Hi, thanks for being here. New podcast ep dropped last week – surprise, we’re going bi-monthly! If you want to listen to the episode and get access to the entire archive, consider updating your subscription plan. And if you’ve made it here without subscribing, you can do that below : )
+
It starts with a messy room. The heat wave is coming but I didn’t really know it. I hang my sweat soaked clothes over the closet door or on towel hooks in my very messy room. I drop my tote bag on the floor and let pill bottles, an umbrella, bandaids, and hand sanitizer spill out. I complain to someone that there is only so much I can do about the mess in my apartment. The mess isn’t even fully mine. I absolve myself but still complain. They suggest I clean the apartment. Cleaning requires physical exertion and physical exertion makes it hotter. I push two bookshelves out of the window unit’s path so that air flows more freely. Beautiful women should not have to clean, I tell myself. I see a tweet about how Marilyn Monroe never cleaned and rarely took baths. She refused to do dishes, just stuck the dirty ones under her mattress. There’s something so comforting about one of the most beautiful women in history being so deeply unhygienic. Then again, Marilyn Monroe was rich so other people could clean for her. Rich people are the messiest of all. I’m not sure what my excuse is because I’m not rich.
courtesy of cliffordthebigredscare
+
A thin layer of moisture covers everything, including every body you brush against. The first real day of the heat wave I meet a friend at an experimental jazz show. There is no AC in the small gallery and about one hundred bodies. The music sounds a little like the score to Midsommar. We are both drenched in sweat by intermission. We leave the venue to cool off at a horror movie-themed bar. I put the cold beer bottle against my forehead. Never in my life have I been so happy to see a bottle of Bud Light. We’ll go back once our sweat has dried. At least this is what we tell each other. After about twenty minutes, we admit to each other how neither of us were planning to go back to the show. We talk about the people we noticed whose sweat was worse than ours.
It’s mean, but a little fun, to point out other people’s pit stains. Pit stains are another way to talk about the weather, sure. Weather is the original cardinal sin for conversation topics. But talking about the weather isn’t as boring when you’re in a heatwave. It might be the only thing to talk about.
+
At a poetry reading in Greenwich Village, everyone who reads is beautiful. I am here for one friend in particular who reads first, and is of course, a perfect reader. No one onstage sweats. At least not visibly. I am amazed because my whole body, not onstage, fights to stay beautiful and not sweaty. Someone reads a short story that ends with how children have no recall for human faces. There is probably a real psychological term for this but it’s no fault of the writer for not including that. Maybe he did. I keep thinking it should be object permanence but that’s not it. Earlier someone said to me they read in a cheesy how-to-be-a-New-Yorker book that you need to develop a sense of object permanence. I barely know what object permanence is. I’ve mostly dissociated from its real meaning because all I can think of is that Nicole Sealy poem when I hear the term.
+
Suddenly there are piles of dead leaves on the ground everywhere. I may be naive about a lot of things in New York, but I’m not a fool enough to think fall has come mercifully and early for us. I don’t bother to google why this is happening, much like I can barely be bothered to google what the exact danger of the presence of lead paint in an apartment is if you are not a child or with child. I assume the leaves are dead because of the heat. The heat is an easy target for blame. Just like the city can be easy to blame for a variety of problems: hard to reach friends, lateness, expensive groceries. I read Hayley Nahman’s critique of life in New York in her monthly column. Her advice mostly bums me out, but I like how she writes about time here. I felt the heat made the days longer, and how that wasn’t a good thing because I was exhausted. But longer days means more time. Like Hayley Nahman writes, more time to walk in the park, do laundry, see friends, decide on a restaurant, more time to notice when the trees start to change.
+
The more readings I go to, the more I’m beginning to believe they aren’t really about literature. This is a good thing. The reading is about the literary circle around it. A reading feels like an occasion. I love it because writers get to pretend to be celebrities! Who cares about the written work when you get to watch beautiful people read pieces about their beautiful lives? Anyways, being beautiful takes the pressure off from the writing itself. This is what I have been telling myself at least. All the readers, luckily, are beautiful, so my thesis stands. Everyone seems to be a good writer, too. At least from what I can pay attention to when I’m not thinking about how there are suspiciously no plates of fries in sight. The flyers for the reading advertised French fries, but they are not in attendance. Or no one has ordered them. We are being fed Negronis and chilled red wine by the bartenders instead. This is essential, as the line-up is nine writers long, and no one seems to be able to get enough.
