. Empyrean and pelagic are fantastic words.
The title PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY became a working title for me fairly
early on. I never had the intention or preconception that the book
would have anything to do with philosophy in a traditional or linear
sense. In the process I started to enjoy thinking about a kid roaming
through a video store in the early 90s and finding a VHS tape on the
shelf titled PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY in the cult, horror or adult
sections by chance. The juvenile intrigue of what might be on that
tape. I didn’t know how I would incorporate the title into the book
until much later in the process.
VKN: Is that your
pen name, then? I noticed that your work is both performative and
cinematic—there are themes of room, sky, desert, mouth, God,
mother, sun, monster, mastication—this is to say: repetition
appears to be a significant part of your book’s existence:
repetition thematically and repetition textually and lexically. If
repetition were to be prohibited in your work, what kind of book
would you produce? Is it unimaginable? What is the primary engine
behind your intense desire for hypnotic ecological recycling of words
and themes? The first part of your 9 part collection—you opened it
with a hallucinatory voyeuristic piece—can you talk about your
process of their arrangement? How did you originally envision chaos
within chaos, order within order? This is your first collection. Are
there other books you have written prior to this “first”—sometimes
our first isn’t our first.
EI: No, actually my
given name is Evan Isoline. The story I’ve heard is that my Italian
Great Grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Northern Italy at age
18 and altered his name due to the discrimination at the time toward
Italian immigrants and immigrants in general. It wasn’t until more
recently that through results from an ancestry website I found that I
may not be related to him by blood at all. In that way my name feels
strange, almost not mine, but I kind of enjoy that.
YES. Repetition
(particularly the obsessive use of particular symbols throughout
these 9 sequences) was a very intrinsic part of the book. In it I use
the word Part as opposed to a traditional chapter, more like how
films are broken up. I don’t see the final piece as a “collection”,
as may be the case with a grouping of short stories or poems, but
something like a unified arrangement of fragments or sequences. This
work (like other writing I’ve done) started with a very chaotic
coagulation of word-pairings, sentences and textual images. For
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY I kept a massive binder of these (along with
Google Docs and Notes on my phone) until they would naturally mutate
in a bodily, peristaltic kind of way, forms slowly growing and
accreting. In this sense, imagining the book without this kind of
obsessive or, as you said beautifully, “hypnotic ecological
recycling of words and themes” I can’t quite imagine what the
book would be. I like making big messes and working inside the mess.
In terms of process,
there were many different ways that I wrote and assembled the text.
Some portions were hand-written, some were typed and assembled on the
computer, some were partially augmented by Markov chain generators,
Google Translate and Natural Language Generators, while others large
portions were written off the top of my head on my phone at work, on
the beach or in the woods. I have an interest in surrealist/dada
chance methods, and no doubt to the Gysin/Burroughs cut-up: the
understanding that on some constitutional level language is a
material, bodily thing, and looking at “writing” as a ritual or
conceptual practice, while moving beyond the idea of automatism for
automatism’s sake. I personally feel that there are so many ways
one can write, draw, or make marks. I don’t think there are any
rules, because to me art is not a game. I’m captivated by the
possibilities; the permutational effusion of language and its
effects. I’m interested in the way I can see and remember words,
and how these experiences make me feel. Knowing when to push things
further into excess and when to let them be. In relation to the inner
experience of the act of writing I’ve found the definitions of
transcend and transgress to be astonishingly close.
At the time I was
writing the manuscript, the word-symbol SKY was something I could pin
or fix my compulsions to in what amounted to being a period of 8.5
months in 2019. Before PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY I had completed many
smaller-scale writing projects, chapbooks and zines but PHILOSOPHY OF
THE SKY is my first full-length book.
VKN: My natural
impulse is to quote raw, visceral excerpts from your book, but your
book is pageless—meaning—it exists without numbers. I imagine
this gesture was intentional. Though I can speculate on why I think
it’s pageless—designwise. After all, the ocean and sky and desert
and film and camera have no page numbers attached to the
bottom/top/side of their existence. It makes sense for you to want
your book to reflect more of the
cinematic-unraveling-after-the-effect of your mind’s endless,
pageless, unbookendable imagination.
