Category: Uncategorized

Away for a couple of weeks or so.

Book news: Spurious (the novel) will come out with Melville House in January 2011. Dogma, a second novel, which draws on some later W. material, will come out at some point after that.

'The path had been beaten diagonally across the meadow', the poet says. 'It was made of beaten down grass in the tall, flowering grass of the field. Who was the first to stamp it down? Who chose to stamp this path so assertively through the field? No matter. It was there; it seemed to us to have always been there, and by walking it again, we'll bear it down again. We made the path; we'll remake it.

'Ann and I. Ann and I on one of our walks, heading out to the river across the diagonal path. How was it that our meetings demanded we move out and away from the others, from the cafe where we met and where the others gathered? Why did we want to go away, and together, two bodies walking in the afternoon?

'We'd been singled out. Chosen. By each other? By the afternoon. By the Ees and the meadows. By Jackson's Boat. Back there, in the cafe, we were full of laughter, jokes. We were funny. We were funny together – other people told us that. But when we outside, away from everyone? When we walked along the diagonal path? A kind of stillness, first of all. A solemnity, as though we were being attuned to something. As though we had to drop to find the level of the afternoon. The grasshopper's noise. The humid warmth.

'It was still. It was always still when we met, Ann had said. There's never any wind, she said. And it was true – there was a kind of gap in the weather. As though it was looking for itself. The thick clouds. The heavy air. As though it was gathering itself up for something, something that hadn't happened'.

'And in a sense, it never happened. Nothing happened', the poet says. I've been asking him to remember. Asking him questions about his past. But he hasn't got any stories, not really, the poet says. He was ill, unemployed … That's how all his non-stories begin, he says: "I was ill, unemployed …", as if to void all incident from them in advance. Expect nothing, the poet wants to warn me when he begins that way, he says. Nothing's going to happen.

The diagonal path. The river. Jackson's Boat. How to narrate a story that never reached a beginning? What happened then, the poet says, what failed to happen, turned its face away from him, from his life. It was looking elsewhere. Does he want to tell his story, to bring it to account, or to look off where it is looking, his story; to look off with it, and see what was revealed? Too look at its look? To look away from him, his life, his story, but to do so within his life, his narrative?

If he remembers it all now – the path, the river – it is not to lose himself in the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of that distance which separates him from the past, diffusing and blurring particular events, and seeming to insinuate itself into those events, even as it seems to suspend still further the sense that anything was completed.

The diagonal path, the poet says. Beating it down, he says, as it had already been beaten down. What was she telling him, Ann? Something about telepathy. Her theories of mind reading. Of mind feeling, he says. – "I can feel what other people feel", she said. About her illness. She was really unwell, she said. About his supposed illness which she said could discern. – "It takes one to know one", she said. About the others in the cafe. – "They think they know me, but they don't".

She liked to use his name, the poet noticed. She liked to say it, he thought. To breathe it, because it is easy to breathe: one syllable. "Always liked": what tense is that? Completed action in the past. As though a past event could be completed, and broken from the present. But it seems, for him, not to have been completed. She's still saying his name, he says. Breathing it. One syllable.

Sometimes he dreams his life is already over, the poet says, and he is living backwards, not forwards, opening doors into rooms in which he has been before. Is there a way of watching your traces disappear from the world, like footprints in snow? One day, he will arrive at the point where he is not yet born. Perfection: the work of erasure done, he, too, will disappear.

What were they talking about, he and Ann? About ESP. About dreams, and the power of dreaming. About her job and her business partner, who was half in love with her. He felt the delight of letting their words go and letting them float into the air. He felt the delight of smiling, of a kind of smiling irony, by which what they said was lightened and made playful.

She liked to play by speech. Liked for it to float, lightened. To say nothing in particular. To converse as a dreamer dreams. About this thing, then that in swerves and darts. – "You give good conversation", she said. A strange phrase. Later, she would say, "You give good phone". It was vaguely sexual, he thought. "You give good head".

You can't step into the same afternoon twice. Or even once, the poet says, thinking of Cratylus. He wasn't the same after that. His life had changed. The afternoon – that one, and the others, although perhaps there was only one, the same afternoon happening over and over again - had become a kind of brightness behind everything, a sky behind the sky: the backdrop of his life, obscured sometimes, sometimes lost, but that burned nevertheless, discreetly, in stillness, gathering without resolving itself, on the perpetual brink of its own happening.

