Shannon is a recurring person in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 8 times across 8 issues between June 06, 2024 and May 13, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as "Shannon and I had to run from the Brooklyn Bridge through a storm of gnats"; "I see Shannon in line at the show looking chic"; "I walk over to Dimes To Go to meet Shannon". It most often appears alongside Jean's, KGB, New York.
- Article page
- Shannon
- Mention count
- 8
- Issue count
- 8
- First seen
- June 06, 2024
- Last seen
- May 13, 2025
- Instagram handle
- @catherineshannon
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
I’m making every effort to walk to the MuuMuu House Dasha Tao Lin Writers Life Tips reading on time, but I arrive at 7:01pm and I already can’t get in the door. I’m standing on the street for a while while my sister goes to Casetta and my friends arrive. Smoking - one cigarette, drinking: nothing, until someone offers me water because I am looking depleted. The sky is all orange because it’s sunset but lots of cloud cover. It’s the best sky color in the world, someone is saying. Remember when the whole day turned orange from the forest fires last summer, someone else is saying. I remember the bright orange sky obviously, and also that there was a plague of locusts that descended on the East River, and that Shannon and I had to run from the Brooklyn Bridge through a storm of gnats and thick red air before ducking somewhat unwelcome into Swan Room.
I wear a black suede skirt to the Elena Velez show, a Forte Forte blouse that would have looked cooler untucked but I didn’t want to look wide, LaBucq heels, white socks, I often worry that everything I own is awful. I see Shannon in line at the show looking chic and a tiktokker known for almost unwatchable parody videos doing street interviews ahead of her. There’s the Hallowed Sons biker game revving engines loudly on the sidewalk, but when I remark at their rudeness, I am told that they are there for the show, part of the spectacle, obviously. Later, I see them inside. I’m not a fashion critic. I’m not really a critic at all. I feel earnestly, simply happy to be here. The show is on the seventh floor of an office building, an industrial space, lots of light, only two rows of seating down a long runway and an apocalyptic techno-adjacent soundtrack that, in a very pared down sense, works.
People are starting to filter back towards the bar, and people are starting to ask me what I’m reading. I pour a glass of red wine even though I’m allergic. I walk over to Dimes To Go to meet Shannon. Purchase gluten free bread. Sharp cheddar.
Inline links: Dimes To Go
I’m recalling things in bullet points. Diner at Casino with Ellie and Shannon. Lychee martini, then dirty martini then steak tartare and chicken and pasta, etc. Then, The Magician publication party at Sovereign House. I’ve been writing about this book - it’s very nice to see the short film that accompanies it. Here is something I have written about this book - I hope to share the rest of it it soon:
In her Substack, Natasha Stagg recommends The White Ribbon screening at Metrograph this afternoon at 3:30pm. I imagine you might find a strange appeal in luxuriating in a weekday afternoon theater experience that will leave you feeling as awful as this film is sure to. Natasha also recommends the new menu in the commissary, but Shannon recently told me it's fallen far from its glory days. I'll have to stop by soon (maybe tomorrow, at 3:30pm) to see for myself.
