Philosophy of the Sky by Evan Isoline
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
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.
About the Author
Evan Isoline is a writer and visual artist living on the Oregon coast. He has work online, in chapbook form, and his full-length debut 'PHILOSOPHY OF THE SKY' is forthcoming from 11:11 Press.
Twitter: @evan_isoline
Instagram: evan_isoline
IN STORES MAY 18, 2021
ISBN: 9781948687225 (ebook)
ISBN: 9781948687287 (paperback)