When we began The Offending Adam earlier this year, one of our aims was to truly take advantage of the online medium. We didn’t want to produce yet another online journal that for all intents and purposes took its form from print: monthly or seasonal updates of what were static issues. We wanted to create an interactive experience between writer, reader, and editor and to draw a bridge between those often-disparate entities in this bizarre little process in which we take part. Thus far, however, for all our good intentions we have still been largely confined by text. With our continued progression in mind, I am proud to introduce Ashley David’s “An Elegy: Fine Things, Flip-side(s) & Transformation,” a compelling presentation on postmodern elegy that actively plays and pushes on the boundaries of creative and academic work, one which weaves elements of Roland Barthes, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, David’s own personal history, nursery rhymes, and others. David describes the work as a “performance of theory” and she accomplishes that. It is a piece that embodies all of the qualities we had in mind when beginning our journal.

"The thwarts, the stutters, the choice to not conclude—this isn’t the way I speak when I go to the bank. As Oppen writes, 'We change the speech because we are not explaining, agitating, convincing: we do not know what we already know before we wrote the poems.' And this is part of why I write: I want to know about things, to discover."

"A Natural History" is a compiled text based on journal entries from two different visits to northern Nevada's Black Rock Desert combined with margin notes from my copies of William Fox's The Void, The Grid and The Sign and Sessions Wheeler's Nevada's Black Rock Desert. At some point in my process of arranging, editing, and composing the text toward its finished form (whenever that may occur), the idea of arranging the piece for a three-part vocal performance came to me. I recruited two students of mine whose voices I liked, and we got together to try it out. The "live" performance of the piece worked okay, but sounded a little like church. In production, as I was working to combine various takes, I came to like the mechanical quality that the multi-vocal production brought to the piece. I decided to pursue that mechanical quality, which seemed a little futuristic, but not out of place with the expansive time scale I'd always imagined for "A Natural History." After a couple of long sessions of concentrated work on the audio, this version resulted. I like it, and hope you will.

"Just in terms of sheer shape and form, I very much felt the presence of a wheel as I was writing the book, a kind of churning machine. We’re hardwired to create narratives about what happens to us during the day so we can sleep at night. And then when we sleep, we create more narratives. It doesn’t seem to be something we can stop, it’s eternal."

This verbal and visual collaboration between Molly Bendall & John O'Brien claims a spatiality of meaning. Bendall's verse is "strewn now" about O'Brien's underlying expansive landscape sketches. By placing words over maps, the words must be seen in a spatial arrangement as each letter and word corresponds to the location it covers. We are left asking: What are the borders between the words and the visuals? We recognize the words as words, but that line between word and visual is blurred. Words can be a guide towards meaning in the same way that maps can be a guide toward a location. The word and map by themselves do not indicate meaning or location. Each is just varying gradations of gray and black on a white page. The reader or viewer takes these raw elements—marks on a page—and turns them into a space of meaning.

It may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard that pilots and surgeons have similar psychological profiles—they are aggressive, self-assured, contain a store of vast technical knowledge, intimidating. And whether or not it is factually true, the comparison does make sense. These are people we give great, blind trust to every day, unflinchingly. Our lives are literally in their hands, and very rarely do we even remember their names after the procedure or flight. It takes a certain amount of ego to name a piece “Real Poetry”, and Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich earn that cheekiness as they constantly dazzle us through this piece’s pure expanse and its technical dexterity. The reader is constantly confronted with all of these aforementioned traits—traits that can be extended to the essayist and poet. “Real Poetry” is a collaboration in aviation that doesn’t ask for your trust because it doesn’t need it. It knows exactly what it’s doing. Relax—you’re in good, capable hands.