[I was going to post something else entirely today—something light and fun—but I ran into some technical issues, and in any case this past weekend's comments and page views indicate y’all would rather talk about Seth Oelbaum. So let’s talk more about Seth Oelbaum! As well as talking about Seth Oelbaum.]

Mike Meginnis’s recent post, and his follow-up comments below, clearly express his desire to pronounce some final word on “the Seth Oelbaum question” (as Reynard Seifert so cleverly phrased it), and put it all behind us. I have the highest respect for Mike as a writer and as a friend, and I understand his frustration, but I don’t think critique works that way, or should ever work that way. The price of being able to criticize is constant reappraisal, and not being able to declare conversations over.

In my comments on Seth’s last post (here, here, & here). I stated my concern that I’d said all I had to say about his writing here, was starting to repeat myself. But Mike’s post and the ensuing conversation caused me to return to certain aspects of it, and think up some new thoughts. (Surprising, I know, that I would find I had more to say.) So this is my attempt to lay out my thinking as clearly as I can. I hope you’ll add your own thoughts in the comments section, if so inclined.

First, let’s agree that Seth’s writing is (perhaps deliberately?) somewhat inscrutable. Seth’s penchant for opacity hasn’t made it easy for people to figure out what he’s up to, even as near everyone agrees that the writing is offensive. Seth has also demonstrated little willingness to engage directly and openly with his growing ranks of critics, preferring instead to double down on his shtick.

I’ve read everything Seth has posted here (multiple times), and many of his posts at Bambi Muse, and a fair amount of his poetry. (Peter Jurmu just gave me a copy of Artifice #5, which contains some sonnets by Seth.) And while I certainly may be wrong in my interpretation, I think I understand part of what Seth is up to. (I’ve said some of this already, but please bear with me.) Forced to summarize, I’d say that Seth is appalled by how the suffering of certain people is privileged over the suffering of others. Thus he was enraged when the US media devoted extensive coverage to the Boston bombings, while it has remained relatively silent regarding the ongoing bomb-heavy conflict in Syria. He’s also enraged when Hollywood regards the Holocaust as an atrocity the Nazis did exclusively to the Jews, ignoring the simultaneous slaughter of the disabled, homosexuals, the Roma, among many others.

If this is indeed Seth’s point, then I don’t find it controversial; nor, I imagine, would you (at least in general—let’s acknowledge that Seth is not one for finer details). If one opposes massacres, then one should oppose all massacres. As such, the US media deserves criticism for privileging certain ones over others. Similarly, we ourselves are at fault when we disregard the suffering of others. We would do well to wonder how and why the world got to be like this, and what we can do to change it.

Meanwhile, we might also say: “Seth Oelbaum, you’re barking up the wrong blog! We’ve already read Karl Marx and Hannah Arendt and Noam Chomsky, and we know what you’re trying to say and already agree with you (even if we find repulsive your way of putting it)! Go post at Little Green Footballs or some other conservative blog, or at least change your shtick to acknowledge that we’re not the audience you’ve mistakenly judged us to be!”

The problem, however, is that this is not the entirety of Seth’s message. The fact that Seth keeps posting here—doubling down—indicates that Seth does not believe that we are “the wrong audience.” Furthermore, from what I’ve heard (and this is hearsay, but I’m inclined for now to believe it), “Seth is always like this”—anywhere he goes, anytime of the day, he’s always “on.” Seth has responded to total war with total abhorrence to war. And while that might not make him the most charming dinner companion (or party guest, as Mike put it), it does suggest a bit more about his motivations. Because I think Seth’s primary goal is to make other people suffer.

Seth wants to make others suffer because it would be wrong for them not to so long as other suffering exists. It is immoral, Seth is arguing, to take pleasure while others are denied the capacity for pleasure. You wake up and you visit HTMLGiant in order to read about indie lit. Well, you could have gone and read Z Magazine, you insensitive asshole, you! While you were reading a post about Alt Lit, 100 more people just died in Syria. So fuck you, and fuck Alt Lit! Fuck the 1% who get to live in comfort and security! Spend every waking moment thinking about the 99% who suffer daily, or else you are complicit in their suffering!

If I’m correct about this, then Seth is a fundamentalist, and hostile to all discourse other than the discourse he deems worthwhile. His self-appointed mission here, there, and everywhere is to put an end to the frivolous fun that others are having, and steer the conversation to what he considers appropriate topics. The fact that others are posting about other things—Mike Meginnis followed “Dear Everyone” with an interview he conducted with some game designers!?!?! Rather than an interview with an orphan killed in the Congo!?!?! Well, this will only motivate Seth to continue posting.

Assuming that I’m correct. I may not be. Because complicating any reading of Seth is his obstinate elusiveness, and his steadfast commitment to all things babyish. As it turns out, Seth does have some different subject matter besides Syria and the Congo and vulgar Marxism: his mummy and his teddy and his tummy and the pretty clothes he wears, and all the yummy foods he wants to eat. These topics are of course often entwined: hence, Seth pals around with the Baby Dictators, whose misadventures he describes in various degrees of “baby-talk” (including frequent misspellings, which I read as deliberate, or at least not problematic for Seth’s project. Sorry, Grammar Police!). This infantile aesthetic is a significant part of Shit Seth Says, and Seth is consistent in it. It would be wrong for those who read Seth to disregard it.

What is the value of acting like a baby? Immediately the word “acting” stands out. Babies act like babies because they are babies, and cannot choose otherwise. And babies are not moral agents, not the way adults are. We don’t hold babies entirely responsible for their behavior, and don’t judge it the way we do adult behavior. Babies can crap their pants and wail their heads off and gobble greedily, but we don’t condemn them for that the way we would an adult who did the same. We tolerate baby behavior, even when it annoys us. And if a baby were to somehow kill another baby, we would regard that sad occasion as an accident. Babies can’t commit murder.

