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Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love
Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love is a genre-defiant sex-trip to post-human dimensions. If C.G Jung, magic-mushroom shaman Terence McKenna and Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae) had a three-way while binging on George Bataille and undergoing Hormone Replacement Therapy, their baby might be the erotic cocktail of Myth Lab. Its extreme theme is nothing less than the fate of the species.
- GenresFiction
104 pages, Paperback
Published July 2, 2024
1 person is currently reading
135 people want to read
About the author
Jack Skelley
10 books74 followersJack Skelley is author of the novels The Complete Fear of Kathy Acker (Semiotext(e), 2023), and Myth Lab: Theories of Plastic Love (Far West Press, 2024). Jack’s other books include Monsters (Little Caesar Press, 1982), Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press, 2021), and Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX, 2022). He contributes fiction and non-fiction to many international publications. Jack’s psychedelic surf band Lawndale released two albums on SST Records, and has a new album, Twango.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
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February 13, 20253.75 STARS
Glossolalia but high on their own supply.
Kinda feminist sci fi erotica on DMT with a lotta nerd and pop culture references.
Zeitgeist but written by fucked up AI.
Cool pictures.
Random sentence:
“Sir wants tight trachia. That’s where Sir is happy. In the grip of gurgling. Say thank you, Sir.”
Glossolalia but high on their own supply.
Kinda feminist sci fi erotica on DMT with a lotta nerd and pop culture references.
Zeitgeist but written by fucked up AI.
Cool pictures.
Random sentence:
“Sir wants tight trachia. That’s where Sir is happy. In the grip of gurgling. Say thank you, Sir.”
July 6, 2024
Skelley finds the humanity in our increasingly post-human world with such exhilarating and sardonic joy.
October 21, 2025
The week before reading this I’d been self-administering. They got me! Or, rather, I’d gotten myself.
I have been Madonna’d.
Listening to Hung Up on repeat because I appreciate the disco cowboy vibes. I’d enter the clown dimensions of her shiny new pillow face if she would let me. Lapdog at the font of her uncanny valley… She would never let me. Do we know anyone I can call to find out? It’s not for me, I’m asking for a friend of a friend.
I digress.
Skelley propagates within this beautiful axis between transcendental love poems from the 15th and 16th century and that disappointing feeling you get when your phone reminds you of your screentime. Chakras are fast and hyper, flying concorde into the ecstatic wet thighs of base immanence, epiglottis dangling the throat goat apex. Even if he happily points you to his influences and references at the end of each chapter, he doesn’t need to. They pool from each pore in sweat and various fluids, until a tidal wave of pure invention and a genuine and expansive goodwill has been squirted into various holes and realities, all of which are other.
Squirt is just piss btw. Men are out there violently curling their fingers upwards trying to hit your bladder, as if to flip-off your cervix who didn’t do anything wrong. So, like, be so real with yourself. In that moment squirt really was just piss.
Again, I digress.
Honourable pervert mode is name dropping Hélène Cixous and Sasha Grey in the SAME sentence. And I love to see it.
I absolutely adore whatever is wrong with all of this, cause, #metoo. Sippin’ on that fluid that made them gender.
“Jewish maenads join Judith to seduce Assyrian SS officer Holofernes Netanyahu. He’s drunk in his tent. He slumps. He has suck-cummed to the compliant command of her furnace-deep throat. Juicy Judy grips his hair, steadies her dagger, slices his collar, and...
plop-plop
fizz-fizz
oh, what a relief it is!”
I have been Madonna’d.
Listening to Hung Up on repeat because I appreciate the disco cowboy vibes. I’d enter the clown dimensions of her shiny new pillow face if she would let me. Lapdog at the font of her uncanny valley… She would never let me. Do we know anyone I can call to find out? It’s not for me, I’m asking for a friend of a friend.
I digress.
Skelley propagates within this beautiful axis between transcendental love poems from the 15th and 16th century and that disappointing feeling you get when your phone reminds you of your screentime. Chakras are fast and hyper, flying concorde into the ecstatic wet thighs of base immanence, epiglottis dangling the throat goat apex. Even if he happily points you to his influences and references at the end of each chapter, he doesn’t need to. They pool from each pore in sweat and various fluids, until a tidal wave of pure invention and a genuine and expansive goodwill has been squirted into various holes and realities, all of which are other.
Squirt is just piss btw. Men are out there violently curling their fingers upwards trying to hit your bladder, as if to flip-off your cervix who didn’t do anything wrong. So, like, be so real with yourself. In that moment squirt really was just piss.
