Real Secrets (Public Secrets 2)

The signature of this body of texts necessarily belongs to C.S., a known alias of S.P. I've signed as more names than most. I realized this after signing J.S.'s statement to the WISP and J.L.'s letter of recommendation to J.S. - all of a sudden a rush of forgotten signatures hit me, beyond the usual mix of names I've danced between and behind. Last night, M and J found out I was C.M. I talked about how much fun I have playing with these names, that there's a rush behind the mask. I remember another mask — I force myself to nix the urge to discuss it further, as to preserve the secret. The thing about the internet is that it's nearly impossible not to sign — there is always some point of signature, a URL, a handle, some surrounding context, some metadata. Like Trisha Donnelly riding into her opening on a horse, I wonder whether certain things remain possible: recently Z told me it was funny nobody put together the secret I nixed discussing above, that my signature is all over it. But once you change the name, things get blurred. M not realizing I was C.M. was one such example. J talked about changing his name on Twitter, and what that did to him inside. We talked about how Twitter wasn't the same, that there'd never be another time like 2021. There isn't even an urge to make a new account under a new name. These new sites serve the purpose that those containers would otherwise.

I've decided to embrace this signature, this C.S.. As I was reading Lahiri's essay on translating Gramsci's notebook and his letters, I began to think of these websites as a sort of letter. The idea of the postcard already echoes heavily throughout the VVS Lemonade site, and to find these sites almost entirely necessitates having received a link. And though I'm trapped in English for the time being, I think of my writing as a certain type of translation, a working between languages and forms, that of linear text, sound, and image. I rework the translation of Derrida's Responding To/Answering For: The Secret through highlight, screenshotting, extracting text, copy-and-pasting, refining, bolding, underlining, so as to reduce the text as much as possible into quotations to enter below. I wrestle with the density of the text. I still feel sluggish from the drinks last night. Time passes, and I continue to labor at this [reduc]/[transla]-tion:

The crowd is the place where the most public and the most secret condition each other, pass instantaneously from one into the other, and it is in virtue of this, though also as something belonging to a certain modern political space (modern and perhaps already outdated in the form Baudelaire was talking about it, the question remaining to decide what replaces the crowd in the metropolises of the West. I insist here on Western metropolises: there are no more crowds in Paris, London, or New York; there still are, perhaps, in Cairo or Mumbai), that we will be attentive to whatever might complicate or blur the equation or analogy according to which the public is opposed to the private, as the non-secret to the secret. The secret is perhaps not inevitably, necessarily, essentially the private, or the interior, or the domestic, or the subjective.

Is it still possible? This is what I've been wrestling with, the inevitability of this I and how it appears. I try to enter in a certain way, and I cannot make it so. It necessitates change. This I must change. I'm reminded of this constantly now. I go out, I go through the motions, and then I question those actions. Going through the motions is not having motion.

Nothing is secret anymore in a newspaper, but nothing is more saturated with secrets than a newspaper; the newspaper is made for telling secrets, and that is its condition, the condition for its sale and diffusion: secrets must be told, and the profession of the journalist, like that of the detective, is the hunt for secrets.

Naturally, language is changing. I repeat what I wrote elsewhere. But here it's different. The voice is different. The presentation is different. The reading is different. A signature is not a scribble, nor is it a name — it is something else, a tendency, a habit, a way of making marks that has little to do with the name, but is often relegated to that domain. I realized that this has nothing to do with P or S, but rather with the polyphony within, finding a way for the voices to dance with one another. Hopoutblick and Ybc Dul's "Too Many Names" comes to mind. McButtons & McNuggets. The Ooga Booga Joint. There is no Pessoa trunk here, no scraps of papers to piece together into a manuscript. I don't think it's possible.

He doesn't sign his drawings [dessins], for this singular man is an exhibition artist and a draftsman [dessinateur]. But what does it mean "to sign"? Does he not sign so that the author of the drawings, himself, can remain secret?