When did she say it? When did he walk into her trap? – "Can you read minds?", he'd asked her. – "I know what you're thinking", she said. – "What?' – "You're thinking how pretty I am". And there it was: how pretty she was.

How indecent it seemed: that sentiment. How personal. Before, they'd been speaking of other things, faraway things. He was at ease. It was as easy as falling, pure relaxation. They had been falling through the afternoon as through the sky.

And now? She'd turned him. She'd come into the field of his gaze, forced herself there. He was to look at her. It was a kind of reckoning. And what did he do, who was walking beside her? Did he stop walking? Stop her with a touch? Turn and face her? Kiss her? Ah, but what did he know of any of that?

He was falling alone now. Falling faster and faster, and into a blackness beyond the stars. He felt panicked, queasy. He could feel the heaviness of what he had eaten for lunch. He'd eaten too much. Anything he had eaten would have been too much.

He was at the brink. He'd been called to account. Here he was – here, in the sultry afternoon. Here – but where was he, and what did she want from him? Sometimes, you see things too closely, from too close up. There's no distance between you and what you see. He saw her. How could he not? He turned his head, looked. Pretty. Was she pretty? My God, what did all this mean?

He kept his silence, the poet says. That makes it sound dignified. But it wasn't dignified. They walked, Ann and he, Jackson's Boat to their right, on the other side of the river. They walked. Hadn't he been waiting to be included in life? To live? And wasn't it being offered to him now: a chance to live? Life itself was very close. He should reach over and touch her. Reach – and touch.

He was on the tip of the wave-crest as it was about to break. And it was breaking. He was about to lose the moment – he lost it; the wave broke. Foam and splashing. A kind of roaring in his ears. He felt ill, quite ill. That's what he said to her: "I feel terrible". I feel terrible: the worst thing he could say.

He broke the spell. He tore the afternoon in two. His life was falling back again into time without event. Nihilism: nothing meant anything. Nothing kept its form. Dispersal – did it happen then, as they walked through the Ees? Were they blown away, apart from one another, as they walked along the council estate to the road?

It was no longer still. There was a low wind. Pollen in the air. His eyes itched. We were going back. Back to the cafe, back to her car. Oh God. A tight feeling across his chest, like a stroke. Like an imaginary stroke. Oh God. That's what Ghandi said when he was assassinated. Oh God. Oh God.

Back to the cafe and the others. Back to the others, who knew something was going on. But nothing's going on, he would want to say to them. Nothing's going to happen.

A Danish translator, why on earth would he, an ex-poet, want a Danish translator?, he asks. Why would he open his door to a Danish translator even if he's come all the way from Denmark, all the way to Manchester to meet with him?

Trust the Dane to come on spec, he says. Trust the Dane just to fly in, he says, all friendly willingness – well, all apparently friendly willingness – and expect to be seen as though all the world were Copenhagen and you can simply go round knocking on people's doors.

A Dane, he says. A Dane with a dictaphone, he says, waving it around. I should know, at the very least, that he's an ex-poet, which means he doesn't give interviews, and has no interest in giving translation advice. No interviews, no advice, he says, that's what he told me.

He never was particularly interested in interviews even when he was a poet, he says. In truth, he was always on the verge of becoming an ex-poet even when he was a poet, or what was regarded as a poet, he says. For him, the word poet is an honorific and not at all like the word Dane which is simply horrific, he says.

A Dane on his doorstep, he says. A Dane on his doorstep with his dictaphone, he says. A government-funded dictaphone, he says. A government-bought, government-supported dictaphone, and a government-funded, government-stipended Dane, he says. So this is how Danish tax-dollars are to be spent, which is to say wasted, the poet says, stepping aside to let me in.

Twitter account.

On the blog, new fiction starting. New characters.

A lovely sentence from Brody's book on Godard:

Duras herself recognised that 'the film was made at the same time as it was filmed; the film was written in step with its unspooling', and criticised directors who did not understand 'that the making of the film is already the film'.

Beware of thinkers whose minds function only when they are fueled by a quotation.

