Improbably enough, the periodic sentence, a vestigial stylistic hallmark of 18th century English prose, has recently become a topic of conversation in certain far-flung corners of the literary Internet. Even more improbably, a peer has requested I share part of an early draft of an unpublished novel I wrote entirely in periodic sentences (and then edited). Ill-conceived as this request may be, It’d be unsporting of me not to oblige. Read a complete excerpt from the novel then titled 2001 below.

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An orange haze of sunlight penetrating his shut eyes as they slowly fluttered open, a whirring in his ears like combustion propelling a jet engine, a salty taste of blood and snot forcing his lips to curl and his tongue to recoil, excruciating pain all up and down his spine and swelling around his knees and elbows, a smell of smoke clouding his olfactory stations, a stink and wetness signalling sweat across his face and forehead, a headache hiding a horrible memory as his consciousness regained its function, C. Delarosa Conway slowly awoke to find himself in a blurry and unfamiliar landscape. After blinking involuntarily to rid his eyes of what felt like sand, gradually constructing an apperception of the broad daylight and clear weather and calm sea surrounding, wresting himself with difficulty but eventually successfully from the wreck of twisted metal in which he found himself stuck, yawning, rubbing his eyes, and attending to the parts of his body that felt unnaturally sore, C. was comfortable enough again with his senses to observe and realize that he was on the shore of a small and isolated mass of land. Standing and turning to look down upon the smashed hull in which he’d apparently slept, seeing the expansive machine that extended to an impossible length in front of him, the charred edges of steel panels, blood-soaked shreds of upholstery that no longer held any shape or form, and parts of human bodies splitting at their fresh ends into tethers of gore, C. was suddenly reminded of the traumatic and horrifying series of events that had led up to the delirium of his awakening here. Clutching his head to quell an intoxicating dizziness that momentarily overtook him, sinking to his knees with a faintness overwhelming him like a heavy weight slowly bearing on his shoulders, breathing heavily and holding his abdomen as he struggled to keep down the bile boiling in his empty stomach, little by little, C. relived the experience of the disaster of which he was now, he realized, an unlikely survivor. As his skin began to tingle and his head to throb with the feverish onset of sickness, as his stomach turned and churned and curled with the vomit welling up inside him, as he began to heave and pant and sweat in preparation for the flow, the gush, the burst, as the moment approached and then, just before the moment came when he would expel everything from within his body, a voice behind him told him to stand up. Shocked and somehow subsequently stabilized by the unexpected command, pushing off from the ground and struggling and then straightening into a standing position, turning toward and finally seeing the full spread of the landscape surrounding, the level apex of a rocky and sparsely vegetated plateau that climbed steeply from the sea, the hands of seaweed that grew just beyond the island’s perimeter attracting clouds of gnats, the sloping dunes of gravel and dirt housing ants and other vermin, and an expanse about a mile ahead where towers and tents and atypical topography suggested some semblance of civilization, C. stopped in his place when he came face to face with a short, stocky man wearing a stern expression. His face so severely deformed that his age was impossible to discern, his body by its appearance naturally weak but imbued with a strength built over years of relatively independent survival, his clothes damp and dirty and giving off a fishy smell that somehow seemed to come from the man himself rather than any residue he’d accumulated, and yet, despite all the rest, his eyes sharp with a vague, indescribable pain, C. was deeply moved by the gravity the man seemed to possess. When, after a moment of gawking in awe, awe partially at the man and his affect and partially at the combined effect of finding himself thrust into a nightmare of displacement and coming upon another person in this place and situation who did not seem to be here for the same reason he was, C. stuttered and blinked and said C. Delarosa Conway, the man gruffly gestured behind him toward the larger and apparently more cultivated area of the island and said Follow me. As they walked together past swaths and splotches of the shit of the few lizards and the many birds that predominantly populated the island, past these birds and lizards themselves, and past the gradually thinning evidence of the crash he’d suffered, the hunks of steel and chunks of skin, the scattered stains of browning blood and patches of sand burnt black, the small, odoriferous man explained the history of this island and the course of events that had led C. here. Apparently, in accordance with an agreement between the Federal Aviation Agency and the like agencies of several other international superpowers, whenever a new series of airborne vehicles was developed and approved for implementation and use, in order to keep the public under the false impression that aviation as an industry was not yet advanced enough to accommodate certain theorized military tactics that drew considerable criticism from politicians, activists and academics, tactics that were already planned for employment in future military campaigns in the U.S. and elsewhere, a plane would be intentionally disappeared and sent to the island. According to the theory behind the practice and the research conducted to support this theory, when people witnessed a major failure of the aviation complex that cooperation between numerous governments couldn’t solve, they were less likely to take seriously new revelations in the media surrounding weapons and technology rumored to be in development. When C. grew fearful and began to prod the man with questions about how such a program could be kept hidden by so many people for so long, about how it was possible for countless planes and an entire island to avoid discovery by any non-governmental individual or identity, about how many and which planes had been disappeared in this way for this reason, about how this was or was not legal, and about how it was possible for such a practice to be executed and perpetuated so smoothly for so long, the man said, repeatedly, anything I haven’t already said, either I’m not allowed to tell you, or I don’t know. When they found their way to the stretch of beach across which were scattered small makeshift dwellings and structures ranging from those small enough to fit one or two people and those large enough to accommodate fifty or more, dwellings and structures mostly fashioned crudely from miscellaneous plane parts and lengths of driftwood, seeing that there were more people on the island than could possibly have been on the plane that had taken him here, C. came to a troubling realization. Before C. could figure out how to phrase the question that was forming in his mind, seemingly responding to the note of worry that colored the few gull-like vocal eclipses he had managed to emit in his effort, the man said Yeah, you’re not going anywhere, but you’ll get used to it; you’ll find a place to work, a community to take you in, probably a new partner, but if not there’s also a guy doing pretty good business selling sex toys and dolls made from airframe scraps, since that seems to be a pretty common fetish these days. As C. silently observed the dozens, maybe hundreds, of men and women surrounding him, some of them busy with construction projects, some of them cooking under tents, some of them swimming offshore as if enjoying any other trip to the beach, as he tried to silently reassure himself that there was no way that he could be living in any reality that allowed for such an occurrence, the man continued to say a lot of the work is in construction, but if your background’s in math or science we’ve got a small team working with in-flight communications systems – every now and then we find one that’s more or less intact and we can actually rig them up to track flight activity within a certain radius, which is useful, since no one wants to, you know, get hit by a plane – but what did you say you did, again, before, I mean? When after a moment of speechlessness during which C. forced himself with effort to continue to treat the experience as if it were real, hoping that he had been overtaken by some hallucination or unconscious out-of-body travel but, for the sake of resisting panic, trying his best to take the situation seriously, he managed to blurt out literary criticism. Nodding, unfazed by C.’s credentials as he seemed to be by everything else around them that was still so bizarre and alien and frightening to C. that he couldn’t accept it as reality, the man said then you’ll probably end up at the museum. Stopping and gesturing lazily in front of them as they reached a large building that looked like a gigantic living-room fort constructed of such an inconsistent hodgepodge of metal, wood and cloth that it barely seemed to hold its shape, the man said Before the planes, there were ships that traders would send here, when a rival company wanted to hijack an export to sabotage an order in hopes of being contracted to fulfill it themselves, and then once a large enough number of survivors of these shipwrecks had accumulated here, they started putting on plays and telling stories and eventually shooting movies and TV shows, stuff you probably know, like first The Tempest and then Robinson Crusoe and then Gilligan’s Island and Lost, and eventually someone had the idea that all that memorabilia should be collected here in this museum that we now have to expand every year or so just to fit it all. When C. Delarosa Conway, staring into the massive compendium of objects and ephemera presented and curated just beyond the flap of violet cloth that hung over its entrance, began to step toward the museum that, more than anything else he’d seen since awakening on this strange island where nothing seemed real, when he began drawing closer to these objects that filled him with fascination and wonder, when he was about to enter this majestic storehouse of history and creative tradition, I stood and spun and wrung my head and fell to the floor in distress as I became so overwhelmed by the inspiration and confusion that assaulted me that I could only sit panting with my head between my knees until I somehow made some sense of it all.