So I have different names for different things — I have to work to organize them, to maintain them, I have to build systems of the selves and how they relate to others, to the world. I just came back and I want to disappear again. This time I have to disappear within myself. I question why I'm doing the things I'm doing. I'm aware of my lack of discipline but also my compulsions, how they don't entirely map onto one another, how they interact with each other, not quite feedback loops, but they're in the same system, the system that is myself. The self as a system. When I was drinking with A and S they said that once I have a job I'll be going out to drink to take a load off after work but I don't think I can do that — I feel too bad about the lost time, which isn't to say that going out drinking is a waste of time, but that it is a type of writing, and it writes artifacts that I don't think I'll be as interested in. Time will become restricted, I'll have to manage it. Human Resource Management. What a term. The self as an enterprise. Selling Enterprise Software Solutions. Selling Self-Software as a Service. It's a matter of operation, of making sure that I'm operating.

The word "incognito" always qualifies a certain modality of the secret, namely, the secret of someone who circulates in broad day-light, who doesn't hide away in seclusion, in a secret place, but can allow himself to venture out into the world, to travel, to show himself without being identified... In general, it is the famous, the celebrity, the public personage par excellence, the media star or politician, who circulates incognito; it is necessary to be famous and highly public to merit the incognito; the ordinary citizen has no right to it; so it is necessary to be very well known to have a right to this incognito that therefore qualifies a certain quality of the manifest secret... that it is necessary to have or to be, as the dailies sometimes put it, "a signature," that is to say a name that counts, the name of someone whose words count. It is necessary to have or to be "a signature" to have a right or access to the incognito, so that we can say, "he or she is circulating, traveling, acting incognito."

Have there been a lack of events? When I told C about the Schreibliga he said he didn't think he could write more about himself. I agreed, I said that the writing this year would be different. He asked about a certain conservativism that I allude to in my writing, because he didn't see it, and then we went into my thoughts and feelings on the canon, about Art and Literature, and I talked too much. But he did ask. He asked if I wanted to play a game with him that would go on for a long time and I was hesitant because of the commitment. I couldn't make the Finnegans Wake reading group happen for that exact reason. This matter of tethering, of things feeling fixed.

We are dealing, then, with a secret that consists in hiding itself while publishing, while making public something of public notoriety but that one passes off publicly as private, etc.

Perhaps my task here is simpler than I thought — I dance around things in different ways. My task is to write Real Secrets. Which then becomes incredibly complicated. The questions of what is and isn't real, of what are secrets and what are non-secrets. On tumblr, someone blogs about H's book and how M is in it but she wouldn't call his parents after he died. Z told who that blog belongs to — she seems erratic and posts crazy stuff because it's the place where nobody seems to be looking. I wonder if I've sent the O piece to too many people (S, A, A2, L) and I'm sure it's been passed along further since then. I've been gossip trafficking — I remember the texts I sent T about the Rogoff piece and how gossip is seen at gendered at that time, but now there are so many male podcasts that are simply gossip. Jeff Teague is running it up off of trafficking NBA Gossip. He let it slip that Mike Bibby is taking steroids now. Most things will pass and then will be forgotten.

And it is the one who speaks in words who signs, or pretends to sign; it's the one who draws who says he doesn't want to sign, who prefers anonymity, unless, and we'll get to this in no time, this isn't just another feint and a more complicated diversion.

I got the H book from J. It isn't good. He told me that and then we talked about Bruce Wagner in the park which seems more interesting. I still haven't seen The Wild Palms but I've wanted to for years now. I haven't been watching things in general as of late. When I start working in Manhattan I'll probably start going more, the way L does, quietly. J got the book from a girl who works at McNally Jackson and trades him books for coffee. I was trying to explain the Brown milieu to him but it didn't seem to be clicking for him, in terms of why it was important. I went to Balthazar with A2 and was trying to explain Keith McNally but it didn't seem to be clicking for him, in terms of why it was important. I create these webs in my head without thinking about them, the information is nestled up there and it's easy to recall. S brought up the "boy room" IG video that D was in and I was able to give a short biography of his life. I'm not sure what D would be able to say about mine.

Voyeuristic curiosity, then, the art of the mask or the incognito, as the correlate of exhibitionistic exhibition [L’exposition exhibitionniste], needs the secret to feed its jouissance and we've noticed more than once that Baudelaire always speaks of jouissance.

