Matt Salesses Saved from Clowning by Sean Lovelace
Matt Salesses at His Desk
He is neither silent with nor excessively obstreperous to associates. Or he is both silent and excessively obstreperous. He is pretty insecure, especially about Korea. His friends—Americans mostly—don’t even really get Korea, North or South. This has caused problems. One time, years ago on a birthday, a girlfriend, a book artist (before his marriage, he dated exclusively book or sandwich artists) brought him a fake, printed notice about his birth. It was handmade. She thought it an act of clevernality (originality and cleverness) and care:
From a bulletin from the Korean Central News Agency, North Korea’s state-run news service.
Mysterious natural phenomena are being witnessed in different parts of Korea as provincial party conferences adopt resolutions celebrating the birth of Matt Salesses. White flowers came into bloom on a pear tree, attracting butterflies and bees at a factory in Pyongyang on September 27. On their way to work, factory workers witnessed this phenomenon and said nature welcomes the festive event. More than 100 blossoms opened on an apricot tree near a film-processing plant in the city on that same day. About 400 blossoms came into bloom on a twenty-year-old wild pear tree in a park in front of the Kaesong Municipal Party Committee building in the same period. On the morning of September 22, fishermen of the fishery station in Rajin-Sonbong city caught a 10-centimeter white sea cucumber while fishing on the waters off Chongjin. They said the rare white sea cucumber has come to hail the auspicious event of the birth of Matt Salesses. Seeing the mysterious natural phenomena, Koreans say Matt Salesses is indeed the greatest of great men produced by heaven and that flowers come into bloom to mark the great event.
He tossed the notice to the dusty floor and said, “I’m from South Korea, not North.”
“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know there was two Koreas.”
“Indeed there are. Two countries at war. They really couldn’t be more different than one another. One is basically a Stalinist dictatorship and one has a McDonald’s. Sometimes someone slyly sinks a submarine.”
The girl shrugged. “So it’s like North and South Carolina.”
“No.” Matt Salesses looked out the window. The fatter of his cats was eating a garden hose. It then vomited up hose-fragments, ate then once again. A repatriation of sorts.
“Whatever,” the girl said. “I brought some Ritalin, too. You want to do some rails of Ritalin, fuck twice, and then go to the zoo? They got some new capybaras.”
“I’m uncertain.”
The girl said, “I have pretty amazing tits. You can cum on them if you want.” She scrunched her shirt up. She had a blue bra. Her breasts were pretty amazing.
Matt Salesses said, “Australia, a country and a continent and an island. Do you ever wonder what the world will look like when all the water leaves us?”
The girl left us. She went to the zoo.
Described by Secretaries
A: “Quite frankly I think he remembers a lot of things. And the things he remembers are those which are inessential. I even think he might remember deliberately, to leave his mind cluttered. He has the ability to clutter his mind with unimportant details. It’s like an aquarium of his own devising though not that much like an aquarium, maybe more like the interior of an aluminum pinecone, etc.” B: “Once when I was sick with an epidemic, I hadn’t heard from him, and I thought he had forgotten me. I felt like an island. You know usually your boss will send flowers or something like that. I was in the hospital, and I was mighty blue, like the cheese. I was in a room with another girl, and her boss hadn’t sent her anything either. Then suddenly the door opened and there was Matt Salesses with the biggest bunch of chapbooks I’d ever seen in my life. And the other girl’s boss was with him, and he had chapbooks too! They were standing there with stacks of all those chapbooks, smiling. “
Behind the Bar
At an AWP party hosted by some entity owned by the Dzanc empire, Matt Salesses wanders behind the bar to pour a glass of white wine and Sprite Zero for his wife. He loves his wife. His hand is on the bottle of Sprite Zero, his glass is waiting. The bartender, a small man in a tight, blue, furry, tight, furry, blue sweater with ironic buttons (I’M A GENIUS and DOWN WITH BUTTONS!!), politely asks Matt Salesses to return to the other side, the guests’ side, of the bar.
“You let one behind here, they all be behind here,” the bartender says.
“We will take what we can get,” Matt Salesses mumbles.
