Read it and Weep is an original Disney Channel movie from 2006, based on Julia DeVille’s' novel How My Private, Personal Journal Became a Bestseller. In the movie, our protagonist Jamie pens a journal that centres around an alternative universe in which her fictional alter-ego is powerful and irresistibly popular. Later, the success of the journal’s unexpected publication alienates Jamie from her classmates and best friends. The perfect girl gets out of control and consumes the real girl. Fiction and reality devour each other to tears. Read it and weep! I look for this phrase outside the fault-lines of ordinary speech. Maya Man’s read it and weep is a ‘live’ poem described as an ‘infinitely performed text’ and focuses on issues of performative (hyper)femininity, perfection and aesthetics through collage, found text and diary fragments. Serif and sans serif text, in white and various shades of pink, layers endlessly with emoji flourishes on a soft mocha background, mimicking the Instagram banal of ‘keep calm’ style affirmations (see also Man’s recent collection secrets from a girl, a browser-based work that spotlights the influence of social media on the cultural hegemony of feminine self-improvement), the no-place Starbucks ambience of introspective hypergraphia. Since discovering the work earlier this summer, I have returned to it endlessly. Sometimes I leave it on running while doing other things, only to reopen the tab to reams of more text. There’s something disturbing about the infinite performance, the run-on. It’s like a Nintendog or Tamagotchi you forgot to feed; a Snake that won’t stop scrolling, having imbibed too many cycles of internet oestrogen; an unstoppable virus. A really hungry girl living in your browser.

While the Disney movie which is its namesake features chatrooms and the disintegration of fact and fiction, it relies on a wholesome foundation of authenticity, trust and self-disclosure (sealed with a kiss). Maya Man’s work, on the other hand, forges aleatory narratives from the playground of ‘internet trash’. The present-tense of an idle browser does the work of mashing and composting narrative together. Watching the text appear, I’m met with a feeling of voyeurism and body doubling, as if I am looking over my own shoulder while typing. Many of the sentences and fragments are uncomfortably familiar, in a cross-generational way, as though sifted from my own LiveJournal or Tumblr effluvia. The effect isn’t nostalgic but rather reconstituted through performance, citation and the ongoing dialogue of recontextualisation. Much of the text is fished from diverse sources: from Donna Haraway’s writing on cyborgs to contemporary think pieces on technology and digital cultures, links to soft exhibitions and Cathy Park Hong’s iconic Minor Feelings. Some of the lines are themselves hyperlinks, taking us direct to the source. But this is more than a dense web of citation. It’s a performance of emotional cognition as such, manifest in the hyperpalimpsest of the confessional post-internet poem. Our speedy brains trying to think shit. There is no ‘unlocking’ some primal meaning here. As the title implies: read it and weep. Read it and…react. Read it and heart, read it and zany face, read it and upside-down-smile-oblivion. Love! Very quickly, I find myself deeply involved in the confessional loop: imagining the sticky detritus of everything said online as part of a frangible masternarrative, sucking itself down the drain of Discourse. Girlhood’s whirlpool. All the things the feminised body is accused of — leakiness, excess and volatility — yield in Man’s coding impossibility through an infinitely seductive literary form. Is this confession, hypertext or scripture?

What does it mean to confess ‘the internet’ as both infrastructure and discursive plenitude — the junk food of endless, empty nourishment? And to write these confessions direct on the internet? I’m reminded of a line from Dana Ward’s The Crisis of Infinite Worlds (2013): ‘Teen Vogue has described the violent establishment of heaven on earth as the sun coming out with no clouds the last time’. This is girlhood’s apocalypse. Ruth Radelet of Chromatics singing ‘Shadow’ — ‘For the last time’ — in Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). I would totally believe this solar oblivion if I read it in Teen Vogue, not knowing fashion from authority. The sun shines out the ass of everything once said on the internet. As long as the webpage runs, there’s always more to come; it keeps shitting these textual materials of the infinite. The fantasy of the endless net is also a fantasy of entrapment. But there is no centre to this web, and not all the lines are legible. What does it mean to ‘read’ read it and weep? I feel intensely summoned into the alter-world of some kind of ur-Girl (nay, It Girl) who curated it. Anatomy of identity traced in variable lettering. The poem pokes at internet culture (‘the TikTok musical industrial complex’), dating (‘But I don’t like that he’s into drugs’), online trends in fashion and gender (‘bimbos of today’, ‘the influencer industry’), friendship and the struggle for self-definition. The lines jostle for attention in a game of typographical value. It feels redundant to point out that ~the personal~ is deeply woven with the economic, the algorithmic, the patriarchal and Big Tech theology. Redundant because we (by whom I mean, a reader familiar with the sources at play here) experience self, as if to say self was possible, as just this very impasto of cultural pressures. With some level of excess — lol that I wanna say jouissance – Maya Man slicks this thiccly layered, slightly toxic self all over your screen. Fuck minimalism. Gender as clickbait ontology forever.