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In one of my earlier posts, I detailed a process called “noise translation” by which I produced a dadaist revision of the story “Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction” from John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. To compose that translation, I recorded myself reading the story and played it through a no-input mixer, a DIY instrument popular among noise musicians. This past long weekend, with similar goals in mind, I holed up in my studio with a homemade analog tape echo unit recording sound-on-sound loops to modified cassette tapes. The results were variously successful, but I did manage to record myself reading Barth’s story “Echo,” from the same collection—a fitting source text for this particular experiment—and produce a new noise translation. Read the results in full below.

NOTE: Recording sound on sound using a homemade loop of generic cassette tape generates a significant amount of tape hiss, so a good deal of the playback was unintelligible. Notwithstanding, I’m surprised as I always am when I experiment with this technique by how much of the original story—as well as its use of repetition as a stylistic device—is retained here.

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one does well to speak in the third person the seer advises in a manner of speaking Tiresias a sphere for self absorption saturation telling the story over and so for another until a much lifer through the word emerges prose with the stars Tiresias’ self-employed in the future with our fictivities and emerging self-absolving Tiresias he murders himself life go look size self-embalmed please don’t fire a card fight with me again talk love honor go we call what’s your problem but Tiresias has stopped odyssey why have we been seen to believe in me and so require in part here we’re grabbing the cane seen to conjoin in an interregnum part of problem first it was the saints we almost derail with beyond his compare to be seen as respect being paid they often comply with the grooming by her not we can’t catch the core and if it’s a problem to offer to rehearse the therapy wax of the conflict monks can we often get the Tiresias formula here off to stop the bastard weed more ironic might recur eat me whole offer Tiresias suffer the maggots stayed to all warm hands beyond the bread the both cabbed I might recur again a philosopher argued with a step to Tiresias ipso facto got to explain explain for flayed himself a frightened dab Tiresias can we not he wanted to start her on chains and flip the patio increase the world to many our witnessed therapist steps to recur Tiresias’s five for one gender or occur memory the philosopher women and children all a case we jumped our Mumford and Sons clinical stop for now monks skittle past her Tiresias’ ordinary spirit intimately married to fries for Mary clinical age we skinned her to call back the strange method liberty to production why aren’t herself to age reoccurs lunch past the offer enough to say that the prime is clinical the variety of general things bright peer take to the woods into the skin muffled wad her lady sectored under Dada all these proclivities immediately rested surrounded by upper weight unman a wonderful suffer a long time upper wide tooth pain and cure if not it clinical wide step nachos I meet the president a century wide that’s our infinite parlor the best part we order a pizza and this rips by blood the government rye up to the widened three eyed snail it loops and reemployed a life of we make it vagina corn up to a woman eat and impossible it reports a measure on the best we do up semaphore part recurs employed the Pulitzer company I froze in my bread all I’ve got for to others might we be one look goes and we made for a Tiresian philosopher once it’s worthwhile to eat the pearl all will be well that’s weed the rail burn all prose can eat and so on so on for anyone real high eye and must we see be a lack alas Tiresias’ problem I eat through the vines ancient father hates himself dripping for all I guess not quite and speech defies somebody else’s for better and so philosopher somebody else’s toothpick Tiresias is like a problem no don’t forget to and you’ve got a con September bees speaking breathily near light now we’re all supposed to be secret nods not for real how we’re the terror is real a week to get started we’re all one maze to speak for any author considerable time and feeling profit margin it simply is a problem Tiresias is repressing scars we’ve all got to take the world we all forgot only a little far always step at which time we’re long behind bleeding stay oceans as well after that came to call feeling over calmed himself to got to meet him always give your people time semaphore and dot not quite not quite speaking all never now we’re all one team deployed Tiresias answers I put the cone not a lot to hire speak yourself home after this we seem to be all profits himself under the same proxy speaking hard for yourself and not Tiresias himself employed a hot Tiresias suffers ribbon self to love or nothing despite you will go maybe to hunt for doctor more and the loop impossibly it started without proper time to make a flutter about Tiresias after hot meat spread off we go positively lost Tiresias himself after all three one hundred self engendered perhaps we lost himself with a time not year not Tiresias also breath recurred could we come together in tone a breaking spiral Tiresias prophet blind it’s a real scene self debunked it lifts forever and ever not what happened after deployed self

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I have a vexed relationship with the popular practice of listing books or other works of art based on personal significance, but of course I’m as much of a sucker as anyone for a chance to relive my formation as a reader and a writer. Since everyone else on the Internet seems to be doing just that this week, here’s a list of “The 9 books I’ll never forget,” with the obvious caveat that any such list will always be incomplete, not to mention for suckers:

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Wanna Go Out? by Theresa Stern

Theresa Stern was a biracial sex worker from Hoboken who made a name for herself in 1973 with a slim self-published volume of unclassifiable poetry vacillating in the space between the New York School, confessionalism, and neosurrealism. This volume, Wanna Go Out?, her only published work, remains a rarity known only to devotees. Luckily for me, those devotees happen to include my father, who still owns the copy Theresa signed for him when he wrote about her in his late ‘70s freelancing era. The poems in this book were the first things I read that made me believe I could write.

Ulysses by James Joyce

There is little I could say that would speak adequately to what James Joyce’s Ulysses means to me. Let’s just say my name is Stephen for a reason.

Obstinate Dust by Ralph Warden Meeker

My high school admitted students in grade 7, so I spent my middle school years in the same building with a bunch of college-bound nerds eager to show off the imperious tomes they were too young to be reading but reading anyway. As a twelve-year-old still as excited about Mad and Thrasher magazines as I was about pop-punk, a thousand-page prose poem called Obstinate Dust by an author with three names was as foreign and mythical an object to me as a UFO. I would spend the next six years trying to read it all the way through; by the time I succeeded, I was a different person altogether.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

In college, I sought out courses that required me to study canonical texts I knew I would never go out of my way to read on my own. One of these was a course on the origins of biography and autobiography in Georgian England. The main course texts were Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and Johnson’s own Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, but we also read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, a revelatory interpretation of the form that expands a brief account of a young man’s birth into a rural Anglican family into a meditation on Enlightenment philosophy, medicine, and politics. I think about it every time I write something about myself.

Ill Tomb Era by Mark Iosifescu

Discerning Substack users will be well aware that ’s is one of the most essential newsletters the platform has to offer, but only true initiates know that his small press Pleasure Editions put out some of the best writing of the decade or so for which it was still around, including Mark’s own serialized meganovel-in-zines Ill Tomb Era. The world of the early-to-mid 2010s was probably not ready for this high-low epic about noise scene hijinks and dystopian conglomeration of religious fanaticism. Here’s hoping it catches up sooner rather than later.

Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany by William Frederick Kohler

Like a lot of people my age, after the 2016 elections I developed a not altogether healthy obsession with the rise of fascism in Germany. I read Primo Levi and Hannah Arendt, but I also read Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, an exhaustive but massively controversial turn-of-the-millennium treatise by disgraced academic and suspected Nazi sympathizer William Frederick Kohler. It’s a harrowing book, particularly Kohler’s autobiographical interpolations about his participation in the Kristallnacht, but it taught me more than anything else I’ve read about the psychology of fascism.

Hang Ten Hail Satan by Chris Francese

I’ve written about my friend Chris Francese before, and even excerpted his still unpublished Hang Ten Hail Satan, but I can’t list the books that have influenced my own writing most without mentioning it again. Chris is a genuine maverick, both as a fiction writer and as a scene reporter for various punk and hardcore fanzines in the Southwest, and his high-pulp period piece about a surfer in a fictional California beach town joining a knockoff Church of Satan is simply one of the coolest things I have ever read. Agents and editors take note.

Libra by Don DeLillo

My girlfriend is something of an armchair historian of the CIA. When we started dating, she gave me not one but several suggestions for further reading on the Kennedy assassination that I wisely inferred were not optional. The only one I had already read was Don DeLillo’s Libra, which we still both consider the only account of the event in question that tells the whole truth about what happened.

GROUP CHAT Season One

As most of my readers already know, I earned many titles throughout the production of the first season of GROUP CHAT, the premiere online text-based reality TV series: creator, producer, editor, etc. As involved as I was, however, I would never call myself the “author” of GROUP CHAT—that distinction belongs to the members of the show’s dynamic original cast. Don’t know what I mean? Binge the whole series from the beginning, whether you already have or not.

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The short story form has always puzzled me. I’ve written plenty and published a few, but in general I’ve never found it to be the ideal narrative form. Why create a world if no one will ever live in it for more than ten minutes? Still, I like to write fiction, and a lot of the time planning for ten pages isn’t as daunting as planning for hundreds. All this is to say I’ve started quite a few stories I haven’t finished, and likely won’t. In the hope that the effort I put into them won’t have all been for nothing, here are the first paragraphs of ten of them.

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Biological

Here’s what happened. There was a real spacecraft, but no one who works for the government ever saw it. It definitely doesn’t look how they’re saying it looks, like a sphere inscribed inside a cube. Sure, it defies our laws of physics, but what kind of intelligence would come up with a design like that? No, that’s the kind of thing the government makes up because they know it’ll keep our attention. Artists can render it a million different ways, we’ll start seeing it in movies by next summer. In reality it had to look way more like what’s described in the literature, circular but aerodynamic, basically in the shape of a saucer. And the guy who saw it is not answering any questions on TV about it. He can’t answer any questions about it, because he’s dead.

Burn Story

After it happened, I felt liberated. I had been worrying about so much for so long and hadn’t even realized. For years, all I thought about was what other people thought of me. After my accident, I always knew. It was impossible for people to hide what they thought of me. They saw me and they showed me immediately. If they ever stuck around long enough to talk to me, they paid attention to what I said, because they wanted to be able to focus on anything other than what I looked like. When I was beautiful, no one ever treated me like a human being. Now, everyone does. There’s nothing left of me but who I am, my thoughts, my soul. Now that I live the life of a burn victim, I never have to try to be more than human.

Coronoid Process

Some impacted wisdom teeth cause no pain or threat to your dental health. Before a tooth erupts, it is usually less likely to pose any problems. Erupted impacted wisdom teeth are more easily infected, because they often butt up against the second molar or create open spaces beneath the gums where bacteria can collect. Some erupted impacted wisdom teeth break sideways through the gums and toward the cheek or jaw, which can cause lockjaw, or create a cyst that can fill with fluid. My third wisdom tooth is currently erupting directly into my coronoid process, or the hinge of my jaw, on the left side of my face. I’m not certain of any infection, but the pain is unimaginable. Still, I have bills to pay. I’m very busy and I don’t have time for interruptions right now.

Man-Made

The bank is a slope of cement extending upward from a long paved ditch that runs parallel to the highway. At the top is a short, flat ledge, two feet wide by four long, hanging just a few more feet below the metal shoulder that protects the ditch from the cars passing above. Todd Cameron stands behind the lens, set up with a tripod about fifteen yards from the bank, forty-five degrees to the right. The rest of the Arcana team is crowded behind the camera, arms folded, clutching boards, fishing around in the cooler for fresh beer or seltzer. A breeze whips around their feet and scares up dust. The quiet is pregnant, like the first few minutes of a western. In the sky, the sun burns a hole through a sheet of cloud.

Mouse Trap

The purpose of this journal is to keep track of my process while I’m trying to catch the mouse. I don’t know how long it will take to catch the mouse, and I don’t want to start trying the same things over and over again. I have never had to try this hard to catch a mouse, or to catch anything. I’ve never cared about having mice around the house before, but there is now this one mouse that I just can’t seem to forget about. Every night for the past week I’ve gone to bed and tried to fall asleep, and just knowing that the mouse was running freely around the house kept me up all night.

Residency

Faking the application was the easy part. None of the real artists I know have credentials they can actually verify. They show paintings in group shows at galleries that go broke the next month or publish poetry in online journals the editors get too busy to keep running. I made up three independent theaters in three different cities, two in foreign countries—that much harder to look into—and invented synopses of plays I claimed to have written and directed. One won an award for young female theater artists producing overseas. In my essay, I outlined what I promised would be my magnum opus: a feature-length experimental one-woman show incorporating mixed media and multiple performance styles to explore and critique the norms of women’s labor in Western capitalist society.

The Snake Cries Poison

The piano is an heirloom. A great if not great great grandfather on my father’s side commissioned it for the drawing room of his palazzo in Tuscany. It was built by a luthier of some esteem in the region, where my great or great great grandfather settled early in life having made a small fortune as a printer in the Balkans. He intended to host concerts for the Florentine intelligentsia, to establish himself as a member of the local aristocracy, but took ill and passed away before he turned thirty. When his son, my grand or great grandfather, took over the estate, he sold off the palazzo and shipped the possessions that retained the most sentimental value to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he set himself up as a philanthropist in the University system. Many of the other possessions were sold off or donated over the following decades, but the rest, including the piano, were passed down to me.

That 70s Show

I’m taking a class for my Ph.D. called Culture and Media After Neoliberalism. I’ve been assigned to a group, and we have to present on a cultural product from the last forty years that illustrates a paradigmatic shift in American political history. I’m working with T, who studies art history, and K, who studies gender and education. We’ve chosen to present on a sitcom called That 70s Show. None of us is very familiar with the show, but we found a list of episodes online and perused the titles and descriptions. Now we’re at T’s apartment watching an episode called “Hyde Bombs The CIA,” and I’m taking notes for the presentation as we watch.

The Truman Show Delusion

On September 11, 2001, I was sitting at my desk in my fifth-grade classroom when our science lesson was interrupted by a knock on the door. My teacher opened the door and another teacher, not one of my teachers, asked to come in. This teacher and my teacher stood at the front of the room and whispered to each other for a few minutes before the other teacher led my teacher to the window and pulled down on the windowshade until it rolled up. Outside, we could see the city skyline. The other teacher pointed to the buildings my friends and I called “the twin towers” and my teacher gasped. “Oh my god,” she said. From my desk, I could just see the outline of the buildings and what looked like a tiny handheld dagger lodged in the side of the one with a large needle protruding from the top.

Vibes

Her name was Yvonne. For the past few years she had been working as a data specialist at a biology lab, archiving field recordings of animal sounds, tagging them with brief descriptions and classifying them by species, region, whatever. She rented an apartment in the University neighborhood and her hourly wage covered it, but most of the time she couldn’t put much money aside. She had not made many friends at work and didn’t expect or plan to. Once she clocked out she kept her head down all the way home on the bus and in the evenings she rarely ever answered the phone or the door. In the Spring she would turn thirty, and she hadn’t played music since her early twenties.

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I read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick once in high school and once in college. I read it more closely the second time, and in the years sense have periodically revisited certain passages just to remind myself of what I’ve always enjoyed so much about the prose, but in general my memory of it is pretty faint. Possibly because of a recent minor renaissance of posting about what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written by an American, I started wondering what might happen if I tried to rewrite the first chapter from memory. The exercise has been humbling, if not embarrassing, but also useful and revealing in its own way.

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Loomings

Call me Ishmael. Though I hail from Nantucket, today it’s to the isle of the Manhattoes I chart my course. There’s a particular breed of discontent that comes upon me at certain inopportune times and hoists me upward and forward in the direction of my only refuge. At these times I’ve no sure means of recourse but to cast off, no sanctuary but the ocean’s pull. When my hypos get the hold of me, when I’m unsettled under the skin and heavy about the head, when that black cloud of malaise and woe gathers ‘round me and follows me every which way, I let fly the sails and rush headlong onto the open waves. Some men pull Cato’s sword from its sheath and thrust down nobly upon it to the hilt; I take to the sea.

It’s my lot and my fortune that I am expressly disposed to avail myself of such opportunity. At this young stage of my life I’ve no ties to either work or family that might prevent a man from letting go his firm stance aground and surrendering to the waters’ mercurial to and fro’. Some men take solace early in the comforts of a home and a wife; I am not this kind. Whatever the malady or weakness of my spirit to which this truth might owe, it’s only in the company of other so afflicted men that I truly feel at peace with my own forever unmoored soul. Restless and adrift as ever we may be, atop the sturdy teakwood decks of any proven ship, we are all alike and sanguine in our absolution.

The Manhattoes is a destination most richly sought for men of my constitution. Here along its lower coast are the ports and harbors of the fishery in all its manifold splendor: great vessels of import and export bearing cargo of every variety; clerks with eyes as sharp as their tongues, wielding their quills like daggers whilst the isle’s wayward masses flock to enlist them as the stewards of their humble fates; and of course, these men themselves, the hundreds hard and worn in the face by voyages come and gone, bodies brawny under battered clothing and chins aburst with beards streaked white with salt, eyes drawn tight and narrow as they navigate the clearest path to their one last welcome aboard.

One of these appears as I jockey for my place on the long line of others hoping to secure a spot on the next ship out—indeed, he nearly knocks me sideways to the ground for all his unwieldy bulk! Once I’ve caught my bearings, I’m more than inclined to throw my fists against him and give forth the word of my anger, but before I have the chance I’m stopped where I stand. An Indian twice my size if he is an inch, the face he shows me is a purple scowl of foul temper I would be not half a fool to give him reason to unleash. Only when I shrink in place and withdraw all my fleeting rage do his features turn gentle and reveal the countenance of a man as wracked and desperate for the spray and the yaw of the sailor’s journey as I.

In the end I do not engage the man; I take my place behind him to wait for the clerks to see to us all one by one. My own bonafides as a sailor are not few, but by no means are they sure to stand up proudly against those of any of the other men assembled. I served some months as a deckhand on a fishing vessel out of Boston harbor, and several more as a custodian on a commercial freighter down the Eastern Atlantic coast. As I wait and watch the others in all their weathered beauty receive their conscriptions and continue ahead to their journeys across the tossing depths, my very form feels near to bursting with the anticipation of the grand adventure to come.

The Indian with the purple face and hair piled high atop his head carries his pack and his own bodily size up the boardwalk toward what future awaits him. At last I have come to the fore! I hand the clerk my documents and submit to his line of questioning. My name? Ishmael. My place of residence? The isle of Nantucket. My occupation? Seaman. The man recites at length the many legal affordances and restrictions I must accept if I am to be offered service upon one of the many vessels here at port. Dutifully I nod and affirm my understanding. A few more formalities dispensed, and I am instructed to sign my name, and then the man curtly hands me the modest sheaf informing me of my assignment.

And now my course is set—I am a sailor once more! I am to report in three days’ time to serve upon the whaling ship Pequod under a Captain by the name of Ahab. My momentary lodgings are reserved at an inn just a short ways up the seaboard. As if at once, all my recent miseries, those flitting demons of the heart and mind that keep a man all but chained to the floor and thrashing about in the futility of his own pathetic wrath, have gone away. I am no more a man adrift, wandering the land without so much as a compass to show him his way. I am soon to be once again in flight across that great expanse which embraces the surface of the earth from shore to shore. But first—to bed!

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Chiasmus. Big Bounce. Sidpa Bardo. Throughout history, across the world’s arts, sciences, and religions, the principle that every ending is also a beginning, every departure also a return, appears again and again, like a specter haunting our reality from beyond, or within. We are always reliving at the moment of living, always becoming at the moment of being, and this is our responsibility and our power, our blessing and our curse. We rise and we fall, we are changed and the same, we are damned to success and redeemed by failure. Death is not the end, hell is other people, heaven is a place on Earth. You can check out, but you can never leave.

In keeping with this guiding principle of existence, this key to all mythologies, as production begins on the final episode of the season, the members of the GROUP CHAT cast find themselves contemplating their origins:

One formative experience in particular emerges as a collective focus:

Naturally, Van’s is not the only question the chat takes up in its final week. In the spirit of recapitulation and resolution, many of the questions raised over the course of the season yield long-anticipated answers:

The revelations continue when the cast gathers live for the first time to answer questions from friends and fans of the show:

The gathering is abruptly interrupted, however, when a late arrival from Nick prompts James to rehash the feud the two have not managed to settle since the previous week’s episode:

The ensuing altercation is heated enough that both parties eventually demand the footage be scrapped, but the production team does manage to salvage some audio when James forgets to switch off his mic:

Fortunately for James, while the closing of the Season One circle may not be enough to resolve his feud with Nick, it does allow him to make peace at last with another of the siblings he has estranged from the GROUP CHAT family, original Season One cast member :

The week’s many happy returns leave the cast with just as many conflicting feelings, but ultimately they are ready for what new beginnings await them:

What is the point of being alive? What is the point of GROUP CHAT? What am I even talking about? Even the most unforgettable summer of their lives has not answered all of the cast’s lingering questions, but lingering questions are essential to this ongoing journey of living and reliving, becoming and being. Some questions have no answers. Some circles never close. Has this journey changed the cast of GROUP CHAT, or merely led them back to where they began—or both?

Only time will tell. For now, thank you for watching Season One of GROUP CHAT. You may now leave the CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: "Weird girl lit" enters the chat, the GROUP CHAT Stalker deepens Ross's lore, and the cast debriefs Alexandra Naughton’s barnburner essay on gatekeeping in online lit.

This week: If you could vote me off GC, would you?