“What?”
“Prague,” mumbles Matt Salesses.
“What?” the bartender says. “You’re a writer, right? All you are writers. You people know everything, right? In the beginning was the word and you people just never stopped. Words, words, words. Turds.”
“I simply said…”
“OK, fine, Mr. Apparent-Dialogue-Through-Which-A-Person-Develops-An-Imagined-Sense-Of-Participation, I’ll ask you a trivia question. You get the question and you can pour your own wine. Hell, you can pour everyone’s wine and dice up lime or dream shards and make small talk with drunken poets and nasty HTML Giant comments on your smart phone and then clean up after and go home and build a big-ass salami sandwich out of drywall crumbs and regrets from your roaring 20’s blah blah blah blah. Here’s the question: Give me the exact definition of a cosmic wormhole. Go.”
Matt Salesses thought about the dark earth, about night crawlers and cat leashes and the abyss, then his mind leapt to outer space. His mind swirled, not so unlike a galaxy, though of course considerably smaller. “Well,” he said, “I think—”
“Wrong!” the bartender barked. “A cosmic wormhole is a theoretical space entity proposed by noted scientist Carl Sagan in his only work of fiction, Contact. Ostensibly, a wormhole could be used to travel back in time. Now wouldn’t you like to go back in time?”
“I really would not,” Matt Salesses said. He saw his small daughter across the room shoving a handful of thin mints down her gaping maw. He loved his daughter. She had a laugh that could split beech wood stacked high on a semi trapped in early morning traffic, a little fog rolling off the lake, chirp, chirp.
Matt Salesses Reading the Emails
His reactions are impossible to catalogue. Often he will find an email that amuses him endlessly, some anecdote involving, say, a Nigerian widow holding the banking account numbers to millions of unclaimed dollars. Other manifestations please him less: Rose Metal Press asking for money again or someone on Fictionaut saying “well done!” or a request by an 18 year old to read/review a book of poetry about zombies. These types of things depress him for weeks. One day he receives this email, from his biological mother who abandoned him at birth:
Dude, wassup? Long time, LOL. Just wanted to say I am not sorry. Children suck the three most important, irreplaceable things from a human being, their Time and Soul and Money. Remember that. Since I left you (and actually two or three other children along the way!) my life has been a rewarding journey of utter fulfillment. I hope you are doing OK, too. Someone told me you had a chapstick book? Like a book about chapstick? Mark, I have to go to the opera. Bye.
Attitude Toward His Work
“My work is meaningless to me. I’ve really only wanted two things in my life and I doubt either will happen. First, I want someone to write a story about me. Second, I want a bridge named after me, preferably a bridge in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I went to school. But I know this will never happen. No story. No bridge. A few nights ago I had this dream where the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina was going to take the Bunker Hill Covered Bridge and change its name to the Matt Salesses Bridge. But then all these townspeople gathered and marched to the mayor’s house and demanded he stand there in his bathrobe on his front lawn and answer ‘a few fucking questions, sir.’ And they said things like ‘Do you really feel Matt Salesses earned a bridge? How long did he actually live in Charlotte? How many nights did he sleep under the bridge? One night, two? He didn’t really care for Charlotte, so it’s a slap in the face to the people who do like Charlotte, like, you, the mayor, or us, the residents. Matt Salesses didn’t really think Charlotte was that wonderful, apparently. I’ve read everything he has written and the Charlotte, North Carolina references are scant, at best. And if some writer jumps off that bridge or fires a gun on that bridge and that bullet hits my house, who do you think I am going to come sue? The city of Charlotte.’ And it went that way for the whole rest of my dream. I awoke in a foul or fetid sweat. And I know it will never happen. The bridge thing, I mean.”
Sleeping On the Stones of Unknown Towns (Rimbaud)
Matt Salesses is walking, with that familiar slight shudder, pop, skip, dip of the shoulders, through the streets of a small city in South Korea. The shop signs are in a language which alters when inspected closely, SPICY CHICKEN BULDAK becoming THAT AWKWARD TIME KIDS DID DONUTS IN MY YARD for example, and the citizens mutter to themselves with dark virtuosity a mixture of languages. Matt Salesses is very uninterested, looks away from everything, the shops, the goods displayed, the clothing of the people, the tempo of street life, the citizens themselves. He enters a brothel/library.
“In the West, wisdom is mostly gained over Facebook. On Facebook, people tell you things.” The nervous eyes of the whores and librarians. The tall bald Madam, gold teeth apron, gold T-shirt, grinning through an opening in the wall. “Why is that Madam looking at me?”
Urban Transportation
“I don’t have much to say about urban transportation today so I apologize mostly I feel talking about the idea of an author appearing at a certain historical moment this epidemics of islands as in being lonely or I should say a lack of experience of relationship is America’s problem today where are the dinners with friends at your own house or even at all I’m not counting Applebee’s where are the bowling leagues or ‘just sitting and talking’ together more U.S. citizens multiple cultures live alone now than ever 25 percent even and I feel it could be the trancelike phenomenon created by our new absorbing media or gods bless Chris Newgent and the Vouched table or the individual illusion of autonomy not urban transportation fuck urban transportation I have to go now I thank you my teeth hurt.”
Matt Salesses Penetrated with Sadness
He hears his adopted sister playing a video she took with her iPhone then emailed to herself, edited, and repatriated on YouTube, in another part of the coffee shop. She has added music to the video, Prince’s Purple Rain. The music is wretchedly sad. “Purple rain, purple rain,” Matt Salesses whispers into the curling, sinewy, breathless, gossamer tendrils of his double skinny mocha (the whipped cream in the cup like a pregnant moon). He decides to create a hand-dance, a special hand-dance routine for Purple Rain, by Prince. He swipes his four fingers of his right hand over the throat, while he holds the elbow a bit high and lowers the hand on the right folds of his clothing, so that it moves a bit back and forth as a pendulum of a clock. He does this 14 times, to memorize the moves, then finishes his coffee and gets his adopted sister. They need to go shopping for thin mints. Matt Salesses’s daughter has a mild addiction to thin mints. They shop for thin mints, they shop hard, but thin mints have become almost anachronistic—it’s as if they are shopping for codpieces or privacy or whale oil—and they find no mints.
I’M SICK OF SHOPPING FOR THIN MINTS his adopted sister posts on Facebook.
Matt Salesses walks alongside her in a deep and wide rainfall and posts on his Facebook: CAN’T WE JUST TRY MAYBE 8 MORE STORES? WE WILL TAKE WHAT WE CAN GET, OK?
His adopted sister does not “like” the post and replies FUCK. NO.
Matt Salesses is penetrated with sadness. And also rain, as I mentioned.
Karsh of Ottawa
“We sent a man to Karsh of Ottawa and told him that we admired his work very much. Especially, I don’t know, the Chinquee thing and, you know, the Blake Butler thing, and the big-ass Matt Bell thing, and all that. And we told him we wanted to set up a sitting for Matt Salesses, for his new Publishing Genius chapbook, sometime in March, if that would be convenient for him, and he said yes, that was okay, March was okay as long as we didn’t fuck with AWP, he had this blog and the blog followers and really needed to shoot AWP, and where did we want to have it shot, there or in Boston or where. Well, that was a problem because we didn’t know exactly what Matt Salesses schedule would be for June, could be a reading, could be a symposium or, hell, battling some deadly body rash, etc., it was up in the air, so we tentatively said Boston around the fifteenth. And he said, that was okay, he could do that. And he wanted to know how much time he could have, and we said, well, how much time do you need? And he said he didn’t know, it varied from sitter to sitter. He said some people were pretty insecure and that made it difficult to get just the right shot. He said there was one shot in each sitting that was, you know, the key shot, the right one. He said he’d have to see, when the time came.”
Dress
He is neatly dressed in a manner that does not call attention to itself. The blue jeans are the color of blue jeans. The jacket is soberly cut and in gray colors. He must at all times present an aspect of neatness difficult to sustain because of frequent movements from place to place—not to mention his mind; the hops and jolt-curds—under conditions which are not always the most favorable. Thus he changes clothes frequently, especially white shirts. In the course of a day he changes his white shirt many times. (This is not so unlike Regis Philbin, a man who changes his shirt seven times per day.) There are always extra white shirts about, in boxes. “Which of you has the shirts?”
