part of getting your attention span back in the era of the Age of Attention is that there are so many urgent and necessary and demanding things in the world, but what the fuck is new? out of spite, I’ve decided to start making bad art if I cannot make good art. I’ve decided that I will masturbate to what little good porn there still is. that I will read voraciously (thanks Libby app even though your selection is limited and sometimes your e-books are transcribed slightly differently from the original) without caring if the opportunity cost is worth a more literary book. that I will stop being up my own haemorrhoidal ass about the pursuit of anything. get out of your own way, as it were.

sometime at the end of July (yes, it takes me that long to get to reading any link you send me, and if it’s a video, forget about it), I got this text from a very sweet person (Weilin) whom I’ve known peripherally but has always treated me with much more kindness, gentleness and earnestness than I deserve:

Hi marylyn! I thought of you while reading this as it reminded me of something you wrote, about your love for reading writing that is rich in laboured meaning. Our intern shared this the other day and i thought it was such a beautiful rumination on the erosion of our reading and thinking culture

in the substack post¹ proferred, Carl Hendrick references a highly conversational and illuminating book, Stand Out of Our Light (free to read here), which posits that our devices (and the endless information they offer) serve as faulty GPSes through the informational, rather than physical, spaces that we inhabit, and serve to further their own goals (views, clicks, distraction and consumption) as opposed to being tools to help further our own, ig/noble human aspirations (but attempt to convince us this is their function anyway). it’s quite beautiful and horrifying in the way that truth reflected to us often is. and the implication is of course that we will ‘amuse ourselves to death‘ if we allow ourselves to. already thinking is difficult. the temptation is to make everything compact, readable, whole. already it is a struggle to remember what it is I really love about reading. it’s a slow creep, perhaps not inexorable but definitely insidious. obviously I don’t harbour dreams of making highly popular internet content but it occupies some of my waking thoughts anyway. what I do harbour dreams of: making a really good painting of an unclothed woman entwined with a serpent. a mirror-lined studio in which I can be insane at any time. publishing erotic sloppy horror pulp with angsana books. having a mesmerisingly good time, always, even in social situations which are dull and awkward and sanctimonious (without the use of applied substances). yes, I’m quite bad at the game of ambition. yes, I am bad at imagining things for myself that are made of pentacles. I still don’t know what a bitcoin is and it’s not like I haven’t tried to get people to explain it to me. I’m not even good at the things I think I should be good at, like anal, or emotional limerence. I want to be a sex therapist but I did a psychology diploma for three years and it pisses me off to think about getting back into school to learn about CBT.

what is something you gave up? what’s something you gave up on? and what is your relationship to those things you thought you loved but decided to put down?

thinking and reading and building my mind palace again has been largely hard but hardly large, meaning it’s a small but niggling thread through which I’m building the unconscious self. a rescue of the destructive. I’m not one to rescue much but I think if we give the broken self some shit and a dark place to sit, it’ll all come together like spores infesting a body in a state of decay.

I’ve also been asking a question of a select few of my friends—those who are self-reflexive and like hard questions (maybe)—usually non-consensually and out of the blue because I have no use for logical segues. it’s “what do you think is your greatest flaw?“, a question usually reserved for job interviews, which is one of my favourite contexts in which to lie. and I’ve loved the conversations that spill out of this prompt. highly recommend. what I don’t recommend: self-flagellating, glossing over things to make yourself sound better, hyping your friend up when they say they hate a certain thing about themselves. I can’t live without curiosity and unabashedness about where our cracks and tails come from. which makes me very annoying to drink with, I’ve been told. two drinks and all the personal questions come out.

there’s no real way to say this without it being stilted but I’ve been chosen to be the inaugural Arts House Literary Fellow and will be for the next couple of months, until the end of November. they’ve given me a little room in which to have my dainty, cruel, perspicacious thoughts and where I can put my legs up on the wall in peace. I like that. I’ve also been writing through the fear of being afraid of being no longer able to write. the fear is real. the other thing I fucking hate is when people say ‘it’s like riding a bicycle’.

I cycle like I am made of wet limpness and scalding anxiety.

it is perhaps like riding a bicycle because every time I get on a bike it’s like it’s the first time all over again. each time there are a lot of stops and starts, I develop an irrational fear of gentle curves on the pavement, and I almost run into a jogger or child.

I’ve been warming up to writing while here, and will be performing one of my babies at the upcoming reading, can poetry be another way of haunting?, on the 11 oct 2025, 3-4pm, in response to Masuri Mazlan’s new work, can haunting be another way of enduring?. it’s free, come leh. I’ve taken the liberty of using a photo of Mazlan’s work because it’s so close to home. I’ll never get tired of talking about ghosts and hauntings and how the paranormal intersects with marginal existence.

my piece is about how codependent toxic partners and ghosts have a lot in common: they both bypass boundaries like they’re nothing.

it’s been a quiet 7th lunar hungry haunty month for me, ever since I stopped living with a haunted person. it’s been a peaceful every month. I don’t miss the night terrors.

be safe out there.

if you don’t want to come to the poetry reading (excuse me?), there’s also another non-literary thing happening in meatspace, called Between the Lines, on the 27th Sept, 7-10pm, and it’s a human library (I think) about sexuality and sexual wellness. I don’t know much about sexual wellness but I certainly know a bit about sexual malaise, the erotics of rot, and shame shame. come by and ask us questions. Action for AIDS is going to be there, and so is Sagami Condoms, Horny.sg, and a range of sex workers, dommes, kink practitioners and sex therapists (I know I said it was my dream but for these people it is a reality!²). free drinks. all welcome. remember what I said earlier about drinking with me, so grant me ante-forgiveness.

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1. I feel some kind of way towards Substacks, mainly the pressure to have an epiphany, or the unspoken rule that I have to be some kind of dopamine-inducing philosopher, or simply that I have to hit a certain wordcount of at least 3000 words, which I resent greatly and recognise that I probably am the victim of a not-healthy amount of projection. also I recently read something bemoaning the lack of “my sunday” type blog posts and the fact that everyone has a substack now, and I thought it might be useful to lean into that feeling. so here you go, have a low-stakes sunday. bless ↩︎
2. I remember saying it was my dream back in 2014 to be a burlesque performer and, while I may have made it a reality imperfectly, it’s better than no dream at all. ↩︎