Betraying Gestures #3

a short gesture of professionalism

I’m not a very long person is a sentence from a text I wrote a few years ago. I know that words have a way of coming back. I am not a very long person are seven words that came back. They came back in a text called Longing. In Longing, I doesn’t know how long a stairwell is because I got distracted by a moving truck carrying long furniture, which makes I think of how long the house this furniture came from or is going to has to be. I hopes these stairs are not too long because I is not a very long person and doesn’t like long things. Last week was a long week of long days. On one of these long days, I started reading Either/Or by Elif Batuman—not Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard. I read Batuman’s Either/Or, the continuation of Batuman’s The Idiot, in a hotel bathtub. The Idiot follows Selin during her first year as a student of linguistics at Harvard, and Either/Or follows her in her second year. The Idiot is set in 1996, the year I was born. On Friday, I celebrated the 27th year that separates me from the day I was born in 1996. I celebrated my birthday reading Either/Or in a hotel room bathtub. Submerged in the bathtub, I read that the books Selin usually likes are long books, containing descriptions of furniture. The furniture I described in Longing is long, and I conclude the text by saying the books I like are not long books. Either/Or is a fairly long book. On Friday, among all the congratulatory messages, I received a message from L inviting me to read a text for her exhibition. She said the text is seven pages long. L invited two other people to read the text. We will meet for one or two days during the next week, and she will record our reading for an installation she is doing for an exhibition. I wrote to A: I, a professional reader. The idea that I became a professional reader came from receiving an invitation to read and being paid to do it—L offered to pay me. Professionalism (or the lack of it) has always been a subject for me, one that takes me to Ana Cristina Cesar, the poet whose biography I said I was writing when I wasn’t or had any intention of doing so, that I mentioned in Betraying Gestures #2. In At Your Feet, Ana Cristina says she is now a professional. I started a newsletter without knowing much about newsletters. Last week, I had a conversation about them. I learned that the newsletter is a media commonly associated with professional/institutional communication, even though there are newsletters that break with the stiffness associated with professionalism. I’ve been asking people what newsletters they read and hearing about newsletters that experiment with literary and artistic possibilities. Betraying Gestures wants to experiment and play with the format of the newsletter, but Betraying Gestures also claims the professional role of a newsletter. My good friend S told me on the phone today that she is an artist; it was a decision she took. She had formulated the same statement before in different ways: that she is a sound artist, a full-time artist, a sound worker, a part-time sound artist, etc. Today she said, word for word, that she is an artist. Profession is the act of declaring something. S uttered a profession. Betraying Gestures is the profession of publishing. Betraying Gestures is trying to be long. To reach farther, reach other people. Betraying Gestures is a playful but confident way of saying, with Ana Cristina, that now I am a professional. Assigning me a profession or a role is what Betraying Gestures gives me when I, for instance, make plans to participate in art book fairs. My plans: one fair in Rio de Janeiro and one fair in Berlin. There is a small device that I buy from China that both records and reproduces sound. I can publish texts by reading and recording them with these devices, and I can show and sell them at the fairs. This week I will show (publish) a text in an exhibition using one of these devices (or Betraying Gestures will). I will install one of these devices on the wall at the height of the ear. On the device will be the Sally/Lamby story, which the visitor can hear by pressing a little button. I asked S to record it for me, the same way I was asked by L to read for her work. S and I talk a lot on the phone. We speak almost every day. Even when we don’t speak because one of us is busy, there is usually a missed call. For years, we lived in the same city, and now, for years, we have been living in different cities. We long to see each other, we are trying to arrange a trip together in the summer. Betraying Gestures longs for possibilities and conversations, I have been trying to involve other people. I have the feeling that the idea of professionalism is sharing the value of something with others. Ana Cristina Cesar says that she is a professional when she isn’t stern and harsh anymore. Perhaps it means she now knows how to communicate and negotiate with others. Last week was so long. And there is another long week to come. I called this letter a short gesture because it is shorter than the other letters, and even though this is a format that is still being established, and I started by saying I don’t like long things, I consider the length of this letter the small betrayal of a format. My legs are short, and my shorts are short. This week I saw an exhibition in a car that lasted for an hour. It was a short exhibition. Betraying Gestures is measuring the length of my professionalism.