"This is genre gone rogue." — Divya Victor
Excerpt
In a utility shed, a box personed dumb platinum auc, untrodden moss artificially gray except for the weeds crawling toward the doorstep. The streets were dead. I was working against myself, it felt.Projection, continuity, yield and accentuate lists, retreated to, if once campus, within them upon entrance, then, responsively gilding itself against the visitors’ weary padding up the steps, the quavering n second, or n1, mice blithering chunks of time—and that Chane Rao, that an awful ending in the ascendency to n1 status badgered him, scope and armaments, illumination a priori n, damaged once into a war with the Tencent Dictum Team which is upcoming and once into the fervent abuse of family members and thanae nearest exits from each intrusive badgering of their sensibilities, tufts through grating, and vines. Servitude in a pulse of air and backtalk about backtalk, undertaking its scary culpability, its confidential fantasies of thermodynamic equilibrium within Ceaurgle’s purview, I survived the barren ciliary handle of this idle governance, told them their release system might unfurl a triple-batch program, and, given its proclivity for as much reallotment, a bargain. Like there’d never be another crew again. Close ˆ
About the Author
J. Gordon Faylor is the author of Disgruntled 1234567890 (Basic Editions), Marginal Twin Contribution (Troll Thread), and Docking, Rust Archon (bas-books), among other publications. He edits Gauss PDF.
Book Details
Trade PaperbackPerfect-bound. 288 pp, 5 x 8 in.
ISBN 978-1-937027-72-8
Publication Date: October 1, 2016
Distribution: SPD
Funding: the NEA
- 05.03.17 | J. Gordon Faylor's Registration Caspar reviewed in Jacket 2
- 04.19.17 | J. Gordon Faylor's Registration Caspar reviewed in Queen Mob's Tea House
- 1.3.17 | J. Gordon Faylor's Registration Caspar reviewed in American Microreviews and Interviews
- 10.07.16 | J. Gordon Faylor's Registration Caspar reviewed in Yellow Chair Review
- 10.05.16 | J. Gordon Faylor's Registration Caspar reviewed by Jessica Sequeira in Entropy
News and Reviews
Advance Praise
It was the worst of times; it was the first of times. Registration Caspar is a resolutely unnovelistic work that lures us with storytelling that drifts in and out of the sumptuous, filthy dreamspace and stark waking life of a biopolitical cipher—an entity that is and is not like us: a thing named Caspar. As if an heir to the unlived lives of the liminal and amorphous biotechnological subjects of Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ, Caspar's bizarre eloquence records the hours prior to its execution. This is the final log of a creature whose great crime is allowing its own entrapment in a biopolitcal quagmire in which execution (of jobs, tasks, schedules) has led to its own execution.—Divya Victor
The language of Caspar's log is water-resistant and rebuffs attention, and reading this book calls for an attunement to language that skims and dips—like Barthes' swimmer—so you can drown in the pleasures of this text. And yet, this is also the story of day-in, day-out struggles in a labor market built for lifeforms sublimated into massive task-zones; into lives lived out at dystopian velocity, break-neck convenience.
Resisting both narrative linearity and readerly mastery of cause and event, Registration Caspar is anti-specialist fiction. Through the tradition of sci-fi, it invents its own lexicons, but, through the practice of poetic innovation, it disputes their usefulness. Gordon Faylor's picaresque pursuit of genre tropes that both compose and convict its users recalls Flaubert's confession to George Sand, when he was writing his beloved Dictionary of Accepted Ideas: “To dissect is a form of revenge.” This is genre gone rogue. It is as if all of Samuel Beckett's unfulfilled plans and undeployed scenarios have come back to haunt and enthrall us under a "a bleary science genre sky.”