Hi everyone!
This one contains a very light mention of miscarriage, some ableist language in a quote, and a slightly more in depth reference to suicide.
I always found Medium a bit ridiculous. I did my degree in something called Performance Writing, which focused a lot on writing outside of literature and on the fringes of it. As a result, I'm more tuned into the bizarre 'romanticisation of literature' that is summed up in things like the Hay festival:
, the fetishisation of smelling books (biblionosmia), 'untranslatable words', NaNoWriMo, and all the other trash bits of literary culture that tries to elevate the written word to a consumptive virtue. See also: "If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them." 🙄
Medium seems to bring this attitude into the internet age, with a motto — “Get smarter about what matters to you” — that calls directly to this idea that literature makes one a better sort of person.
And if literature has this sort of power, the writer is elevated to some sort of minor god — this too has been updated in how many Medium writers come across like wankers. Whereas previously you would have to endure meeting people at parties telling you about their novel, they're now whatsapping you a link to their Medium article.¹
Please clap.
OK, so I do have some feelings about this. Feelings that for a while I cathected through my own Medium account! Which I tried to make as anti-Medium as possible — handily pretty close to my writing style. The other day I stumbled back across the archives and unlisted nearly all of them because they're too weird, but I am curious as to how they hold up.
So today I am going to share some annotated highlights. These were quite inscrutable before, so perhaps it'll be interesting to share some of the thinking. They also each feature some nice header images that I’ll share too.
¹ Or Substack newsletter.
the y1000000k bug will make the planes fall out of the sky and into the sea and all your descendants will jump out on the slides and blow their life jacket whistles happily together (2017)
one billion years in the future everyone will be smarter than you are now, or everyone will be less smart.
one billion years in the future everyone will have seen that contemporary theatre performance where they just say in the future everyone will be for two hours.
one billion years in the future it will in fact be a classic text like the bible or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Title is possibly the best part of this one. A few years previously I had gone with a friend to see a show by Forced Entertainment which consisted of two people on separate boxes saying phrases that begin with "In the future..."
Like most of Forced Entertainment's work, it starts off interesting, then gets terminally dull, and then gradually becomes more and more fascinating as you focus in on the repetitiveness. This piece kind of riffs on that.
However, like most of my work, this one starts off pretty weak. Reference to Ayn Rand a little on the nose to my liking.
one billion years in the future no one will even know enough to even bring an image of you to mind, to even know there was anything to know, or everyone will know who you were.
Death! Existential dread!
one billion years in the future there will be a gender for every person alive just like there is now, or there will be only one gender and no one will know what gender is, or men won’t exist and we will remember them like neanderthals, like what happened to all those early humans who shorter or taller or had big foreheads and we share a little of their DNA but other than that — and men will be like that.
one billion years in the future no one will be transgender and oh my god thank goodness, truly thank goodness for that.
*Mindlessly ticking off Kay Lack bingo card.* OK, so we're starting to get into it now.
one billion years in the future you will either have one billion descendants or no descendants, and they will either be spread across the universe or nowhere, and now i think of it is descent really anything more than churning around.
See she gets close to an interesting idea here. Multiplicitous progeny is quite awe-inspiring — that merely having one child can impact the future so dramatically. I remember reading about these shaggers back thousands of years ago or whatever who we're all related to, and I bet some of them at the time had no sense of their own importance in the scale of human history.
Then she links in space travel and it verges on even more interesting! But, sadly, loses confidence and defuses outwards. Towards:
one billion years in the future robots will pay taxes because that is what they are programmed to do.
Which is an OK ambivalent ending. The title is the best part of this one — nice image. 6 claps out of 50.
attention pleas (2017)
Get the homophonic double meaning and recursion out of the way early on. Wise move. No, wait...