Seth’s baby dictators, then, pose something of a puzzle. They’re murderers—mass murderers—and yet their being babies would seem to excuse their crimes. (A baby can’t be a dictator, except perhaps metaphorically.) Baby Hitler is not responsible for genocide; Adult Hitler is. Baby Hitler has not yet become Adult Hitler, which Seth acknowledges when he describes the character as “the boy who will one day kill six million you-know-whos and five million other oh-who-cares.”

But at the same time, Baby Hitler remains Baby Hitler. He is unlike other babies. It would be wrong—and I think Seth wants us to remember this—to therefore treat Baby Hitler as we would any other baby: to pinch his chubby toes, to coo and gurgle in his face, or to indulge his incessant screaming for attention and for treats. Because Baby Hitler will grow up to murder all of those people! He is a grotesque parody of a baby, monstrous and disgusting. Inasmuch as Baby Hitler’s cuteness may lead us to treat him like a baby, that cuteness is horrible. (I’m reminded of Maurizio Cattelan’s sculptural installation HIM.)

If I’m correct here, then Seth might be critiquing cuteness as something that can cause us to overlook or forget or even indulge murder. His baby dictators, unlike other babies, bear the responsibilities of adult selves (their adult selves), and must be regarded as the moral equivalents of adults. Being a baby is no excuse.

Is Seth then critiquing adults who would act like infants? That would sync up with his critique of the bourgeois Icky Whitey, who wants only to disregard wars and massacres, or at least insist that death and destruction keep elsewhere, out of sight. Like babies, they are concerned only with themselves, and with having their greedy needs met. We have met the baby, and it is us.

What then of Seth’s own persistent babyish antics? Here he might be demonstrating his own complicity, perhaps even parodying himself? Is this a manifestation of his guilt? Does he castigate himself for every time that he (like Baby Marie Antoinette) has wanted, and therefore bought, and therefore eaten, a soft cherry cream cheese croissant? That croissant, the money Seth spent on it, the attention he paid to it, the space in his tummy that it commanded—all could have been better used, used to save innocent lives! Purchasing a croissant makes Seth—makes anyone—complicit in a croissant-making industry that is no doubt intimately connected to the military-industrial complex and to some extent responsible for every bomb that has fallen on Syrian civilians. CROISSANTS = BOMBS. By this logic, one cannot drop out—one cannot avoid making war by making love—because everything is war. Total war means “nowhere else to go.”

Remember what the Misfit said, at the end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”? “She would have been a good person […] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” Seth would be The Misfit. Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life.

So what then?

Can Seth be placated? No, I imagine not. The poor will be with us always, and Seth’s insistence on being “always on,” always acting the provocateur, would indicate a total commitment to his cause, or a deranged inability to do otherwise. His desire to call humanity to account has, perversely, rendered him somewhat inhuman. For someone who has made it his mission to condemn others for their lack of compassion, he demonstrates little himself.

Obviously the man embodies some pretty basic contradictions. Who appointed him this site’s scourge, let alone the world’s? By what right or logic does he hold moral authority over anyone else? Especially since his reading of Marx / Arendt / Chomsky is unburdened by wit, sophistication, or all that much understanding.

Furthermore, what would Seth have others do? For all his complaints, for all his critiques, what solution can he offer other than recognition and misery? Does Seth possess some concept of atonement? Because it’s true that as I sit here in my Logan Square apartment, I am complicit in many ways with all kinds of suffering. I have long known this, and I am, I think, willing to accept this. Recognizing the ways in which my being harms the being of others is important, and necessary—but what lies beyond that? What awaits us after awareness?

∞

And now, Dear Reader, we’ve reach the point where we must talk about ourselves. Because as Christ once said, “Whenever thou makest a gun of thine own hand, and pointeth it at another, three of thy fingers point back at thou—and one at God, you stupid fuck.” And as Nietzsche put it, “Take care not to watch scary monster movies at night, lest you become a slobbering fan of monster movies.”

It’s been curious to read so many comments suggesting that Seth’s posts are somehow “killing” HTMLGiant. While the “death” of a blog remains a vaguely metaphorical concept at best, Seth’s supposed role in this site’s passing would seem greatly exaggerated:

“The AWP Should Stand for Something Very Vulgar Because It Is Very Vulgar”: 97 comments

“Dressing Up Anne Frank”: 184 comments

“American Humans Are the Least Specialist Thing in the Universe”: 52 comments

“Dear II,” (by Mike Young): 47 comments

“Dear White Race”: 83 comments

“Dressing Up Maya Angelou”: 101 comments

“Maybe if…”: 63 comments

“Dear Everyone” (by Mike Meginnis): 54 comments

Also, in terms of page views, over the past 90 days, Seth has landed six posts in the top 25, as have the two Mikes. That’s seven out of 25 (24, actually), or 30% or something. And it’s something.

In other words, over the past three months, writing by and about Seth has proven exceedingly popular at this site—nearly one-third of its discourse. And it’s possible that Seth is pulling an Objectivist-style trick, and registering all those page views himself (furiously refreshing the page at NYC public libraries), and posting all those comments under a variety of Disqus accounts that he’s created/hijacked … but we all know that isn’t the case. Seth’s writing is popular because the people, one way or another, like it.

I like it, and you like it. We read it, reread it, comment on it, argue over it. Seth’s writing has if anything invigorated this site, given it a new and different life. Our comments, when studied closely, actually say: “That’s it, I’ve had it! I’m never reading this website again! … at least until the next time Seth posts.” So Mike M. can try to pronounce the Seth Question finished with and forgotten … but I fear that’s wishful thinking.

Because we can’t help ourselves, can we? Roughly 700 comments and counting would indicate that the man who one day grew up to be a baby has given us a great deal to discuss (and discuss so pleasantly—truly, Seth’s been successful in inspiring compassion).

From where the implacable Seth Oelbaum sits, this probably looks like validation. You, me, HTMLGiant—we need him after all.

[The image at the top of this post is taken from the article "Pregnant Congolese Refugees Face Enormous Risks when Delivering."]

Starfish Over Oyster

If you didn’t know how a starfish eats an oyster it does it like this,

There’s no description of the act itself in Heather Palmer’s Starfish Over Oyster (except the reference in the title) but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a great metaphor for a book about hunger control, voice and violence. Starfish Over Oyster takes place in the mouth and the stomach. Heather Palmer writes like a shotgun blast and a jawbreaker. There’s a burst of ideas tucked into an intimate shell you have to suck on. Each line is compact and dangerous; some slip by while others kept me rereading them or turning back to them pages later.

Visually the book is beautiful. The layout looks perfect. Everything seems so precise, largely due to the pages’ ample negative space. The poems themselves, flush left and right, look like constrained little packages, small but dangerous. That being said, Starfish Over Oyster takes time to process; there’s no fat in the language and the subject matter is dark. It’s about a girl consumed by a city, her father, and hunger itself.

The city is recurring and important. It becomes a token for control, mastery and dominance. This theme is reaffirmed with the idea of a sort of edible Darwinism. Again starfish eating oysters. One has power, the other is being sucked open.

In later pages, the book begins to take a more discernible narrative structure, similar to Palmer’s previous book Compliments of Us (Spork Press). Forget any kind of comfortable solid ground though, it’s still a floaty dream world. Palmer’s protagonist is innocent (if not silent) in a world of perpetrators, including her father and “the dietician” and “the seamstress.” Interesting enough that both occupations measure the body and its weight; both are interested in restraining hunger.

Certainly hunger looms over the book. Starvation even.

Hunger is in almost every poem. The girl lives hunger, and it embodies her.

Why is the narrator so hungry?

The breakthrough for me was when I abstracted hunger. I started to think about craving for any number of things. What about our own personal hungers? Are they for food or something else?

Illness is addressed and it becomes unclear whether the girl’s illness is legitimate or a ruse by her father and his cohorts because her treatment of herself is so odd and unscientific:

There seems to be something silly about the girl’s solution to her illness, maybe her father is right, maybe she does need help.

There’s a childlike quality to the book too, one that makes the reader and protagonist feel isolated and vulnerable but also content. The outside world seems so big and we are held with the girl and her small things:

(Spoiler alert!) The girl gets her tongue out. She has to create language again. Like Compliments of Us (a book about triplets drifting into separate identities) Palmer is concerned with the development of perception. Who perceives illness and what their motivation for doing so is. Who goes along with that definition after it is created. How (even good–intentioned) stewardship changes the identity of the child/person being protected.

***

Wyatt Sparks lives in Chicago. His writing is featured or forthcoming in The Small Press Book Review, Banango Street and some lit mags.

23 years

Yesterday, after my lunch but before theirs, I interviewed Droqen (i.e., Alexander Martin) and Ryan Roth, the developer and sound designer of Starseed Pilgrim, a beautiful, mysterious game about “tending a symphonic garden, exploring space, and embracing fate.” It’s six dollars and I am extremely confident your computer can run it. I was kind of awkward and shy, predictably, but the two of them did great. We did it as a video because that was expedient, but if I were you I would treat it like a podcast — listen to the audio; don’t feel like you’ve got to watch. We talked mostly about video games – Starseed Pilgrim, Droqen’s other games, stuff we had all played and enjoyed, and things we didn’t like so much. But I don’t think you have to like video games very much to find a lot of what they said interesting. I made some annotations (indexed by time code) to provide context and further information for the things we discussed; click past the fold to see them.

00:01:21 - Steam is the premiere online digital video game retailer, as well as the name of the platform through which you can access and manage games purchased at the Steam store. For indie game developers, placement on Steam represents an important milestone, as the store’s contents are curated — in other words, they won’t sell just anything.

00:12:10 - Here I’m referring to this lecture, Designing the Universe, by Jonathan Bow and Marc Ten Bosch. (I apologize to Marc Ten Bosch for blanking on his name!) It’s a really fascinating lecture.

00:13:00 - So Jonathan Blow is the main guy behind Braid, a puzzle platformer about time manipulation, one of the first real indie hits. Jon Blow is also one of Starseed Pilgrim‘s big boosters, and probably responsible for much of the game’s recent success.

00:20:22 – Here’s the page for Asphyx.

00:21:59 - You can learn more about Analog Defender here.

00:25:15 - So I think that here Droqen and I are talking about the same thing — I couldn’t remember the name, but he’s right, it’s called Desperate Gods, and you can see more about it here.

00:29:14 - Here’s the page for Probability 0. I haven’t played it, but it looks fun!

00:34:05 - System Shock 2 is a predecessor to Ken Levine’s BioShock games. I never played it, so I can’t say much more than that! But it was pretty important to a lot of people.

00:38:06 - Here’s the Tim Rogers review of BioShock Infinite.

00:45:24 – This seems to be the video to which Droqen is referring.

00:48:00 - If you’re not familiar with the term “roguelike,” here’s an essay I wrote about this kind of game.

01:03:22 - You can see the sequence Droqen describes here, (and then the next couple hours of the game!), here.

If you watched and/or listened to this, thanks very much! And again, check out Starseed Pilgrim.