WHAT I DID Monday, December 1 Mental and physical clarity is the thing that is the prerequisite for everything else. This is the thing to which I have returned. It happened suddenly. It happened in a hotel in Western Massachusetts. I'm not enlightened, but now I can breathe. I like to run every day. It doesn't have to be for lengths of times that feel like eternity. Just a few minutes is fine. The uptown B is late. I’m sitting in the subway station with plenty of time to Make Big Plans. I'm going to Be A Hostess. I'm going to Be A Tutor. I'm going to be a Professional Rock Climber. The truth of it is, my stint in bohemia is becoming unsustainable. "If you need money, you should be a pilates instructor," says Shannon. "Oh, true." I say The truth of it is, this idea sounds as good as any. I've tried to stop correlating monetary concerns with any sense of my creative ambitions. In a mirror world, I ghost write letters for my friends. I teach strangers how to scale buildings and to make their limbs long. In New York, I am better. I crave the forest and the snow and the pine trees by the window and particularly the ocean. I crave all this more than anything. When I arrive in the country, the expanse always shocks me. I don't know what to do with all that space. After class, I go to the dermatologist. It’s decorated for Christmas. They tell me everything is fine. This is the part I like the best: where I brace myself for terror, and then they tell me everything is fine. Uptown, I go to my aunt’s office. We have sushi and tea. We go the AMC. I like Wicked. It’s very sweet. I saw someone say they like Wicked in the way you like Barbie, but I like Wicked more. I like the soda machines and the supersized cups and the reclining red seats and the nerd clusters at the AMC. I like uptown. I could live here. I did live here, once. Wicked feels like a movie in the way a movie-in-the-theater should. Afterwards, David asks me three times if I liked Wicked. Yes, I say three times. He asks me if I can give a full review, but I can’t, not really. I liked it, I say. In the car home, I am cruel on a phone call that I made with the express purpose of being kind. I meet David at Cassidy’s house, where a lot of people are watching Spy Kids. Do you want a white claw, someone asks. No, I say. I am crying a little on account of my cruelty in place of kindness. David tells me something I should remember about being kind. I don’t, ultimately, remember what he says, but after this, everything is good. Tuesday, December 2 Riley and I go to Fanelli’s for dinner. Club sandwich and martini. I haven't felt removed from social activity or the desire for extroversion lately. To the contrary, I've been wanting very suddenly to connect very deeply with old friends. I want to go to Florida and drink Virgin Pina Coladas. I did that in college. I had so much fun when I did that in college. Can I come if you go to Florida this year, I ask Riley. Yes, she says I think we should go. I make a vlog with David. It's so much fun. David says I can't post the vlog, but then I edit it with Slavic music and then he says ok fine. I've felt an aversion to parties that place themselves at things like The Intersection Of Culture and Nightlife lately. I don't like when people who immerse themselves in these things express cynicism or borderline disgust towards a Scene. I feel immensely grateful for a community with adjacency to and/or aspirations towards art. I like readings. I like gestures towards intimacy, even false intimacy, even social climbing intimacy. I like that these things stem from something other than voyeurism, despite their tendencies towards voyeuristic or pseudo intellectual descent. But, I can't bring myself to attend. You haven't seen me in weeks. Not that anyone is counting. Not that I'm even counting, except it's hard to find things to comment on outside of Myself when I'm keeping close quarters. So bored by brooding. I could do something like Get Arrested. I could do something like Make A Gift Guide. David's friend calls him. "Do you want to go to KGB," he asks. "No," says David. "I'll go," I say. "Do you want to take Chloe to KGB for me?” David asks. “No,” his friend says, “she's kind of a dud socially." David takes his headphones out. "He says you're kind of a dud socially," "I'll see her six days in a row and it’s just her, and when I finally don’t see her, Chloe has a party with all her beautiful friends," he says. Then he lists out all my beautiful friends. We don't go to KGB. Wednesday, December 3 I stay inside for most of the day, that's what I assume you do when there's a man hunt. I remember the Boston Marathon bombing. I’d canoed there on the Charles River with my dad, and after we left the race safe and sound we learned that no one was allowed outside for days. They eventually found the guy in the hull of someone else's boat. Some different suburb. I assume that it’s the same today, but the UnitedHealthcare Assassin proves to be less of a threat to public safety. I go outside around two pm. SoHo is booming. Back inside, it starts to snow. I can see it through the greenhouse ceiling. David reads me transcripts of conversations he’s overheard in coffee shops. It would be hard to fake real coffee shop gossip, we both agree. There's a strangeness, a nonsense almost, in the overheard familiarity of conversations among people you don't know. The snow has come with wind, and I can see an umbrella on the roof above swinging wildly. I worry it will come crashing through. I worry that wind and icy pebbles of snow and shattered glass and the sphere of the umbrella stick are all about to crash down on me. The snow is thick and icy, but it’s melting as it lands on the glass and so there is no noise. I kind of think the snow looks like nuclear fallout. I almost say this out loud, but then I think that wouldn’t be very pleasant. David gets a text that “It’s snowing!!” and he rolls his eyes. “I don’t find whimsy in snow,” he says. “I do,” I say. Of course I do. Thursday, December 4 It's a strange week. I keep grasping for some concrete sense of how things make sense. I was acting insane last week, but now I am not. I was floating in space last week, but now I have mental and physical clarity. Things are never that simple. Acting Insane tends to happen in waves. The truth of it is, my sense of stagnation comes largely from the fact that I am acting very stagnant. It also stems from my phone and from things like staying up all night. We go to Sarabeth’s for dinner. They have happy hour now. I don't like to eat or drink early, and while I’m quite familiar with the concept of happy hour, I feel like I'm discovering it for myself for the first time. I'd like to order all the eight dollar cocktails, the shrimp, the deviled eggs. We’re sitting at the bar and it's cozy even though it smells slightly like cleaning supplies. Sterile in an old school way. This is not something I hate. The Greenwich Village Sarabeth’s just opened down the street. I like the Upper West Side Sarabeth’s because I would go every year on my half birthday as a child. We would go to The Central Park Zoo and then to Sarabeth’s. It wasn't as spoiled or superfluous as it sounds. It was just a nice tradition. Today, Sarabeth’s is nice until it isn't - a slow crescendo into an unhappy hour as the three to five pm menu is swapped out for normal prices. So, I stay up all night and reconsider if I have rediscovered mental and physical clarity after all. I call my friend and she says I have literally no idea what you mean by that. But I don't think I'm just using buzzwords. Clarity is the prerequisite to everything else. This makes sense to me. Next week is all the holiday parties in the world. I like this time the best. I'll go to the tree at Rockefeller tonight. I'll go to The Central Park Zoo. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO It’s the busiest week of the year… choose your ventures wisely. Monday, December 9 From 7:30pm — The Thing Is returns to Jean’s. This month's show (It’s A Wonderful Life) will star Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, and Rebounder.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6r7b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F46b17e6b-abf9-4738-96fe-3836b061abc3_1334x872.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CEI2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe956e9be-2073-42ec-8943-74e226bc24bf_1518x850.png, The Thing Is, Jean’s, It’s A Wonderful Life, Delaney Rowe, Julia Shiplett, Jake Cornell, Rebounder
From 7pm - 9pm at Heart — Are.na hosts the launch party for Are.na Annual 2025. There will be copies of the book, drinks, and readings. Are.na is one of my favorite corners of the internet - “online software for organizing content, and a toolkit for assembling new worlds from the scraps of the old.” The Sixth Are.na Annual launch will feature readings by Finnegan Shannon, Gerardo Ismael Madera, Reuben Son, and Megumi Tanaka. Custom drinks by Megan Pai and Cammie Lee.
Inline links: Heart, Are.na, Finnegan Shannon, Gerardo Ismael Madera, Reuben Son, Megumi Tanaka, Megan Pai
Monday, April 1 My mind was reeling so fast in my Irish Literature class this evening. I started flicking through Internet Web Applications at warpspeed. I made some calls. I didn’t go crazy. “Saying no is a far more reliable path to avoiding sin than saying yes”, I heard someone say, through my fog, through the haze - that snapped me out of it quite quickly. “What if you literalize that, and just say no to everything?” a quiet girl across from me asked. I wrote this part down - “JUST SAY NO TO EVERYTHING!!!!” It was humid, heavy, soon-to-be-hot spring, today, in New York. I lost my head. Truly. I became very braindead very quickly, today. I recovered as best I could. It’s the way these things always go. Unmoored from the interactions you’ve been taking for granted, you’ve been alone with your thoughts and suddenly, you’ve found yourself thinking Nothing At All, and Saying A Lot Out Loud And Saying A Lot Online. You realize, suddenly, how wrong this all is, and then you become briefly concerned that maybe, suddenly, it is already too late for you. Or maybe it isn’t too late after all.. Water on the windowsill. I remember spring two years ago, a taxi cab from Chelsea down to where the East River runs near the Lower East Side. I wore a yellow dress and I ran like the wind from the river to the hotel bar. The fires. The maggots. It was that day in New York when it felt like cosmically, biblically, something bad was probably about to happen. The Seven Plagues. The air was thicker and hotter, then. I am thinking about that day because I was braindead on the Internet then, too. Celsius, protein bar, things had begun all thick and ugly and then I’d been whisked away into a big black car, shuttled to the bar at Nine Orchard, my friends convincing me to stick around and then I did, I stuck around for a while, I never really left after that, come to think of it. “It’s Deep Tech Week in New York,” Shannon tells me, today - whatever that means. She sends me an event as such, and I investigate the schedule for the rest of this week from there. Deep Tech Week is a week of events about Tech, and they added the word Deep in front of it to make it seem more cool, I realize quickly. “Turning Science Fiction into Reality,” the text on the website says, and I don’t really like the sound of that. I find that premise, as strictly a premise, material reality aside, even, to be nearly cartoonishly evil. But, I suppose I’ll try to be less pedantic. I eat a sugar cookie (gluten free). Two protein bars from that new brand DAVID. A brand activation crispy sandwich from Joe And The Juice. The packaging is orange instead of that usual nice pastel pink. KEVIN DURANT, the packing says. It is nine pm, and I am suddenly ravenous. Good. Looks like I got my corporeality back. I really was planning to go to the Deep Tech Party tonight, but the rain started in an instant, in the exact instant I was set to leave, really. Like it’s trying to communicate some form of serendipity, reason, warning, whatever. Monday is the day where I let myself get every last thing done on my phone. My eyes burn. It rots the soul. My week continues and I become much more particular with myself. Tuesday, April 2 It’s not that I mind being kind of exhibitionist, even, but I can’t control the feedback loop and I start to drive myself mad. Taking stock of the state of the union like THINGS THAT ARE "IN": Swimming
WHAT I DID Thursday, May 8 I've been panopticon-ing everyone here, and you have asked me to stop. Ok. I'm sorry I have already told about what happened on Wednesday. Not here. Imagine it's all fantasy. I mean it when I say that I am really not talking about myself. Being all confessional and then I feel kind of gross about it. Being kind of glib about the parts I thought were most sincere. I've been neglectful, most of all. Right now, I am most sorry about that. In the end, you'll be lying on a Japanese floor mattress and you'll be thinking about the parts that are still the same. Tonight, I went to the party that I usually avoid. I went home before the parts that come next. Another flight tomorrow, and I wish there wasn't more travel though, I am glad for where we are going. An old school hotel, Sue Wong beaded dress, borrowed shoes and sharing the different details of my life like oh it's been all grad school and true love and self surveillance - this part will be nice. My friend suggests at dinner - I don't have insomnia, I live in an environment of psychological torture sleep depravation. I could latch onto this. Psychological torture. My friend says - New York vs LA; you can find nuance in uglier things here and she cites me as the example of nuance as if I am something like resilient or tough. I have never been described as either of these things before, and I hope I haven't been plying myself in victimhood too heavily, because really - my circumstances are wonderful. It is a sweet description, though. I'm glad I'm not a fraud, at least. Lots of parties this week and those were nice while they lasted. You can't be indignant without clarity, which - I am working on having more of. I set up the summer so as to have the days stretching endlessly in front of me. This concerns me a bit. I will need to read for two hours every morning. There is a novel forming mostly beneath my writing here, and I will need to finish that. All at once it's like everyone has drawn the same conclusions about good and evil. Everyone was all like this is so good, and then everyone snapped at once and it was like: this is evil. I have briefly wondered where this change would map out cosmically, though, I have tried to be a mystic about it, and my basic impulses revolt. I was culling chapters from my Secret Diary a while back. Here, I was saying. Time stamp it in Google Docs and you know I meant this before I even knew I would need to show you it was true someday. None of it was really so long ago. So, I wonder, for example - what July will be like? I wonder about June. You could be a bartender or a DJ. Sounds like something someone who has lost their intuition would say. I'm talking in hypotheticals because I mean it when I say that I am not, really, talking about myself. Friday, May 9 Rebecca and I sat at Bar Belly in the rain for a while last night. Shannon made me cauliflower rice and avocado for lunch. I did circle around to my boyfriend's culty and evil type hang later in the night. There was chicken from the street, there. Rebecca will stay at our place while we're gone. She stayed at ours for a while last night. Everyone went to KGB, later, but I am being more regulated about it. Making pasta at nine am because I was up all night in spite of new efforts. Pouring rain and then we're driving towards Laguardia. In retrospect, I still do not think I was being dramatic about things, but it feels distant and small now. Short term memory maybe, or, the present is often quite extreme and so; wherever I am, it absorbs me. I like his brown leather bag, cufflinks, it's been to and fro this airport all spring which serves to dividend the chaos a bit. Anyways, everything is fine. I have a life in New York that I will still feel so lucky to return to. "You guys are in love!" a girl in micro-shorts told us at the party last night. "How long have you been in love for?" "Almost two years," he said. This is the pragmatic answer and also this is true. The girl beamed. "I've been in love for ten days," she said. I need to hold things closer to my chest. Not here - I am obfuscated enough about it here, so it's hard to do much damage. It's different in the real world. I say things that I know to be true, but I say them before I really understand what they mean. I am more protective of the things that are good, and I am quick to give away all that is bad. This is not how a person should be. Happy Mother's Day, the light and water show at the airport is saying. Elderly couple to my left devouring fried chicken. I feel incredibly ill, come to think of it, but some of this stays sweet. Darling darling darling, he keeps telling me. Are you ready to fly in a plane in the sky? Artificial Intelligence will come to destroy the earth and you will be like twenty-five years old and on your phone and talking badly about your friends behind their back and forgetting to call your family and drinking to disgust. Artificial Intelligence will come to destroy the world and you will call your sister, call your mom, lie under the open window with your boyfriend. You will be making up stories and praying over a glass of sparkling water. You will be listening to music and sound and language from real life. You will picture a relic of yourself still human, and you will be pleased. Saturday, May 10 I have decided to return to Photos. It is funny how these things work. I felt quite repulsed by images for a moment, but even just a few days of speaking out loud how much the equilibrium has been missing and how much now, it is time to get it back - I said this out loud along with other things, and now I can face the physical form again. And so much of the physical form is so pretty. I do like when things are ethereal and kind of between realms - it is why I have always liked to be very thin, although I’m pretty Normal in Body these days - and this is the most boring of boring things to discuss, anyways. My tendency is to archive and hoard. It is comically wrong to suggest that I seek to leave behind no trace. My point is, for a while now, I could not bear the traces. Something has shifted. There is a gold framed photo of a palm tree across from the bed in this hotel, and it’s the kind that is old school not tacky. Everything is art deco here. The ceilings at the bar are ten stories high, he told me, before dinner. There was salad and a cosmopolitan and such nice conversation and, I do always get whisked away when the time is right. I’m feeling pretty even keeled. If April happened again, it wouldn’t happen like this. The day has been so good so far. The hotel is old, classic, and art deco. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Tuesday, May 13 Doors at 7pm, reading at 8pm at TJ Byrnes — Bronwen Lam & David Dufour present Patio, an evening of reading. This rendition features Martina Mendoza, Mark Iosifescu, Myles Zavelo, Stephanie Wambugu, Babak Lakghomi, and Steve Anwyll.