You With Your Memory Are Dead

When Mr. Shipley first shared with me his desire, to lock himself in a room with nothing but Begotten playing in a loop cycle, watching its images over and over again for two weeks, isolating himself from any outside influence, taking no interruption or break except to sleep, it seemed like a recipe from the writers of the old testament prophets manipulating and isolating all sense so they may unfettered by the noise of the everyday unearth their experience of the divine; Gary's approach to making Begotten his own in a ritual of creative-conscious engagement is a decision to no longer passively "watch" Begotten but to enact and digest within his own being a ritual which would remake the film inside his very temple of earth, his body. I always secretly hoped Begotten to be more than a movie, to be in fact an initiation for those willing to go that far. So I can only admire Gary for finding the necessary map to what makes this film belong only to those willing to unlock it. - E. Elias Merhige


Gary Shipley's conception of reality is more like our actual present reality than our literary culture's usual inbred narrative realism can afford; that is: grotesque, cornered, starving, horrific, on the verge of being ripped to shreds. Yet in the same breath, by way of his attentions: finally transcendent of that same ongoing mundane, excised of playground made-for-TV horseshit,thought-bendingly alive in a way most ways of storytelling couldn't begin to wish to ape. Literature almost doesn't deserve this maniac, and thank hell he's here. - Blake Butler


Genre: Literary Fiction