Discussed: 

Present: Joseph Young, Amanda McCormick, Tracy Dimond, Caryn Lazzuri, Laura van den Berg, Linda Franklin, Matthew Zingg, Jamie GP, Chris Mason, Dave K, Adam Robinson

Tardy: Megan McShea

Jamie GP: Don’t read anything, don’t read anything about Star Trek, just go see it.

Adam: Chris, I just told everyone we are going to take notes and put them on HTMLGiant like a review, is that okay?

Chris: Cool.

Adam: With all our names.

Chris: Cool.

Joe: All right. Do people like this book? I mean I want to call this guy Joe Hallmark because it’s so sappy.

Dave K: Oh!

Linda: I actually didn’t like it at all. I liked about 8 lines.

Jamie: I thought Blake’s blurb was a hack.

Linda: I just don’t like reading “O Christ” in every poem.

Chris: I really liked the book but I hoped at some point how we would talk about the religious aspect, for probably many of us who aren’t religious.

Jamie: It’s funny, because early on I think he’s playing it to effect. Like, oh here I am in Iowa.

Adam: Does it say Iowa?

Jamie: No, but that’s what you do when you go to Iowa.

Adam: Yeah but he lived in a trailer park.

Jamie: I think he’s playing that up.

Joe: I don’t think it’s about Christ. Like Pigafetta.

Jamie: I thought it was about devotion.

Chris: That’s what I thought too. To me it reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch, about our civilization in that vein.

Matt: I wondered if this was a religious poet. I came to it like they were archetypes.

Linda: To me it was a fakeout, like haha gotcha. I mean I have trouble with poetry anyway, but I don’t understand why you’d devote pages and words to something that doesn’t mean something to you.

Tracy: Reverse psychology?

Joe: I use religious symbology in my writing because it’s so powerful.

Linda: What about the use of “shit” and “fucking.”

Matt: I like the way it counterbalances.

Dave K: I think it’s vulgarity as honesty in a way that kind of works. I didn’t think it was excessive. Those moments came after a huge stream of poetic language.

Matt: Yeah, I was having a—

Linda: Like poop.

Dave: OK pooping, fair enough.

Matt: But you know that song by Jenny Lewis, “when you’re on, you’re fucking on”—that’s what this is like.

Joe: I like it when she swears.

Matt: And here it’s like all he’s left with, “the elemental fuck.”

Tracy: The profanity and religious imagery was bringing it all to the same level. I don’t have a religious background, so using the profanity equalizes the religious language, which I don’t understand.

Linda: Profanity comes from religion.

Jamie: But it gets so sweet by the end. Like “Our Lady of Supreme Happiness.”

Joe: (reads “OLoSH”)

Jamie: If you wrote that for someone, you’ve got them forever.

Linda: But why is that heightened by the stuff in the first 12 pages?

Dave: I think you have to go through all that stuff to get there.

Linda: My favorite is “Post Nativity” on page 13.

Jamie: We have Adam to thank for the fucked up pagination for that.

Amanda: Yeah, look at the Table of Contents.

Linda: That thing looks weird.

Adam: Those were all stanzas.

Linda: When I like something, it’s because it rings a bell in my storehouse, in my memory … burning trees and what a sun looks like behind the trees, all that means something to me … Maybe I liked the book after all, I don’t know.

Adam: My experience reading this book is that it was easy to read fast, but if I read it fast I didn’t get it.

Caryn: It helped me to hear him read.

Adam: He reads a couple of different ways too. Sometimes he reads kind of softly and sometimes he reads like a slam poet. I mean, not like a slam poet, but real loud and moves his arms around [gestures].

Chris: [reads poem on page 4] I like it because it has that Revelations feel, but is so rooted in the everyday.

Amanda: It’s sensual too.

Adam: Is a 25 an actual gun?

Linda: Do they have poetry codes for reading out loud?

Caryn: Like notation.

Jamie: like musical notation? [a little later…] How much can you take before you tune out your life?

Adam: Regarding the idea of putting in notation, I think he does that in the way he composes the poems. I also wanted to ask about that first poem. Didn’t you think the first poem is risky and a clash of symbols to start the book out? Where he describes the guys with the hands on their penises, “waiting for me”?

Linda: It is the same me?

Joe: This is the more visionary me.

Adam: Like an invocation.

Linda: [says something about masturbation and coming]

Dave K: A lot of stuff in the book reminds me of Catholic sermons. I grew up Catholic and most priests are terrible public speakers, they’ll start off with one point and then go off the rails and start saying whatever. In a good way, some of these poems remind me of that. As a reader, it was kind of refreshing to get lost in that.

Adam: Did it remind anyone of Portrait of the Artist?

Vague agreement from group.

Jamie: I’m assuming Joe Hall wasn’t raised Catholic?

Group uncertain

Megan: Catholicism is really gory.

Adam: The body is so present in these poems.

Joe: I was comparing this book to yours, Megan. I was saying Joe is a poet with an eye for language and you’re one with an ear for language.

Adam: So he’s conjuring image and Megan’s conjuring sound?

Linda: I had a general question about biography. When Joe and I go to art things, he never reads what the artist has to say about the piece, but I like to.

Matt: Normally in the past I usually go back and brush up on who the poet is … I don’t know why, but I resisted doing that this time.

Megan: I always assume everyone is 30.

Matt: All I know is that he’s reading at Pete’s Candy Store in New York. I saw his bio and he has a beard.

Linda: Does it matter how old the reader is?

Joe: He’s got wings and horns and all that biblical shit.

Tracy: Then you have these really beautiful moments, like on page 38.

Adam texts Joe. He says he was Roman Catholic until he was 16 and then it was just missionary coffee at a gas station yesterday.

Dave K: I still think he’s a snake handler.