E.M. Cioran

E.M. Cioran:

We are increasingly interested not in what an author says but in what he may have meant, not in his actions but in his projects, less in his actual work than in the work he dreamed of. If Mallarmé intrigues us, it is because he fulfills the conditions of the writer who is unrealised in relation to the disproportionate ideal he has assigned himself[….] We are adepts of the work that is aborted, abandoned halfway through, impossible to complete, undermined by its very requirements. The strange thing in this case is that the work was not even begun, for of The Book, that rival of the Universe, there remains virtually no revealing clue; it is doubtful that its structure was outlined in the notes Mallarmé destroyed, those that have survived being unworthy of our attention. Mallarmé: an impulse of thought, a thought that was never actualised, that snagged itself on the potential, on the unreal, disengaged from all actions, superior to all objects, even to all concepts – an expectation of thought.

A little later, Cioran notes that whereas Baudelaire called Poe a 'hero' of letters, Mallarmé went further and called him 'the absolute literary case', and comments,

No one today would assent to such a judgement, but that is of no consequence, for each individual (like each epoch) possesses reality only by his exaggerations, by his capacity to overestimate – by his gods.

W. reminds me of the Hasidic lesson Scholem recounts at the end of his great study of Jewish Mysticism.

When he was confronted by a great task, the first Rabbi, about whom little is known – his name, and the details of his life are shrouded in mystery – would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he wanted to achieve was done.

A generation later, the second Rabbi – his name is not known, and only a few details have been passed down concerning his life – confronting a task of similar difficulty would go to the same place in the woods, and said, We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers. What he wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and the third Rabbi – whose name is known to us, but who remains, for all that, a legendary figure – went to the woods and said, We can no longer light the fire, nor do we know about the secret meditations belonging to the prayer. But we do know that place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be sufficient. And what the Rabbi wanted to achieve was done.

Another generation passed, and perhaps others, who knows, and the fourth Rabbi – his name is well known, and he lived as we do - faced with a difficult task, merely sat in his armchair and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And that too was enough: what he wanted to achieve was done.

There was a fifth rabbi – well, he wasn't really a rabbi – Scholem forgot, says W. His name is Lars and he writes everything about himself at his stupid blog. He forgot where the woods were, and that he even had a task. His prayers, too were forgotten; and if he meditated, it was on Jordan and Peter Andre. He set fire to himself with his matches and the woods were burned to the ground. And then the whole world caught fire, the oceans boiled and the sky burned away and it was the end of times.

Death is close, says W. Death has set out to find us, all of us. And this will be a death of a kind we cannot anticipate. A meteor-strike, the flaming sky, the stars falling from the heavens … We have no idea of what is to come, he says.

What idea could we have? How could we anticipate our annihilation? Death will be everywhere, W. says. The earth a flaming ball. Why does no one understand? He understands, though, insofar as he can understand. He gets it, and that makes him feel very alone.

It's the opposite of cosmogony, W. says. It's the return of the pell-mell, of chaos, of the tohu vavohu, he says, quoting Genesis. Of course, I should know a great deal about that, with my flat, W. says. I should know everything about it, with the damp spreading across my wall.

It's like fate, I've told him, the damp. The water streams down the wall. It weeps. And then my flat's tilting sideways. It's pitching into the earth. If you look at the skirting, I've told him, you'll see how far they are above the floorboards, which are sinking, along with the joists beneath them. Sinking and leaving a great gap between themselves and the skirting, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

I think it's smiling at me, the flat, I tell W. I think it's beginning to laugh at me.

A double suicide – is that the answer? But who would stab whom first? Who would string up the nooses? And could W. be sure, really sure, that I was really prepared to die as he was? Or even that he would be prepared to die as I apparently was?

Death seems as far away from us as ever. When will it end?, W. wonders. Isn't the end already overdue? Shouldn't it have come already? When the apocalypse comes, it will be a relief, W. says. We'll close our eyes at last. There'll be no more need to apologise, or to account for ourselves. No guilt …

There are no friends in this miserable country.

Q.: Did you start writing to escape from solitude?

A.: No, because I wrote things that made me even more solitary.

Genet, interviewed

Extreme fatigue goes quite as far as ecstasy, except that with fatigue you descend toward the extremities of knowledge.

E.M. Cioran

The obligation to express is omnipresent in Beckett's work[….] To my knowledge, Beckett has always refrained from speaking about the source of or the reason for this obligation.

Asja Szafraniec

I've never felt Sam to be a pessimistic playwright. A pessimist does not try to write. The true pessimist wouldn't take the trouble of writing. Writing is an attempt to communicate, and if you're a pessimist you say communication is impossible: you wouldn't do it.

Edward Albee, interviewed

Stupidity's never blind or mute. So it's not a problem of getting people to expresss themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don't stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.

Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.

Deleuze

‘What are you working on, exactly? I have no idea.’

‘Reification,’ he answered.

‘It’s an important job,’ I added.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said.

‘I see,’ Carole observed with admiration. ‘Serious work, at a huge desk cluttered with thick books and papers.’

‘No,’ said Gilles. ‘I walk. Mainly I walk.’

Michelle Bernstein, All the King’s Horses, cited here.

In each life, particularly at its dawn, there exists an instant which determines everything[….] This instant is not always a mere flash[….]

How old was I? Six or seven years I believe. Stretched out beneath the shade of a linden tree, gazing up at an almost cloudless sky, I saw the sky topple and sink into the void: it was my first impression of nothingness, all the more vivid in that it followed a rich and full existence[….] Commencing on this day I began to ruminate on the lack of reality in things[….] I was one of those men predestined to wonder why they live instead of actually living, or at most living only on the margins.

The illusory character of things was once again confirmed for me by the proximity, by my ceaseless frequenting of the sea; a sea whose ebb and flow, always mobile as it is in Brittany, disclosed in certain bays an expanse which the eye could only embrace with difficulty. What void! Rocks, mud, water… Since each day everything was put back into question, noting existed. I imagined a night aboard ship. No reference points. Lost, irremediably lost – and starless.

Seen in its vastness, existence is tragic; up close it is absurdly petty.

from Jean Grenier, Islands

Robert Walser wrote his books just like a farmer who sowed and reaped, grafted, fed his animals and mucked out after them. From a sense of duty, and to have something to eat. "It was a job like any other."

"My most productive work times were morning and night: the hours between noon and night found me stupid."

"I could not tie myself to a paper or a publisher. I wouldn't want to make any promises that I couldn't keep. Things can only grow from me unforced."

[Jakob von Gunten]'s my favorite, among all my books." After a pause: "The less the action and the smaller the geographical region a writer uses, the more important is his talent. I am immediately suspicious of novelists who excel in plot and use the whole world as their character. Everyday events are beautiful and rich enough that a writer can strike sparks from them."

"Artists must fit in with the ordinary. They must not become clowns."

"In 1913 when I, with a hundred francs, returned to Biel, I thought it was advisable to be as inconspicuous as possible. No [gloating.] I went walking by myself, day and night. In between I conducted my business as a writer. Finally, when I had exhausted all my subjects, like a cowherd his pasture, I went back to Bern. At first things went well there for me. But imagine my fright when I got a letter from the feuilleton editor of the Berliner Tageblatt in which they said that I hadn't produced anything for half a year! I was confused. Yes, it's true, I was totally written out. Burned out like an oven. I made a genuine effort [despite the letter] to continue writing. But they were silly things, and that worried me. What works for me is what can grow quietly within me and what I've somehow experienced. Then I made a couple of amateurish attempts to take my life, but I couldn't make a proper noose. Finally it reached the point where my sister Lisa took me to the Waldau Institute. I asked her just outside the gate "Are we doing the right thing?" Her silence gave me the answer. What else could I do, but enter?"

"It's madness and cruelty to demand that I continue to write in the sanitarium. The basis of a writer's creativity is freedom. As long as this condition is not met I refuse to write again. [In that regard] no one has given me a room, paper or pen."

Across from the casino at Jakobsbad there's a baroque building that resembles a monastery, probably an old folks' home. "Should we go inside?" Robert: "It looks much nicer on the outside. One should not try to reveal all secrets; I've believed that my whole life. Isn't it good, that in our life so much remains foreign and strange, as though behind ivy-covered walls? That gives it an inexpressible appeal, which more and more goes lost. Today it's brutal, how everything is desired and taken."

On the matter of productivity: "It's not good for an artist to wear himself out in his youth. Then his heart is prematurely fallow. Gottfried Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Theodore Fontane saved up their creativity for old age, certainly not to their disadvantage."

"During my last months in Bern I had nothing to say. Gottfried Keller might have experienced something of the sort when he accepted the post of [Staatsschreiber]. Always pacing about the same room can lead to impotence."

"Writing in particular needs a man's full strength–it just sucks him dry."

"At the sanitarium I have the quiet that I need. Noise is for the young. It seems suitable for me to fade away as inconspicuously as possible."

