The lonely audience and the used performers — attention economy at its most abject
echoes
From: Big Red Son
- Early text: porn starlet Jacklyn Lick, "I think a lot of fans
are very lonely people." [body Q&A run]; the fan taxonomy (the "mook"; the
peephole expression "on a face with jowls and no hairline"); the
near-closing image of a B-girl whose breast a stranger "very deliberately
pinches" — "Because we cannot see her face, we don’t know whether there is
any reaction there at all. We have an informed guess, though." [e-text]
- IJ echo: IJ's account of loneliness as the demand that pleasure-products
meet and deepen (the isolated viewer; Marathe's being "chained in a cage of
the self" — digest, pp. 774–779), and the novel's attention to used,
silenced, or unreadable women (Joelle behind the veil).
- Weight: shared-preoccupation