a lesson in abjection

this is the letter

I'm writing this with tears in my eyes, I came down to London England for a  short vacation unfortunately i was mugged at the park of the hotel where i stayed all cash,credit card and cellphone were stolen off me but luckily for me i still have my passport with me. I've been to the embassy and the Police here but they're not helping issues at all.My flight  leaves in less than 3hrs from now but I'm having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won't let me leave until i settle the bills.I'm so freaked out at the moment got nothing left with me i was mugged off all i got.Can you please help me out with some cash?So freaked out here

i feel like tattooing it to myself, or writing every line all over again. i'm writing this with tears in my eyes. i came down to London England for a short vacation. everyone i've ever emailed on my yahoo address, which i'm now closed out of, were sent this email from ostensibly me. 10 years of emails. ex-lovers ex-professors those who might hire me publish me.

So freaked out here.

I'm so freaked out at the moment got nothing left with me
                                                     got nothing left with me

a sort of awful banal poetry

stolen off me but luckily for me
                      but luckily for me




Tonight at the Whole Foods my hip brushed the hot sauce at the salad bar and it shattered everywhere on the floor all over my pants my shoes. Then I ate my salad with a plastic fork and bit off part of the fork in my mouth and had to spit out  my food so I wouldn't swallow the plastic.

A locusts sort of day.

I feel like withdrawing completely from all publicness.

So freaked out here.

Like a violation. Is that dramatic? I feel violated. Like I was mugged in a way.

I think I need to take some sort of break from my public selfdom.

identity politics

someone from nigeria at 5am hacked into my yahoo and facebook accounts. why? i ask at first. to steal your identity john says. this amuses me at first on a philosophic level, even though i know it is no joke. fine i say. they can be obsessive-neurotic agoraphobic have terrible gas pains from traveling they can spend a semester rewriting the essay collection they can spend too much money on a haircut today because they are convinced they're becoming a hag they can sit at their childhood kitchen table and attempt to smile at their baby nephew while wondering why their maternal instincts are not directed at children they can wish they wrote serious theory-ridden essays  and instead they read romance novels they can google themselves at 7am they can not have had a real holiday in more than two years they can buck under the pressure of helping their uncle up the stairs to his bed at night with a strap tied around his waist as they pause at the foot of the stairs his brother their father is holding him up and there is the picture of him and their father as twins in sailor suits they can fight down the terrible terrible poignancy and melancholy of this they can worry they're getting fatter dumber uglier they can buy a pair of tight cigarette jeans with a 28 inch waist and then walk around all day in terrible pain from their bloated gut and feel again like a silly green girl for buying pants that are too tight for them they can they they can...

in all seriousness, if you received an email from me that I am in London and desperately in need of cash because I got mugged, my accounts got hacked. hundreds and hundreds of the people in my address book over the past 7 years received this email. It is a scam. I'm absolutely horrified by this. Sorry for any annoyance.

that dream that you're naked in some public place...i've carried it around with me all day. i feel so violated somehow, so vulnerable and exposed. And weirdly really humiliated.

but it's funny people are saying on facebook that they knew it wasn't me because the grammar was atrocious. but you all know that my grammar is atrocious and my punctuation and capitalization only occasional.

montevidayo

if by chance you haven't heard of Johannes' new online culture/lit blog montevidayo, you must must go spend time there and read brilliant essays deep in theory. Johannes has asked some great people to wax philosophic on any number of interesting topics pertaining to culture, poetics, film, art - they're coming out at so fast a pace! -  I'm especially excited that Megan Milks, John Beer and Danielle Pafunda are contributing (favorites so far being Danielle's essay on the poetic animal and Joyelle McSweeney's essay on the Korean multimedia artist Fi Jae Lee.) I plan to start reading it regularly - my one gripe is that even though the illustrations for the site are attractive, and they've fiddled with the design for better, I'm still having  trouble reading all the brilliance with the white type against the black background.