"I was so happy this morning," said the enthusiastic Robert "when I saw clouds instead of blue sky. I don't care for beautiful views and backdrops. When the distant disappears, the close grows more intimate. Why shouldn't we be satisfied with one meadow, one forest, and a couple of peaceful houses."

"I liked my hospital room quite a bit. One lies like a felled tree, and needs no limbs to stir about. Desires all fall asleep, [like children exhausted from their play]. It feels like a monastery, or the waiting room of death. Why have an operation? I was happy as things stood. It's true I got nasty if the other patients got something to eat and I didn't. But even this didn't last long. I'm sure that Hölderlin's last 30 years were not as unhappy as portrayed by the literature professors. To be able to dream away in some quiet corner without having to constantly satisfy obligations is certainly not the martyrdom that people make it out to be!"

"Ordinary people like us should be as quiet as possible."

"You see, every time I moved into a new city I tried to forgot the past and immerse myself completely in my new milieu."

I asked Robert if it was true that he had burned three unpublished novels in Berlin. "That could well be true. At the time I was mad for novel-writing. But I realized that I had seized on a form that was to too long-winded for my talent. So I moved back into the little shell of short stories and feuilletons …"

"In Herisau" he continues "I haven't written anything. What for? My world was smashed by the Nazis. The papers that I wrote for are gone; their editors hunted down or killed. I've almost become a [Petrefakt]."

After a few steps, Robert: "Let's slow down; we don't want to chase after the beautiful, but have it with us, like a mother her child."

"In your youth you're eager for the unusual, and you're almost hostile to the everyday. As you age you come to trust the everyday more than the unusual, which arouses suspicion. That's how people change, and it's good that they do."

"How often such quiet, inconspicuous folk are underestimated when they're young, and yet they are that which holds the world together; from them comes the strength that helps a nation survive."

Robert never acquired his own library, at most a pile of little Reclam editions. "What else do you need?"

In the sun, Robert’s head reddens like a tomato. He smiles at me with enthusiasm: "It would be nice to keep going like this into the night."

"Back in Zschokke's day, they still understood how to write gracious novels. Today novelists terrorize readers with their dense tediousness. It's not a good sign for these times that literature acts in such an imperialistic way. It used to be modest and good-natured. Today it possesses [Herscherallueren]. Das Volk are said to be its subject. That is not a healthy development."

Robert: "It's good to be thrown back on simple things. Think of how many people shed their ballast in the war, and how beauty then had room to grow."

from Carl Seelig's Wandering With Robert Walser, in English for the first time, in a draft translation by Bob Skinner.

At the beginning of things, I tell W. - a beginning which, in Hindu cosmology, will return after the end – Vishnu, appears in the cosmic void before his servant, Brahma, who has been charged with the task of creation. How shall I begin, Lord?, asks Brahma. Begin with a sacrifice, says his master.

But what shall I sacrifice?, says Brahma. Sacrifice me, says Vishnu. What shall I use, as the means of sacrifice – what as the knife, as the altar, the post and the fire?, says Brahman. Use me, says Vishnu. I am the offering and the reward.

What is sacrificed, then? If it is Vishnu to whom the sacrificial act is dedicated, then God has been sacrificed to God. The object and subject of sacrifice are the same. But Vishnu is also the means of the sacrifice – its knife, its altar, the ceremony itself. He is the chant and the fire, just as he is what is sacrificed and is also the presiding deity of the sacrifice. He is all those things.

But why, then, is the sacrifice necessary at all? Perhaps it is because the world, the whole world we see before us, is what is not yet sacrificed. Perhaps the world itself – all of us, all our lives – is the offering to be burned on the fire.

But even that is wrong, I tell W. For the sages tell us that the world, seen in the right way, is, in its entirety, already a sacrifice. Seen thus, all things – everything that is part of the world, and even the world itself – are already aflame. The world burns upwards to God just as God is in all things as the burning itself and the power to leap upwards.

Then perhaps we sacrifice to remind ourselves that all things are already sacrifice, and that our souls themselves are afire, licking up into heaven like flames. Perhaps it is for our sake that we sacrifice, not God's: to remind ourselves of our burning souls and of the flaming that is our world. For our sake: then God would ask us to sacrifice because we ourselves are sacrifice, and we are part of that great sacrifice that God also is.

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.

from Herzog on Herzog

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You – wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics …

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition – that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon – further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write … And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night … Then, just after you turned off the light … A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner … 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea – the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique …

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life – the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter …

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist – you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.