Last night we talked about television shows — about Truman Capote and the Swans. In my head I thought that The Swans would be a good high school mascot. I think it was S who brought up high school mascots. There was a lot of talk about nothing, dancing on surfaces, ice skating. I wish you could look at a conversation from above, the way you can look at an ice skating rink after a dance, or a routine, or a sequence. It isn't my territory but it's beautiful. I asked a girl recently if she was into sports and she said ice skating, but I can't remember who this was. I thought about crushes this morning, and how long it's been since I've had one, and my relationship to desire in general.

To comment the density of this paragraph, surrounding a prince who everywhere delectates in his incognito, it would be necessary to engulf within it, as in a crowd, the totality of what constitutes the very subject of Western culture or philosophy. You have the whole thing in just a few lines: the finite and the infinite or immense (the word "immense" returns three times), the self and the non-self, the dwelling close to oneself outside oneself (Hegel's Absolute Knowledge and speculative dialectic), sex/gender, the discoverable and the undiscoverable (and you easily imagine how close the connection remains between the experience of discovering, of discovering the undiscoverable, and the secret: to keep secret, to keep oneself secret, is to make or make oneself undiscoverable: what does it mean to discover and to discover oneself?), the "remaining hidden from the world," and language, the question of language and of what, the paragraph says, "language can but awkwardly define."

When I was in LA N said I was crazy. He said he was crazy too. That some people would think that we're crazy. I brought this up with J2 but he didn't think we were crazy. I don't really think I'm crazy either. I think having all the names would seem crazy to some people but it's pretty normal to me, and it's normal to J2 too. Last night I was lying to people and telling them that I was from Queens. It didn't matter — I doubt I'll see them again.

He loves secrets, apparently, as he does anonymity, since he refuses to respond or answer for his name in what is called a signature. He wants to erase his own name.

My favorite lie is the one L told me at the after party for J3's show. That Infinite Jest was on Oprah Winfrey's Book Club and that women used to cut the book into pieces with a knife in order to read it more portably in public. If a lie is good enough it becomes real, in the sense that the existence of the lie becomes a fact. That it's my favorite lie is perhaps another lie. The question of veracity, then you get the Enlightenment and such, you trace things back, conceptual etymologies etc.

In other words his writing, the one through which he publicly declares his wish "to speak to the public today about a singular man," is a betrayal from one end to the other; it is the betrayal of a friend and a secret, but it is also a betrayal avowed, confessed, by means of which the author appears before us as before the law. This text is a confession and, as always, the confession of a secret, a secret fault; but here it is a confession that consists in committing the fault for which one confesses.

I talked about things with people today. I saw a lot of people. I met people. I didn't drink so I remember it well. The problem is that the novelty is gone and I'm not finding enough in the minutiae of the daily that I consider worthy of inscription, that probing these things through writing would lead to a place that's productive. Outside The River with L and J2 we talked about how drinking and going out is work, just as reading, and I talked with L more about what I've been up to and I talked to J3 about those types of things more. It's a struggle to talk through these things in a way because I feel like I keep saying that I'm doing stuff but that it's willfully obscure. Obscurity isn't the point so much as attention to mechanisms and how they function. I used the phrase "object tangibility" or something of the sort with J3 and she liked it — she talked about how conceptual practices don't work anymore and said that my work lies on the border between design and art, which I realized was true, I could probably design more saleable commercial objects and work from there.

It betrays the secret by saying that it should not do or should not have done so. When one doesn't want to betray a secret, it's better to keep one's mouth shut and not to say "there is a secret," or "I shouldn't tell you this, let's keep it secret, etc.": a familiar scene.

The challenge I'm facing is how to reconstruct the machine to do what I want. And what do I want it to do? I could build a machine that swallows me, that causes me to throw words all over these pages — it's quite easy to do so. But I also come back to describing this practice as a tool, rather than the final stage of the work. Of course the question of the final stage is a dubious one, the whole streaming era non-physical object intangible infinitly updateable situation, but there's still an importance to iterating through this into other things. I've strayed so far from secrets and signatures, knowing that with every word is another signature of sorts.

