Thomas Moynihan

Better than any work of Lovecraft, contains theoretical formulations and trends one would actually like to pursue for their own sake (not for their rigour or truth-value etc. but just for sheer balls to the wall eccentricity/extremity) as they are a true pleasure to read. I can certainly see how one could despise this work, seeing it as a genealogy of long-dead scientific hypotheses largely from the 18th and 19th century which are almost laughable by our modern standards, containing fake authors like the notorious Daniel C. Barker (a figure conjured up by the CCRU to spout total batshit musings on ideas of geotrauma, a kind of literalisation of Freud’s assertions in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle), perhaps worst of all for its incessant neologisms (which I will perhaps find grating in a few years time - Moynihan certainly doesn’t have anywhere close to the justificatory ground that someone like Heidegger had for fashioning these novel terms). However, as somebody who has long extolled the virtues of lyrical invention over nearly any other metric, I have to say that I absolutely loved this book, I think Moynihan, despite my prior reservations, has a great style.

Moynihan’s book certainly isn’t perfect, I think his postscript is particularly bothersome and I am beyond bored by anyone who spends any real length of time contending with antinatalism/humanity’s potential self-erasure, but he has certainly done a fine job of explicating a strain of thought (by no means a secret history of course) worth digging through. Probably as good as theory-fiction is ever going to get but I haven’t touched Cyclonopedia yet so we’ll see, I could be wrong. I recommend this to anyone who has ever wanted to crawl inside a Burroughs or Lovecraft text and pause the narrative just so that they can read the fictitious tomes they mention on their shelves. I’ve also got to say that there are plenty of potential great band names in here if you’re so inclined, they line practically every page. Listening to either dissonant atonal no wave music or sleazy techno á la Tuning Circuits or some of Aphex Twin’s more intense work from the 90’s just ties the whole package up with a wonderful little repulsive bow. Actually shameless self-promo but shuffle this, consider it a lovingly made playlist I spent all night putting together just for you, the privileged reader of this truly half-arsed review:


https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5LbncxOjbJ7UzNrCgTMrZY?si=3scIT9UcTTK5jTfHMuny...… (plus d'informations)