The Reader Gets Stalked

Riffs is revealed as a serial troublemaker

This brief outburst of an essay has been completely re-written since it was posted in Barçelona yesterday, 10.12.25

Behold the reader in the crowded metro. She fights off the rising tide of cellular conformity, the endless loop of same-thing distraction by a simple act of concentration. She is in her own way a warrior for humanity.

Tough circumstances make great readers: jail ( a friend had only Miller’s Capricorn to keep him company during a week in a Japanese jail), mountain ledges (boom out that cherished poetry with free reverb), cheap hotel rooms where the couple next door are banging on the wall (tough concentrating on the life of Dante while the wall behind your head is vibrating). I have an old habit of reading poetry to the man in Morrison’s grave on New Year’s Day before the crowds arrive.

Even the act of throwing a book across the room is a tribute to its power to infest our imagination.

Early morning is good for photographic encounters, before the psychic guard rails go up and people are still willing to talk to stranger. That openness, a conditioned reflex, changes culture to culture.

Today’s victim: reading a book. On Organizational Management. Her intense, somewhat cat-like, concentration, and those eyebrows, attracted the photographer like honey to a bee. We spoke but only briefly.

But true, I’m a pest who takes a photo of someone engrossed (perfect word with several shades) in a book. Because I’m a writer. Because I want to know. Because the sensation of reading is by nature a category different than almost anything else, even if it’s a building manual on a construction site. Because I’m a pest.

2

Privacy issues, just short of harassment, here. You want the heavy, don’t you ? You want it darker.

The walls of Barcelona’s metros are currently plastered with posters against male violence, featuring variously healthy but highly neurotic looking women suffering, biting their nails or lips in a worried manner. One looks close to tears, others stare into the distance. The slogan ? ‘If it feels like male violence, it is male violence.’

We’ve been here before. By my count, we’re in the 25th year or so of the Great Reëducation Campaign against the male of the species, to what effect no one is sure. Posters don’t seem to be doing the trick.

Someone else will have to speak to pertinent demographics: present levels of masculine violence against women in Catalunya, has it been going up or down; audience reception, because by definition these posters are directed at a mid- to upperclass urban audience, having little or no effect on those great unreachables, the resistant rural and working class — you know, those terrible people who feel that there are more serious issues than, did some rando say something rotten to Elizabeth in the elevator today. Whatever violence club-totting Emile or José is inflicting Out There is beyond the reach of these posters, which in some weird way are self-congratulatory. Everybody made money off it, and they can feel good about it.

(Having grown up in a household of continual, full-spectrum domestic violence from both sides, I am sympathetic to the Cause but find the Campaign dubious at best.)

So, am I a harasser ? In somebody’s book. The photos are now the universal possession of the internet and I didn’t ask about that.

Even worse: I’m a serial satirist and tormenter who not only takes people’s photos (typically but not always with their consent) but I go further, talking to strangers. And like any ordinary crim, I like to do it. I feel I must do it. I feel the day isn’t complete if I haven’t talked to strangers, if I haven’t engaged. We are social beasts and must talk, or we-you-they go mad.

3

Back to the easy stuff. After experimenting with substack’s photo edit page, I’m still such a rube I can’t make photos smaller. It killed the Céret essay, for me at least, having the photos all different shapes and sizes. Plus I’m on the tall side and I like my photos long and lean. Idiot in the Internet Age.

So this is a test. I failed. I could of course just size the photos super small before I hit substack. Let’s see.

Worked this time.

*Great coffee in Spain, cortado or espresso. This column / outburst is read-for-free-comment-for-free. You can pitch in for this writer’s supply of dark black aphrodesiac juice here. Five dollars a cup last I looked.