He wanted, curious author that he is, to seduce his reader and whet his curiosity, his unhealthy taste for the secret. A curiosity that in this case leads to unmasking an incognito and getting to know someone whose genius is none other than the genius of curiosity.

He felt ill, exhausted and his body felt heavy. He realize how many words were sitting around him, in front of him, unread. And that it would be impossible for him to have read all of them. But the signifiers, the references, those could be mapped. And he remembered the importance of prayer, the importance of health, the importance of the body.

And this curiosity, shared after all by Baudelaire, this taste for unveiling the secret, this too is M.G.'s secret, more precisely the key to his secret. At the last session, I drew your attention to the very obvious link between the figure of the key and that of the secret; here, curiosity becomes the key to M.G.'s secret.

This thing has become unwieldy already. I rework it in my mind to be similar to the 20 foot long piece of hanji paper that I have hung up — the thing is that I'm not working in a certain direction but have laid out strokes across it and am now working back in to fill in the different parts. At the end the work is the work and no one can see. These types of pieces about the work itself being made in the midst of the work are often trite, boring, etc. — I question the turn, but I wasn't sure where else to go. My mind leaps to the Rembrandt painting of the artist in his studio. Of course then it jumps to Rembrandt's signature, the forgeries, the fakes. Was I still going through the motions? Or did I move with intention?

In fact, if M.G., this singular man, doesn't sign, and doesn't want to sign, if he doesn't want his name divulged, doesn't seem to want to answer for his drawings, that's because he's head over heels in love (like Baudelaire) with his own signature, with the most authentic and original there is, the least imitable, the most difficult to counterfeit... I said he was a voyeur a little while ago, an exhibitionist and a narcissist. He is so in love with loving himself and his own originality that in truth he devotes a true cult to his signature. He does nothing but protect it. And so, what matters to him is the signature that does not consist in affixing the seal of his initials or the inscription of his literal patronym, in the form of letters, to the edge of a drawing, but rather the signature indistinguishable from the inimitable line of his own drawings [la signature confondue ave le trait inimitable de ses propres dessins]...

I talked about this question of writing/non-writing with L outside — he recommended Bartleby and Co. by Enrique Vila-Matas to me. The PDF is downloaded and I await its arrival somewhere below, after the Labatut.

It is priceless because it isn't even money. If that's how things actually stand, then the most secret is no longer secret at all. And in describing his drawings, Baudelaire no longer unveils a secret. He perhaps describes the secret of his works, as art, but this secret is not a secret name, a representable secret, a secret that one keeps in one's possession.

It is different to write a single sentence here than it is to write a single sentence elsewhere.

Baudelaire is exculpated; he exculpates himself at the moment of his greatest betrayal. One can no longer discern between the cerne [mark] of the secret and the cerne [mark] of the non-secret, namely the line of the drawing publicly exhibited, exposed to full view [là savoir le trait du dessin publiquement exposé, voire exhibé].

I compared it to a brushstroke with somebody who was a painter, a proper painter, not a mediated painter so to speak, and it turned into a conundrum of language.

The only secret that remains is the one of the encounter, the randomness of the encounter in which two signatures cross each other, what Celan calls, in "The Meridian," Geheim-nis der Begegnung, the secret of the encounter, in which consists the poem. At this point one can no longer distinguish the secret from the non-secret, the private from the public, the natural or originary from the institutional, non-literature from literature, truth from fiction, the non-signature from the signature, etc

— C.S.

At the river E was screaming at J — something to do with the improper use of fire, a sort of Promethean quandary. The rules were firmly delineated when he yelled "I work here". This place was far from nature, with its CDJ waves and dizzying circulation of heated sand from the banks. I explained what was happening to J2 and A and M and B. All they heard was the yelling. J seemed unbothered the next day, I texted him that it wasn't like FOOD. And it wasn't the Basque Coast either — there was only a society that wishes it was high, a massive body of people trying to be People. On the phone with N: I question where I want to be, I question how I have been, I question my commitment to intention. Now: I remember my I Ching.

I remember silence as a form of speech.

— C.S.

She sells seashells by the seashore.

She sells

She sells sea — she'll sell more.

