Celebrity Skin

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Sardi’s second-floor windows overlook the theaters of 44th Street. Framed drawings of famous people line the walls—every wall except where the liquor racks are. At least I assume the subjects must be famous. How do I work at a magazine which puts celebrities on the cover and not recognize anyone in these caricatures besides Chris Rock? I’m not wearing glasses, I excuse myself, when people ask for my help in identification.

“Is that girl in the sparkly dress named P—?” I ask a celebrity manager in a sparkly cardigan. “Yep,” he informs me.

P— and I lived together eleven years ago. I haven’t seen her since. I had to move out because I tried and failed to overdose on pills and got advised to take the next semester off. “I still wear your sweater,” she says. I don’t tell her I don’t remember which sweater because I was drunk most of that term. I got straight As.

I’m chugging gin martinis despite my self-imposed two-drink limit. I go to another bar in the West Village and a celebrity whom I recognize walks in. She recognizes me and we wave hello.

Start a fight with a gay guy. Walk home despite the cold listening to, of all things, Sigur Rós.

The next day, I go to MoMA to watch Pink Narcissus, a film I haven’t seen for eleven years. I am almost lulled to sleep by its horny pink haze, the double-edged charm of doing nothing and wanting everything.

G— says the film would’ve been more interesting if the central guy were hot but I think he’s beautiful. Plus an incredible ass. Considering G— and I are dating and look nothing alike it’s probably assuring we have divergent tastes.

We want to see a bit of Christian Marclay’s The Clock but MoMA closes in ten minutes.

Globs of snow plummet onto 53rd Street. My glasses drip and blur. The D train arrives mercifully quick. Pasteur again. A coconut crêpe and a Tsing Tao. Back home, I think to read but instead watch Architectural Digest YouTube videos. Watch The Comeback even though I’ve seen it twice. Lisa Kudrow’s character—a former sitcom star now playing a bit role on a new sitcom but the central role on a reality show—is always negotiating control: asking the producer for a “timeout.” The producer says, don’t worry, we’ll edit it. Edit it how? She asks for the sitcom writers to reconsider her lines. This is not your show, the sitcom’s director says, that is, he points to her follow cams. She tries hard to be liked or at least likable. Of course, it’s all fiction.

I do not feel like going outside. I’m reading four books at once which I don’t advise. One is Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment. Durbin depicts occurrences from reality TV. In the first section, “Wives Shows,” she interlocks restaged scenes from the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season one (have watched), Mob Wives, Sister Wives, Married to Rock, and Basketball Wives. Durbin gives such an attention to sensuous details, to micro-expressions, to conventionalized speech, to the build of tension created by reality TV editing—but she doesn’t introduce interiority. She’s not schematic, exactly; her descriptions are not impersonal. Not à la Robbe-Grillet. But not not.

Durbin doesn’t speculate, doesn’t reveal: she gives us the surface over again. This produces an unnerving “fiction”—if that’s what we could call this book. Although, in truth, it is truth that reveals a fiction: The guilt of schadenfreude. The displeasure of passivity. The coercion of editing. The inevitability of narrative. The restaging of lives: a pastiche of humanity: the desire to belong.

Brandon Taylor published a craft Substack about how he thinks the lack of interiority and the misuse of “silence” he reads in certain first-person fiction can be attributed to people writing through the experience of reality TV and other similar media rather than of life. I agree in some sense. And I agree basically with all his points about the deadness of the resulting prose. About what prose can do. About what the hell is going on. But I also am always worried: isn’t experiencing media part of life?

Lately I’ve been dreaming of celebrities: Madonna on patent-leather roller skates, Isabelle Huppert on an ivory-colored wool sofa. The other night I had a dream or nightmare in which a TikTok meme song (“Diva” by Beyoncé) looped endlessly and every time it restarted so too did my movement. I could not progress, only stutter and loop. Diva is the female version of a…

For many years I’ve dreamt in third person, dreamt of people who aren’t even me, dreamt of screens. But this trashiness is new—this lack of imagination.

David Foster Wallace said the issue with literature was TV.

David Shields said the hope for literature was TV. (I think? I write hybrid-genre fact/fiction-blending prose but I think Reality Hunger was so inane I got nothing from it.)

Isn’t all good literature also writing through the experience of prior media: of things you once read?

But the problem Taylor’s noting isn’t learning from other forms; the problem’s empty imitation. Not dramatizing the experience of mediation—but rather confusing media-consumed for method. Not questioning that flatness which Durbin so virtuosically intensifies. (Hers a most unnerving third person.) Never seeing yourself apart: The way your life is a pop song not because pop songs are like life but because you have made your mind like a pop song.