A Friend Comments on M’s Aloneness
“The thing you have to realize about M. is that essentially he’s absolutely alone in the world. He’s like that zone between the two Koreas, you know. A no man’s land. Maybe it comes from something in his childhood, I don’t know. But a lot of people who think they know him rather well don’t really know him any better than say a coffee mug knows the snowfall or Ralph Waldo Emerson knows tantric sex. He says something or does something that surprises you, and you realize that all along you really didn’t know him at all. I remember once we were at a reading in a small bar in Boston. M of course was the headliner. A group of ruffians and car mechanics came in and I got worried. Would ruffians and car mechanics want to hear lyrical writing? Would they listen to M’s book? And I said to him that I didn’t think these people wanted to hear a reading from a small press book, with the all sloshing frustration and beer within their bloodstreams and minds and bellies. He just looked at me. Then he said ‘Of course they want to hear a book. That’s what the words are for.”’
Matt Salesses on Crowds
“There are lost crowds and then crowds of poets who read other poets who write poems for poets, you know, that type of thing. Sometimes, while giving a reading in the hub of Boston, I can sense whether a particular crowd is one thing or the other. Sometimes the mood of the crowd is disguised, sometimes you only find out after two or three or, you know, four hours of reading what sort of crowd a particular crowd is. And you can’t speak to them in the same way. The variations have to be taken into account. Some crowds like Tang lyric poetry, while others enjoy modern adaptations of the Tang lyric poem. Other crowds you try a flash fiction and they’ll seize you by the throat! They will rip the urinals out the bathroom walls and throw them at you! Understand? They want something long and slow and sustained. You have to say something to them that is meaningful to them in that mood.”
Gallery-going
Matt Salesses enters a large gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Farther Building. His entourage includes his wife and tiny child. Tao Lin is at a microphone reading in a low, slow, bored, low, garbled, indifferent, low monotone voice. He keeps saying, “And then they ate whale.” Over and over, “And then they ate whale.” Matt Salesses Iooks at the immense crowd, all of them smiling and nodding, all raptly watching Tao Lin. “Well, at least we know he has a fishing pole.” Matt Salesses’s wife and tiny child dissolve in laughter. His wife repeats the remark to a woman who does her nails, laughing. Tao Lin, who has been standing for fifteen minutes while saying, “And then they ate whale,” didn’t know anything about “the fishing pole” comment or even hear the “fishing pole” comment or really even care.
Matt Salesses Puzzled by His Child
The child is crying. Matt Salesses puts up the fourth side of the crib. For a while, the crib was pushed up against the bed with the adjacent side open, so that his baby’s mattress and Matt Salesses’s mattress made one J-shaped sea. Matt Salesses could reach out and comfort his baby in her sleep, when she spit out her pacifier or shook with nightmares. Matt Salesses’s baby is a pacifier baby. The crib looks like a cage. Matt Salesses hates to be separated, but the baby keeps rolling around, widening a gap between the mattresses, as if teasing the abyss. Matt Salesses put up bumpers in the crib like at a bowling lane, because that is how the baby uses her head. She flings it around at imaginary pins. Concerning these bumpers, Matt Salesses writes, “We have heard not to use them. We have heard to use them. They say a lot of things, people, the internet.” The crying of the child continues.
A Dream
A Boston Red Sox game slugger kindly attends a bridge dedication ceremony. Overhead, a steady stream of simple machines which resemble literary magazines, glimmering trains, lifted brows, short shorts. The shiny paper instruments are on their way to complete the bombings of the houses of Laura van den Berg, Matt Bell, and Steve Himmer. A war novel, in the hills.