— C.S.

and I wonder if I have annulled the secret by speaking of the secret. On the train yesterday I read Balzac. I took a number of trains. I took the R, then I took the 2, then I took the 3, then I took the F, then I took the G. Up down up down up. There is a monotony and I keep drinking. I'm still searching for self-discipline. Silence as a service. I finished Thomas the Obscure and thought about what was said, how long it's been since I've been to the ocean, how it's been longer since I've been in the ocean.

The lack of the lack, R said that last night, making a Lacan joke. I'd been texting Z and A the past couple days about (P/S)aaS and cybernetics. When I got to Z and C's last night, Z and G were watching a youtube video on Cantor and Infinity — I talked about the maniac and von Neumann, I repeated things, I was spitting alcohol. In the morning I remarked to C about how I couldn't be a functional alcoholic, it takes me too long to recover the next day. Tonight I can't get too drunk, I have to work tomorrow, I have to wake up for work tomorrow. I think of my age and of discipline and of what I am trying to mold myself into. I think about the things I keep saying I will do that I have yet to do. I think of writing the most perfect secret.

I think of writing the most perfect secret.

Then he resolved to devote all his efforts, from tomorrow onwards, to finding out the cause of and the interests involved in this mysterious affair. It was a novel he might read: better still, a drama to unfold, one in which he would have a part to play.

In the case that there was not a great conspiracy, he realized that he had to invent one. Luckily, there was a whole tangled web of lies truths and associations to get lost in. There was something that could be formed from floating speech. He began to map it out — the constitution of an Event.

— C.S.

If it had to be, it had to be the end. He needed there to be some great scheme, some purpose to the universe. It was the task of tasks, the burden of burdens. He was worldweary. The snake was eating itself, before it was present.

— C.S.

Outside on the avenue they assembled, huddled in masses far enough from the harsh glow of the cul-de-sacs. C was yelling at a Chinese man who was smoking a cigarette and trying to drag a hulking mass of metal into the light. Was it ordained as such? He had that look in his eye, C did, the one of cocaine mania, the blue shifting into a gaze of ice. There was nothing to see, there were three men wandering about like blind mice. There were beers. Everyone was playing pretend. Pantomiming fake language interactions reflections condemnations. It was the question of mediocrity — no one asked it, but it voiced itself from the sewer and snaked around the ankles of everyone walking past, grabbing, tugging, pulling, flipping people over. The ground was stable but the environs were not.

There are certain things that used to mean so much to me. Then I had to become my own God. The world changed, as did the stars. The new constellations hang in a state of flux, having already been written while also waiting to be inscribed once more.

— C.S.

This question of purpose tugs at me once again — not in the sense of grand overarching purpose, but of purpose in the actions of the every day, of not falling back on this sense of going through the motions. At the end of the night I wanted to disappear again.

“When I think about the internet (which is impossible), I feel similar to when I have a crush. I feel crushed.”

I feel crushed. I feel out of place and out of time. Where I'm supposed to be, where I will Be, until the World catches up.

— C.S.

At work I have thoughts about writing, ideas I would like to expand through the act of writing, but I find myself unable to do so. The thoughts pass, they go unwritten, and I have to learn how to relish in their unwrittenness.

On the hike with C and A we got to the top of the mountain at the perfect time to be enveloped in the mist. An hour later, on the way down, the sun broke through the clouds. C wanted to see the other mountains from the top, to see other places that he'd summitted from a different point of view. He said he'd be going back with K in the next week or so. We had the conversation about stepping foot in the same river and playing the same video game — the self always changes. I planned to see Duelle last night but I had too many things to do after work so I went home instead. This morning I read L's tumblr post about it and felt a twinge of envy. I have to work during the only other screening. It would've been my third time watching it, and my first in the theater.

— C.S.