Another book I’m reading right now is Dayswork, a collaborative novel by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, which so far is obliquely describing a heterosexual marriage (from the singular perspective of the wife) through anecdotes revolving around Herman Melville. On one page, the writers list various doomed grandiose things men did at age thirty-one (bought land in the Berkshires to be close to Nathanial Hawthorne, rowed across the Atlantic with only 250 eggs, made broad declarations in The New Republic). I am thirty-one and am now feeling I ought to make a prodigious mistake.

In Dayswork, there is a bit of recounting of the nastiness of Robert Lowell, arch-manic-depressive, and I always get a bit nostalgic and jealous when I read about people with poorly treated bipolar. Perhaps I will not make a prodigious mistake at age thirty-one because I take sky-blue mood stabilizers which prevent clinical delusions of grandeur. Two-hundred milligrams.

Another book I’m reading right now is The Netanyahus, also a blend of fact and research about men whose delusions of grandeur continue to be of regrettable note.

Read a New Yorker article about Benjamin Netanyahu’s noxious media collaborator, Yinon Magal. Written before the purported current ceasefire, the article wonders if one will ever come. Magal calls for further settlement on the West Bank, where Israel launched a new offensive this week; television here and there is an agent of Israel’s constitutive genocide, of the United States’ constitutive genocides.

As Cohen writes, Ben-Zion Netanyahu (the father of Benjamin) “correlat[ed] the Jews to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and the Arabs to ‘the Indians’: ‘The conquest of the soil is one of the first and most fundamental projects of every colonization.’”

In ’67, Lowell wrote to Elizabeth Bishop: “Well, my heart is in Israel, but it was a little like a blitz krieg [sic] against the Comanches—armed by Russia.”

In Moby-Dick, Melville wrote, “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me” and Toni Morrison wrote “We can consider the possibility that Melville’s ‘truth’ was his recognition of the moment in America when whiteness became ideology.” Ahab can only go mad.

What is the other book which I am reading? Oh, this Cristina Rivera Garza book on necrowriting in Latin American literature. But I think I need a break; reading literary theory is making me feel a perverse guilt for all I haven’t read.

Rivera Garza: “[I]n times of aggravated neoliberalism, times when the law of profit-at-all-costs has created scenarios of extreme horrors, the body text has become—like so many other once-living organisms—a corpse text.”

I did not watch the indoor inauguration. I did not leave my house except to pick up enchiladas. I had one Zoom meeting and then bought tickets to the ballet. I changed my duvet cover, purple static dancing in front of my face. I considered doing yoga but felt too sorry for myself. I took a quarter of a lapis-blue edible in hope of feeling anything else.

Instead I felt more of the same and read and watched fifteen minutes of various movies until two in the morning. I read about the ELN taking people out from their homes and shooting them in the streets and cried and read the first four paragraphs of Moby-Dick again and laughed and I read about Steven Miller and felt delirious and with all of this what was I to do? Stop taking cocaine, go out to sea, and delete social media would be the obvious “lessons.”

Choices I was contemplating regardless.

My mistakes are banal and repetitive, or I am afforded the privilege of finding my missteps banal, distanced from repercussions in the cosmopolis while facing the psychic dis-integration of belief from effect. Banal but something I’m not dissuaded from writing about them, so apparently I find them, in fact, remarkable. If I found my own life so banal would I bother to broadcast it?

All the mood stabilizers in the world can’t cure every compulsion.

I tell G— I wish I could really let go, be an actual genius, and he’s like, “That’s a toxic myth,” but then I’m like: “Melville(?), Van Gogh, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey.” “Is Britney bipolar?” Maybe not, but I believe this performance owes itself to the shadow of risperidone:

In her memoir she says she wasn’t ready following her public spiral, her management was giving her shit for her post-pregnancy body but insisting she wear no clothes, she ran into her ex (JT), hadn’t slept—but was being pressured by “everyone” to give! us! more!

Who is pressuring me? Myself, and, to some extent, the more defensible abstract gargoyle haunting my career insecurity, my checking account. No one: I write this for free and in lieu of doing something either more fully “non-productive” or more fully profitable. I mean, I work in media in the ’20s—is anything “profitable”?

I called W— and she read a bit of Natasha Stagg’s Substack aloud, wherein Stagg talks to a lot of people of various career identities—I forget exactly, magazine editors and copywriters and actors, let’s say—noting how no one is fucking paying us. Jobs are drying up and the one’s that haven’t, you better hope you don’t have to go to court to get your fee. In my recollection, which is hazy having been read this aloud, Stagg wonders, What are we all so intimidated by if nobody is even compensating us—financially, professionally—in the end? What bridges are we afraid we’re gonna burn?