We might contextualise read it and weep within a longer history of post-internet ‘gurlesque’ and its disruption of the confessional through techniques of performance, collage and humour. Arielle Greenberg, who coined the term, describes it as ‘a conscious mash-up and nod to other literary theories and cultural phenomena including the grotesque, the carnivalesque, burlesque, and riot grrl’, encompassing ‘work which performs femininity in a campy or overtly mocking manner, risking being inappropriate, outlandish, even repulsive’. The gurlesque is itself a frankenstein assemblage of existing work, just as read it and weep beckons you to the text through the interplay of gendered, cultural, capital and digital matters. You don’t so much read as glide, meander, navigate, stumble around it. I have this flashback to Belinda Carlisle’s ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ playing at the Magnum skating rink in Irvine (which you can now watch being demolished). Probably I had pigtails and tucked flared jeans into my too-small boots; probably on ice, I forgot how to use my legs. I fell and saw god. I never learned to dance like a girl, so I fell over. I wanted to go back on Neopets and be anonymous, genderless, everyone. Did we ever lose the distinction between earth, heaven and the internet?

This failure of distinction and code-learning results in a weeping wound. It begs to be written into, tended. ‘I must love my nothingness’, writes Simone Weil, quoted by the poet Maï Ivfjall on Twitter. read it and weep is a conscious mashup of tumblr girl culture and all its baroque proliferations of suffering, introspection and indeterminacy (see podcasts Hate Fiction, Internet Aesthetic or The Polyester Podcast for more on this). Indeterminacy is baked into its very form. The violent, electric establishment of too much writing.

I’ve said this is a poem, but it’s been auctioned and exhibited as an artwork. The artist and poet Bunny Rogers (herself an early purveyor of a post-internet gurlesque, whose cryptic poetry dumps offer abysses of digital gender performance) makes a distinction between the kinds of exposure and intimacy found in art and poetry. In a 2020 interview with Thomas D. Trummer at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Rogers admits:

Poetry is more humiliating, for sure. When making art you can distance yourself. You can separate—you can make something and step away from it and say “that’s done.” But with writing it feels much more brazen. […] that’s part of why art’s so appealing to me, because you’re able to say things and then feel some sort of protection, you know? That it’s still shrouded in this encoding or mystery or whatever…

Embedded in the work of art is the possibility of refusal. That’s not what I meant at all. You’re reading too much into it. Trummer suggests that ‘poetry seems to be more connected or embedded in time, in terms of an event’. Every time I refresh the screen of read it and weep I restart the possibilities of an event. It is a poem in ‘run-time’ and one that never ends; one which can’t be crystallised in a single line, burning my ears or eyes. How could you exhaust it? Somehow, Man’s work hybridises the visual and poetic to embody both brazenness, shame and withdrawal. In lieu of static collage, we have constant textual emergence, the lightplay of screentext. The piece dramatises the act of writing as the command drive of ‘generative experience’. Content proliferates. A lowkey diary entry bears aesthetic equivalence to high theory. Pink feasts on latte data. Text is buried beneath text; selves rewrite selves. There’s no distance between what I wrote five years ago and yesterday’s tweet. In a sense, everything is humiliating. Time rewires through the glimmering neurons of linguistic stimulus.

Here, the dopamine of ‘posting’ is supplanted by the saturation of text as weathering density. It can’t help itself; it just keeps happening, as if governed by unknowable, esoteric systems. Affect, meaning and voice overwhelm as particle clusters of the original event and context of their source appearance. Why does this resonate so much with me? I love the static build-up of a blog: how its posts gather dust, the way a link is so contingent; the implicit webtree from which fragile jewels may be plucked and sifted. Here however, overlay casts everything into permanent simultaneity. Sometimes my addled brain sees the text not as language but the stylised typography of a temporary furniture, a diagram of atmospheric pressure, a chaos of isobars. The ornamentation of infinite graffiti on a schoolyard mystic writing pad. Freudian awe. I’m kind of paralysed in the desire to swipe or reset. I stick with memory’s excess.

As video content gets all the algorithmic clout of our current moment of reels and stories, read it and weep challenges the grooves and rhythms of reading: in turn, challenging how selves (and in particular, girl-selves) are (re)written online. The title is a provocation and imperative. What is the ‘it’ here? Human capital? Gender capital? Affective value? The creator economy? The sum total of everything the artist read on the internet during the years of composition? The artwork itself, and who now owns it? The possibilities of meaning which cluster, fall and blur between the lines? Where to put this pain, the ‘it’: the singularity formed from all the text it had swallowed. Whose feminine abjection, whose weep-worthy lines, whose diary, whose heartbreak and humiliation, whose internet (sub)culture does ‘it’ belong to? In reading this, we are mourning something, but it doesn’t integrate into some complete, developmental ‘whole’. Girlhood itself folds into what Sianne Ngai calls ‘the cute’ and its aestheticization of the ‘minor’. Maya Man gives us a hyperobjective girlhood, whose massively distributed textuality is this self-regenerating vibe-emulsion: only phasing briefly into anything so much as a writerly identity, a confessional voice, a critical avenue or a Mary Sue. ‘I want to live a life worth writing about’. What’s the residue of this languid practice-as-research for life? Desire, fantasy and the wound we keep poking with hex codes and glowing keys.

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read it and weep can be viewed for free at readitandweep.live.