EI: Wow, that is a
very mindful and generous read. Yes, the book was left purposefully
unpaginated. But absolutely, Andrew Wilt (of 11:11 Press) and I
talked about this and both really felt that a “pagelessness” or
absence of page numberswould lend to visual, glyphic, and vertiginous
sensibilities I was after. Oceans, skies, deserts, forests … to me
these things belong to a symbolic category that has to do with space
and has been poetically essentiallized over time. I wanted to play
with that idea—to subject natural poetic imagery typically
associated with Sublime, Ecstatic, or Mystic experience to the
artifice of repetition and mutation. In regard to ideas of the
cinematic, or to how cinema might be related here, with PHILOSOPHY OF
THE SKY I was thinking a lot about lenses, prisms, distortions and
refractions—in relation to ritual experiences of seeing. I really
wanted to facilitate conditions for an active, viewing experience
(with reader and writer trading roles of performativity and
spectatorship). I’m really interested in the idea of a
“writer-self” and of a “reader-self”, or archaic performance
scripts ascribed to the archetypes of Writer and Reader, as well as
to the book as an object in general.
To explore this idea
I began to imagine the idea of a book believing that it was in fact
not a book, but maybe a series of photographs or a film. I found it
interesting to consider inanimate objects and animate subjects
trading places, or carrying the potential of being more than one
thing simultaneously.
VKN: Can you talk
more about your relationship with your publisher—(We are
pressmates, Evan, obviously!)—what was/is like to work with Andrew?
And, how was the initial project evolved with him?
EI: It was a very
exciting and serendipitous experience. I’d met the writer and
artist Mike Corrao online in early 2019. He showed interest in some
small self-published chapbooks I had begun to make of my own writing
and proceeded to write an ekphrastic-theoretic essay about a chapbook
I made called MVSHY VMBRA, or O! The Scarcity of Gore. I was amazed,
and started to uncover realms of underground literature and
independent presses (that prior to this) I had been totally blind
too. Meeting Mike (who in turn introduced me to Andrew) was a very
inspiring experience and we have collaborated quite a bit since early
2019.
That’s right! We
are now press mates and this is particularly exciting for me as an
admirer of your writing and art. It’s been a thrilling experience
getting to meet, correspond and collaborate with writers and artists
in this ever expanding independent literary network.
In terms of working
with 11:11 on PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY, I was heartened by the fact they
showed interest in the project early on. The manuscript, as you can
probably imagine, was fairly complex and required lots of transfer
from Word to Adobe (type setting, formatting etc.) There were moments
where I was concerned about the formatting and the idea that
something might get lost in the process, but Mike, Andrew and Tyler
at 11:11 really helped bring the vision through and ultimately into
the 3-D, and for that I’m very thankful.
VKN: I could tell
from your book that it was labor-intensive, but also incredibly
satisfying! Your “CHYMICAL WEDDING” part four of your collection
is so textually inviting. My eyes were dancing everywhere—my eyes
were like at a visual candy stores and they just want to eat up all
the shark gummy worms and lexical popcorns and word art—these black
boxes with words in white fonts—these different square and
rectangular rooms—my favorite of these is the page that begins with
“I SEE THE BODIES A BODY WITH ONLY A MOUTH A BODY WITH NO EYES”
of this section so that when I came to your stenciled-like phrase “I
was so hungry I ate myself” I completely related. How did the
design/arrangement/visual design part of it arrive to you? Did you
play around with it a lot? Was it organic and intuitive? Or did you
fight with it in order to arrive to such black rooms with white
words?
EI: It’s great to
hear that this portion felt inviting for you visually/textually. I
think this part differs from the others based on the visual
formatting and juxtapositions of font/voice. Although the text felt
somewhat austere, I was hoping to create a dynamic or engaging
reading experience. One where the reader might feel an agency to
explore the spatial potential of the page, like a mise-en-scène or
the geometry of a stage design. The formal elements of CHYMICAL
WEDDING initially took priority over the conceptual elements. At the
time I was interested in post-Robbe-Grillet structural conundrums and
potentials. The structure of each page felt very intuitive and had to
do with ways I was attempting to categorize shapes, styles and voices
simultaneously. I wanted to juxtapose a more traditional
symbolist/romantic poetics with stark, linear prose sections. I began
playing with font and italics etc., text boxes and the use of white
and black. This felt like some kind of abstract empirical process or
an alchemical movement, trying to marry varying ideas and forms,
across a spectrum of dark and light. The title CHYMICAL WEDDING
obliquely refers to a Rosicrucian text that I read some time back in
my early-mid 20s. This portion of the book was the second part I
completed. and for me, felt like a new way of navigating the page. It
was exciting to create these shapes, or “rooms” and be able to
occupy them. The dead white screen or canvas had been a stifling
place to begin and begged for an interference. There are living
writers, artists, and publishers who come to mind that are seriously
innovating what “literature” can do and how it can act, both
digitally and in print, and I very much admire this endeavor.
VKN: Also, happy
birthday to you, Evan!!! You turned (?) something yesterday? How does
it feel to have your book out on your birthday? Is that right? My
days and nights are pageless and numberless—like your filmesque
book! And, how did you celebrate it—especially on the heel of COVID
nearly, oh so nearly, ending? What is your collaboration with Mike
like? What project(s) are you working on with him? Are you able to
share? Give us a sample/tease of what is to come between you two?
EI: Thank you so
much Vi! Yes, yesterday was my 35th birthday and was very special
though laid back. For me laid back is good and I’m not necessarily
rushing to get back to various versions of “normal” social life
in the U.S.
Earlier on in the
publishing process Andrew asked what my ideal release day for
PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY would be, and naturally, I said my birthday.
That Andrew was able to make it happen was pretty awesome. There’s
something about this first book being published that feels like I
completed a project that started a LONG time ago in my head. I think
it’s because it is the byproduct of many timelines converging. I
didn’t have any understanding of what a first publishing experience
might be like but regardless, this felt significant one day before my
35th birthday.
I produced a
chapbook edition of Mike Corrao’s writing back in 2019 entitled
AVIAN FUNERAL MARCH. This experience led to a rich correspondence and
in the middle of lockdown last year Mike and I decided to collaborate
on an experimental play, one that would be “impossible” to stage.
The writing process was really intuitive and spontaneous. We started
at the beginning and finished at the end, sending portions of text
back and forth over months of emails. The play has been picked up and
will be published which we’re thrilled about. That’s about all I
can say at the moment!
VKN: Happy 35th to
you ! May you grow to be 135 ! My Bell Curve collection is also
coming out on my 42nd birthday. Your collection, from an aesthetic
standpoint, also vacillates between extreme density (not necessarily
maximalism) and minimalism—for instance the page with “a
spider/websick” (also I love the word “websick” so much—I
imagine this is how a spider might feel creating webpages with their
long limbs and mouths—also themes of your book operating on a
conspicuous, but also subliminal level) from “EARTHLESS (monster
of mine)” is significantly textualwise and visceralwise, and from
your Part Four “CHYMICAL WEDDING”—both seem to watch the
primary themes of your work in that the minimal quality of your sky
is drawn, repulsed, compelled, magneticized by the suffocating,
asphyxiating aspects of your poetic desire. Did you want to drown the
readers? Give them the illusion that they are breathing? Or were you
trying to invite your readers into the profound, savage underground,
ethereal depths of your dreams/poetic/concupiscent-scape?
EI: Thank you so
much that really means a lot! Wow, congratulations, that’s very
exciting! I know that for many Bell Curve is a highly anticipated
release and I am no exception. How great that the book will appear on
your 42nd. And may you see beyond 142 years!
I’m pleased to
hear that you feel a vacillation between extreme density and
minimalism in the book. It feels important to note that my background
is in visual art (drawing, printmaking, multi-media). I have a
bachelor’s degree in drawing/printmaking and a master’s in
mult-media art/theory. That being said, my approach to writing has a
lot to do with aesthetic concepts and techniques I learned through
studying visual art. Certain basic things like dynamic composition,
value scale, contrast, color theory, repetition etc. With PHILOSOPHY
OF THE SKY, I spent a great deal of time meditating on its form and
geometry. Building things out and flattening them back into images. I
wanted to explore different geometric qualities in writing that I had
experienced in visual art, polyhedrons, cubes, and especially
triangularity—that is, I was very fascinated by Nikola Tesla’s
interest in the numbers 3, 6, and 9, Pascal’s Triangle and the idea
of the perfect number. Again, I like the idea of putting various
concepts and things together to see what happens.