"Party favors" strikes me — an interesting etymological point to probe, along with a word that's twisted in meaning from a gift bag of assorted plastics and candies in childhood to poppers and nose drugs — but it's this idea of calling it a "favor" that's compelling. The quick internet search provides no fruitful results regarding origins. The phrase appeared in the 1905 OED without an explanation of its origins. There's a throughline from "favor" to "gift" — you can do the Derrida-dance at that point and suggest an idea that a gift cannot be repaid but a favor can. And there's the matter of the compounded phrase becoming a noun, one that perhaps borders on the idiomatic, while being composed of two words which are simultaneously nouns and verbs. One could also say that the party favors an individual; one could party and one could also favor. Language as a combinatorial game. I finished the Labatut at least a week ago — the conclusion of AlphaGo, Lee Sedol, AlphaZero, and the computational world we've already entered and will only become deeper submerged in, and the way in which machines can play this combinatorial game in ways that we cannot. I think of playing chess or go and remember what Caillois wrote about agreeing to the rules of a game, how it's disagreeable if one were to flip the board up in anger or in losing, that it violates the mutually agreed upon rules, but perhaps this is the major point of advantage we have against the computational system — that we are human and can break rules.

The party in question was at A's — I got the invition via email, to an identity which isn't C.S., but of course these delineations are blurred, and some things are only relatively secret. The night before last I was having dinner with N and Z and we talked about E's mystique — I said that I think it's impossible for anyone to have mystique at this point in time — secrets get out, people talk and gossip, an immaterial ledger forms that can be accessed, despite how one chooses to present themselves. At the party I exchanged secrets with A, and it was the type of thing where it was clear that my invitation was somewhat strategic in regards to future plans which for the time being must remain furtive and secret. It's a beautiful thing to attempt to do, to write a secret with other people. I'd like to think I'm staying true to that here.

On the banks of the river I ran into L2 — this was weeks ago now, and he recommended Enrique Vila-Matas to me. I burned through Bartleby & Co. with a certain fervor that I haven't felt over a novel in a long long time, that I now feel as I scroll down my converted pdf of Dublinesque. I look at how his website is constructed, the certain geometry to it — at the party I talked about him with A2, who was the only person I've talked to who had heard of him. I talked to K about Guillame Dustan, who I want to read because of his importance to French autofiction, which L2 was lauding as something still very alive and worthwhile in a way that literature in New York is not, but also because of his wikipedia, where he was a gay man who was a proponent of barebacking in the wake of AIDS and died of an overdose, a certain commitment to living in a certain way. At the party I did a little bit of cocaine, and subsequently spent the following days wondering how much damage it did to the gum surrounding the screw where my eventually implanted front tooth will be attached to. The challenge I'm facing right now is that continuing to live in a fashion of reckless haphazard drunkenness and impulse will surely lead to significant financial harm and damages that will teeter me into relative ruin. That word brings Duras into the fold: Let cinema go to its ruin, that is the only cinema. Let the world go to its ruin, that is the only politics. Yet I myself don't wish to be a walking ruin, at least not yet. I remember what Carrère wrote, that P was a sickly man. I think of affliction, of naming, of the affliction of naming. I talked with C on the phone last night about our semi-collaborative ventures and brought up a quote from Mohaghegh's Omnicide II, from the Anginomania section. I couldn't remember it properly, or locate the pertinent parts quick enough. Naturally, things are different now:

The anginomania flexes the imagination against multiple constrictions: the noose, the horns, fate, the womb, and the drum — and all of this simply in order to tie themselves (by close-fitting force) to the destiny of the Supreme Class. Whereas the neurotic's approach to greatness resembles the assassination of a celebrity by the fawning social misfit seeking attention at all costs, the manic version stems from a paradoxical belief that they themselves are the best practitioner to ever walk the earth (and their consequent desire to test themselves against all present and prior greatness). This is not the competitive paranoia of the ego, but simultaneously strictest and most free-moving philosopher called the generosity of the 'best enemy': the proceed from the image of being the finest to cross this existence — the thinker must perform themselves as the lone oracle, the poet must call themselves the cardinal of the last word, the artist must announce themselves as the arch-shapemaker of all ages — in order to survive the tightrope walk (another anginomaniacal image)... One must conceive of oneself as the most dangerous rendering to arise since the very prelude of one's medium: otherwise, why bother to knowingly produce inferior samples? Manic elocution is to cry out 'No other can touch me' as a testament to modesty: for all else is offensive self-indulgence.

And how does this connect back to the compulsion toward extreme tightness? The only surefire way to validate singularity, distance, or dominance is by bonding oneself and breaking oneself against the luminaries of the game. This battling protocol is found prevalently in most movements of street poetry and street art throughout history, as the newbloods try their teeth out on the leathery skin of old veterans; or, to borrow a page from the maniac's playbook, it can even involve calling oneself the second coming or improved reincarnation of long-gone personalities of lionised status. No doubt, such is the amazing balletic contrivance and zealotry of a recursive temporality whereby great forerunners supposedly existed only so as to dare or challenge the present manic figure (the precursors taunt, snarl, and rile from afar). This knots them together in an inspiring tension, a cross-epochal vice through which names grow polysemous and their prestige is re-peddled as another's pendants: in this way, past formations are spattered, unspooled, and compacted into new subsets. In opposition to those stories of sycophants who followed every footstep or memorised every line of their favourite author, made extraordinary efforts to live in the same city, cultivated the same habits, enacted the same methods, and yet still stopped impossibly short of grasping the other's creative spark, the anginomaniac seeks an alternative tableau of tightness along the lines of the Parthian Shot (famed technique of ancient Persian Empire horseman who could shoot arrows while reiding away from their enemies, firing over their shoulders at onrushing foes.

And what is the final concert of this tightness that strikes its changing target through withdrawal? It is that here, mania shows us a paradigm of intimacy along-side complete anti-modularity: that no pieces should be interchangeable within a tradition; in fact, when such flexibility of components occurs, the tradition should be destroyed and put out of its misery. Nothing is isomorphic, lending to styles that are inimitable even when taught (a densification process that allows neither forebears nor followers)...

... mania excels in the logic of originality-through-capture.

— C.S.

A whisper: outside of the opening I was talking to T. She was there with her friend T2, who was a friend of S, who I was there with. I was there earlier with S and T2 and we left to get beers. But we broke off when we got back — T2 was introducing S to more people and I was talking to T.

T how I knew S and I responded with the answer — then we talked about the film I had seen before coming, about Duras and incest and putting yourself into work, which then bridged into Rivette and Out 1 and the Bulle Ogier series as a whole. Which lead into me sharing a website I had made recently, which then got into other writing practices.

I trail off. I realize that I should've written a secret without words.

— C.S.

Waste deep like a whole lotta shit

It's a whole lot of shit. I was spamming T texts after but I remembered this vehicle, that I can drive it, that it'll serve a purpose. I was scanning above, my eyes locked onto a phrase: "Going through the motions is not having motion". Last night I walked to The River after work — E told me to pull up because to talk about PR moves for his upcoming EP release. G was outside with him and asked if I was staying for the show — I'd forgotten he was performing and then committed myself to it. Immediately I regretted it but I wasn't sure how to extricate myself. One hand I knew his set would be good, but on the other was the matter of the self, of inertia, going through the motions, and these motions not carrying me where I wanted to be. I tried to eat dinner by myself so I could read but E and G came along. I would ride the train home with S and P around 11 and then worked writing images for a few hours and then called it a night.

N pulled up around 9 — there was also this guy D there, who I'd never met, but he worked with S. She told me he went to Brown. We got to talking about writing, similar to how I had to talk about art at the opening the previous weekend. Neither conversation was great, but it was N asking me if I'd written anything recently that sort of set me off internally. I suppose the problem is this matter of not talking shit about one's friends, but the inevitability of doing so, and that this isn't intended as a talking of shit so much as a talking through things. He'll never read it is the other thing, because he really doesn't read my work. And it's this thing where there can't be an expectation that he'll do so — that sort of reciprocity-based relationship isn't what really works either. And maybe it's an overestimation of how I view the signature and how strong it is, given that he couldn't tell which piece was mine in the suite of CB essays. But in any case, it's a thing where Z could — and that's a different relationship to signatures, reading, relationships, etc.

I texted T about all of this and more today — he related it to the problem of the main bitch, how such a definition is context dependent, and then we went on to talk about Jerry Magoo and art criticism, fathers and killing them, profilicity, masks, and projects. Right now I feel exhausted. I texted A about an unwritten essay — about Magoo and shitcoins and the internet and the circus. "Circle the drain swim against the current".