The Andy Warhol Diaries Edited by Pat Hackett Review
A form of self-odium that only the finest amour-propre can produce.
Structurally, a postmodern structural follow-up to Molly Bloom's 40-page monologue at the end of Ulysses, even vaster in scale, one lean long soliloquy served in singular paragraph with no chapter division, unpunctured in its lissom flux. The voice runs. The notes are stark, a platter dropped on a table, here you go, there isn't anything more to it, so declarative, so flat, a dry hotdog on a paper plate.
It is pleasant to read matter that allows its division into evaluable units and methodical assessment, but it is also pleasant to move through amorphous slacks of vagueness that soften the brain into inactivity and loosen the saliva for no following mastication. Particularly in a landscape ill at ease with the consumption of aesthetics of no utility, it is good that the purposelessness of gland activity may yet have its way.
Things one can find in the book:
I Sentiments of self-effacement expressed through tubular exsanguination
"When they cut me open, they're going to find bone, limp, hollow tubes like cooked rigattoni, and gallons of creamy fat, too."
II Visceral ignobilities plasticised through aesthetic jargon
II.1 On Doritos:
"The bag has a lot of blue and black on it, as well as dramatic photos of the Doritos. Blue and black are inedible executive colours. They mark the contents as exclusive and ambitious. I think it's cool ranch flavour in the US, a thick dressing. I like processing Doritos in my mouth. Saliva piddles moisten while molars pounds to a paste. I compress the paste between my tongue and the roof of my mouth to make new Dorito flavoured spit leach from it and get into me via ducts. The paste remainders forms a curved cast and this is a remarkable temporary food object."
II.2 The romantics of Ibuprofen Express Liqui-Caps vials:
"I like eating indexed human technology... they're darling, and they work."
III Bursts of ecstatic paroxysms of chilled mania:
"The coil of thought gives a person insight into my battle with evil in my deified sense of self."
IV Beautiful views on art
"The ambivalence I like is performative like love sometimes needs be. I do equivocation socially but in my heart I am certain. Art's ambivalence is a bluff to protects its unpronounceable certitude, where unavailability’s coaxed into synonymity with ambivalence. it is about really adoring not knowing forever and ever."
There is nothing more to say. As Atkins says: "Understanding is most often comprehension and not sympathetic awareness."