W— and I discuss our job options: she says working in a nursing home, but I say they’re all getting sued for unsafe staffing shortages because they’re owned by private equity companies; I suggest law school but she says we’re too old.

Tech-bros of all genders are being laid off. My family members who work as nurses or physician assistants have multiple jobs. I am on Substack being an unpaid influencer with no product to push other than myself.

I try to push myself to watch this trashy HBO documentary about a sun-damaged ecstasy salesman but I can’t hack it. The whole movie is cut like a trailer, a preview extended over an hour-and-a-half. I love the come-up but I prefer the roll. The best pills I’ve ever taken were shaped like Donald Trump and my second-faves were LinkedIn-logo presses. Trump pardoned the Silk Road guy; I never used the site, instead letting the weird kids who’d gone to my college after boarding-school hopping trawl the site instead: not just MDMA but anything that went by an acronym rather than a name. I close the ecstasy documentary tab. My browser jumps to a poem by Harryette Mullen I’d opened early but not yet read called “Spam for President”:

A hot pocket in every Chernobyl, a pig in every inbox. I’m announcing early that I’m running for the top spot. I’m building a beautiful mall. You will receive daily updates on our campaign, complimentary tickets to our rallies, a chance to win free hotdogs for your family.

My voice may grate your nerves again. The electoral system is broken, but I can fix the race. My critics are enemies of the people. I can handle those losers. Fortunately, I consider you a friend. I’m already counting your vote. One thing you can say for me, I deliver the pork.

Mullen wrote one of my favorite poems ever, collected in Recyclopedia, “[Kills bugs dead.]”:

Kills bugs dead. Redundancy is syntactical overkill. A pin-prick of peace at the end of the tunnel of a nightmare night in a roach motel. Their noise infects the dream. In black kitchens they foul the food, walk on our bodies as we sleep over oceans of pirate flags. Skull and crossbones, they crunch like candy. When we die they will eat us, unless we kill them first. Invest in better mousetraps. Take no prisoners on board ship, to rock the boat, to violate our beds with pestilence. We dream the dream of extirpation. Wipe out a species, with God at our side. Annihilate the insects. Sterilize the filthy vermin.

The double affirmation of killing dead overkills, an obsessive insistence on extirpation that false-promises those self-anointed the peaceful dreams of others’ nightmares. In Jawbone, a novel by the Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda, a fearful school-teacher is haunted by the admonishment of her mother: you have cockroaches in your brain. One among her religious girls’ school’s wealthy students writes an extended essay on the color white: She’s supposed to write about Poe, but instead writes about the Moby-Dick chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale”: “white horror resembles cosmic horror in terms of that mystic sensation. White, as you said in class, represents purity and light, but also the absence of color, death, and in definition it represents that which merely by showing itself anticipates terrible things that cannot be known.”

The school teacher doesn’t know her students had painted a room white in an abandoned building where they tell each other 4chan-style creepypasta stories, trying to out-scare one another. She doesn’t know they worship a drag-queen White God. The teacher is fearful because her ex-students at another school had attacked her at home, tied her up. Students and teachers and mothers alike know they frighten one another, are frightened by how their bodies change or refuse to.

Rivera Garza: “[D]eath encroaches on the very same territories where internet connections are making their forward march—a sort of contemporary battalion. Blood and screens, conflated. If writing is supposed to critique the status quo then how is it possible—through writing and with writing—to dissociate the grammar of predatory power from aggravated neoliberalism and its deadly war machines?”

