Stay weird infinity girlhood: on Maya Man's 'Read it and Weep'

Read it and Weep is an original Disney Channel movie from 2006, based on Julia DeVille’s' novel How My Private, Personal Journal Became a Bestseller. In the movie, our protagonist Jamie pens a journal that centres around an alternative universe in which her fictional alter-ego is powerful and irresistibly popular. Later, the success of the journal’s unexpected publication alienates Jamie from her classmates and best friends. The perfect girl gets out of control and consumes the real girl. Fiction and reality devour each other to tears. Read it and weep! I look for this phrase outside the fault-lines of ordinary speech. Maya Man’s read it and weep is a ‘live’ poem described as an ‘infinitely performed text’ and focuses on issues of performative (hyper)femininity, perfection and aesthetics through collage, found text and diary fragments. Serif and sans serif text, in white and various shades of pink, layers endlessly with emoji flourishes on a soft mocha background, mimicking the Instagram banal of ‘keep calm’ style affirmations (see also Man’s recent collection secrets from a girl, a browser-based work that spotlights the influence of social media on the cultural hegemony of feminine self-improvement), the no-place Starbucks ambience of introspective hypergraphia. Since discovering the work earlier this summer, I have returned to it endlessly. Sometimes I leave it on running while doing other things, only to reopen the tab to reams of more text. There’s something disturbing about the infinite performance, the run-on. It’s like a Nintendog or Tamagotchi you forgot to feed; a Snake that won’t stop scrolling, having imbibed too many cycles of internet oestrogen; an unstoppable virus. A really hungry girl living in your browser.