DISTRACTIONS
-My book came out & it was the busiest month of my life. Strangely, I am relieved that most of it is over, because while I love attention & while I have been waiting for this moment for as long as the pandemic has been happening, it was really stressful! I am so grateful that I was able to have my book release the fucking Brooklyn Museum with fucking Pom Pom Squad and that my entire family could be there. I am the luckiest bitch in the world. I’ve said that so much this year & maybe it’s getting kind of boring. I think I am obligated to show you the places! Like fucking VOGUE and NPR!!! I also did a reading at the STRAND with TERRANCE HAYES WHAT THE HELL. Thank you for buying my book and sharing it!!! It’s now going into it’s SECOND PRINTING????!!!!!
-Puloma and Will came to visit me and we spent a few days together, feeling very at home with one another because we know each other the best. It was really bananas being able to have a Halloween Weekend. Last year, Hannah, Arti & I sat outside of Playground Coffeeshop in the cold with masks on & we decided to drive to Prospect Park to see Arti’s crush play in some band. We watched them for three minutes then went to go piss behind a tree, which is the way I spent a lot of 2020, bare-assed in a park peeing out a spiked seltzer next to a stranger who was doing the same. This year there are more toilets.
-The Halloweekend: Friday, we went to a cover band show at this place called the gutter. I had been really strict about COVID shit for the last month because I didn’t want to miss my book release, so it was really the first time I had been in a crowded place since June. We walk in and there’s a White Stripes Cover Band playing Seven Nation Army. That bass line that’s so familiar to me was ringing through a room of people dressed up as television characters and ghouls and dead people, it smelled like beer and floor, like bodies all together. I wasn’t looking at Will or Puloma or Andrew Existential and but I knew we were all smiling because that feeling was there. The feeling that’s like, we chose the right place to be, the night is so young and so are we, we don’t know this room or who is in it and let’s get a fucking drink. “I feel like this is how people met the love of their lives in like, 2005,” I told Puloma, and she sipped on her drink and said, “I know. I feel like I’m in a memory.”
DISTRACTIONS AS NATASHA RAO
Whenever Kyle Carrero Lopez sees Natasha enter a room, he goes, “Natashaaaa!” like from that scene in Party Girl, a movie I have definitely seen (I haven’t). Natasha is so vibrant in this low-key way. She always has gossip for me and she makes me want to indulge in everything there is to indulge in. Her new collection Latitude feels like crawling on all fours on a freshly waxed wooden floor to a fresh cup of coffee. I interviewed her about the shit I always do.
What was your relationship to reading like when you were a kid?
Oh, those were my glory days of reading! I was obsessed with books in a very genuine way that I wish I could recreate now. I was always reading—on the bus, at recess, in restaurants, and late into the night with a little light clipped over my bed. It was a very magical relationship, in that I felt like if I read a book, I became the protagonist. Like if I were reading one of the books in A Series of Unfortunate Events, it all felt so vividly real to me that I could tie up my hair with a ribbon and truly believe I was half Natasha half Violet Baudelaire. Which was the greatest feeling! Slipping in and out of so many different selves and leaving suburban New Jersey for other worlds entirely. My brother and I also used to read a lot of books at the same time—literally while sitting next to each other and dunking Chips Ahoy cookies in milk, one of us flipping the page when we reached the end of it, which made reading feel very alive. I think a lot of what I look for in books now is that same feeling of total fascination/absorption, though it feels hard to encounter anymore. In elementary school we had this program called D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything and Read) where they would make an announcement on the loudspeaker at some random point in the week saying “DEAR time!” and you had to stop whatever you were doing and read for half an hour. It was delightful!! I’m all for bringing that back.
When does reading suck and when does reading rule?
Reading sucks when you have to read something you don’t actually enjoy, for a class or job, and the act of reading it is preventing you from being out in the world with your friends who you know are all having a great time. And you can’t bring the book with you to the hangout because you know that if given the option between laughing in the sun with people you love or annotating a dense, incomprehensible text, you’ll always shut the book and pick the former. Reading also sucks hungover, when you become acutely aware of how slow your brain is moving and for a second are scared that you’ve permanently altered your mind and will be groggy forever. But when reading rules, it really really rules! Like when you have to grab a notebook or your phone to write down lines. And when you think you’ll just read for twenty minutes but suddenly four hours have gone by and you’re crying and the book is done. And when you’re lying in bed with a friend or a lover and they read something aloud that’s actually really beautiful and you two suddenly have this special moment of both following the same train of thought together. And it especially rules when you find a book and are convinced that the author and you share the same mind, because they’ve put into words something you’ve felt your whole life but have never articulated.
Have you ever pretended to read something to impress somebody?