Again, I digress.
Honourable pervert mode is name dropping Hélène Cixous and Sasha Grey in the SAME sentence. And I love to see it.
I absolutely adore whatever is wrong with all of this, cause, #metoo. Sippin’ on that fluid that made them gender.
“Jewish maenads join Judith to seduce Assyrian SS officer Holofernes Netanyahu. He’s drunk in his tent. He slumps. He has suck-cummed to the compliant command of her furnace-deep throat. Juicy Judy grips his hair, steadies her dagger, slices his collar, and...
plop-plop
fizz-fizz
oh, what a relief it is!”
June 27, 2024
Brilliant and wild, Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab is a manifesto of exuberance disguised as a sci-fi sex test-center for the invention of communal futures. Skelley’s a mad scientist, scholar and poet.
- Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.” If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.
- Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself.
- Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great).
- Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head.
- Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug
- Chris Kraus, author of After Kathy Acker
In Myth Lab, Jack Skelley adroitly molds an “Einsteinian elasticity between objects and ether” to the “clitoverse.” If this formulation seems too vast, just think about a) the last time you felt good about power and b) all the ways to say yes to pleasure as a source of liberation. In conducting a “cosmologic psychoanalysis,” Myth Lab thrillingly hot wires our neurons to an endless mirror stage reflective of our own instinctual nature.
- Kim Rosenfield, author of Phantom Captain
An explosion of clit-cock-and-pop-culture worship. Skelley’s eroto-celestial universe fights back not only against the denial of desire – “also known as fuckheadocracy and market forces” – but against death itself.
- Francesca Lia Block, author of Weetzie Bat
A hallucinatory book that straddles gender studies, science-fiction, and cultural criticism (to name but three of many genres). Ever eager to use a newfound Skelley-ism, I urge everyone to read Myth Lab and be “Kardashian'd” with love (i.e buy it now, it's great).
- Susan Finlay, author of The Jacques Lacan Foundation
In Jack Skelley’s Myth Lab, something weird and beautiful is forged in the crucible of infinite horny grief. It’s an epic, delirious descent into the inferno, navigating the concentric circles of romance and desire as literary malady, TikTok psyop, benevolent cosmological principle, and more. Simultaneously a quest, a physics experiment and an elegy. I loved following its narrator - a tender, erotomanic, Blakean particle - seeking and finding visionary head.
- Daisy Lafarge, author of Love Bug
November 10, 2024
Truly encapsulates the manic world we live in that’s packed to the brim with information,interesting and annoying people and porn and when the lines are blurred between everything
August 11, 2024
A whirlpool of flesh and feeling, deep, dense, damp, damaging, and debriding.
December 5, 2025
Mckenna takes Blake on date, Vonnegut's one table over in the marginalia - myth as a narrative theory text, science fiction pseudo reality that eddy’s into itself and outside of its own references, into an adjacent reality that can name genitalia in a near infinite carousel of permutations.
"These skins are crucibles"
" all science, all technology, all culture are prosthetics of language, itself a prosthetic of Imagination."
"beware the five-year long reptilian shit post will precede a Bot Beast holed up in Macedonian discord boiler rooms serving Dark Mirror reruns to larp scam ram masses duped into doing their quote unquote own research white boomers succumbing to self-flattery claim to be pilled to the 5th dimension but in reality are drunk on normative Brexit and vax memes while zoomers vibe and vape inverting materialism where god particles hear your cries and know your heartache and monitor their human selves in ecosystems ripe for augmenting for the body of humanity receives metaphysical BBLs from digital eugenicists"
"These skins are crucibles"
" all science, all technology, all culture are prosthetics of language, itself a prosthetic of Imagination."
"beware the five-year long reptilian shit post will precede a Bot Beast holed up in Macedonian discord boiler rooms serving Dark Mirror reruns to larp scam ram masses duped into doing their quote unquote own research white boomers succumbing to self-flattery claim to be pilled to the 5th dimension but in reality are drunk on normative Brexit and vax memes while zoomers vibe and vape inverting materialism where god particles hear your cries and know your heartache and monitor their human selves in ecosystems ripe for augmenting for the body of humanity receives metaphysical BBLs from digital eugenicists"
October 8, 2024
i think it is very admirable for a boomer to approach xellenial myth making like this and i’m glad this book was published. it’s very cool to see an elder cool person enter a modern vision of paradise. that said, it wasn’t like, fun to read
July 11, 2024
PURE INVENTION
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews