Notes from Underground
July 2nd
I wake inside a sublet in the lowest, most eastern edge of the Lower East Side. I haven’t slept in Manhattan since 2009 when I moved to the city after working in Paris. Back then I hosted at Lucien, and following a couple months of enduring the bistro’s tyrannical owner, I went to LA where I’ve lived ever since.
In LA I flitted around the edges of many scenes and watched them all swell, crest and collapse. These days I’ve been thinking specifically about those scenes for here, improbably and quite surreally, I find myself near the epicenter of LA’s underground literary earthquake.
What drives scenes? What attracts so many artists and dreamers, graspers and grifters to them? I’ve come to NYC for many reasons: to hook a lit agent, to schmooze with publishers and editors, to debut Casual Encountersz. But mainly I want to experience NYC’s literary scene to get a better understanding of my own.
That night friend invited me to Clandestino.
“This is NYC’s Prado,” they assure me.
The two bars, like America’s twin great metropolises, are impossibly different. Their one similarity: I spend many nights watching poets and sex freaks doing drugs in their bathrooms.
July 3rd
Honey’s rooftop is ringed with Bushwickerati: blue hair, septum rings, stick-and-poke tats. Poet Lily Lady emcee’s the reading with an aristocratic flair, as if they can’t be rushed nor bothered.
“What about a Casual Encountersz at the Ritz?” Lady asks after the reading, once they realize I’m the writer who’s been pestering them the past few weeks. “I’ll have a room there, actually.”
I plan to host three NYC Casual Encountersz, a mini tour of sorts. Debuting CE as an invite-only reading inside a five-star suite with Lady’s gang of queer poets?
“Sounds chic,” I say.
July 6th
After the reading at Village Works, everyone goes to Scratcher. Even my friends The Poet and the Sex Freak tag along. Sometimes I worry that everyone I know is either a poet or a sex freak.
I’m trying to chat up Tracy O’Neill, a novelist who has agreed to read at the second NYC CE, but who now sits behind an IPA. Running CE, I’ve learned that nothing qualifies as confirmed until they’re standing behind the mic. After a few too many tequilas, I work up the courage to cozy up to O’Neill who turns out to be a pro, I mean the woman has a PhD—of course she’s showing up! I need to relax, this month of puzzling together readers and venues won’t be easy if I can’t keep a lid on my neurosis.
Meanwhile Nylon reporter Sophia June and her gang are partying in the back booths and invite us to another bar. We meet there and soon we are trading numbers, Instascams, everyone asking about the upcoming readings.
NYC’s fluidity is unimaginable in LA’s sprawl. It’s mesmerizing, addictive. For a social butterfly like me it’s uncut cocaine.
July 10th
Two days until the Ritz CE. Instascammers and sub slackers harass me for the addy. One ‘journalist’ DMs that she wants to write a takedown of Crumps, the leftist infamous for his substacks mapping Dimes Square’s alt right whack jobs. I’m freaking that 100 people turn up and get us shutdown.
“Stop acting like a little bitch,” snaps my mentor, exiled London-based New Yorker writer Alexis Okeowo when I FaceTime them for advice. “Keep it together!”
July 12th
The Drift party is packed with the literary establishment, or what the ‘establishment’ calls the ‘underground’ and what the ‘underground’ nicknames ‘The Grift.’
Drinks are $18. Something criminal about it. I love The Drift. I subscribe and submit (and get rejected). But even I give away free booze at CE. Readings—even transcendent ones full of talented, hot writers—are still trench warfare. Obliteration is the only way to survive. But it’s fine. One of the sex freaks sneaks in Mich Ultras and another’s got ketamine and we’re off to the races.
Editors, agents, and journalists with the power to transform beatniks’ lives mingle and flirt. Everyone’s asking where I studied and I fight the urge to lie that I went to Brown or have an MFA from Columbia. Drift-world attracts a scholastic, pedigreed crowd, one I’ve always envied, admired and oddly feel part of, even if I attended a mediocre university and missed out on the MFA pyramid scheme.
While dancing a debonair lit agent asks for my manuscript. This type of networking rarely happens in LA and crystallizes an important distinction: NYC’s literary circles may be ruthless, but that’s in part because there’s stakes with contracts, commissions, and deals dangling before everyone’s eyes. Back home, my beatnik LA scene lacks those opportunities, which helps keep it youthful, bohemian, and in the shadow of Hollywood’s greed, radical. But what does literature lose without capitalism’s professionalized switchblade at its throat?
I spot reporter and legendary tweeter Joe Bernstein who I invited to CE. Yet among the pantheon of shitposting deities, Bernstein lives lower down on Mt. Olympus. The Zeus is Naomi Fry and she’s nowhere to be seen. Will Fry join the fray?
Socialite and writer Sophia June glides by atop vintage platforms and introduces me to Drift founder and the evening’s starlet Rebecca Panovka. We talk Mexico City and doppelgängers all while I suss out the afterparty deets.
Meanwhile the crowd’s thinning, the potty-trained media class turning in early, when as if on cue Naomi Fry arrives. We’ve been DMing, as one does, about the Doors, Guns ’n’ Roses, and the Jews. If there’s any NYC writer I want to cover CE, it’s Fry.
“Hi Sammy,” Fry says, greeting me as if we’re old pals, as if I weren’t some rando Instascammer. “You’re going to High Dive?”
We trail Fry to the afterparty, but she melts away faster than the ice in my soda water. Does she realize I think she’s the most hilarious of all shitposters? I’m about to find Fry and confess when the sole of Sophia June’s platform breaks off.
What can a broken shoe portend about the fragile nature of scenes? I wonder as a friend jerry-rigs the platform back together with plastic grocery sacks. Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing, perhaps it’s time for bed.
July 13th
The Ritz is a fortress and as Lily Lady pads barefoot through the lobby, I worry how we’re gonna sneak 30+ freaks past the army of doormen guarding the hotel.
“Fuck the Ritz,” says Lady, in the elevator, gliding up to the 14th floor.
Sex workers, Semiotext(e) dolls, and one Paris Review editor cram into the room. Poet Matt Starr recounts sucking off hotdogs and Mackenzie Thomas reads teenage sexcapades. Crumps does crumps and poets Sul Mousavi and Zoey Greenwald salute mothers and youth. Maddie Vasquez weeps while memorializing a fallen poet. Reclining across the bed, Lily Lady closes out the night and tells everyone to leave.
But before the room clears, a pillow fight erupts, Lady and a bunch of poets jumping up and down, bashing each other, ecstatic, euphoric, electric.
July 21st
Sovereign House hums with the launch of Heavy Traffic Magazine. The crowd’s mixed between Dimes Square glitterati and Drift world and others I can’t ID.
There are no readings which makes it easier to observe NYC’s literary factions circle each other like fighters in the ring. Writing has more in common with boxing than anyone admits. Much has been whispered about downtown, the rumored tech financiers and alt-right politics, the clout chasers and Catholic converts. To be honest everyone I meet is warmer and friendlier than the internet’s bare knuckled discourse would ever suggest. Any scene, no matter its participants or politics, burns on the gasoline of spectacle. It’s what attracts so many to its heat. Everyone wants to see and be seen, especially one of the sex freaks who turns up.
“Good people on both sides,” she says, eyeing the buzzing room.
July 22nd
The Second NYC CE at Powerhouse Arena makes me nervous because the lineup is legit, serious writers. People with agents, books deals, degrees. My world in LA is club kids writing on Notes App. By contrast NYC feels like the big leagues. Legend Sam Lipsyte, and icons Tracy O’Neill, Sarah Wang and Jessica Denzer.
Guests arrive with flowers.
“You’re here for the reading?” I ask.
“No,” one snaps. “We’re here for Loré.”
Meaning poet Loré Yessuff. Another serious writer. All poets need a gang at their back.
Serious writers are usually good writers. They’re not chronically online. Might be something there worth consideration, though as a full-blown Instascammer, I’m not digging any further.
July 24th
The Bowery Poetry Project. Free mezcal and $5 Tecates. The audience snaps after each reading.
Bohemians are forever and I love them.
July 25th
Matt Starr and Zack Roif host the Perverted Book Club in sex shops, but in person they’re quite wholesome, the type women bring home to meet daddy. At Dream Baby’s Fan Fiction event the lineups center performers, artists, dancers. Everyone’s glamorous, polished, poised. Party bunny Brock Coylar gushes they’re delighted to meet me and follows back on Instascam.
Do any of these scenes produce good literature? Does mine? Maybe that’s the wrong question. More interesting is if these scenes antagonize and entertain, if they foster humanity and friendship. Screens and phones dominate our lives—a reading is one of the few live, communal experiences left and maybe helps explain the energy behind the tidal wave of reading series. Somehow the metric of good vs. bad seems beside the point.
Besides, it’s tricky to predict who will emerge from the swell while it’s still frothing and surging, swallowing up some and spitting out others. Maybe it’ll be easier to answer once the wave breaks.
July 27th
The crowd squeezes into François Ghebaly, spilling out onto the patio. For the NYC CE Finale, the lineup mirrors my literary tastes: Archway Editions beatniks Chris Molnar, Naomi Falk and Heavy Halo, along with Big 5 novelists Daniel Magariel, Megan Nolan and Hannah Lillith Assadi. For spice I toss in hottie translator Samuel Rutter and Neoliberalhell provocateur Matthew J. Donovan. Go low, go high, go out with a bang.
Gallerists, MFAs and goths, Maoists and edgelords mix and mingle. I’m begging everyone to come inside, quiet down and not touch the art.
The gallery’s a sauna and with the heat my mind wanders over the past month: ketafiend poets, alcoholic novelists, writing every morning and partying every night with NYC’s endless supply of crooks and con jobs, schemers and the scammers. The 20 writers I’ve curated into three Casual Encountersz during this hellaciously hot July. The journalists, agents and editors I’ve tried to seduce into caring about my manuscript. And what have I learned? I wonder as the boxes of Ami Ami run dry and Ghebaly’s staff throws us out.
We return to Clandestino and like an omen another of Sophia June’s platforms breaks. Again. Maybe June’s shaky platforms signal that literary scenes, no matter how professional or bohemian, how good or bad, are doomed to collapse, that their ephemerality is what makes them magnetic, unique, special.
Meanwhile people keep introducing themselves, saying we met at one of the CEs or another reading or just out and about. It’s strange because though I try to introduce myself and make everyone feel welcomed at Casual Encountersz, often I’m blacked out with anxiety and don’t remember much. Only that it was debaucherous, that I was moved by pretty words, that I was surrounded by so many beautiful people.
