Last Night
Michelle Tea, witch of improv.
Michelle Tea’s hair is the pink color I was looking to wear last night and didn’t have in my closet. I wore a white shirt with a black stripe down the middle belonging to Richard and designed by a man I call Wilkie Collins. The actual Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone. I read it on a Greek island where you read whatever you can find in English. It was a great. That summer, I also first read SCUM Manifesto, by Valerie Solanas. It was the only book in English at a kiosk, and they had several copies!
Michelle carries forward the spirit of Valerie as a comic disrupter—without stalking people or the loaded gun. She was in Hudson the other night for a reading at Spotty Dog Books & Ale, and a large group gathered to enjoy her philosophy of radical pleasure. She told us she doesn’t drive. She doesn’t have a driver’s license, but she is planning to learn, now that she is fifty-three. She said she had organized the Sister Spit bus tours, in order to go places other people would drive her to.
It makes you think about how an absence in a person can become an invitation to others. Michelle embodies the spirit of the pub owned by Richard’s grandparents in Bury, Lancashire, the Help Me Through the World. At the event, I asked her why she has always been as interested in creating communities as she is in writing. She said, “I just want to have fun, and to have fun, you need to be around other people.”
I stopped my life for a few seconds to consider this, and I remembered a story by Lydia Davis, in which the narrator makes pretty much the same point about happiness or at least the things you would look back on in a life that you would remember as your life. The narrator doesn’t think she would look back, with a sense of having lived, at the solitary activity of writing. She thinks she will look back with pleasure at the times she was engaged with other people.
At the bookstore, there were people from my past and people I was meeting for the first time, and the people gathered went from very young to my age, seventy-seven. I was reminded, as I’m reminded on a daily basis, that other people sweep you out of yourself on a magic carpet. You are you and you are also a floating camera looking down. At the bar, a row of young people with tattoos were pictures at an art gallery. Their faces were so beautiful they exchanged all the other emotions in me for admiration.
I loved hearing the readers. Carley Moore remembered a trip to Spain she’d taken in her college years, a trip during which she had tried out being a reed, open at both ends, and letting experience flow through her. It was a mind-altering account of what she called being “slutty.” The book we had come to celebrate is called Sluts and is the first book in Michelle’s publishing venture, Dopamine Press, that is partnered with Semiotext(e).
Before the readings began, a woman in the audience asked Michelle why she’d called her first anthology Sluts. Michelle said it was a mean word used mostly to describe women who were sexual. A mean word she was removing the sting from and also leaving the sting in. You can’t really renovate language to mean its opposite. A word will mean its opposite and. The and of life is the same as the and rule of improv—you roll with the chaos and turn it into comedy or beauty. Everything in the world has a mind of its own, including your own mind.
Carley recalled a time she’s asked to chose between two men. She’s thinking she’d prefer to have a threesome, but these men aren’t the kind who’d consider that option, so she comes up with the idea of flipping a coin. She has sex with the winner of the toss, and she confesses maybe it wasn’t the best way forward. Maybe she should have gone with attraction, pure and simple. Still, looking back, she likes the coin toss. She likes the idea of being a prize two men want, and she likes that she has staged it all and cast the parts. She thinks how rare this is, really, for women.
The piece is a love letter to a girl she wants and doesn’t get. It’s the girl who tells Carley she’s too slutty to consider. She’s too easy in the world, too ready to give herself away. The girl Carley wants to kiss is always moving back and saying, in effect, don’t you care how you are understood? Don’t you see how the world works? Don’t you see how you will not escape being judged? Carley is sad not to get the girl. She would have been sadder, she makes clear, not to have fallen in love with freedom.
Biz
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What we did at our first Art Lab Writing Retreat, May 3-5, 2024.
Smelled lilacs, watched birds, ate cake, listened to Abby sing, talked about small boobs, talked about large boobs, told Jewish jokes, asked jokes if they were Jewish, walked up Warren Street, walked down Warren Street, asked each other about our scars, asked each other to describe the last look on the face of someone we loved, talked about sex in the wrong place, ate shrimp, ate lox, drank wine, drank Aperol spritzes but not like anyone else makes them so don't ask what was in them, wrote under the gun, read to each other, sat on the deck, loved strangers, loved strangeness, missed everyone as soon as they were gone.
Working together one-on-one.
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You swing a rope around me with your writing and won’t let go. I didn’t have time this morning to read this but I did, all the way through, slowly, deliberately. Enchanted as ever by your way of spinning the rope to include the unexpected. Brava again. And again. Thank you for your ongoingness.
To being swept out of ourselves on the magic carpet of others! ♥️