Group agrees to read “Post Nativity.”

Joe: You’re Christ, Linda, so you get to go first.

Linda starts.

Megan: I’m glad I got the part with the Beck reference.

Dave K: I’m glad I got the part with my name in it.

Megan: Is “nativity” just a religious term or is it any birth?

Jamie: What the fuck’s the point of Mary after she has Jesus? Okay, you fired the gun, so what am I?

Linda: My uterus is the chamber for your cartridge.

Joe: He is referencing Yates. The falcon, the gyre, the turning.

Adam: On one side of the thaumatrope, it’s Christ on the cross. On the other side, it’s I want to be your cell, your lens, your onion skin. Not sure what that is.

Joe: One side of the disc on the thaumatrope is God and the other side is absence.

Amanda: I thought it was referencing the last words of Christ.

Matt: The first last words of Christ.

Adam: One of the turns in the poem is the trailer park. The guy’s in the Chrysler, the cut—

Chris: What is a cut, anyway?

Amanda: Like out in the cut.

Linda: I thought it was like a construction site.

Jamie: Or the worst part of the ghetto.

Adam: And also cut like a wound. This is one of my favorite parts of the poem.

More scintillating conversation. Laura misses a bunch of stuff.

Adam: who will become the first scholar of Joe Hall?

Linda: I wish Justin was here. I would be interested to hear his take.

Jamie: I think if you’re explicating these poems, you’ve gone done the wrong path.

Joe: That’s true of any poem.

Adam: I think it’s good to parse.

Linda: It’s helped me. I like it better now.

Dave K: A part of me was hoping that “O Beast, O Christ” was referencing the fact that Jesus was a werewolf.

Joe: He stole pies. I’m not making that up.

Amanda: And going back to what you were saying about the first poem and thinking about the speaker as a kind of Christ.

Linda: Look at page 61.

Joe: The speaker does identify with the godhead. Whitman-esque.

Chris: I read the refrain as a resonance with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Linda: I think I have an advantage being older. You’ve read so much, you get a little hints of things.

Adam: There are different kinds of age.

Joe: I think it’s most individual consciousness.

Adam: How many of these are a series? Like can you pick up the book and just read a couple of pages?

Group assessment: no. Laura says something about how we read and then tries to explain it for people who were out of the room and fails.

Joe: Explication is fine, but why write a poem if you can just explicate it?

Adam: Dancing about painting.

Linda: But this is a book club!

Megan: There are things that refer to specific things, specific allusions. As I read it I wondered, is that a reference? So this has been helpful to me.

Dave K: There’s so much information and the pacing is so fast, you’re not going to get everything unless you read it a shitload of times.

Adam: A lot of time it’s effect too, and there’s no point trying to explicate effect. It’s like two turn tables and a microphone.

Adam turns to Dave K and asks if he just dropped a rufi (sp?) in his beer.

Dave: Can we make it clear in the notes that I did not rufi Adam?

Tracy: Even if I wasn’t getting everything as I was reading, I was feeling the effect.

Matt: It’s that feeling when you first read a poem, like oh that kind of flew over my head and then you go back and re-read it and get it some more.

Caryn: With the O Beast, O Christ, the pace is so fast in those poems, I thought it became a kind of pause.

Megan: When I read Christ, I read it as an explicative. I use that as an explicative all the time.

Laura: I remember Joe telling me that there used to be a lot more of the O Beast, O Christ.

Adam: Chris Toll edited a lot out … One of the things I like about this book is its cohesion.

Jamie: It’s almost fiction it’s so cohesive.

Amanda: There’s a lot of fuck-with-yous in here. It’s representative of existence.

Group pauses to listen to possible altercation unfolding in street.

Adam: It’s funny that he has a section called “These Are Devotional Poems.” There’s a lot of jokes in there.

Amanda: It seems like those poems are softer.

Jamie: I want to write every one of those poems.

Matt: Actually that kind of felt to me maybe like … maybe a little forced. But it was nothing that pushed me away.

Linda: How many heads did the beast have in the apocalypse?

Jamie: 7. Everything is 7 or 3.

Amanda: The table of contents is wrong.

Joe: Maybe that mispagination is intentional?

Jamie: I don’t think so.

Joe: All the numbers are fucked up.

Adam: Oh no, it’s not a mistake. Those pages aren’t part of the section. They’re in between.

Matt: Have you ever read a Jesse Ball book before? All those weird fonts and symbols.

Adam: When we did Post Nativity, he didn’t want to do regular page numbers, since it was a single poem. He is a lot about effect for such an academic poet.

Jamie: I love that you called him an academic poet. It seems like you can go two directions after this. One is more studied, one is less studied. I want the less studied.

Chris: Is this a trope? Like found material he’s working through, or is it his vision of America?

Adam: I was processing that too.

Amanda: What about Portrait of the Artist?

Adam: Well, yeah. It’s about a dude trying to be a dude, like this dude, who gets fucked up by a preacher who preaches for 80 pages.

Dave K: You should write the jacket flap for the next edition.

Linda: I don’t mind asking stupid questions, but who is the beloved?

Group consensus: Cheryl.

Joe: I think it’s a psychological working through of the fire and the brimstone and the devotion and the beloved.

Jamie: The identity turmoil.

Megan: Like, can my life be a devoted life when I have been so low?

Linda: I guess I just don’t know who Cheryl is.

Amanda: I don’t think it’s just Cheryl. Also God and life and art. All those things.

Laura: The layering of images, the pacing of the poems—it feels to me like the devotion is supposed to speak to all those things, not just one thing.

Matt: I think the idea of southern gothic is kind of stupid. Has anyone read Wise Blood?

Joe: Of course.