Thank you for the
close and perceptive reading of the text! If it was going to be a
book, I really wanted it to vibrate, and to do this I wanted to
present a text with multiple layers and connotations, and for it to
present built-in aleatory pathways where a reader could feel some
agency to associate and roam a little. Or open the book at any point
and start reading. This is not to suggest there wasn’t some
personal antagonism or cruelty animating my poetic desire as you say.
On some level there are stylistic allusions to a literature that
existed or exists to intoxicate, distort, and confront. Primarily
though, I would like to activate or open up possibilites of the
“writing” experience for myself. Responding to PHILOSOPHY OF THE
SKY the writer, philopsopher and publisher Gary Shipley wrote that
the book wants to “grasp the entire sky to fold its hidden aspect
into a secret weapon and blow our brains out across the heavens.”
There is a violence in me no doubt that wants to antagonize the
reader/spectator on some level, but ultimately the desire to confront
myself in the act of writing feels most important. If I were to, as
you say, find ways to invite the reader “into the profound, savage
underground, ethereal depths” of my
“dreams/poetic/concupiscent-scape” this would approach and ideal
experience for me.
VKN: We come from
similar backgrounds, Evan! Of the three mediums (drawing,
printmaking, multi-media), which medium is your favorite? The visual
art and I are soulmates. In the ethos of soulfulness, your work also
has long blocks of prose (some of them were born from your
dream(s)—it is so delightful to see your mind operating at
different modes of register, which I think what dreaming/filming is
like—where we move through different worlds—but the ones that get
born into books are linguistic, literary worlds. There is one
line—actually lines—from one of your long prose sections that I
love: “My neighbor was a tall skinny woman, slightly shorter than
me … She looked at me very suspiciously at first, her skin like
partially dried papier-mâché pulled tightly over a slumping and
dented wire skeleton”—it reminds me of the book by Salvador
Plascencia’s The People of Paper (please forgive if my memory fails
to accurately summarize this since I read that book a decade or so
ago), where the protagonist tries to make love to a woman made of
paper and he ends up with paper injuries such as papercuts. What is
your experience with translating from dream into reality like? From
images to language? And, do your dreams cut you like the way paper
cuts someone? If they don’t cut you, do they force you to turn
themselves into books? Where do your dreams go after they leave
you—sprawled out, sudorific on the bedsheet of life?
EI: That’s so
great! I love your visual art and that you have such a soulful
connection to it! I really enjoyed experimenting with multi-media
installation art when I was in graduate school. Interfering with
space. Leaving strange things behind for people to find. Like the
aftermath of a vandalism, or a ritual habitation of space. It felt
theatrical to me. As is the case with a published piece of writing,
much of the time a work of art is observed the piece’s creator is
already absent, but in a sense not very far away. Growing up, this
facet of creativity and art always made me think of the phenomenon of
God.
Now that I am
primarily focused on literary projects I feel a great freedom working
with text, its possibilities feel expansive and liberating in their
relative disengagement from materiality. But as I’m sure you know,
turning text into a book is a different kind of riddle altogether. I
think for me I find a lot in common with writing and the physicality
of installation art, sculpture and performance–the latter you had
mentioned earlier. But in the end, it is writing and drawing that are
inseparable in my mind. They are the base activity in which I relate
symbolically to the world.
The connection that
you bring up between dreaming and filming is very poignant in terms
of how cameras and eyes work I think and how I began conceiving the
piece. For instance, at one point I started to frequent fairly
obscure internet forums and blogs dealing with the symbolism of
dreams. Over time, this became quite fascinating—a kind of
voyeuristic experience—the vast majority of posts had concerned
phobias and nightmares. People either weren’t having happy dreams
or weren’t posting about them. I couldn’t believe how detailed
and visual this personal information was that they were sharing. It
was intriguing and could be surprisingly disturbing as well. I became
particularly interested in and followed certain individuals who
exhibited radical religious, political and suicidal ideologies,
becoming convinced the world was going to end or had already ended.
There must be something about the tectonic grind between dream and
reality that is destined to give way to violence.
I am not aware of
The People of Paper but will now have to read it! Wow these are
really beautiful and evocative thoughts you have related to dream and
to the surface-nature of paper and sudorific bedsheets. I have
definitely come out of dreams with “cuts” of some form, in a
figurative sense, or have in some way been marked by my dreams.
