DISTRACTIONS as OCD
The main distraction for reading over the last two weeks was a weird OCD spiral that kept me from sleeping. I felt itchy: mentally & physically. It’s the worst feeling. You just want to explode. I was also quarantined in my room for a few days because I had just gotten back from visiting family. Perhaps this goes without saying but it is extremely stressful only being able to function in your room and then having to put a mask on when you go and cook downstairs so that you don’t potentially infect a roommate. I love NOT KILLING people & also the stress that surrounds ordinary things in these bad times fucking honks.
It was nice yesterday so I wore florals
DISTRACTIONS as Grief
I feel strange claiming this grief, and I want to make it clear that I don’t know if the grief is mine to hold - but the death of my sister’s uncle hit me pretty hard. My sister and I have different dads. I grew up visiting her aunt’s house & I don’t know, actually I don’t feel like explaining the nets of my family because I am feel very THE OJO about everything. But family is family & I was pretty beside myself last week. I didn’t expect to be. I was so sad that I just slept. I could only be on my phone & that felt worse. There was no way in hell I was reading a book. And I think that’s okay! The perfect formula for reading, for me, is feeling calm & steady; mentally well. When things aren’t like that, READING IS IMPOSSIBLE. Which makes me really think that Reading and Enjoying Reading is such a goddamn privilege. Which is not to say that we should give up on reading or that it’s elitest. I actually don’t think that at all. I think we should try to think about what makes people feel safe, calm, mentally well & do the best we can to make that happen. I’m thinking now of going to a party with my mom at Miguelito’s and sitting in the corner, reading.
Side note: we are raising money for funeral costs & for his wife Debora, who is now without income. If you have some to spare, I’d love it if you donated. Thank you!
pic: rose & a lamp
DISTRACTIONS as JAMIE LOFTUS
So happy I got to ask Jamie questions this week! If you don’t already know Jamie, she’s a TV writer, comedian, co-host of the Bechdel Cast, and often I forget this one, a TRAINED JOURNALIST. I remembered how deeply she was a journalist while listening to her very meticulously put together Lolita Podcast, which should win every prize and award. Seriously the stuff I learned about LITERATURE about HOLLYWOOD about AESTHETICS about the ways in which my adolescence was formed by YOUTUBE CLIPS OF THE 1997 VERSION OF LOLITA… it should be taught in schools. In addition to putting a microscope to one of the most controversial books of the 20th century, Jamie also famously ate Infinite Jest throughout the course of one beautiful year. Naturally, I had to ask her about why reading sucks.
(pic of Jamie taken from her insta: @jamiechristsuperstar)
When you were a kid what was your relationship with books?
Excessive and obsessive! I was very, very into consuming as many books and cartoons as I could when I was little and wrote about them in these Hello Kitty notebooks my mom would get me for 85 cents at Michael's if I wasn't annoying at church. Every book got five stars except for Simon Cowell's memoir, which got zero (nice). Any YA I could get my hands on -- one I always think about is Dancer by Lorri Hewett, it's so great and never gets its due! Very happy I was late getting picked up from school and took it out from the library. Was a child edgelord and resisted Harry Potter, but absolutely wanted my first kiss to be from the boy that becomes a vampire in Cirque Du Freak. I spent most of junior high trying to read my way through all the books referenced in A Series of Unfortunate Events even though the vast majority of it went over my head. I cannot in good faith say I read Anna Karenina, but I definitely stared at every page of it for a while on Christmas break because they needed it to break a code in the tenth ASOUE book. My amazing sixth grade teacher let us read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and watch The Birds. I'm pretty sure I learned that what I thought was sex was actually wrong by reading a library copy of one of those Shopaholic books, which I'm pretty sure were fucked up but I really wanted to know what sex was and the lady in the book had it sometimes. There is a book I can never remember the name of that had a plot line where a tall girl dated someone shorter than her that made me cry, I wish I could remember the title. There was this series of Barbie tie-in books called Generation Girl that I read a TON because I was convinced by those and by Taina (which was a Nickelodeon show about basically the same thing) that going to a performing arts school in New York was my destiny. It wasn't! I'm talking too much.
Have you ever pretended to read a book to impress somebody?
Constantly. It gets confusing because I need to juggle the lie about the book I've read for a while, then actually read it but still feel like I'm lying.
If you could do another podcast on the legacy of book or an author, which book would that be?
Oh man! I am just starting to work on a show about Cathy comics, so I guess that's pretty adjacent. She's a very bizarre peek into a middle-class boomer woman that I find really interesting, because most of what I knew about her prior to reading way too many Cathy comics were people making fun of her for pretty cruel reasons. The reasons to actually criticize it are way more interesting! I also just really badly want to hear a fully reported account of the Janet Cooke story from the 1970s -- I know she's never given an interview, but I hope someone can speak with her someday, it's a very complicated story with intersections in race and gender and journalists who smoked inside that I'm really surprised nobody seems to know about. There was a good radio story on the story last year but I hope there's more to come. Oh man, and also a look into Dory Previn's memoirs, I've read them all and her story is goddamn fascinating, it's all about navigated mental illness and art and Mia Farrow stealing your man. I'm really stuck in the 70s right now for some reason.
