Ho ho ho – I feel so naughty! Plugging in the modem, hearing the little diddle-noises it makes as it converses with a computer somewhere else... I’m reading fiction instead of writing an essay, you see, as I’ve often done in the past and have done so again. This time it’s Beckett’s Molloy. I’m slowly, through philosophy and fiction, dismantling the psychological and ideological and conceptual framework with which I entered university. Instead – I read books about humans as machines, as Übermensch, as tramps shorn of the ‘inessential’ parts and concerns of human existence. All very individual books – that is, books written by human creatures that are alone – well, perhaps with the exception of the books that talk about desiring-production. (Naming names can make things somewhat exclusive, sometimes.) It’s been said by some this week that I lack integrity – which leads me to wonder what that is and whether I should adopt some. These might be things best suited to anonymous confession, for reasons of prudence, but I won’t keep it to myself – it’s too much fun typing about them, after all! An attractive typeface draws attention to what one might call the architectural attractiveness of words – their simplicity, their “purity”, you might even say. The television is finally keeping mute about that strange parade of sports and competitors and people in tracksuits that is unfolding (and being reported as multiple parochial narratives across the whole of television-land) in Greece. The laptop is making scurrying, tapping noises – ad software at work, but I can cut it off at the breach. Military metaphors – I saw an exhibition of photography from Paris today, including some of the siege at the time of the Commune. It was quite incredible: the Tuileries Palace like a Roman ruin, torched by socialists or insurgents. Coming back to the books that I read, by people quite alone: it is the sort of fiction that appeals to me, when I am at the desk at this still hour. Oh, but now I’m bored with this sort of writing, so I’ll paste it up – I wouldn’t go on so long, but the tap-tapping of the keyboard is so wonderfully percussive.