JM presents … SELFFUCK DAY

 

SELFFUCK

“Literature from the event horizon. The title SELFFUCK is meant to suggest masturbation, ontological violence, ambiguity and transmutation. The subject of SELFFUCK is ocular and Dionysian; a dark, bodily plexus where cinema is related to death, voyeurism to god, architecture to entheogenic travel. If you will. SELFFUCK is a parasitic text-organism from outer space that induces visual hallucinations which slowly and painfully devour your brain. SELFFUCK is an animistic religion of nothingness. Death before death. SELFFUCK is a primitive cult of the future. A giant arachnid with peep holes instead of eyes.

In the words of Marguerite Duras:

“This is a book.

This is a film.

This is night.””
– SELFFUCK

 

THE FIRST SIX SELFFUCK BOOKS

SF1: O, the Scarcity of Gore, or, Mvshy Vmbra by Evan Isoline

“Evan Isoline’s O! The Scarcity of Gore is a text that demands your presence. It is a physical object. A book that must be held in your hands as you read it. Cinema transcribed onto paper. Language projected onto vibrant screens. Written in all caps. Written in the macabre outlines of a garamond-esque typeset, with margins and font size in constant flux. Footnotes trail along the bottom of the page, denoted by alchemical symbols. O! The Scarcity of Gore is a web of surfaces. It is an object with permeating aura, drawing you in.”
– Mike Corrao at Full Stop Dot Net

5″ X 8″, 24 page stapled booklet, rainbow astrobright paper, vellum interweave, with archival uv resist sticker cover. Comes in opaque black ziploc poly bag.
– Buy

 

SF2: Young Clown Red Winter by Evan Isoline

SACRED CLOWN X ANTHROPOLOGY X ANARCHY X THEATRE X ROMANCE X HORROR

4″ X 5.75″, 28 pages, archival grey cardstock, semi-opaque vellum interweave, magenta/orange paper, with a UV resist sticker cover.
– Buy (Currently Sold Out)

 

SF3: AVIAN FUNERAL MARCH by Mike Corrao

Mike Corrao’s AVIAN FUNERAL MARCH is a new mythology of abstract and half-formed entities. It reads like breathing a miasma of autoclaved cell cultures, or deadly endospores, the DNA of an ancient, occursed organism awakening inside your mind.

Glyphic, cryptologic, theatrical and incantatory, Corrao’s text speaks to the healing power of a sacred automutilation. Deity. Cataract or wave. The undulant and peristalsic form of something that doesnt know what it is yet. Tactile, sensual and organic. Entropic. Liminal. Ritualistic.

Mike Corrao is the author of Man, Oh Man (2018), Gut Text (2019), and Two Novels (2019). His work has been featured in publications such as 3:AM, Always Crashing, Collagist, and The Portland Review. He lives in Minneapolis.

5″ X 7″ stapled booklet, 20 pages, grape astrobright cardstock, semi-opaque vellum interweave, solar yellow paper, with a UV resist sticker cover.
– Buy

 

SF4: Psalms by S.M.H.

PSALMS is a territory simultaneously natural and religious; a site of veneration and desecration. This collection of poems and experimental writing by S.M.H. draws you to the dark and endogenous source of a cry, born of its namesake, the Psalm, or “the words accompanying the music”. These are the words accompanying the music of violence, trespass, and the violation of the body. The text becomes a beautifully heavy and discordant vibration, or a lament, rising from within this body, this Earth of root and meat, lithified bone, blood eddying into dirt, mud marbling into ejaculate. The text is a pain, a consciousness harmonizing in its course to the outer surface of the orifice or the wound–to the place of escape. The text itself becomes an agonized, flesh-like substrate, a magmatic fluid, a gore. PSALMS is a stageset for an act of transgression, or the anthropomorphic casualty of a war between Nature and God.

Limited edition chapbook of poems and experimental writing by S.M.H. 5.5″ X 8.5″ stapled booklet, 40 pages, archival black linen coverstock, grey paper, with a UV resist sticker cover.
– Buy

 

SF5: Ultraviolet Torus by Dale Brett

A float-fall through the toroidal arc of a romance in a textual crystallography that simultaneously accretes and erodes like a phantasm or a waveform in carbonated shoegazy swells.

“I wanted to create works that I couldn’t really find elsewhere, in particular I wanted to cultivate a voice that could evoke a certain emotion or feeling in a reader not often felt in literature—like those experienced while listening to repetitive music or resembling a certain sensation like floating on water or that moment before you enter a hypnagogic state. These are the kind of things I think about imitating when I write. But I also want to have a relatively conventional narrative underneath, something that I can relate to on a more base level, an actual story too. This aspect of the work essentially underpins the abstract imagery employed to achieve the desired carnal effects at the depth of the surface. I explore this in greater lengths in my chapbook, Ultraviolet Torus.”
– 3:AM Magazine

5″ X 7.5″, 60 pages, archival light blue linen coverstock, seafoam paper, violet ink, with a UV resist sticker cover. Comes with 2″x2″ SELFFUCK sticker.
– Buy

 

SF6: Circles by Josiah Morgan

This text is the result of a drug that revealed the scaffolding.
This drug was provocative and induced a certain feeling of dying.
No ego death, no juvenilia, no experienced commonality.
To write about the self without using any pronouns that denominate the self.
To rewrite the process of being an individual.
Away from the idea of sentience looking out.
Toward the idea of objects looking in.
Circles are objects.
They look in.

Josiah Morgan’s chapbook is a poet’s film about the kinesis of violence, a codex of ritual horror and youthful jubilation, lexically assembled as if by a troubadour in the dreamworld of a self-referential loop, in relation to abject cultural tableus, nuances and ellipses.
– Buy (Coming Soon)

 

THE ONLINE SELFFUCK TEXT

Alongside the other weirdo online journal Surfaces, SELFFUCK Online (coined ‘selffuck.help’) is fast establishing itself as one of the most vital sources for visual text, visual poetry, transgressive poetry, technoprose and other forms of hybrid literature. The work on selffuck.help is vital and violent and a regularly satisfying part of my week. It includes work by such major figures in the underground scene as Gary J. Shipley, Germán Sierra and Sean Kilpatrick, among numerous, numerous others, many of whom make up part of a complex international network of collaborators and friends. I have included some excerpts of my favourite selffuck.help works below, and you can also check out my own contribution if you feel so inclined.
– Personal note from JM.

 

Gion Davis
from ‘four poems’

“if we don’t make it past this I want you to know I love you

quick touch me the way I’ve seen Ohio & West Virginia touching
secretive & unexpected & impossibly soft
where I once spent $180 on fireworks in the name of love
that fell straight down from the sky like the rain
in Denver standing in the parking lot of the apocalypse
slathered with sunscreen & deaths in the family
full of chemical sadness & funeral salad
kissing the winking mirror of my memory
eating Frosted Flakes on the bathmat
bleeding barbecue sauce blood all over the bed
where you reached for me & said I think we should make a plan
to leave the US before the election
& I thought is there anything sweeter
than the dark wrung sponge of my pussy
the strawberry juice on my shorts & Reddi-Wip on your chin
while we imagine pulling the ripcord together before our country demands
we climb into our body bags & zip that zipper
like a long comet zipping up the Milky Way
over our heads”

 

Leonard Klossner
from ‘title and untitle (or: title, text and poem,’

“Bodies long to eat, they yearn for socialization; this body of text {though it is not yet perhaps a text}, like our own, demands to be caressed by another, loved by another, to speak, to be heard, and to listen to the voice of another, and here we begin to hear the emergent call of the voice of what words of Lispector’s become ours as they are devoured and thus incorporated into this text {as if they haven’t always already been incorporated }; the complication of origins, the certainty only of series and of succession, and the impossibility of a beginning when we see that the origin of everything is discoverable in the yes which pre-dated and inscribed the demand for their formation—One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe never began.”

 

Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich
from ‘face’

“there was a winter of impatience and a desert in the middle of potential. i lost my tongue somewhere belong the way, i had to drop propositions of my longings to listen to saint paul. his epileptic fit was an icebreaker, since then my mind has been leaking, on steadily on.

into the night i fled from more than stars. i tried to escape the lure of the equator but still i wound between the There and Then. i hastened to compact my antepredicative body, abstracted from all sense data, all indriyas and inputs. i wanted to curl back up into the first skin, mother’s warmth. that was not to be, however. all my wishes were exempt, all my thoughts were of breath and its manifestation. for you see, there is nothing that exists that i have not breathed on once. everything that exists has an impalpable glow, to be amenable to the sight; that is all my doing. to restore silence is the role of objects; i have wished, like a birthday cake, and blown on everything in the room, just to see it.

lend the flame some oxygen. unfortunately now it’s all phlogiston, and the smoke has revelled in my throat, searing my heart, scarring my lungs, blackening my brain.

there really is no alternative to this. this tacit sick adoration of reality. so long as we lean to words we are colluders with god. the word conspiracy means to breathe together, hence the primary conspiracy is the controversy over the existence of the world. we hushed our lungs out: the room arrived. the question is what came first? the accomodation of space or the preverbal birth pangs of flustering brains.

(what i miss most about you is my state of mind)”

 

T.W. Selvey
from ‘fingering’

“I am truly blessed. I have fingers.

I have blessed TV dinner fingers that perform the prerecorded act of a cultural vivisection upon a deformed network television hospital drama, digging a jagged full-length bone out of a hungering evening’s liquid crystal display, osteophyte razors where there were fingernails. Blood halts the credits, which has named the moving, talking mounds of microwaved blackened Salisbury steak. I serve warm fistfuls. The brown goop is unsalted and I eat the acrid weight, insatiable and fat from feeling in the centerpiece that I will never compete, measure up, subtract or add to the compendium of a sacrificial history and its entrees: the apothegms gutted from heads, the hook-hanging costumes, the peripatetic wandering around unchaperoned in meat packing plants, unbidden eyes turning into reddish water and I go blind while crying, emptying sockets that gave up on sight. I should choke on such slabs. I can agree totalitarianism has conquered matter. The sealed material is imperfect as every nation is a plenary and power binges on revolt, a revolting group of muscles that’s not overpowering and pinning me to the world, but as an interlude producing me as a civilization’s stopping point, discredited but comfortable like a sand mattress, sinking.

I have blessed fingers that practice safe sex with multiple bullet holed partners, shot through like the Kennedys, lacking a reptilian hymen, fingerfucking through the soft tissues exploded into mutated orifices, some pulling tight, some coming loose, as hollow tips burrow new avenues of pleasure leading to organs, organs caressed bloody by the tip of a studded condom that yanks at the enriched hair of my whitening knuckles. I am not Jim Morrison’s Lizard King persona. The runny bodies of my lovers and I cruise by fiery monuments made to honor assassins. Waving adieu, we ride by in a camouflaged Humvee limo. NRA sponsored wars, backseat cocktails, pleasant smelling oils, and roofies supplied by a pharaoh billionaire. Presiding over a deep-fried population, a hieroglyphic briefcase stores Ra in a manilla envelope. Burning all the sunlit and immeasurable, the time-honored girth of treason looms with the stature of an omnipresent investigative camera lens. Spoon-fed cyanide, this political inheritance runs down my chin and puddles on my shoes, glistening nuclear yellow.

I have blessed fingers that help me open packages of over the counter medications, cut up lines of what could be battery acid or eyelids, find and ingest fingertip full droplets of antielectrons to polarize myself, and un-charge an abandoned vaginal pyramid in favor of an unvisited one that features little translucent apparition entities who fuck in the middle of the street, contorting zig-zag arms, nauseous genitals blending. People made of bending neon tubes and yellowed paper who don’t get arrested for lewd acts I inexplicably think we should try. Then one time they stopped the fucking. The constant shifting of the ghostly outlines of their empty bodies: that continued. I graphed their functions with my trusty calculator. Not quadratic formulas. Don’t they know I hate precalculus? Living vicariously with asymptotes, a new show on cable starring Chairman Mao talks about me to spiritual death. I send text messages from a future time to a friend who’s entitled “The Carter Presidency and Beyond: Power and Politics in the 1980s.” She doesn’t respond because I’m a hostage now, too busy. With the voices, the figures, more and multiplying, pounding on my plexiglass ear, pounding and demanding to be let in, like an archeologist, positioned at the entrance as flies gather for the mummified stench. Beginning, in the beginning, it is muffled and from there it rises, purple iris opening, the volume madly rising, a wild chorus of gnostic shrieks, and all is set to ruin my good cheer.”

 

LITERATURE FROM THE EVENT HORIZON
LITERATURE FROM THE EVENT HORIZON
LITERATURE FROM THE EVENT HORIZON

Check out Evan Isoline’s body of work here.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Today JM aka the mighty writer, theater maker, and general creative whirlwind Josiah Morgan has formulated an introduction to — and tour of — the very exciting, newish Portland, Oregon-based press SELFFUCK. I just ordered a batch of books from them, and I recommend you do as close to the same as possible. And the press is about to publish Josiah’s new book, so that’s a sign of high quality control right there. Anyway, pore and enjoy, and thanks a ton, JM! ** Misanthrope, If I could put you on speed dial with that self-endangering slave I would. I met David. He’s a sharp guy. I get that he thinks he has organised himself into a cool guy and survivor and that he’s scared to question that hard fought persona. I’ve had a number of friends and even boyfriends who came from horrible upbringings and thought they’d figured out how to survive and thought only they knew best and ended up self-destructing, fatally in some cases. I don’t know what you do to help people like that. I tried with the ones I knew, and it helped a little and never helped much ultimately. But, yeah, all you can do is keep trying. It’s rough to hear about that. He could wake up. He could. Just do your best, man, and I know you are. ** _Black_Acrylic, Well, I guess at least he’ll leave a good looking corpse, or, I guess, steak? France has been pretty free of media-attending conspiracy theory nutters thus far, but they’re out there, and hopefully they will stay disorganised. Oh, I loved your new radio show episode! I was bouncing around on my desk chair, and I never ever do that. Respect and thanks for the fun, maestro. ** Bill, Good question. I suspect he’s as much Hegel’s grandson as davidbowie is David Bowie, but … Thanks about my toe. I think I can make the trek, but it is taking its unsweet time settling back into being the littlest toe. Nice title: that film you watched. Nice cheapo poster too. Noted. As is kinonow.com, which is new to me. Thank you for entertaining me! ** JM, Man of the 24 hours and beyond! Thanks again, pal. Oh, that’s totally fine for him to wait and send the bunch of books after yours is out and among them. No problem at all. Thank you for intermediating. Big day to you, cyber and IRL! ** Okay. You know what you’ve got up there and what to do with it. So, please do what you do, and thank you all. See you tomorrow.