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I make few demands of my readers. I ask that they read carefully, that they observe the archival conventions, and that they do not write in asking why a given act has been excluded. To this short list I now add one further expectation, long assumed and never stated, concerning the condition of the reader's own person.
It has come to my attention that the study of this material is sometimes conducted over long hours, in enclosed rooms, by readers who have allowed the practical matters of upkeep to lapse. I understand the absorption. I do not accept the consequences.
The reader is expected to wash. Not symbolically, and not only the hands, but in the full and conventional sense, at the conventional interval. The reader is expected to attend to the hair, the nails, and the teeth, none of which improve through neglect, however deep the listening session. The reader is expected to launder the garment worn while reading, which is frequently the same garment worn the previous day, and the day before that.
Above all, the reader is expected to tame the ripe odour before it becomes a feature of the room rather than the reader. I will be candid: the forms I keep have a documented relationship with the unpleasant, and a reader may come to believe that personal ripeness is itself a kind of fidelity to the material. It is not. The records do not require it. I do not reward it.
A clean reader, a clean garment, a ventilated room, and a clear interval since the last attention to the body. I ask no more than this, and will not be argued down to less.
Standing order on reader condition
I anticipate the reply. The reader will point to the cassette culture, the squat, the basement, the deliberate squalor of certain scenes, and will argue that upkeep is a bourgeois imposition foreign to the tradition. I have heard this argument. I note that the figures who built the tradition, whatever else may be said of them, largely bathed.
The aesthetic of decay is a position one takes in the work. It is not a licence for the person who merely listens to it.
I keep this directive as a standing expectation of all readers, retroactive and ongoing. It is not enforceable, I having no inspector for the purpose, and rests entirely on the reader's cooperation. I trust the reader. I would simply prefer that the trust were earned at the basin.
VAGO
c. the present age