#seth simons

“When I started reading and writing criticism, I thought it was because I wanted to understand art. The longer I do it, the more I see that I also want to understand why I like the art I like—why I am moved by what moves me. Right now I believe my tastes, if persnickety, are pretty simple. I crave work that feels as strange and familiar as a human being. I cannot tolerate the familiar without any strangeness, nor the strange without anything familiar. I think this is why I am drawn to standup, improv, and poetry, all forms that at their best feel like direct transpositions of the human psyche: weird, jagged, unpredictable, furious and hurt, funny and sad and awestruck, never exactly describable in retrospect, always on the precipice of collapse, a dream you’ve woken up into.”

Somewhere a ghost of me wanders the library of what I swore not to do.

I was stupid in love with her for a spell, a good spell, but it never would’ve worked you see, we were like two ships, or I was like two ships and she was like a human person with her own inscrutable cabinet of want. Still, how nice to be two ships. Sails unfurled, dolphins leaping, everyone in their white suits.