Betraying Gestures #12

reception gestures

There are two ways I start writing a Betraying Gestures newsletter: I either continue or react to a previous one, or I uncover a new subject or aspect of Betraying Gestures. #1 obviously started from something new, together with #2, #3, #5, #8, #9, #10, and #11—most of them. #4, #6, and #7 stemmed from previous ones. In #12, Reception Gestures, the present one, I began by inaccurately counting in an effort to find a smooth way of correcting something I wrote in Betraying Gestures #11. I was on the train texting with D on Tuesday morning when she told me she disagreed with an affirmation on the letter I had published the previous day, that someone had told me Betraying Gestures makes complex use of English. D said she thinks Betraying Gestures writes in simple English. In its simplicity, I didn’t consider what the Betraying Gestures that makes complex use of English could be understood as. I was referring, as was the person who originally made the affirmation, to the polysemy of the title; I didn’t consider that it could also mean that what made complex use of English was the newsletter, the publisher, the persona the publisher is, or even the novel I’m writing—I renamed the novel I’m "always working on", the one I talked about on Betraying Gestures #9, Betraying Gestures. On the train, I went to check the letter to see how it sounded and how I could fix it. It's not the first time I have had to redact an edition. This time I simply added “the title” between parenthesis so there would be no more doubts. Of course, the text received by email doesn’t change. The complexity of the title lies in its polysemy: betraying it, both means a gesture of betrayal and the betrayal of gesture, and everything in between. Betraying Gestures is so generous! On the train, I was doing something I had been avoiding for weeks. Betraying Gestures, with the label Coisas Que Matam, is publishing a cassette tape by Dubious Gestures—a Betraying Gestures spin-off enterprise including myself and Marina Dubia. On the train, I was editing the audio that will be copied to the tapes. The audio I also talked about in Betraying Gestures #5 is an edited conversation and reading between Marina and me. After we recorded it, I edited the beginning to hear how it would sound, and when I saw that it worked, I began postponing doing it all the way to the end. One of the reasons I was on a train was because I knew I had to be on one to be able to finish the tape, so I decided to travel somewhere I had to take a long train ride to get to. Since I first wrote about the tape in Betraying Gestures #5, it has been given a name: Colaglue. We talk about communication, languages, and the forces that keep things together—about a glue quality some writing has that adheres to new signifiers (and new signifiers adhere to it). We also talk about actual glue, the medium of the tape, and how our voices stick to it. These past few weeks, I’ve been going a lot to stationery stores, a particular one in a basement. I bought paper, blades, and glue, that I’m using to bind Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry). I talk so much about betraying and so little about gestures, their presence seems to be limited to the subtitles of the newsletters: navel-gazing Monday gestures, the always of a gesture, exaggerating is a gesture of readership, etc. When I interrupted editing Colaglue to check the newsletter to fix the mistake D had pointed out, not only did I realise I had something to write about in this week’s edition and that D was becoming a character who mirrors Betraying Gestures and that I fictionalise to mirror it the way I want to, but also that I don’t make use of the complexity Betraying Gestures (the title) entails; I don’t use or write much about its meaning of betrayal of gestures. This realisation really gets me worked up in my seat, as if I had just seen a major flaw. I try to catch my breath, I drink a sip of coffee, and I remember how, throughout the editions, I’ve insisted on the importance of tautology. I have a tautological title; therefore, even though there are semantic differences, every gesture of betrayal is also the betrayal of a gesture, and vice versa. Ok, I’m calmer now: the gesture is in everything I do; every word is a gesture; Sleepy and Sad (Happyberry), this, and the tape are gestures. The betrayals are committed and found along the way. What got me thrilled about Betraying Gestures when it started to take form was that it would be based on gestures and not only on the practice—or on the gesture of practice. The difference I saw between a gesture and the practice was that a gesture communicates—the publishing—while a practice often transpires behind closed doors. A gesture can only be a gesture if it has reception. That is why I have to come here every week and gesture Betraying Gestures; otherwise, it stops working! There is some exaggeration in all of this, but I’m playing with attributing Betraying Gestures the status of an almost-entity. So I’ve put a parenthesis on Betraying Gestures #11, indicating that the complexity refers to the title, and I internally organised the alleged complexity. At this point, on the train, I have drunk more than a few cups of coffee from their refill coffee system and am high on caffeine. I go for one more cup, and when I’m getting back to my seat, I drop the coffee. It spills all over the table, including on my computer, which I immediately start to dry with my T-shirt. Luckily, no coffee gets inside of it. I dried the table, and I sat back in my place. I expressed relief to the couple sitting in front of me; they were an audience for my clumsy caffeine high performance. I came to this trip motivated by the occasion to edit Colaglue, but

I also had in mind the idea of writing a story about reception set at a reception. Perhaps a hotel reception desk. When I think about reception, one of the first things that come to mind is a book by Paul Zumthor called Performance, Reception, Lecture that I never read much of, a phone’s lack of reception, and hotels—something Betraying Gestures appreciates; the impermanence, its aesthetic and codes, as the hotel room phone that is Betraying Gestures’ logo, discussed on Betraying Gestures #9 (I apologise for this linking, that has become a mania by now). In Colaglue, Marina and I discuss who a cassette tape is for in 2023. If I could redact this discussion, I would propose the word reception. I propose the word for Betraying Gestures (the newsletter) and ask how it arrives at its receptor, especially from where this edition began—a mismatch between intention and reception. A betrayal? In Betraying Gestures #5, I mention a friend who made a piece of a photo of her navel, C. It could be read as a sharp comment on reception. I wrote to her at the time; I was doing this when I mentioned someone, writing them and telling them about Betraying Gestures and that they were mentioned in it. Some of Betraying Gestures' first subscribers came like this. I was modeling Betraying Gestures on friends and colleagues and writing about them as an excuse to let them know Betraying Gestures existed—using single letters of the alphabet to keep their anonymity (gentle betrayals). I built a readership that, for my parameters, is considerable. But I stopped using this strategy, and with it, I stopped getting any new subscribers. To be honest, I stopped all my strategies for getting new subscribers. Substack provides me with a graph of my subscription progression; it climbs until August, when it becomes completely flat. C immediately subscribed to Betraying Gestures but only answered my email a couple of weeks ago, after reading the letter that had been published that previous day. She said it made her think of a term she had come across, business affairs, "an idea of relationships, flirtations, winks, and corner smiles", she wrote. But reception and readership are different things. Readership is the group of readers; reception is how this group of readers, or individual readers, receive or perceive a message. I tried to start my story about reception set in a reception a few times, and as neither of them went very far, my idea seems to end here, trying to grasp a question regarding reception that I still can’t enunciate.