Though a lot of the time I find my dreams frustrating and very
boring. The boringness interests me too. This particular section you
are addressing (LIGHTNING HEAD) was written in a fairly quick
stream-of-consciousness kind of way and I pulled quite a bit from
dreams, films and travel experiences. I would say that, more than
anything specific, it was the ACT of dreaming, and the ACT of
watching a film, and the ACT of traveling that interested me the
most. I’m one of the people who never came out of the theatre when
2001: A Space Odyssey ended. To get some of the textural minutia and
detail in LIGHTNING HEAD I started collecting and analyzing bad YELP
reviews of motels that I would find online. The entire section in
some way deals with certain Oedipal concepts I was relating to
apocalyptic cults and to the image of the Pietà, particularly
Michelangelo’s carved Carrara marble in St. Peter’s Basilica. I
was once again exploring mental constellations.
When dreams leave
maybe that means we leave the place of dream, or simply that
awakening is tantamount to a different form of wandering and desire.
It could be that humans have more than one self. I suppose looking at
a piece of art as nothing more than a potentially objectionable
residue left over from a person’s dreams makes a lot of sense to
me. More than wanting an answer or proof I’ve grown to enjoy the
mystery involved in being human; I like artifice, veils, surfaces and
masks … frames and tensions. Going back to film or to theater,
conflict and anticipation are imperative to arriving at some feeling
of fulfillment or catharsis.
VKN: Why is your
relationship to the ocean so erotic? Though your relationship to the
sky is also erotic–it seems that that eroticism is a slight bit
different. Is there a distinction between the different types of
eroticism that manifests in your love for the sky/ocean? Or could one
lump your philosophies of desire into one? And, while at it, I have a
light question for you: what is the meaning of existence, Evan?
Surely it is not number 42. Or is it? I hope not!
EI: If there is a
sense of eroticism in my relation to the ocean in the book I think it
is to do with the “ocean” as a representation or a simulation.
This has to do with ideas the symbol might invoke: immensity,
voidness, amnesia, fear. The ocean as a symbol (which in turn is
metamorphosed into sky, desert, woods etc.) is effective in placing
an anthropological subject in a place of uncertainty or even danger.
To be clear, these paraphilic relations to objects, placesand natural
phenomena in the book are not necessarily my own, or even a
character’s I had in mind. I was imagining a type of first-person
writing where I could explore new symbolic territories. At this
point, I think if my relationship to symbolic language carries with
it feelings of eroticism it may be because “art” to me is more of
a state than a thing. A profoundly symbolic realm of interpretation
and association where one can get lost and navigate patterns.
Haha! Maybe the
answer to the question “What is the meaning of existence?” is
42??! It seems like an appropriate answer for a computer to give.
Forgive me, but for a human, that question seems flawed if one
considers there to be not be one singular meaning of life, but many.
VKN: Without going
into too much psychoanalytic depth, your work carries a range of
interests—some are bright like the sky and aquatic like the sea,
but inside that sky is cloudy depths of difficult subjects such as
self-killing, death, masturbation, terror, suicide—how do you
manage the dark aspects of your work? (Though I don’t classify
masturbation as dark! Rarely ever!) How do you invite them in and
still give them so much life/light? Also, this may feel non sequitur,
but do you like Coke or Pepsi? What kind of soft-drink or drink guy
are you? (alcohol could be mentioned/included)?
EI: I’m very glad
you wanted to bring up some of the darker themes and connotations in
the book. When I began writing the manuscript in spring 2019 a young
man jumped off of the large bridge and into the river estuary where I
live. The town is small and people knew this person. I heard he was
in his early 20s. Someone I was close to worked with him—their
desks were right fnext to each other. She said that at one point in
the day he just got up and walked out of work, and that this struck
people as strange. He never returned. Local authorities and Coast
Guard could not locate his body. A large amount of time passed before
his body was recovered way up the Washington coast. The way that this
affected people on a local level felt palpable and emotional,
although sadly many people have jumped off of that bridge since I’ve
been here. Though I did not know a thing about him, this particular
instance made me very emotional and I remember the weather that day
being so blue and wet and cloudy that I felt like I was dreaming or
going to drift away. That night I revisited work from the late Dutch
artist Bas Jan Ader; specifically the pieces I’m Too Sad to Tell
You and In Search of the Miraculous.