Amanda: The things that we should be the most devoted to, the ones that matter most, aren’t on a pedestal.

Group decides to read “2 Exorcisms.” Joe says something about porn. Adam starts.

Adam: It’s just like “Post Nativity”!

Megan: How so?

Adam: In all ways.

Megan: All the words are different.

Adam: Well, two thirds of the words maybe. But the effect feels the same to me. I loved that image of his friend leaning in a doorway, eating an apple, waiting for whatever.

Matt: Images of people leaning against doorways has always been, for me, well gosh. A throwback to westerns to something.

Adam: Weird.

Dave: Maybe you have an inner ear issue?

Matt: Maybe it was because growing up we never had a porch.

Tracy: It’s something you stop and do and just rest for a second.

Dave K: It’s a way for you to not dance at prom.

Joe starts to sing “Lean On Me.” Dave K leaves to go to work. Chris leaves too. A trend has started, everyone is leaving or going to the bathroom.

 Joe: We have the devil’s toilet downstairs.

Group: converses about Beyonce and roller skating.

Joe: I went to the Devil’s Toilet.

Jamie: Great, that means it works.

Adam: When you go down the stairs, the impulse will be to lean forward, but you should lean back.

Megan: Good of you to pass that knowledge on.

Adam: As long as I’m recommending things: don’t go into the basement at all.

THAT THEY DROWNED, that was a surprise. You fashion a raft by binding their bodies together in a tangle and set off down the riviera. Piles of burning furniture fanned by the wings of big moths diving between scraps of fabric trailing sparks as they dance up out from the bonfires lined along the city’s banks. You feel tan. There’s a breeze. Again you inspect the map, the schematics. Eyes closed you rehearse in mind the soundings, trace with your fingertip their signs in the air.

By the time you arrive in front of the theater your necrotic gondola has bloated, rotted apart. Ready? asks Blanchot on the radio. Ready responds Blanchot. Your grappling gun finds its hooks around a gargoyle’s neck near the southwest spire. You scale the wall, climb in through an unpatched hole in the roof.

Crawling in the dark you tear your knees, your palms. Splinters long as splints. Your blood mixes thick dust blanketing the scarred wooden floor. Now you’re blind in a corner you can’t get out of, down low under an angle impossibly wide and breathing. Here this is, you figure, and resign yourself.

Cough, sputter,
unconsciousness.

In the TRAVELOGUE OF AN IMMOBILE NOMAD our pilgrim speaks of the nomad’s vision with the tape recorder. This during that time he’d given up speech, saw himself seen as a lack, a man-shaped recess in space, an outline receding in an obsidian hallway carved by his being’s flinging backward away from the things of this world, of encounters. What had been his blindspot (the body) became a door he turned to passing through, drawn into that emptiness as by a great wind. The edges carved to what had been his edges in the world of persons and things tightened the deeper in he shuttled. He felt himself contracted, reduced unto his vanishing point –

– [ and there he was floating, outside of space and time and all made things, a tape recorder in his hand and he was speaking, his-speech-the-recorder umbilical, symbiotic, generative of something prior even to potentiality, creator of the deep on the face of which the light would one day move. ]

Splash. Water in the face.
Soft focus sharpening.

Here’s Blanchot. Thought we lost you. Your wounds, you notice, have been bandaged. How long was I out? Don’t ask such inane fucking questions.

We’re in the projection room. The lead detective, you notice, is bound to a chair, his throat cut. The hostages are piled sleeping at his feet. Oh, you say, you found them. I was almost certain they’d drowned.

On top of the projector, your dossier. Retrieved. Your gaze follows the flickering film passing thru the tiny window and into the auditorium. The backs of anonymous heads perfectly still, facing forward in the dark in a shared yet private immersion. You wave.

I got my copy of the keys to this blog while I was unemployed. I had just quit a job not because I hated it, and not because I didn’t like the people there, but because I wasn’t very good at it. This was hard for me because I am the sort of person who needs to believe he is the best at basically everything. I am a teacher’s pet, a perfectionist, a people-pleaser, a needy pile of nerves, sometimes. The way I started writing here is this: I had written at the blog for my magazine for a while, and some people here had liked some of the posts. Roxane Gay was one of those people. She told me she had suggested to Blake Butler that I be invited to post here. Blake seemed receptive, but nothing happened, and meanwhile I was looking for work but not finding any and I spent most of the day sitting on my couch reading job listings and feeling my heart hurt. I needed to feel like I was succeeding in something. I thought that one way I could feel like I was succeeding would be to write for this blog, which had been a comfort to me in grad school, where two different instructors made me openly cry by telling me that I was no good at fiction. I liked to tell myself that the sort of people who read this blog would like what I was writing, and in fact had liked it in the past, as evidenced by certain posts and discussions, and that there were a lot of people who read this blog, and so I couldn’t be all bad. Now, unemployed, heart aching, I thought that writing things here might help me feel better again, and that it might advance my writing career in some way, which is important to me, because of said personality defects. So I sent Blake a gchat and asked him if I could please start writing here. I think I e-mailed him about it too. He said yes. And so I did.

So for a while I posted a lot, and I watched my posts closely to see how they did in terms of traffic and comments, especially as compared to other posts by other, more popular writers, to the extent that the WordPress back end would let me discern that. It made me feel productive. My heart hurt a little less.

My posting slowed to a trickle when I found new (and very stressful) work. I also had a super-long novel to finish, and a story in Best American Short Stories, which made me feel that I needed to do other things (like finish said super-long novel) in order to capitalize on this success, for the sake of the aforementioned writing career. For a while, I didn’t read this blog, except very occasionally when I saw that A D Jameson had written something especially geeky, which is basically my jam. When I started reading again, I saw that Seth Oelbaum was posting with some regularity. And that made me want to never write here again. It made me want to stay away.

Like a lot of people, I sometimes find some of this blog’s writers and commenters infuriating. The thing I like least about this blog is when it tries to be cool. (This is also the thing I like least about other human beings in general.) The usual strategy for achieving coolness around here seems to be some combination of disappearing up your own ass, demonstrating value, and saying bewildering, inflammatory things in such a way as to create the illusion you are a radical dissident, important thinker, etc. These qualities, combined and multiplied, describe the Seth Oelbaum persona in its entirety. (Well, almost: Seth also likes to post jpegs of people, including himself, in ugly clothing, and to sometimes write like an infant.)

If Seth had ever written something genuinely interesting or provocative, this is where I would feel obligated to respond to the meat of his writing. I might quote some especially frustrating passages and respond to their particulars. Because he has produced literally nothing of any value in his time here — even the comment threads in response to his posts, in which he rarely deigns to participate, are hideously dull and repetitive, especially my own contributions — I feel no such obligation. There is no there there. It is enough to say that his work is uniformly ugly, boring, and totally devoid of insight. It is hateful, bigoted, witless, and misspelled. It contributes less than nothing. It actively detracts from everything else that happens on this site. I feel less alive when I read it. I feel less capable of love.

Seth may or may not believe that he is bringing attention to injustice. But I can’t name even one of the atrocities he’s written about. The Oelbaum persona overshadows anything it purports to discuss; everything the persona creates is subordinate to its creator. The dead bodies Seth posts are not dead bodies: they are advertisements for the Oelbaum persona. Seth accuses “the white race” of indifference to the suffering of other people. I would accuse Seth of using the suffering of other people as a platform for his own self-aggrandizement. He expresses his privilege by using their bodies as fuel for his tacky machine.

It may well be that Americans, and perhaps even white Americans in particular, do not think often enough about the ways that other people live and die. I probably don’t. I’m not sure how my thinking about them would help, in all fairness; Seth claims to hate money, but money is probably what most of these people need most of all, so that they can feed themselves and their families, and so they can use their money to buy politicians, so that they will own these politicians, so that they can tell these politicians to stop ordering and allowing their deaths. I do not give enough money to other people. I do not help them as much as I could.

But worse than that, I don’t love them enough. I have limited money, but my love is potentially infinite. I choose — and it is very much a choice, one that I make actively each day — not to give it to them anyway.

I began with how I started posting to this site because I’m curious about how Seth got here. Did Blake give him the keys? Maybe he did. Did someone invite Seth? Did Seth invite himself? Did he tell anyone what he was planning to do once he got here? Is there someone here who likes the Oelbaum persona? Does the person who gave him the keys regret it now? I have no Earthly idea. I regret it on that person’s behalf.

Seth believes that we care too much about Jewish people. He claims that we care too much about the Holocaust. He claims that we care too much about the deaths of people in Boston. He claims that we only care about the deaths of white people. He apparently feels that these are very important points, because he returns to them again and again. He is wrong on all counts but the one. (We who are white Americans may genuinely only care about the deaths of white people, though I don’t think this is the result of racism so much as a more practical concern: we’re so relieved it wasn’t us, and that it won’t be us, that we forget to empathize. I don’t offer this as a defense, but in an attempt to more precisely define the problem the Oelbaum persona is so clumsily addressing.) The problem is not and never has been that we care too much about anyone. It is that we have never cared enough.

We can mourn two things at once. Better still, we can love them. In Seth’s imagination, there is a limited supply of love. He claims to want to give it to the people who need it most. In reality, the only limits on our love are the ones we impose. If Seth wants to love the people who are suffering in this world, then he can do that. And he can help us do it too. He can write informative posts about them. He can send them money. He can encourage us to send them money. He has chosen to make us love less. He begins by making us hate him. He hopes to make us hate each other. He imagines this will lead us to love more deserving and more needy people. He’s wrong about that too.

I’m not writing this in hopes Seth will be “fired.” That’s not really how this site’s culture works, though if he were fired, I would welcome that. I’m not writing this in hopes that Seth will stop posting. I don’t think that he will stop until no one’s reading, which might take a long time. Let’s be honest: I am writing this to hurt Seth. I am writing this to give you an opportunity to hurt Seth too. I’m writing this because I want him to stop, and because I want him to know how badly I want him to stop, and so that other people can let him know also. I’m writing this because I want it established very clearly, here and now, that participation in this site does not imply any kind of association with the Oelbaum persona. I have no idea where this jerk came from, folks, and when he’s gone, he won’t be missed, by me or anyone I love.

I want to love everyone. (I want to want to love everyone.) I want to be kinder and more generous. (I want to want to be kinder and more generous.) But I can’t love Seth Oelbaum. Not even a little. My heart is hard, and I’m not even sorry.

I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying

Koi fish have hundreds of scales that form a protective armor around them. Matthew Salesses’s I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying is a collection of 115 flash fictions that, like those scales, explore the spoken and unspoken nuances that connect and glue relationships in all their misfit forms. Many of the characters go unnamed, a decision that suggests that the companions symbolize divergent desires. There’s the wifely woman who’s his main lover and there’s a “white woman” who acts as a mistress as well as another Korean woman who is in place “for emergencies.” Each serve a different need, though none can satisfy him because he partitions himself like the segmented chapters that comprise the book. They are lyrical segments akin to jazz solos forming a striking concerto of prose. The impetus that triggers the journey of the book is the appearance of a son he never knew he had. When the boy’s mother, an old lover, passes away, the narrator takes the son into his home. Rather than a definitive reaction to this revelation, there’s a miasma of conflicted emotion, an uncertainty that could best be summed up in the piece, “She Was a Tsunami to His Earthquake:”