Today, I can’t deal with death so I’m being passively vegan even if last night I dreamed of spraying poison in my apartment, as well as of liberating living garden gnomes from Hudson Yards. Today, the heat in my office is broken and I’ve only walked four blocks. Today, TJ says, “You have a beard?” when he comes over to save me from my hermeneutic depression. Today, I speak with a neighbor who says, “I’ve lived in this building for a thousand fuckin’ years” and shakes my hand with her miniature fingers. Today, I eat anchovies and mussels and chicken and kale. Today, I invent an unnecessary errand to feel as if my life weren’t predetermined and so go to the bookshop and buy Hamlet and Pedro Páramo. Today, I read abysmal immigration news on X, which tries to get me to use its new TikTok-style videos tab to watch raw-meat influencers. Today, I run out of clean towels. Today, I FaceTime two friends neither of whom pick up. Today, I go to the office and the heat still isn’t working. Today, the newspapers’ newsletters include “additional Trump news” bulleted lists. Today, somebody jokes that I should be the new editor-in-chief of Them. Today, I read that the architect Norman Foster referred to 270 Park as a “device.” Today, on North 4th Street, I see that actress that always plays an angry German woman, and I think, but wait, is there an actress who plays an un-angry German woman? Today, I search “war machines” in my laptop’s documents folder but realized I have a paper copy of A Thousand Plateaus. Today, I realize I have lost my copy of A Thousand Plateaus. Today, I almost trip on an A-frame ad for “fka twigs matcha.” Today, someone seriously suggests that I should be the new editor-in-chief of Them. Today, I read the line “Digital temporality belongs to the undead,” and realize I am reading five books at once. Today, I see more Instagram stories by people claiming they’ve been forced to follow JD Vance but that sounds like fake news? Today, I see an Instagram story that says Substack is mostly people writing essays about how social media = bad. Today, I receive a Susbtack that says “social media is out.” Today, I finish reading The Netanyahus. Today, my Sephora package comes. Today, I wear the same outfit as yesterday. Today, I realize it’s not an actress, it’s actually some, like, TikTok comedian woman who makes fun of her German mom. Today, I realize this literary form is too iterable. Today, I read some Jean Rhys, who writes, “Last night was a catastrophe…” Today, I think of writing something dishonest. Today, I’ve exhausted all blog goodwill, I think. Today was yesterday or the day before and this present tense that I’m writing this paragraph and this piece in has unhinged me to the point where fixed temporality doesn’t matter, all time’s the same same once flung into this text editor and so bothering to put these events in order, not the order of thought but the order of calendar time, would feel dishonest to the order of thought, which, I think, is most likely the only structure—if it might be said there is a structure—to this or any of my Substacks, and I worry that this habit, this habit of writing as I think has ruined my interest in writing essays, although perhaps I am merely “burnt out” and my interest in writing essays will return, but I keep saying to myself “dissipation” as I write this, that I am dissipating the energy I could be using for other writing, other writing I perceive as more worthy, or at least more salable, and can to dissipate mean to get drunk? it seems so per the dictionary—I didn’t imagine this definition—but how affected would it be for me to say that? that I was dissipating the night before, or something? But I like affected speech. It seems to me that a non-affected “plain language” is no more or less affected than any other way of writing or speaking. But, in fairness, I do have a buffer before something comes out from my mouth (although not my fingers), which isn’t to say I choose my words wisely, but rather that I feel my words overdetermine me, and so the loop I find myself in, this verbal loop, is shaped by my wanting to shape words that feel more like me but in doing this, in attempting to shape those words to be more like me, I find words more inadequate, or I am more aware of their inadequacy, and so I feel further and further from myself. Now I’m thinking, perhaps what is at stake in my language, whether spoken or written, is honesty, and although I was going to never send this message because of its honesty, my “coming out” as mildly insane, perhaps such honesty will not alienate me further from myself—perhaps my being honest will not register to myself as a performance—but will in fact bring me more “into alignment” with “myself,” but putting quotes around “myself” is reminding me of this Lispector line I have to find about living in quotation marks. Oh, it’s “My home’s witty elegance comes from the fact that everything here is in quotation marks.” Of course the line is about furniture, of course a line I misremember as being about the narrator is about fucking furniture—but when searching for this line I alighted upon one better for my purposes: “I’ll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror of remaining undelimited”—and reading through my underlines in The Passion According to G.H. I am struck by the sensation that everything I have written has been written before, that the reason I write with quotation marks—that this entire post is riddled with quotation marks, and that I deflect myself by scare-quoting my life, both including and beyond my furniture—is that I have never in fact written a single new thing, not even the lines outside the quotes, but I have to stop, I cannot think this way and go on, I can’t keep moving if I am convinced that everything that I write has been written already, and so that is enough I decide, this thread, this—well, to call it a “narrative” thread would be to do a disservice to what narrative is—but this thread of thinking needs to be put to rest, I must quiet down, read something that feels nothing like myself, or better, maybe even watch TV, TV where other people experience their own lives as endless reflections, but I can’t manage that, I keep writing this line, because there is no one to say, “that’s enough for today, today, you’ve written enough,” because the only thing that ends something like this—this post—is not the shape of thought as an essay or story could be, but a thinking through, or an attempt to give shape to my life, a dishonest or maybe overly honest verbal loop, and so, sure I could sit at this table forever, well, I wrote “table” because sonically it worked better in the sentence, but in fact I am at my kitchen counter, I could sit at my kitchen counter forever and—