Some outtakes and notes from my new piece in Compact “Downtown Demons” (the composition of which explains the slow down in the diaries lately):
I felt, re-reading Dostoevsky's The Possessed, sometimes translated as Demons, about a dysfunctional group of anarchists in a sleepy, backwater Russian town, this summer, that I was reading the great American novel 2023: prophetic and disturbing vision of nihilism-in-action. While I am far from alone in noting the prophetic power of The Possessed, the novel, for me, served as a starting point for reflecting on my own experiences in New York City’s decadent, (rhetorically) revolutionary, (covertly) nihilistic, (ironically) religious downtown scene (which is in a symbiotic relationship with certain trends in Internet culture) over the past two years.