I am sharing a piece of Evelyn’s genius, transcribed with permission.
The pet bourg and professionals choose to carry on living their lives like so many little sitcoms. Long after the death of mass television and the sitcom, life inexorably seemed unable but to mimic “art”
The husk of art, for artless people, ie spectacle. the art of small-mindedness, small victories, and shrinking worlds. the city vanished into the booth, the booth into the simulacrum of one. and no more referents, only the purgatory of endless reflexivity.
Can you even bemoan the absence of dignity when the world is a corpse whose soul has fled and when the people who gorge on this decomposing body vacillate publicly and shamelessly between sanctimonious self-pity and smug self-satisfaction
I’m tired of the interventions and opinions of cannibals.
Felt comforting to read—somehow even though it shouldn’t—the sameness of the rage is consoling; shared and therefore less heavy, maybe just for a second.
I have been watching them.
The cannibals.
A sitcom about a gallery opening, a sitcom about a new magazine launch party, or a poetry reading.
Every night someone’s celebrating nothing, attributing meaning to voids.
They’re all the same: proud and blood stained; convinced of their own magic.
I agreed to do a reading this weekend and already I feel sick at the thought. I haven’t been on stage in years.
More importantly, who do we think we are?
In what ways have we earned the right to celebrate when the cost of what we have is endless death?
I like to flirt with the man who sells me my cigarettes.
His manner is gruff but softens in the face of bare legs or a giggle.
I give him everything I have because there’s nowhere else to put it.
His prices are good. In this economy, you lift your skirt for that.
You say bonne journée and you mean it.
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