Matters (from an Administrative Assistant)
“We had this table set up at this book fair in Prague and we said Matt Salesses and Tyler Gobble would be there signing chapbooks so I mean we had two maybe three people in line and waiting. And we couldn’t find Matt Salesses or Tyler Gobble! Nobody knew where they were. We had looked everywhere around the book fair. They had just withdrawn, made themself unavailable. There was this one chapbook signing that was probably, possibly, could-be more pressing than all the rest put together. Really crucial. We were all standing around wondering what to do. We were getting pretty nervous because this thing was really…Then Aaron Burch walked in and disposed of the problem by giving everyone free bourbon. Free bourbon!”
Childhood of M as Recalled by a Former Teacher
“He was not a very alert boy, not very bright or good at his studies, not very thorough, not very conscientious. But that’s not unusual, that describes a good number of the boys who pass through here. It’s not unusual, that is, to find these qualities which are after all the qualities that we do not look for and do not encourage in them. What was unusual about Matt Salesses was his lack of compassion, something very rare for a boy of that age. I remember, though, that in Matt Salesses this particular attribute was very marked. A total lack of compassion. I would almost say that it was his strongest characteristic.”
Speaking to No One but Waiters, He—-
“The bowl of porridge, I think.”
“The donuts.”
“The fucking kimchi.”
“The eagle puree.”
“The PANK fritters.”
Matt Salesses Explains a Writing Technique
“The muse is basically a cat. This reluctance to obey-call it perversity if you will-is responsible for the common lack of appreciation of the cat. His disregard of us and our wishes is disagreeably unflattering. The trouble is that we human beings are so vain that we look upon the habits of any domestic animal (of course the cat is not truly domesticated) as being specially developed for our benefit. The dog or monkey that will learn mechanical tricks for the reward of a pat on the head or a piece of sugar is acclaimed for his skill. And this ability to understand and obey is applauded as a sign of intelligence. The cat, on the other hand, applies his skill and intelligence to his own purposes. There is truth in Bernard Shaw’s remark that footballers’ brains are in their feet. The cat reveals his braininess by incredibly skillful feats of jumping and balancing, but it is useless commanding him to perform. The rarity of performing cats is significant.”
Matt Salesses on His Own Role
“The core problem with the Good Man Project is an absolute lack of source material.”
As Entrepreneur
Chapmen traveled through England as early as the 1570s (Watt) selling books to whoever they could.
With Stephen King Fans
Matt Salesses, walking the streets of Maine, finds himself among young Stephen King fans. Stephen King fans line these streets and malls, narrow and curving, which are theirs, dedicated to them. They are everywhere, resting on the embankments, their glossy family photos, small, repatriated ear-buds, short hair (business in the front, business in the back). They sit on the sidewalks, back to back. They stand at that place where the sidewalk meets the walls of buildings and also below trees in that place where the tree trunk meets the ground below the tree trunk. The streets are filled with these Stephen King fans who say nothing, reveal only a limited interest. Street after street contains them, a great, great, great number, more displayed as one turns a corner, rank upon rank stretching into the infinite distance, drawn from the arcades, the gas stations, the Cracker Barrels, staring.
He Discusses the French Writer, Poulet
“Who the heck is Poulet? Organized competition? Haven’t you grown out of that yet? How do you make up for accidentally setting your fiancée ’s hair on fire? Do I look cute? How do we explain freedom to our children? I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a commercial made in which children sing about wishing to be you? Why haven’t they started yet? What did they have to gain? Do we believe that we can opt out of the normative models that drive what we buy, how we dress, how we act? Although, to set the record straight, I did win a couple of trophies. That makes it worth it, right, Dad? What are you eating?”
Matt Salesses Saved from Clowning
Matt Salesses in the water. His flat black hair, his white shirt, his writing pen are on the shore. He retains a large, red clown nose. His hands beat the surface of the water which flaps and floots about him. The toothpaste foam, the gossamer depths. I throw a line, the coils leaping out over the surface of the water. He has missed it. No, it appears that he has repatriated it. His right hand (typing finger) grasps the line that I have thrown him. I am on the bank, the rope wound round my waist, braced against a fuel efficient car. Matt Salesses now has both hands on the line. I trundle him out of the water. He stands now on the bank, gasping. I remove his clown nose. “Thank you.”
