American Returns II: Another Collage

I’ve been back in America for almost two years. Lana’s new album runs more and more late. This story doesn’t begin with Lana del Rey, or Joan Mitchell, or John Ashbery, or America though. It begins in Britain or the Channel Islands somewhere, in the afternoon their time, when a popular right-wing influencer who I’ll call Peony, sends me a DM. She is going to kill herself and blame it on me. Three days later or so, she threatens to sue me for libel in the UK. Lana’s new song about having 57.5 million listeners on Spotify is grating on in the background at the time, aptly preoccupied with the signifiers of social media success as stand-ins for work of substance.