Exercise for the Reader
To each his own sacrifice. Sometimes it's difficult to accept that we live within the confines of a lottery and not a system. It's the purity of avarice. We want what we can't afford, the simple concept behind any-what-ism is the old carrot on a stick.
Greetings from the backlash: a molotov cocktail chucked in a window, an invisible urbanite scratching identity with a mixture of toluene, acetone and xylene or the Robinson Caruso, zombie-like, existence that herd on and off train platforms across the world.
Mailer recognized long ago (1974) that underneath it all, the disenfranchised believe, and act on the belief, that the god of our dreams is within us. Welcome to the applied science of graffiti.
What's in a name, when it's all in the name of mythology? Forward motion echoes history. It must.
The bylines are nothing more than an attempt to draw your attention to the medium of graffiti and encourage you to consume it. When you have done that maybe you'll be persuaded to appreciate the medium. The idea being that the more you appreciate the medium, the more informed you will become.
This writing is trying to pull you in and expose you to the medium much like an eye-catching picture. This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM. But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW! Because all the byline is attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you'll be doing what the byline is telling you, and if you read on you'll be doing what the byline wanted all along. And the more you read on the more you're falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good manipulation of a medium works.
They're TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it's describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you've read this far then you're TRICKED but you wouldn't have known this unless you have read this far. At least the byline is telling you directly instead of seducing you with a beautiful or haunting visual that may never tell you.
What is really being suggested is that you are foolish to consume or not consume a text merely as a consequence of the medium it is presented in. This is a con because if you agree then you'll probably appreciate this writing -- But the byline just warned you against that, and that a con is a con. And that a good text could be considered as one that gets you to appreciate it without getting wrapped up in a medium.
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