Same question now but about a book you would eat
I have an extremely cursed biography of PT Barnum from an ex who wanted to be 'the PT Barnum of comedy' (could not tell you what this means with a gun to my head) that would be very cathartic to eat! Unfortunately, it was filthy when he left it at my apartment the day he admitted he was cheating on me with a girl on Instagram who lived in Oregon.
When does reading suck and when does reading rule?
Reading sucks when there's a deadline, even if the reading material is great! Reading rules when you think you're in the mood to watch YouTube videos about rollercoasters all night but then it turns out you're actually a Genius Who Wants to Read a Book.
Last book you read & wanna hold hands with?
Ooh! I just finished The Witches by Stacy Schiff, which was good and also boiled my brain. Such a Fun Age rocked, I read a memoir from a soap opera star I like that was pretty toxic honestly, and I recommend that everyone reads Cathy comics if you want to feel like you're taking a bath while remaining exactly where you are.
FINALLY THE BOOK THAT I READ!!!!!!
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
Alright this was … the scariest book I’ve ever read in my entire life. Books don’t really scare me because there aren’t any images, they are just tiny little innocent words strung together by a stranger & I can make them go bye-bye by closing the book and looking at my phone. Whereas movies … I am not allowed to watch scary movies anymore. I famously had an OCD spiral for an entire year after watching Hereditary & by that I mean I FOUND OUT I had OCD because a psychotherapist was like, “Yeah the fact that you think everybody is going to poison you is OCD lol here are some worksheets.” Did I ever do the worksheets absolutely not!!! I hate homework because its sucks (almost as much as reading). Anyway I say this because I thought about this book while shutting the lights and running to my bed in the dark. It is fucked up.
These short stories are all based in Argentina. What do I know about Argentina?? Well, it’s where Alexis Blidel Bledel Bluh-dell?? and that girl from that chess show are from which technically makes them Latinas even though they are blonde & blonde-eyed & blonde-souled. Ugh okay I don’t want to go into talk about White Latinidad because BORING & they don’t care & I don’t care but anyway, this book taught me a lot more about Argentina than I previously knew, and all through these very scary stories. Can I tell you exactly what those things are?? No!!! All I know is that there used to be a dictatorship there and that a bunch of people went missing. It seems like a really fucked up place where the land is just haunted. Her final story “When We Used to Talk to the Dead,” is about a group of girls trying to connect with people they know who have “disappeared,” as in, when Argentina just disappeared a bunch of people in the 80s & no one found them ever again. It’s the sort of ghost story that Kelly Link would tell with a flashlight.
Mariana Enriquez writes each story with such a deep, horrifying understanding of the land she lives on . In one story, “The Cart,” a homeless man takes a shit on the sidewalk of a middle-class town. He is called a bunch of names and then he walks, silently, away. Suddenly the town starts to lose all of it’s money. People get laid off. People’s savings accounts get sucked dry. They turn desperate. They eat family pets. The poverty runs rampant, like a disease, throughout the neighborhood. A story like this feels like satire, but it also feels real. She isn’t sympathetic towards the people of the neighborhood, but to me, it’s clear that that’s where she comes from. She’s Twilight-Zoning her upbringing. Every story has the sense of like … a character has touched something they were not supposed to touch or ignored something for too long. And all of it kind of like, hungover from the dictatorship. There’s also a lot of women masturbating to the point of injury?? I thought I could talk about this in a smarter way but I can’t.
Okay also SPEAKING OF OCD & SPEAKING ONCE AGAIN OF MYSELF: there are two stories which made me feel really, super connected to Mariana. One of them, “The Well” is about a girl who is so afraid of her entire life to the point where she can’t leave her house. The Fear happened all at once to her, after visiting a witch with her family. The way she describes the Fear and the way it debilitates her life felt so true to me. Like, uuuugh I can relate to being told a scary story once & then losing my hair & my sleep. This other story, “Meat,” reminded me of my fucking BOOK because it’s about this icon called ESPINA who like, flays himself to death (there is so much body horror in this book bruv) and then his teen fans dig up his 6-month decaying body & eat it?? Then they vomit up his remains?? Okay the only part that relates to my book is the icon coming back from the dead.
HERE IS A POEM
blast off
all the boys in movies love dead girls
& all the girls love sentient weapons
one is like “i died of tuberculosis
but i’m still a virgin u can tell cos my tits”
& the other is like, “bleep bloop why come humans
shake hands? how strange 2 be alive at all…
ILY g2g blow something up
for the government xo” & yr like aw!
whenever i see a painting
i look hard to see if there’s
somebody stuck in there
who is going to get old as
hell & then disappear
that’s all 4 now! next week i’ll be talking about The Department of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans <3