Description
Fiction. Philosophy. SITU is a hesitant unfolding of demise, a text that occupies the interstices between diegetic, philosophical, and poetic discursive timbres. From this tension—which finds form in an indeterminate subject's relationship with a bench, his anguished site of rest and motion—the subsequent flux at the center of the narrative voice facilitates a kind of epistemology of volition that both proves and parodies the necessity of the philosophical system for a narrator whose instability gives such exploration its emergent poetic urgency. In the wildly despairing and circular machinations that ensue, this attempt at "thinking thinking" moves in and out of the body of the thinker it observes, displaying a devastating picture of the paradoxes at the basis of all representation, whether willful or inadvertent, an aesthetic act or a causal order inferred through polemic and reasoned pursuit. SITU is Seidenberg's signature style raised to the next level, an accomplishment that calls to mind the literary contributions of Blanchot, Bernhard, and pre-impasse Beckett.
Author Bio
Writer and artist Steven Seidenberg is the author of PLAIN SIGHT (Roof Books, 2020), SITU (Black Sun Lit, 2018), ITCH (RAW ArT Press, 2014), and numerous chapbooks of poetry and aphorism. His collections of photographs include Pipevalve: Berlin, and Imaging Failure: Abandoned Lives of the Italian South. He has exhibited his visual work in Japan, Italy, Germany, Mexico, and the United States. From 2012-2017 he co-edited the poetry journal pallaksch.pallaksch. Based in San Francisco, Seidenberg travels broadly to give talks and readings, both focused on his own work as writer and photographer, and in collaboration with anthropologists, philosophers, and artists from around the world.
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA