The Isle of Lazaretto

From Schism Press

Books are there to amaze us: Mark Horvath and Adam Lovasz have certainly done that. I'm not sure I've read a more paranoiacally invigorating and inclusive text since Negarestani's Cyclonopedia. This book is a wonderful mashup of critique and mysticism, deconstruction and speculative realism. It's like Dialectic of Enlightenment on bad acid and crammed with scientific research. The reach of scholarship in here amazes me: we've got OOO and Deleuze, but we also have Lyotard and Irigaray and Blanchot. This book is an invaluable polemic against the idea that breaking down the boundaries between things is always best. Global warming is doing an excellent job of reducing the "islands of ice" (the icebergs) to their oceanic environments. Is that good?

- Timothy Morton

This book exhibits the beauty of a random encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table; it is consistent with its self-inflicted predicament: the shadow of Maldoror haunts it like it should, no less, no more, lightly and deeply. At this particular juncture (passim), Mark Horvath and Adam Lovasz write: Immanence has become horrific, but this does not mean that we should seek and escape from the terror. (114). I endorse it like any poet would, in awe of its dramatic mastery over nihilism, . Junking Isidore-the-first, I offer: may it please heaven that the reader, emboldened, and become momentarily as fierce as what he reads, find without loss of bearing a wild and sudden way across the desolate swamps of these somber, poison-filled pages; for unless he brings to his reading a rigorous poetry and a tautness of mind equal at least to his wariness, the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar. All we need to know is what is digesting the mummies (45) that, and injection of 5T increase aggression in crayfish (56), the rest only means that withdrawal has THE UPPER HAND in this battle (64). At some point during this glorious Saturday morning of my reading, entranced by its verb, I invoked Ah Pook the destroyer himself and shouted "on reparation do carbuncle, in it euphemism, and rendition my bootleg." By the power of junk, may they be blessed. For them like me, for us then - "necronauts, modern lovers of debris, radio and jetstreams-there is only one option, to let things thing, to let matter matter, to let the orange orange and the flower flower... speak about the thing itself and not just ideas about the thing, of saying 'jug, bridge, cigarette, oyster, fruitbat, windowsill, sponge'." To my pleasure, they added: Menger sponge (73). Lazaretto Island, formerly known as Agios Dimitrios (after the military saint and martyr) before it became the name of a suburb, successively bearer of a monastery, a leprosarium, a military hospital, another, the same, leprosarium, a concentration camp, the headquarters of the Italian army, a small church, and a wall against which those condemned to death were shot, is the heraldic arms of its vortex, the Menger sponge of its past, present, and future. Given the chance, when all the souls of the drowned refugees, soldiers, prisoners, and other martyrs of history will find transitory shelter somewhere else, in the company of other illness-boxes set free of their miseries, a self-sufficient community of onanistic-sex-craving Gynoids will colonize it. The Isle of Lazaretto will be their breviary.

- Isidore Sebastian, aka Dr.Junk-the-second, aka Thierry Bardini Author of Junkware, self-appointed pataphysician, covert agent of the INS