+
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona features a section-long heat wave. Now the heat has everyone in a rage. I underline this though it’s far from interesting. I see Fire of Love, a documentary about volcanoes, which are hot to spend time around, I'd imagine. I am suspicious how unbothered the volcanologist couple seems to be about the proximal heat. I listen to “Hot Car in the Sun” on repeat. No one at the reading reads a piece about the heat.
as seen on Kate’s ig
+
Someone does read a long piece that mentions the Cheesecake Factory. I really begin to dissociate. I’m hungry. The story is funny, but I’ve often wondered at readings, how if a reader (a real one, not the writer) were to read this (not out loud in front of a crowd, to themselves, in the comfort of their homes) if they’d find the story funny or compelling or heartbreaking at all. Maybe it’s the performance of the piece that makes it funny, just like a reading makes its writers and the act of writing more glamorous just by its very nature. I guess this is the great mystery. How the joke (your writing) is going to land.
After the reading, I compliment Jo Rosenthal, one of the readers, the essay she read. Her piece moved me, which is something you should tell a writer I think. I tell her, your essay moved me, thank you for reading it, I loved it. She says, thank you, I love your hair and your outfit. She’s right, my outfit is great. The heat and the compliment go to my head a little. I love compliments from writers even if the compliment was obligatory. Only later do I realize she is a writer I’ve read before. And that I like her writing in real life, too. In this case, the writing does work beyond the reading.
outfit in question, you be the judge
+
The heat makes the days one long stream of consciousness. I walk from 84th Street to Columbus Circle through Central Park after seeing Nope. I keep looking up, waiting for an alien cloud to start sucking park goers into its cyclone. At least there would be wind. Down by the lake, surely, I think it’ll be cooler. It’s hotter. I walk a little longer, convinced I can make it to Union Square. Google tells me it’ll be fifty-five minutes. I’ve already lost track of how long I’ve been walking. Waiting for the J, I stand next to two girls dressed almost identically in Haim-inspired outfits. Black bell bottom pants and black bralettes. The NYU kids are everywhere. I haven’t been home all day, she says, my room is hotter than outside. It’s so European, how none of us have AC. What is a club? Her friend asks, repeating an exchange student friend’s question. Answer: a place to get drunk. Knock knock. I have an absurd thought that I want a frozen hot chocolate from Serendipity 3. In an unmoving crowd after a play, a man loudly says, I’m all for innovation but that was dreadful. Someone else whose honesty has no spatial awareness. Sitting at the window at the Penrose, I see a group of young men dressed exactly alike in white tee shirts, dark jeans, and sneakers. Because I’m running late to a show, I take a miraculously $12 Uber to Williamsburg. A Tesla shows up. It’s the same day Elon Musk’s swimsuit body reveal makes the Twitter rounds. I fumble to open the door, dumbly excuse myself to the driver that I’ve never been in a Tesla. I read a tweet by Elon Musk. He makes a portmanteau of Twitter and Tesla. I guess this is meant to be clever, to show he can invent new language in addition to spacecraft and technocratic clusterfucks. The sunset is orange, and for some reason, it’s hard to take a picture even though the car’s windows are picture window-sized, and for some other reason, the AC is not on. I wave to bad dates as we inch through Bed-Stuy. Who’s there? Three women in white dresses at a crosswalk in Bed-Stuy. One woman is in the ubiquitous Outdoor Voices tennis dress. I covet it for a moment until I imagine how the spandex must lock in sweat so you are just one Ziploc bag of moisture that costs $140. Another wears a satin slip that is half falling off. It’s not very late but it is Friday and she seems drunk. The third one in the cotton dress, looking like she just wandered off the dairy farm, is me.
+
No matter how hard I try, I miss another reading. I take a screenshot of a reading flyer, then forget about it. I have many screenshots. There will be another one, my friend says when I cancel our plans to go to one on the Lower East Side on Sunday. Another friend and I had gotten locked out of her apartment for four hours so I wouldn’t make it in time. Surprisingly, being locked outside for hours isn’t a great segue into listening to poems in a small bar for two to three hours. My friend asks me if I know any of the readers. I don’t, I just want to go to go. I am the ideal customer for readings. I want to be seen, too. I don’t care what I hear or who reads, as long as I get to sit in the salon. Even if the salon isn’t air conditioned.
sent to me just this afternoon
+
A friend and I whisper through the entirety of one person’s poems at the reading. The MC tells us to stop talking, kindly enough, though she blames the audience overflow on the sidewalk for the noise, not us. We remain undoxxed, but we also don’t take our momentary luck that we weren’t directly shamed for granted. We stop talking. I realize I can get away with more than I thought. At least more than I used to. Men like to tell me beautiful women can do anything they want. I believe this is meant to be empowering and permissive. Or this is said with the subtext that women are manipulative at the expense of men who inevitably can’t get away with anything. Whatever the intent, they aren’t wrong. Beautiful women can do whatever we want.