In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, poet William Butler Yeats was living with his wife in Ireland when two cataclysmic events shook his homeland. The first was the Irish War of Independence, a conflict with deep associations for the former Irish Republican increasingly seduced by authoritarian ideas. The second was the Great Influenza epidemic, a mass illness event which almost claimed the life of Yeats’ pregnant wife, Georgie. It was at this time of great political and personal upheaval that Yeats wrote his most famous lines: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

What kind of cataclysm does it take to make a group chat fall apart? This week, an escalating feud between two of its most dynamic personalities brings this question directly to the GROUP CHAT cast:

At first, James seems to have moved on from the affair unfazed, however unresolved things between he and Nick remain, but before long his suspicions and frustrations are back with a vengeance:

Finally, James decides to lay all his insecurities at the mercy of the chat:

Is James playing games? Is Nick gaslighting? Is Rachel Cusk Canadian? Even at a time when it seems like nothing in the world is certain, there is one thing you can count on: the answers to all of your questions will be revealed next week, on another episode of GROUP CHAT!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The cast takes on salary discourse, a letter to the editor, and two of the chat’s closest compatriots break up.

This week: What is Dua Lipa doing?

In “Before the Law,” a famous parable by the celebrated German modernist Franz Kafka, a man stands before a gate attended by a gatekeeper, and asks to be permitted “to gain entry into the law.” The gatekeeper denies the man’s request, but when the man asks if he might gain entry later, responds, “It is possible.” The man sits before the gate and waits for years, asking again and again to be let in, but every time the gatekeeper denies him. At the end of his life, the man asks the gatekeeper why no one else has asked to pass through the gate. As the man’s hearing fails him, the gatekeeper shouts, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to close it.”

Early in the week, the chat is firmly in its element—trash-talking Rachel Cusk’s new autofictional collaboration with Natalie Portman—when a bizarre anonymous communication demands its immediate attention:

Fortunately or not, the cast has more pressing concerns to attend to—namely, responding to ’s new essay on gatekeeping in online lit, which seems to have inspired some backlash on another digital publishing platform:

The only gatekeepers the cast of GROUP CHAT minds, however, are the influencers responsible for defining and codiyfing the emerging microgrenre of “weird girl lit”:

After some debate, the members of the cast settle on a fitting response to the phenomenon:

Will Nick’s new identity get him through the gate? Will online lit ever forgive Alexandra? Will the GROUP CHAT stalker continue to deepen Ross’s lore? No gatekeeper will be guarding the answers to these questions; they’ll all be waiting for you, unpaywalled, in the next episode of GROUP CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: A state of emergency, the chat’s first will-they-or-won’t-they, and the cast’s resident Iowa graduate’s possible ties to the CIA.

This week: Jobless is a mindset.

During Italy’s storied “Years of Lead,” a period of ongoing social unrest and violent conflict between the classes, the leaders of the neo-Marxist Autonomia movement identified the “refusal of work” as a foundational principle of the society they hoped to build. In the Autonomist vision, “refusal” meant more than just going on strike: it meant rejecting the entire wage labor system. According to theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “job precariousness [was] a form of autonomy from steady, regular work, lasting an entire life.” Is a similar refusal, or at least a commitment to precariousness, necessary to a writer’s way of life? This week, the cast of GROUP CHAT ponders some very similar questions.

The chat is up to its usual tricks—lambasting Substack trends and the legacy authors who participate in them—when a write-in from a viewer provokes some strange behavior from James:

This new reticence on the part of one of the cast’s most vocal members persists into the week’s main event, an impromptu GROUP CHAT roundtable on the evergreen “salary discourse”:

Finally, James’ castmates have had enough, and they work together to surveil him around the clock until he reveals the real reason for his camera shyness: an irl confrontation and subsequent falling out with his closest—spiritually and geographically—compatriot in the chat:

Who is expecting James to join a call on Friday? What exactly happened between James and Nick to make James go dark so abruptly? How much money does Stephen really make from GROUP CHAT? All will be revealed next week on the premiere online text-based reality TV series.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The cast receives the results of the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey, the GROUP CHAT Stalker returns, and one beloved cast member takes his final bow.

This week: Who does James work for?

In 1951, George de Mohrenschildt, a recently naturalized US citizen born and raised in Russian Belarus, settled with his third wife in Dallas, Texas to pursue a career as a geologist in the petroleum industry. Over the next decade, de Mohrenschildt established himself as a fixture of both the local oil industry and the local Russian-American community. In 1962, a colleague introduced him to Marina Oswald, another recent Russian immigrant to the area, and her husband, Lee. At the end of his life, de Mohrenschildt would reach out to his friend George H. W. Bush to explain that the CIA had engaged him to monitor Lee, then deceased and immortalized in American mythology as the man who assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

How often are the people we meet and befriend secretly working on behalf of the United States government? This week, the members of the GROUP CHAT cast ask themselves this very question.

The beginning of the week finds James frustrated about a recent post by emerging writer :

Later, Ross and Audrey address his comments on last week’s episode, in which he revealed his behind-the-scenes attempts to orchestrate a romance between them:

As the week progresses, some suspicions about James’ ministrations, and the motives behind them, begin to arise:

Finally, an anonymous respondent to the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey provides some shocking revelations about James’ time at Iowa, and raises some unsettling questions:

Is there more to James’ relationship with the family behind the Merril Lynch financial empire? Is UFO research secretly funding students of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Will Ross and Audrey ever go on a real date? Only the coming episodes of GROUP CHAT will yield these privileged secrets, so tune in next week to hear them first!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: New bombshell audrey snow matzke enters the chat, characters struggle with the limits of their power, and the castmates try to identify the GROUP CHAT Stalker.

This week: Only boring people get bored.

A popularly cited koan attributed to the Seventeenth-Century Zen master Shidō Bunan teaches: “While living, be a dead man, be thoroughly dead—whatever you do, then, will always be good.” Does the same rule apply to a group chat? Can participants in a group chat, even one visible to the public, aspire to achieve the spiritual void state of the dead man, such that whatever they do becomes, simply in and of itself, good? This week, the members of the GROUP CHAT cast will have several occasions to grapple with the implications of these teachings.

Week seven has barely begun when James decides he is bored, and takes to the chat to try to ease his suffering:

Luckily for James, he does not have to wait long for what quickly becomes the main attraction in the chat for the week, the results of the GROUP CHAT Viewer Survey, many of which may or may not have come from current or former members of the cast:

Some viewers, though, can’t be bothered to voice their opinions via the proper channels. In the case of the GROUP CHAT Stalker, anonymity is apparently not enough:

Of course, while the truth may deliver us from boredom, it also inevitably takes its own toll. After lingering on the periphery of the chat for some time, Ryan can’t help but take the viewers’ unfiltered reactions to his relatively taciturn persona to heart:

Does Ryan’s departure somehow foreshadow another former member’s return? Does this week’s episode meet the GROUP CHAT stalker’s definition of “audacious”? Does James have any idea what the word “mog” actually means? As always, the answers to your questions may be only a week away, so do not miss the next episode of GROUP CHAT!

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: Rachel Cusk and Natalie Portman, more on transgressive literature, and bookshelves versus edibles as the truest representation of the self.

This week: The pill of a greater god.

In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous identify the ability to “believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” as one of the vital responsibilities of recovery from alcoholism. What unique challenges does such a responsibility pose to that most mercurial of personalities, the writer? Is it possible for people who make it their purpose in life to expose and test the realities of the human condition to recognize that they themselves are subject to its vicissitudes? This week the cast of GROUP CHAT is forced to take up these questions in real time.

Last week, several members of the GROUP CHAT cast underwent a process of self-reflection that led them to reckon with their identities as television personalities, as writers, and as people. This week, the arrival of a new castmate prompts them to project that interrogation outward:

Having only just arrived, Audrey is still secure enough in her own identity to submit to questioning without losing her composure and resorting to aggression. For others in the chat, however, the burden of performance seems to have triggered acute crisis. Writers, by nature, prefer to control narratives. What happens to writers when they become another writer’s characters? Can writers, like recovering alcoholics, successfully relinquish control to another, higher power? For some, the pill of a greater god may prove too big to swallow:

Of course, even the author of a text must sometimes answer to critics. Now that Ross is back in New York, he’s free to enjoy the benefits of literary community like attending readings and soliciting gossip. However, he’s also accessible, if not vulnerable, to the designs of the robust GROUP CHAT readership. When he wakes up after a night out to find a mysterious parcel on his doorstep, he enlists the chat to help him puzzle out the identity of an even lesser-known quantity in the GROUP CHAT calculus, the “GROUP CHAT Stalker”:

Is the GROUP CHAT Stalker calling from inside the house? Will Audrey maintain her equanimity? Exactly how and when did Nick’s “milquetoast insolent thing” first emerge? Tune in next week for another episode of GROUP CHAT to see what answers—or further questions—await.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The ghost of Isabel(le) haunts the chat, Ross is back stateside with even fewer clues, and Nick asks the biggest question in publishing: what about men?

This week: Can the self occupy virtual space?

In Jungian psychology, the “self” is defined as “a transpersonal power that transcends the ego.” Jung’s writing on the self is foundational to our understanding of the concept, but contemporary culture presents many questions Jung failed to anticipate. Can the self occupy virtual space? Is appearing onscreen an opportunity for liberation from the ego, or is it a further indulgence of the ego that ultimately forecloses one’s ability to access the self? Is it possible to transcend one’s ego on a reality TV show? Luckily, the cast of GROUP CHAT is here to take up Jung’s work for the rapidly changing present.

After establishing himself early in the series as the chat’s token Canadian, Spencer kicks off this week determined to show off another dimension of his character:

Spencer’s ontological crisis proves contagious when he challenges his castmates to define his character based on his bookshelf, and others quickly follow suit:

The true avatar of Jasmine’s identity, however, is not her bookshelf, but her preferred brand of edibles:

Meanwhile, Ross may be a retired stoner, but thanks to the contact he made in Japan, he’s not retired from the workforce just yet:

Back in the chat, the question of the self and its mediation finds its perfect focus in the recent controversy over Rachel Cusk’s forthcoming collaboration with Natalie Portman:

In fact, Cusk is not the only Rachel the cast suspects of presenting an inauthentic self:

What is James talking about? Is there really more to Spencer than being Canadian? What ever happened to Ryan? If asking these questions leads you to wonder who you really are, tune in next week for another chance to live your truth!

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Next week on GROUP CHAT:

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

Previously on GROUP CHAT: Ross lands in Japan, a new bombshell enters the chat, and one of its most dynamic participants makes her exit.

This week: Winning but at what cost?

In many cultures, ghosts appear in spirituality and folklore as reminders of past failures or misdeeds. A house is haunted by the specter of someone its residents somehow wronged, a plot of land or nation state by the population from whom it was stolen. Do ghosts haunt digital spaces as well? This week, with the loss of one of their own fresh in their minds, the remaining members of the GROUP CHAT cast find out, and the answer tests them all in more ways than one.

In the wake of Isabel’s sudden departure, the chat is a house divided, unsure whether to pause and reflect or cut its loss and never look back:

Some take it as a reminder of their own precarity, an opportunity to consolidate power and single out common enemies:

Before long, though, Isabel’s exit turns out not to have been as final as it may have seemed. When Van calls James out for his bewildered comment on her recent Substack post about the two French actresses who dominate her writing practice—Isabelle Adjani and Isabelle Huppert—the ensuing debate makes clear that the spirit of Isabel(le) isn’t finished with the chat just yet:

In fact, ghosts of the past seem to be haunting several members of the cast. James apparently has not gotten over his “perfect raw score” on the verbal SAT:

Meanwhile, Nick is still struggling with his college years. Toward the end of a long and spirited debate about the role of the literary agent in the publishing ecosystem, during which he cites the recent findings that over 70% of employees at traditional publishing companies are white women, Nick reveals that his entire approach to publishing his own work emerged as a way to cope with his failure to impress the women at his liberal arts school:

In Japan, however, Ross has been fighting more than just metaphorical demons:

Will Ross’s mystery contact show up? Will Isabel’s spirit ever leave the chat for good? Will the rest of the cast be able to put their own demons to rest? If these questions haunt you over the coming week, make sure you tune back in for the next episode of GROUP CHAT.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: The poll function as passive-aggressive coup, Honor Levy starts a war, and Ross teases a mysterious side quest in Japan.

This week: Is a group chat a thermodynamic system?

In the posthumously published notes to his 1824 treatise Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, French physicist Sadi Carnot observes, “Wherever there is destruction of heat, there is production of motive power.” This notion has since been refined into what we now call the first law of thermodynamics. Heat can move in any direction, in or out of any one position in space, but it never disappears completely.

Is a group chat a thermodynamic system? For the physicists of digital space who take up this question in the future, this week’s episode of GROUP CHAT will serve as a foundational case study.

The experiment begins in the first minutes of week three, when most of the cast is either asleep or otherwise occupied in the real world, but one member is awake and looking for answers:

What is James asking, exactly? What does he mean by “cake slicer person”? And is there really one “in the room”? The next morning, all is revealed. has officially joined the cast of GROUP CHAT, and she’s brought along a tiramisu from Philadelphia’s own Termini Brothers bakery, as well as a few riffs on a classic Patricia Lockwood tweet:

Before long, however, the pleasantries are over, and the tough questions are back on the table:

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Ross has officially landed in Japan, and the mystery surrounding the offer that brought him there has only deepened:

Of course, the other members of the chat don’t have to fly to Japan to find that questions tend to beget further questions, whether or not they come with satisfying answers:

So far, Ross is managing to keep his head in a strange environment that continually fails or refuses to answer his questions:

Others, however, can only hold back for so long before they start demanding answers. When a casual prompt about recent works of transgressive literature leads to some unfiltered critique of the “trauma plot,” static builds to a critical point:

Mere days after the arrival of a new member elevates the temperature of the chat to an all-time high, one of its most dynamic participants makes an exit that leaves the rest of the cast depleted of energy. Will these fluctuations resolve and restore the chat to a state of equilibrium? Will Ross ever meet “the other American”? Will the cast share even worse opinions as the season progresses? Join us again next week to find out.

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

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Previously on GROUP CHAT: Tone-setting icebreakers, the first potential rivalry of the season, and an inaugural hot-take-off.

This week: What is the point of being alive?

What is the point of a group chat? Is it to workshop your writing? Is it to solicit advice or support from friends? Or is it to performatively bait your peers into aggressive low-stakes conflict for the entertainment of whatever audience may or may not be watching? In this week’s episode, the cast of GROUP CHAT takes up this very question, and the answers are more far-flung and far-fetched than you might think.

In its second week, the chat is no longer a territory in search of a map. The cast members have poked around the interior and sized each other up. Now they’re ready to let their individual strategies guide their way.

A couple of the cast members prefer to hang back, cultivating aloof mystique. Jasmine makes a weekly cameo appearance to share excerpts from her in-progress erotica:

Ryan is also a stealth player, dropping off for days at a time only to casually resurface at a critical juncture:

Other members, though, are determined to engage at a much higher level:

Different approaches are borne of different motivations, and sometimes of different origins. Three members of the cast (Isabel, James, and Nick) are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and three (Jasmine, Ross, and Van) in the New York Metropolitan Area, which by the beginning of week two has already bred contempt:

Friction intensifies when one of the West Coasters shouts out antediluvian lower Manhattan lightning rod (and fellow Bennington College alumnus of GROUP CHAT producer Stephen Piccarella) Honor Levy:

The lightning rod of the chat, however, appears to be Isabel, whose unwavering commitment to self-promotion leads first to speculation about her motives as a cast member and then to a poll that may or may not be a passive aggressive attempt at a coup:

As polarizing as her behavior may be, though, Isabel is not the only member of the cast with an eye toward promotion. In an attempt at a different kind of coup, James nearly spends $100 on an advertising contract with Ross Barkan, who, despite being identified in Episode One as a likely GROUP CHAT spy, refuses to engage:

Fortunately Barkan is not the only Ross in the GROUP CHAT universe. In fact, it’s Ross Devlin’s poll that really sparks the chat’s curiosity:

Will Ross follow a mysterious rich looking person to Japan? Is Isabel here for the right reasons? What is the point of being alive? If you find yourself asking any of these questions as the summer heats up, you know where to find the answers. In the meantime—back to the CHAT!

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Next week on GROUP CHAT:

GROUP CHAT is a production of Grey Fiction Media. All episodes are written, directed, edited, and produced by Stephen Piccarella. All original music by Sebastian Castillo.

Greetings, Grey Fiction readers! You’ve heard the buzz, you’ve met the cast, and now the wait is over: welcome to the first episode of GROUP CHAT, the premiere online text-based reality TV series!

What happens when eight writers from across the world, none of whom have met before, join together in one digital space to monitor and dissect the entire literary Internet—and they do it all in public? Over the course of this season, GROUP CHAT will answer this question and many more.

As of this writing, the cast has been chatting for exactly one week. In these early days, personalities and relationships are still emerging, but their initial expressions will set the tone for the weeks to come. Let’s take a look at what’s been going on in the CHAT at this exciting and formative time.

First, some classic icebreakers help the cast counteract the caginess of the first few days:

Although a couple of the guys are a little confused about what Jasmine does for a living:

Momentum picks up during some back-and-forth about book design and the best way to mic a reading:

The real conversation starter, however, is the recent Vulture profile of Joyce Carol Oates, with whom Van is apparently acquainted:

Predictably, pretty much everyone has something to say about Joyce: