Hello, meat grinderz. What’s it to you lately?
God DAMN-A-LANG, am I ever busy. This isn’t to paint being stuffed to the gills as a cool/bad/fragrant/fractured/frantic/orange/matronly/ANY-QUALIFIER-ASS time; it’s just how it’s been the heck going. My book deadline grins at me from where it sits on my shoulder. And I keep making it worse! I keep doing all the fun shit that I love! PLUS WORKING ON THE BOOK THAT I LOVE! My dance card = sustenance for benevolent termites, like:
– I’m really into working for Rolling Stone, partly because I pitch them GI-GAN-TEUR ideas that sometimes begin: “I hope you’re enjoying your weekend! I was thunderstruck by a scene report–type pitch on my walk to the donut shop just now. It’s as follows: They Might Be Giants is a nerd band for math losers, right? YO, NOT AT ALL.”
And then I spout off for a little, and then it works and I get to harangue one of my all-time favorite bands. And then the Johnses tell me stories about GG Allin that I will clutch right here (gesturing to heart and brain and crotch with the one hand that isn’t holding a promotional radio station mug of vodka-soda) in saecula saeculorum.
– I’m reading McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh, whose feet I would agreeably dry with my hair:
A difference of opinion, but not of spirit. Re: McGlue—if your nose levitates ceiling-ward upon the very THOUGHT of reading a novella, try her attack-dog-voiced short stories, both of which, here, are fixing to make my lay my extendos across the floor like a blonde shag carpet.
Also reading: Sex and the Single Girl, but it’s for research, which is I guess why anyone has been reading it for the past 50 yearzzz. Helen Gurley Brown, its author, I would adore and prize and send groceries to as a friend, but god DAMN if a segment about homosexuality doesn’t clear its throat and gravely intone, “Before you rule homosexual men out of your life, however, let’s consider: Are they really monsters?”
I know what you meant, but you meant what you said, and (though you wrote it ’62) our tentative comradeship comes to an end. The book: not my favorite! Out of five stars: All the imploding ones that we can still see after they’re dead, if we squint!
– One little-known factoibdt about me: I’m fond of putting clothes on my person so as not to be mistaken for one of the lesser primates among our animal QUEENdom. (You are welcome, feminism. No longer 1962 up in this here w’bsite, NOW IS IT?) Dazed & Confused, in a partnership with Racked, noticed this and made a home movie about it. Consider this lunacy:
I mean, you can watch me turn lazy roller-skate arabesques around my apartment—God, we’ve come so far!—but what I’m hoping you’ll read is the accordant interview.
– More GUARDIANNE.
– I started a website after spending a year saying, “How do I glue the squad together?” Enormous Eye is one way, but far from the only. I ask writers I revere to chronicle a Saturday, which is exhausting and fruitful, and then I publish those chronicles on Monday. Sick 2 do!
– I continue to grit my smiling editorial teeth with Rookie between ’em, plus I write there too! Who wouldn’t? Rookie is brimming with world-class readers and writers, like Zadie Smith, and it is the wish on non-extinct stars that delivers every day regardless.
That’s not all, but it seems like it righ nah, so I’m calling it. Mad love to you and yours, my heart-butchers.
Halfway everywhere,
ARS
ARS 