Admittedly yes. Usually something I started reading and then just couldn’t get through, so it’s a half-lie. The last instance that comes to mind is at a job interview in which they asked me what I was reading and, for whatever reason, I said I just finished Finnegans Wake. In reality I got through like seven pages.
When is a time you felt very smart, and what is a time you felt like the opposite?
To keep it reading-related, I feel very smart when I’m concentrating on some kind of article or analysis, and an idea really clicks, to the point where I’m underlining and nodding my head. But I can feel like the opposite if I read the next sentence ten times and still don’t have any idea what to make of it.
What are books to read when you are 1) breaking up with somebody 2) crushing on somebody 3) feeling completely neutral
Breaking up with somebody: I’d opt for something long and depressing, so as to distract myself with fictional pain instead of my own, maybe Anna Karenina. Crushing on somebody: The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich, specifically “Twenty-One Love Poems” in that book. Somehow I think Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson is perfect for both breaking up and falling in love. Feeling neutral: Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins to get the blood flowing.
What the Fuck Did I Read?
I promise I did!
The Right To Sex by Amia Srinivasan
A publisher sent me this book which is how I know that I have made it. I ran into Lore Yussef at the Brooklyn Book Festival and she said that she tore through it in two days and left a lot of pages underlined and dog-eared, so I was sold She says some like REALLY NUANCED things about sex work and porn where I was like, damn, I gotta re-think this whole thing. The porn stuff was maybe stuff I already knew, like, porn has started to become a teacher for young people to have sex, but it's informed by the patriarchy, which wants to see women be submissive. But then it's like, well what if women want to be submissive? BUT THEN IT'S LIKE, can you even know what you want in a system that has been so fucked for hundreds of years. What really struck me was her conversation about sex work, which is like, yes, we have to acknowledge that all work is work, but we also have to acknowledge that all work is exploitative because we are only working for a means of survival. So it's not that sex work is GOOD, it's simply just somebody's job, and people need to be protected under that job. But that made me think about this porn star I follow and like called Lena Paul who mostly does like female-friendly porn and she's always like, "This is my passion. I just love to cum on screen." Anyway, now I am re-thinking everything that I love to do and why, especially if I am making money doing the thing that I love.
SENSORY by JUNJI ITO
Puloma visited for my book release and we spent the Halloween weekend doing what we love the most: visiting book stores. I picked this one up on our visit to Blue Stocking. Puloma had just injured her foot so we were walking very slowly. I looked for my book in the store but they did not have it. This book scared the shit out of me! It’s about this woman who finds herself in this forest on the mountain and then this cult is all WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU and then there’s this explosion & she emerges from the explosion as this like, volcanic angel who everybody wants a piece of. There’s a lot of hair floating through the air like spaghetti. The drawings are disturbing as hell and deeply visceral. If you’ve been having trouble reading I recommend a graphic novel to stimulate your phone-addled brain enough to hold something open.
The 29th Year by Hala Alyan
This book came into my life at the perfect time, because um, I am 29. It’s such a stunning collection! I read this in two bus rides, just so blown away by what this book captured. It made me want to fall in love or go eat a pizza and stare at strangers.
POEMS! <3
do you remember when we used to say babe ironically
i never wanted the happiness
cursive on a mug offered, except for when i did.
a television hung up on a white wall
playing the weather! a $12 piece of wood
that said HAPPY HOLIDAZZLE!
the concept of pajamas!
instead: flower abandoned in the snow. and i had noticed it first!
i just wanted to know that you were standing
somewhere handsome & that i was thought of.
those movies we predicted so well.
those bowls of tofu.
the year of isolation where you let me be the one
who was afraid. because you were brave for me!
you were traffic on a bicycle. you were a pinch
in-between my thumb & forefinger underground.
you were cans of mint & you were wrenches
underneath the dresser. you were the lights on.
the lights off.
beauty is just clothes
a woman becomes an icon when she says
three simple things like: 1) i want you to love me,
2) i feel lonely sometimes, 3) i don’t want to be old or forgotten.
to remember anything is humiliating,
like what i said to you in the middle
of the summer at 11:52 AM. sometimes
you are algorithmed a person or a song
& sometimes your friend introduces you.
what do you think about it? getting to know me.
harambe was only in les mis for 15 minutes
the halloween wasn’t horny.
the veil was simply thinner
and we were all together.
sorting through jackets that once
belonged to somebody’s mechanic grandpa
we wonder if the dead gorilla marked the end of all of this.
later we will all ask & be asked who are you
but we are not sisters like that.
my friend says she is just going to stick it in dry
because she feels like she smells like blood.
walking she tells me its impossible to not feel joy
for the successes of someone you care about.
the park is dying & perfect. congratulations:
the weather is finally what we expected it to be.
i take out my phone & disguise myself online
to search for evidence
that you have moved on
then remember that I am still
crossing a street.