Bottom line—certain
events, emotions and subjects amounted in a way that pushed me in a
certain direction. It all felt connected and I think in a social kind
of way I needed to grieve and exorcise, even for losses that weren’t
mine personally. Though there is no doubt that writing at the time
was a mechanism I designed to channel and understand my own
self-destructivity. I was overwhelmed. Screens, work, political
vitriol, narcissism, greed, addiction, racial hatred, porn,
captivity, war, terror, ads, all conglomerating into a virulent
onslaught of visual information … in regard to the bleeding edge of
the virtual and the real I was looking for ways in and ways out.
Now to rapidly shift
gears, beverage-wise (I love this question! Ideally I would always
have some kind of beverage in arms reach), I love coffee, herbal tea,
beer, wine, Tequila and Gin. I don’t drink soda much anymore these
days, but I love coffee to my own detriment! Espresso on ice. I
really appreciate good water as I get older as well.
VKN: The
vomit—eating vomits—toilet bowl scene from your book also was
hard to digest. I had to remove myself in order to read/process it.
Re: the young man: I am sorry to hear that!! That must have been
devastating for you to witness peripherally. Like dreams, they find
their way into our work. Sometimes surreptitiously/ sometimes
blatantly. Bridge-jumping always feels like time traveling to me—a
way to cross from one reality to another. To cross into an extreme
end of the spectrum.
What are you working
on now, Evan? And, do you wear boxers or briefs or lingerie (!)? And,
if one had a book (one that you love or even hate !)
designed/printed/laminated on it, which book would you choose to have
on it? With a back and front cover? If I were to wear briefs, I would
want this line from your book to be stenciled on it: “DURING SLEEP
MY MOUTH IS FULL OF CYAN GEOMETRY.” In fact, I just want to wear
briefs (only—which unfortunately I don’t own any!) while reading
your PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY and gazing at Tiffany Lin’s Instagram
account. I think her Instagram account and your book are soulmates.
She takes pictures of clouds with her camera and uploaded them there.
There is even a post about “The Sky We Built” ! Too bad I had to
read it wearing all Eskimoesque outfits because I am always so cold.
EI: That’s really
interesting to know that the text is capable of inducing an intense
reaction like this. When I was 22 I studied painting and printmaking
in Italy and tore off by myself on buses and trains through western
Europe (Rome, Paris, Berlin, Prague …) and found myself in some
very squalid and disgusting rooms. The more I ran out of money the
more squalid and sketchy they became. This developed into a curiosity
involved with visiting and experiencing spaces like this in the U.S.
as well. Or maybe thinking about physically filthy or abandoned
spaces as projections of an interior mental or spiritual kind of
space.
Yes, I totally
understand what you mean. For some time I’ve imagined
self-destructive and onanistic acts being an anology for something
obscure. These subjects carry prominent social stigmas that limit the
way people are able to relate to them. A frustration with this is
partially where the bookemanated from I think.
Thank you for
asking! I am a good way into my second full-length project. Similar
to PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY this will be very visual and even more
design oriented. I admire the work of the Bauhaus, Swiss typography
and Russian constructivist design. I would like to push the potential
for graphic design, visual art and literature to coalesce, though, I
must say, it feels important not to exclude conventional literary
structures and styles. My new piece is using first-person narration
and design elements to explore transhistorical (or maybe
pseudohistorical) poetic monologues. It is very diagrammatic and
growing off of some of my experimentation in PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY.
Ooh la la! I am a
boxer briefs person but would not object to the idea of a man
enjoying to wear lingerie. If I had one book to laminate or print on
my undies maybe it would be Dante’s Inferno, where the mountain and
its seven terraces are all present! Or maybe just your average
self-help book from Barnes and Noble. Hahaha, I love that! Maybe
having briefs produced with that line could be a smart marketing
decision for me to get my words out there. I guess I’ll leave it to
the reader to make what they will of it. To wear it as they want. I
just took a look at Tiffany Lin’s sky imagery and I totally know
what you mean. I was just thinking about this earlier. Since
finishing the writing I’ll see images of a blue sky on my phone or
catch a glimpse of it out the window, or walk into a wide-open space,
stop and look up and feel transported right back into the obsessive,
abductive emotions I was possessed by while writing it.
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/06/04/isoline/
