Teleportations #1

From Pret opposite the British Library to Pret opposite Russell Square

30 May 2023

11:00-12:00
In therapy, I was surprised to discover I had not yet told my therapist about my teleportation project. I suggested that I could send him the links to the two radio shows I made for it, but he said ‘tell me about it’, so I did. If, like Robbie, you’re new to the teleportation project, I will leave you with this brief description from the first walking and reading group session I organised with Kat Black and Jupiter Woods:

What’s Love Got To Do With Teleportation is part of an effort to think and talk about time and space and the conditions of loving relations, as mediated by different speeds of movement and communication in the city. In an image of a near future London, Pret offers teleportation as a form of public transport (in partnership with TFL).

Here are some links you can follow for more information:
https://jupiterwoods.com/event/whats-love-got-to-do-with-teleportation
https://jupiterwoods.com/event/whats-love-got-to-do-with-teleportation-2 

https://jupiterwoods.com/event/whats-love-got-to-do-with-teleportation-3 

And if you follow these you can listen to the radio shows:

 

Before I continue, I’d like to recommend you check out @expretDOTorg on Twitter. 

18:55
I’m the only customer in the Pret opposite Russell Square. When I was served, the Pret worker initially mistook me for her colleague. There are two Pret workers here, that I can see; at present both are stood behind the counter, one partially obscured by a large vertical sign with three sides, made, I think, from strong white cardboard and advertising ‘Club Pret’: ‘Get 5 barista-made drinks & 10% off our entire menu. Every. Single. Day. [QR code] £30 per month.’ One of the workers has just emerged from behind the counter and now stands leaning on the other side, holding a large translucent pale pink rubbish sack. She wears a lanyard around her neck, a brown cropped sweatshirt and a pair of black trousers, with trainers. Her spine shows slightly through her skin when she bends over to deal with the rubbish. She puts a red and white striped paper straw into the sack and closes the cupboard doors around the bag and the grey plastic container it’s stretched around. 

I’m trying to Shazam the music here but my screen shows ‘this is tough’, and ultimately ‘No Result’. 

The worker with the brown cropped sweater is now sweeping, but her sweeping is interrupted by another customer, a man in a suit, shaven headed and wearing glasses, who asks her to check if his chosen baguette is vegetarian. It is. Suddenly there are several more customers, more than I can keep up with. The worker with the brown cropped sweater has winged black eyeliner, I notice. She continues to sweep.

I must leave soon for Senate House Library. Before sitting down to write I surveyed the Pret artwork and the sign saying Pret gives leftover food to homeless people. As if this is enough. The extent of homelessness near to Kings Cross station, just down the road, is painful to see, a clear sign of the housing crisis in this city. Next, I ate a packet of dark chocolate salted almonds, posting on Instagram more or less at the same time that I had started to think of What’s Love Got To Do With Teleportation again, and that Robbie had suggested that if I turn the project into a novel it should be titled Pret a Danger. I wondered if the recipe of the dark chocolate salted almonds had changed – weren’t they less salty, the chocolate not as dark as when I last tasted them, I can’t remember when? In the Pret opposite the British Library, from which I ‘teleported’, I ate a chicken, broccoli and brown rice soup, and two boiled eggs with spinach.

The broom the brown cropped sweater-wearing Pret worker is using has bright yellow bristles, and a silver handle. I think this outlet will close soon. I continue to wonder what music is playing. I think back to my soup and recall a line from the book (Caroline Levine’s Forms, 2015) I was reading in the British Library:

‘One cannot make a poem out of soup’.

Jacob told me that Baudelaire disagrees, and sent me ‘This Soup and the Clouds’, from Paris Spleen, trans. Louise Varèse:

My dear little mad beloved was serving my dinner, and I was looking out of the open dining room window contemplating those moving architectural marvels that God constructs out of mist, edifices of the impalpable. And as I looked I was saying to myself: “All those phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as my beloved’s beautiful eyes, as the green eyes of my mad monstrous little beloved.”

All of a sudden I felt a terrible blow of a fist on my back and heard a husky and charming voice, an hysterical voice, a hoarse brandy voice, the voice of my dear little beloved, saying: “Aren’t you ever going to eat your soup, you damned bastard of a cloud-monger?”

From: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v8n1/features/muse/candito_page.shtml 

I do believe that Bernadette Mayer would also think it possible to make a poem out of soup, if I ignore that Caroline Levine is being literal, considering soup as matter. 

What would happen to the soup of the teleporter if she had some in her mouth while teleporting? Would it affect the process of dematerialisation in the place of departure, and rematerialisation in the place of arrival, that the teleporting body must necessarily go through? I wonder which path not taken my duplicate self would be wandering today, if I were the teleporter for whom the process began to glitch, producing a multiple self with each teleportation journey. Perhaps she would have gone directly home after leaving the British Library, thus saving money on Pret food. No matter, I will move on now to Senate House.

With thanks to Kat and Sam D. Hannah G said she really dislikes the Pret opposite the British Library: ‘Place of depletion/dissatisfaction.’ I agree.

For some recent teleportation Instagram posts see @lizziehomershame

Pret opposite the British Library

Pret opposite Russell Square

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