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DEADMATH
DƐVDMVTH is a mythographical-rhetorical work, a book of flowers, of arcadian theophanies & semiopathic assaults. In sur-rendering its totems & mementoes of Western arcana to the agency of their own dissolution, DƐVDMVTH brings the dead into rebellion, constructs a monument to an uninterpretable key in a ruin of obsolete modes.
260 pages, Paperback
First published August 11, 2022
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December 5, 2022
There are, for tucked-away, back-corner-of-the-brain (yes my brain has corners), totally inexplicable reasons that have nothing to do with intellectual rigor or whatever all I may or may not know about literature, music, and film, and everything to do with visceral, neurochemical reaction and my innate desire to be challenged by art (and maybe even my desire to feel secure in the knowledge that there are still things out there that I don't and can't know), a handful of artists whom I unquestioningly love while fully accepting that I don't actually understand their work. And sure, I get that in the information age there are numerous, freely available pathways to "understanding" most things - or at least reading about other peoples' understandings of them; that if I wanted to know the formal impetus behind a Mondrian painting, or the philosophies undergirding a Roy Andersson film, or the influences that conspired to create any number of impenetrably great Cecil Taylor recordings, I could reach those answers from this Goodreads page with a single click. Informational understanding isn't really what I'm talking about here, so much as personal - a very particular, mysterious class of artists whom I know I like, but about whom I personally find it difficult to explain what it is that I like exactly.
As a reviewer, this can occasionally be problematic, but here we go.
DEADMATH is unlike anything you've read all year. In fact, scratch that. DEADMATH is unlike any twelve things you've read all year, as author Evan Isoline is such a polymorphous stylistic chameleon that no two sections of this ensorceling dodecanomicon feels like it could have possibly been written by the same person. The discipline and commitment applied to each voice suggests powers not of this Earth. It's almost easier to imagine him as a kind of orthographic conduit, hammering away at some chaotically fused matrix of gargantuan, analog printing presses and homebuilt, helmet-interfaced ultracomputers, and maybe even a coal furnace iron forge as various wandering spirits drift in and out of him, possessing his faculties one chapter at a time, dispensing through him their final garbled communiques of love and hope and doom and despair before crossing over to the other side.
To flesh that out just a little bit - just to try and provide the vaguest of semi-user-friendly description - these twelve pieces run the gamut from unsettling, oneiric prose (in a story whose title is but a here-irreproducible spiral glyph), to heady, vocabulary-expanding poetry (in "Abscissa of Thistles" and "Piss All Suns"), to some of the wildest visuo-linguistic experimentation you're likely to see outside John Trefry's Castle (in "The Dusk of New Venus" and "DEADMATH"), to interactive, borderline-sentient theoretics (in the breathtaking centerpiece "Red Air"). I swear to you, that's about the best I can do. To even delineate the pieces this much feels reductive, as all these discreet genres are really canoodling and commingling throughout, as though barricaded underground for a linguistic last days orgy. It is both demanding, and unfathomably generous work; an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap between his consciousness and ours; a sharing of truths too uniquely true to be shared.
That last piece I mentioned, "Red Air," in particular has the feel of an offering - a Creation of Adam finger tap between a cloudbanked author swimming so far over his readers' heads that, should they reach this mountaintop midpoint, the least he can do is offer them a deep, celestial wind-breath before they head back down the other side. Isoline is doing SO MUCH here - with typesetting, with language, with theory, with form - that the very idea of meaning ceases to hold meaning. I looked up words I didn't know for a while, but eventually I just had to stop. It would've taken me a year to finish the book (and I don't think I would've "understood" it any better). Occasionally a turn of phrase would rise up from the textblock - a snatch of pure, illuminated manuscript to grab onto and hold tight amid this otherworldly thicket of impossible writing - but by and large, DEADMATH is not a book you read so much as a spell that you submit to. It takes your lid off. It works you over. It nests into your back corners and makes a cozy home. It will not let you forget it. And in our present age of everready information and AI-generated art and poetry, it is that rarest of achievements that dares you to admit you don't and can't understand everything. Dares you to guess, and think, and try, and fail, and live with the unknowing of another mind's mystery.
As a reviewer, this can occasionally be problematic, but here we go.
DEADMATH is unlike anything you've read all year. In fact, scratch that. DEADMATH is unlike any twelve things you've read all year, as author Evan Isoline is such a polymorphous stylistic chameleon that no two sections of this ensorceling dodecanomicon feels like it could have possibly been written by the same person. The discipline and commitment applied to each voice suggests powers not of this Earth. It's almost easier to imagine him as a kind of orthographic conduit, hammering away at some chaotically fused matrix of gargantuan, analog printing presses and homebuilt, helmet-interfaced ultracomputers, and maybe even a coal furnace iron forge as various wandering spirits drift in and out of him, possessing his faculties one chapter at a time, dispensing through him their final garbled communiques of love and hope and doom and despair before crossing over to the other side.
To flesh that out just a little bit - just to try and provide the vaguest of semi-user-friendly description - these twelve pieces run the gamut from unsettling, oneiric prose (in a story whose title is but a here-irreproducible spiral glyph), to heady, vocabulary-expanding poetry (in "Abscissa of Thistles" and "Piss All Suns"), to some of the wildest visuo-linguistic experimentation you're likely to see outside John Trefry's Castle (in "The Dusk of New Venus" and "DEADMATH"), to interactive, borderline-sentient theoretics (in the breathtaking centerpiece "Red Air"). I swear to you, that's about the best I can do. To even delineate the pieces this much feels reductive, as all these discreet genres are really canoodling and commingling throughout, as though barricaded underground for a linguistic last days orgy. It is both demanding, and unfathomably generous work; an attempt to bridge the unbridgeable gap between his consciousness and ours; a sharing of truths too uniquely true to be shared.
That last piece I mentioned, "Red Air," in particular has the feel of an offering - a Creation of Adam finger tap between a cloudbanked author swimming so far over his readers' heads that, should they reach this mountaintop midpoint, the least he can do is offer them a deep, celestial wind-breath before they head back down the other side. Isoline is doing SO MUCH here - with typesetting, with language, with theory, with form - that the very idea of meaning ceases to hold meaning. I looked up words I didn't know for a while, but eventually I just had to stop. It would've taken me a year to finish the book (and I don't think I would've "understood" it any better). Occasionally a turn of phrase would rise up from the textblock - a snatch of pure, illuminated manuscript to grab onto and hold tight amid this otherworldly thicket of impossible writing - but by and large, DEADMATH is not a book you read so much as a spell that you submit to. It takes your lid off. It works you over. It nests into your back corners and makes a cozy home. It will not let you forget it. And in our present age of everready information and AI-generated art and poetry, it is that rarest of achievements that dares you to admit you don't and can't understand everything. Dares you to guess, and think, and try, and fail, and live with the unknowing of another mind's mystery.
Displaying 1 of 1 review