There we go.
you are watching me through my laptop camera. i love you nsa agent i love you and i don’t want cover you with a folded-up post-it note i just wish you would tell me who you are. please arrive at my door tomorrow at 7pm. we can leave. we can go away and you can tell me about what you’ve seen and then we’ll smash our laptops and our phones and then buy new ones and then smash them too like that scene in that godard film where they crash the car and the lights are all different colours
maybe you’re a robot by now but please still come please please please i won’t be disappointed i promise
Another common theme in ~*~ my work ~*~ is indirect intimacy. Writing is for me often a way to discharge my desires for closeness without the threat of genuine connection, often in a confused, chaotic, or desperate way. I think this comes across quite well here.
Godard is an interesting reference, given the feeling of detached intimacy also comes across. I've actually fused two scenes here. The first I can't find a video for, but it is described well here:
One of the film’s most memorable images—no mean feat considering that Pierrot le Fou is comprised almost entirely of memorable images—occurs when Ferdinand and Marianne burn their car alongside a devastating wreck they come across in order to fake their own death. The discovered wreck is a nasty piece of work: a couple driving on a highway bridge accidentally drove over the side, smashing into the ground and becoming stuck in a vertical position.
But as Ferdinand and Marianne walk away from the smouldering remains of both cars, the camera pulls back and reveals that the bridge wasn’t a bridge at all: it was merely a section of bridge a few dozen yards in length with no entrance or exit ramp. What’s more, as the camera starts to pan left, we realize that this modern, industrial bridge section was constructed in the middle of the uninhabited French countryside. Here we see the inner workings of Godard’s method: what’s important is that there is a bridge, that there is a wreck that Ferdinand and Marianne can use to further their escape. They are mere plot devices. For the narrative to continue, Ferdinand and Marianna have to discover a method by which to elude their pursuers. So the narrative summons one out of thin air. Godard highlights the artificiality of such convenient narrative developments by making the artifice literal.
And the other is this scene, one of my favourites in cinema — sadly slightly butchered by youtube compression:
Consider me somewhat charmed. 34/50 claps.
wasp nest brain; inside/outside (2018)
Around this time I revived my periodic interest in assemblage — cutting and gluing texts together — so here we go:
unable to screen out frightening images and feelings originating in their dreams. They also lack barriers between their own identity and those of others, or between their own beliefs and unconventional ideas. Hartmann proposed that such people have “thin” boundaries between their mental processes and argued that thinness or thickness of boundaries was “a broad dimension of p
“tender-mindedness” and to Blatt and Ritzler’s “permeable ego boundariariety of areas, including boundaries between sleeping and waking, thoughts and feelings, and persons, places,
thin and getting thinner. as a child they told me that if you touch a butterfly’s wings it dies. cigarette paper ash looks solid but isn’t.
I think the first paragraph is maybe from... some psychoanalysis text, and the second is fused from two others. I was quite keen these ruptures being varying degrees of obvious. The end of the first paragraph is made obvious, but the weld in the second ('boundariariety') is a little more subtle to the casual reader.
The third paragraph is of my own authoring, I'm quite sure.
"He began to lose all capacity to distinguish between himself and the external world. Everything that happened in the world also happened in his body. He could not put a bottle between two shelves in a cupboard, because the shelves might come together and break the bottle. And that would hurt inside his head, as if his head were wedged between the shelves. He could not shut a suitcase, because pressing the things in the case would press inside his head. If he walked into the street after closing all the doors and windows of his house, he felt uncomfortable, because his brain was compressed by the air, and he had to go back home to open a door or a window. ‘For me to be at ease,’ he said, ‘I must have open space. […] I must have the freedom of my space. It’s the battle with the things all around me.’"
This one is quoted with quotation marks! Which surprises me now given I was doing assemblage and traditionally I wouldn't mark quotes in that context. So it must have been some deliberate choice.... In any case, this is from a book called The Revolution of Everyday Life, by Raoul Vaneigem. It was a situationist text and kind of a littler, but much more exciting sister to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. The chapter I'm quoting is called Isolation — here is another section:
Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time it gets fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear of always returning to the same single note: whether there are two of us, or even ten, we will finish up alone as before. What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our own unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so many pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot confront the effect of general isolation. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless. No love is possible in an unhappy world.
The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.
Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they wreck your desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more consequence and more poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured a town and offered it to his favourite for a smile. Some of us have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve -- passionately enough to offer our love to the magnificent bed of a revolution.
Intense eh? Back to me.
I then link to this video:
Which I saw on someone's okcupid profile once, and was immediately transfixed by.
i watch the youtube video and the dub and captions and the mouths and the scene all merge into one and myself. i have been working on doing this with everyday situations, everyday people. on the top deck of a bus looking out, the wind swaying us from wheel to wheel, i notice potential protagonists, and gently push my self to the side, and try to bring them in, another more favoured child. i can’t hear their thoughts or see what they’re seeing or know what they know but that isn’t necessary, just like it isn’t always necessary for me to hear my thoughts or see what i’m seeing or know what i know.
Which refers to a habit I once had of sitting on the top deck of buses playing with the sensation of thinking. A lover of mine remarked to me once that though the 'thinking' sensation usually happens in your head, with effort you can try to move it around a bit, a little lower, maybe a little into your body. I tried to move it into other things in the world, and then people I saw outside walking along. I imagined to myself that if I did it just right, we would swap places.
i have been working on doing the same with myself. last week something happened and i felt everything very intensely but still i think without knowing it, and sometimes i can bring it back, or i can hear a song like it is me talking or like it is talking to me if i if i try. but everyone else is very loud. i told my friend it is like listening to you talk when the radio is on but i forgot which was supposed to be me, you or the radio, and i think i got it wrong and swapped around, you can turn the radio up, that’s the difference. or maybe you can’t. maybe the radio turns up and down and you are me and i am the compressor.
Pretty chaotic. I think this is about something like the feeling of remembering someone else saying something as if it was you saying it, or vice versa. The bit about the compressor refers to an audio compressor, which is often explained as if you are in the car with your grandmother with the radio on and she says 'too loud!' when it's loud and you turn it down, but when it's too quiet you turn it up. Or something.
wasps i read you can’t play the radio too loud near them because it vibrates their nest and then all the wasps come out and they find what is making the sound and they sting it or you if they think you are near it or something. that’s me. there is a nest of hornets in my head and if it gets too loud they hear the noise and realise my needs are not being met and they come out and they sting everyone around me. i am in starbucks. it is my new strategy. if i come here every day or so i can listen to you talk to me and then the wasps are okay. otherwise the wasps
It's one metaphor Kay you don't need to make a huge thing of it.
i stopped therapy. i know everything now. i asked my therapist what if i came back, in a year, what would it be for, he said these:
being trans is lifelong hard, you are always somebody else to somebody else
the light distant observer and the well of nightmares. the scientist in the videogame and the portal to hell. the beekeeper and the hive. sometimes you say things and i think “wow” but you don’t think “wow” you think “this is normal”
I restarted therapy shortly after this, obviously.
The second thing he said was that he noticed I have a very strong tendency towards observing myself without identifying with the very strong feelings I report.
people tell me i am funny and i read this morning, what is it that makes people funny? i forget why. but here it is — dual. the benign violation. light and dark (or). i understand now. here it is he said In describing his quiz show, QI, Fry has said, “There are times when I’m doing QI and I’m going ‘ha ha, yeah, yeah,’ and inside I’m going ‘I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die’” and i tell e and i laugh! it is funny because it is true!
Okay, so this is actually really funny to me. Because it really is true!! Sometimes that combo of suicidal despair and humour feels very wrong, but sometimes it feels very right — like the feelings were made for each other. The way he slows it down too... oh my god ahahaha.
The person so afflicted often believes that he or she can accomplish anything.
This seems like a quote but I actually can't find it anywhere. It's probably from a psychoanalysis book (I was reading quite a few at that time). I have a bit of a thing for sudden oblique shifts at the end — (cf "one billion years in the future robots will pay taxes because that is what they are programmed to do.").
I find them quite enjoyable. They are the only place in a text where nothing will come next to explain what came before, and so the reader is implicitly required to make sense of it themselves. Or else.
K