His lovers, his co-workers, and finally, his son, form a tenuous thread that bind the invisible wavelengths of his life together. Only, he is always trying to split them apart and keep them isolated in a delicately stratified web. In describing the side girl-on-the-side, he says: “I had to be careful with her, though I wasn’t technically married, because she collected the crumbs of truth, but for an hour with her, I was someone else, and when I left, I could discard that part of me and know it would be repossessed.” The elegance of the book lies in the poetic congruence with which his life is shattered by circumstantial incongruence. Say, for example, his observation at an art gallery with his son that only the letter T separates the word “paint” from “pain.” This was an association formed from his failure to be the artist he aspired to be as a freshman in college. He is protecting himself from pain, but entering it willingly to try to teach his son something about painting. That contradiction of both being in the mural and trying to control it hints at the theme of a man all too aware of his foibles and flaws, but still is helpless to do anything about it. Twisted accents in his relationships add shades and make every interaction a layered strip tease, tantalizingly bare without showing anything essential:

There’s a charm and wit in this narrator who juggles relationships like pins and an ambivalence that reflects the title’s declarative uncertainty. Racial stereotypes, interracial dating, and cultural dichotomies are handled deftly without being heavy-handed as when he “took the boy to L.A. since he barely knew he was Korean,” a funny little insight considering Los Angeles has one of the biggest Koreatowns in the world. “‘How big is Korea?’ he asked. I told him it was sized to slip through the cracks.” At times, we hope the narrator will be able to maneuver his way through all the traps he’s set for himself. Eventually though, his affairs catch up with him and his working politics get him in trouble at work. Worse, he is nowhere near an understanding with his son and it appears the wifely woman wants him gone after discovering his infidelity. He can’t hide in bouts of denial, his egresses hoping for physical intimacy are forbidden, and no flourishes of witty insight can will away his plight.

It’s the intersections between the scales that makes I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying, so interesting— those vulnerable spots that expose flesh while desperately trying to protect against it. I think of composite images made up of multiple portraits to form one that can only be seen from afar. Matthew Salesses, through these 115 separate pieces, forms a picture similar to a pointillistic portrait. The relationship between the macro and micro view is as ambiguous and clear as that of all connections the narrator has with those around him. It’s part of what makes this collection so bold and yet so intriguingly elusive. I’m pretty sure I know what Matt Salesses is saying. At the same time, I’m pretty sure I don’t know what he really just said.

***

Almost Gone

Brian Sousa’s debut is a novel-in-stories about the life and tragedies of three generations of a Portuguese-American family living in Rhode Island. Their lives are punctuated with a series of desperate escapes abroad, beginning with Scott on the beaches of Brazil mourning the death of his young daughter, re-enacting her drowning in several senses of the word. He doesn’t know that it was a similar flight of desperation that brought his grandmother and grandfather to America from Lagos, Portugal many years ago.

The characters may occasionally run, but they cannot hide from their literary fate. Each character’s private pain explored in turn; each timely revelation increases the stakes. Helena emigrates from Lagos with her husband Nuno, and finds her life in America barren and cruel in comparison. Nuno cannot muster any grief for his wife’s death, and instead nurses his obsession with Catarina, the beautiful Portuguese woman who lives in the guest cottage behind his house. Nuno’s son Paulo listens to his teenage son Scott having sex, while his own marriage is rapidly deteriorating around him. Ten years later, Scott’s marriage is no better: he loses his child and abandons his wife. The unwitting observer to all of this family drama is Catarina, who can never seem to escape her fate as the object of every man’s desire. She too leaves her husband, fleeing into the streets of Granada.

These are stories of loss, infidelity, alienation…all the persistent demons of modern suburban life. And for that matter, of suburban literature since the dawn of Cheever.  But Almost Gone glimmers when Sousa manages to step outside conventional grief, and twist the knife ever so slightly. The best example of this is a deeply awkward scene where Nuno arrives at the cottage to woo Catarina, after his son Paulo has just tried the same and left, rejected. Nuno falls, and pleads with her from the ground:

It’s remarkable how well the Portuguese-American experience assimilates into the suburban-American experience. Three generations—from new immigrants to Rhode Island townies—and every parent feels alienated from their child, every marriage struggles to stay afloat in choppy waters. The standout story is the only one from Helena’s point of view, in which she is obsessed with catching the stray dog ruining the garden in a desperate attempt to regain her husband’s affection.  When Helena prays she looks to Deus to try to understand her place in this world. The only difference between Helena, her American daughter in law, and millions of disaffected wives is who they’re praying to and what they’re asking for.

Almost Gone is full of these constructed parallels. No scene is without a direct line back to the theme. Sousa drops each chapter neatly in its place. Even mundane interactions are dripping with significance.

For all of its Portuguese bullion, the flavor of this novel is staunchly American. The novel-in-stories format, the quiet desperation of every character, the touching and awkward sex scenes: it is all very of-the-moment in American literary circles.  This extends down to the craft level, with the epistolary section, the bilingual swearing, and all the things the characters imagine saying to each other but never do. A graduate of Emerson’s WLP program, Sousa clearly learned his lessons well—perhaps too well. The result is a quintessential “MFA novel”: technically flawless, emotionally weighty, but lacking in the creative risk-taking that makes fiction a transcendent joy.

***

Claire Blechman is from one frozen hinterland or another. She is an honorable-mention-winning writer, thanks in part to her MFA from Emerson College. Her work has appeared in The Fiction Desk, Gargoyle, Interrobang, the Ploughshares review blog, and the Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms. She wrote her whole website by herself, then unimaginatively named it claireblechman.com.