.SOMETIMES RAW.

Yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever decluttered your house and donated, sold, or thrown out a bunch of things?

OK, sure, sex is cool, but have you ever successfully kept up with your expenses in real-time for a full calendar year so you can make a big purchase of something you always wanted?

Yeah, sex is great, but have you ever had chocolate cake in the morning for breakfast?

So, sex is great but has your partner ever sneaked up behind you and just kissed you on your neck?

So there’s sex. But there’s also your child’s school not assuming you are the default on-call parent because of your gender, and instead contacting your male partner first to pick up your sick child in the middle of the day.

Yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever framed a print you’ve owned for five years and actually hung it on the wall? Because that is truly orgasmic.

Yeah, sex is cool, but have you ever had a bookshelf wall full of books?

Ooo yeah, sex is very cool, but even hotter is if you click “unsubscribe” from dumb newsletters and put your phone and computer in “sleep mode” at 2100 hours.

Yeah, sex, blah blah blah, but have you watched Stephen King’s IT with popcorn on the couch yet???

Sex is a thing that is good. But have you ever seen Human Resources take a documented pattern of harassment seriously and fire someone immediately with no retaliation against the people who filed the complaints? Because that, wow, is also very, very good.

I am a big proponent of sex, BUT… have you ever been invited to an event you didn’t want to attend and just said “no” without making up a convoluted excuse and had the other person accept your personal boundary right away?

There’s sex, then there’s the all-over tingling sensation you get from deciding not to read the article that is infuriating everyone on the internet.

Sex can definitely be satisfying, but is it as consistently satisfying as listening to the rain while being inside with a good book, a cup of hot chocolate, and a foot massage?

Sex is cool but have you ever turned to a teenager in a movie theater who has started looking at their phone twenty minutes into the first act, calmly hissed, “Put that away right now” and had them obey you immediately?

You could have sex, or you could just recycle your entire stack of unread magazines and papers all at once without an ounce of guilt. You will feel the same release.

Sex is cool and you should do it… but I would also recommend the experience of hearing the voice of your therapist in your head as you’re about to make the exact same mistake you’ve made numerous times in the past but then CHOOSING NOT TO DO IT because you’ve grown as a person and you’re doing the work.

There’s kinky sex, and then there’s the thrill of deliberately using a coaster on a table belonging to someone you hate.

OK, I get it—sex is cool, but have you ever asked three senior professional coworkers what their salaries are, had them tell you openly in the spirit of helping, and then gone to your next performance review armed to negotiate with that very helpful information?

Sex is without a doubt very cool. Also cool? Liking and feeling good about your current haircut.

Yes, sure, sex is cool, about as cool as not drinking alcohol at night and then sleeping eight hours straight and somewhere in there having a wild, wild sex dream about Falkor, the luck dragon, from The Neverending Story cause you’re so deep in that sweet REM, baby.

Sex? Cool. Wearing flats to a black-tie wedding because your feet hurt and honestly you think you might be over-wearing heels? Even cooler.

Yeah, sex is cool but have you ever told someone you didn’t really want to hang out with that you had a doctor’s appointment, implied it was somewhat serious, and then spent the better part of an afternoon wandering around in the woods looking at trees enjoying the silcence?

Oh man, good for me. Look at me! I am listening to jazz.

Here I am, just taking in the moment. Fully present. Just me and the music.

Yup yup yup yup yup. Completely immersed. Thinking about nothing else.

The rhythm. The musicality. The syncopation.

Is that the right word? “Syncopation”? That’s a jazz thing?

Sync-o-pate sync-o-pate sync-o-pate.

One thing’s for sure: I am not on my phone right now.

I don’t even know how many minutes it’s been since I looked at my phone.

Because I am too busy listening to this song.

Is it a song?

Does it have to have words to be a song?

Maybe it’s a piece?

That’d be kinda pretentious. This isn’t a museum.

I mean it’s “ART.” No one is saying this isn’t art.

But it’s not Van Gogh. You can’t listen to a Van Gogh.

Is that insensitive? He cut off one ear. But he still had another one.

Oh, you know what? I bet they call it a “tune.”

Man, jazz guys are so cool.

That bass player is rockin’ that flat cap.

I don’t think I could pull that off.

Maybe if I carried a bass with me people would buy it.

How does he get that thing around?

Does he take it on the subway?

If he did, he could say, “SHOWTIME!” That’d be a fun little joke.

In the bass community, is it just generally accepted that you have to have a car?

If you’re a jazz player and you run into another one, do you give each other tips as a show of solidarity?

I’m so glad I have the attention span to appreciate this music.

Not everyone could sit here and just totally let go of themselves like I’m currently doing.

Especially not in my generation.

Honestly, I feel kinda bad for people my age.

Constantly distracted. Unable to appreciate what’s happening directly in front of them.

Not me!

I’m an old soul.

Are we still on the first song?

Sorry—first tune?

You know what? Doesn’t matter.

I got nowhere to be but here.

Does the library close at ten or eleven?

Well, what difference does it make?

I’m just gonna leave whenever the show’s over anyway.

I mean, I guess if I know when the library closes, and the show goes late, then I can have a backup plan ready so I don’t waste any time googling.

I’ll look it up between the sets.

Is a group of “tunes” a “set”?

How come jazz shows don’t have playbills?

Oh, wait, everyone’s clapping. Was that a solo just now?

How do they decide how long the solos go?

I bet there are some guys who are, like, notorious for going way too long.

And it’s like, are they showboats or are they geniuses?

It can be difficult to tell the difference.

Like Airplane. Now that was a movie.

Denzel Washington is hot!

I really liked La La Land and Babylon, but I totally zoned out during First Man.

It just feels like such a waste of time for everybody involved when you go see art and you suddenly realize your mind has been wandering the whole time thinking about a bunch of bullshit.

Whoa, the saxophone player has a flute now!

I wonder if he’s seen Anchorman.

He probably gets that all the time.

“You stay classy, San Diego.” Hilarious.

Why don’t they make mid-budget studio comedies anymore?

What is Judd Apatow doing to nurture the next generation of comedy directors?

Who made Blockers? I liked Blockers.

Oh, here comes the end of the tune.

🎵Da daaa, da daaaa, DA da daaaaa! 🎵

WOOOOOOOOOO!

So good.

I’m so glad I’m here right now.

How long was that, an hour?

Let me check.

Twelve minutes.

You know what? There’s a whole lot of city out there.

I should be spontaneous and leave right now.

Off to the library I go.

Hey guys,

I love a gem-like book and the satisfaction of devouring a story all in one gulp. Here are seven favourites, besides, of course, the ones I have written which are short, crispy essays.

A new-to-me author: The English Understand Wool

If you spot this book in a store, you’ll feel the magnetic pull of its silver spine, drool-inducing Thiebaud cover, and declarative title. The story begins with Marguerite, our teenage heroine, explaining the finer things in life. She’s learned from the best, her exacting maman. At seven, Marguerite begins to play bridge – “one cannot always assume that a child can be kept out of sight” – and her mother’s friends soon request Marguerite as a partner, “especially if there were to be interesting stakes.” But then, at 17, Marguerite learns something her maman had failed to mention, and it’s way higher stakes than what hotel to visit in Paris.

The crowd pleaser: Mr. Salary (more copies here)

Faber Stories is a British series, but you can find their short-story collection online. For five bucks, each edition costs less than an iced latte (in New York). Mr. Salary was the first piece of fiction that Sally Rooney published — before Normal People and Conversations With Friends — so it’s fun to look back at an earlier work of hers and see her signature style developing. There’s an illicit will-they-won’t-they aspect to the narrator’s relationship with the titular Mr. Salary, an older family friend she moves in with at age 19 and later comes back to visit when her dad is dying. I started it in the pool and then had to finish it before getting dressed again.

Nonfiction gems: 300 Arguments and Tell Me How It Ends

I’ll read anything Sarah Manguso publishes, but 300 Arguments is a true delight. “Think of this as a short book composed entirely of what I hoped would be a long book’s quotable passages,” she explains. Pack it for a park hang and then discuss your favorite aphorisms with friends. Here’s one: “Aspiring to fame is aspiring to a life of small talk.”

Next, in her extended essay Tell Me How It Ends, Valeria Luiselli (whose 2019 novel you may have read) goes through the 40 questions she asked migrant children while volunteering as a court interpreter in New York. Of five- and seven-year-old sisters from Guatemala, Luiselli writes, “The day before they left, their grandmother sewed a ten-digit telephone number on the collars of the dress each girl would wear throughout the entire trip. It was a ten-digit number the girls had not been able to memorize, as hard as she tried to get them to, so she had decided to embroider it on their dresses, and repeat, over and over, a single instruction: they should never take this dress off, not even to sleep, and as soon as they reached America, as soon as they met the first American policeman, they were to show the inside of the dress’s collar to him. He would then dial the number and let them speak to their mother. The rest would follow.” 

Luiselli encounters these girls after they’ve crossed the border, spent time in custody (“they didn’t remember how many days, but they said they were colder there than they had ever been”), lived for weeks in a shelter, and then flew to New York to reunite with their mom, stepdad, and baby brother. “But of course, it doesn’t end there,” she writes. “That’s just where it begins, with a court summons: a first Notice to Appear.” Though the volume is slim, she takes on the massive U.S. border crisis in a way that is clear and immediate. It’s a heart-wrenching look into the lives of children before and after they cross into the U.S.

Best in class: Kick the Latch and Aug 9 — Fog

Kathryn Scanlan writes some of my favourite little books. Kick the Latch tells the life story of professional “racetracker” Sonia, drawn from a series of interviews Scanlan did with a real horse trainer of the same name. It’s an immersive look into a brutal and sometimes beautiful way of life, told in a series of vignettes. “You live at the track, your life is full,” Sonia explains. Horse legs are “wheels,” jockeys sit in their cars blasting the heat while wrapped in cling wrap to try to “make weight” for a race, and a galloping horse spends “a lot of his time suspended in the air — flying, really — or on one foot.” That foot lands with “a thousand pounds of pressure held up by that one thin leg, that little hoof the size of a hand-held ashtray.” You don’t need to be a former horse girl to find it fascinating.

Aug 9 – Fog, also by Scanlan, has a slower, sleepier feel, but it’s no less compelling. The source material was the five-year diary of an 86-year-old woman living in a small town in the 1960s. Decades later, Scanlan found the diary at an estate sale. She took it home and typed out some of her favorite sentences, arranging and rearranging them over the course of several years. As Scanlan writes in the intro, after spending so much time with a stranger’s writing, the diarist’s voice has become part of her own. “Often I say to myself, ‘some hot nite’ or ‘flowers coming fast’ or ‘grass sure growing’ or ‘everything loose is traveling.’” This spare and beautiful portrait of a woman might inspire you to take another stab at diary life.

A French favorite: Happening 

In New York, I was in an Annie Ernaux reading group that was formed after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We gathered every six weeks or so for wine, cheese, and Annie talk. We’ve read six of her books so far, and this is the one I suggest whenever friends ask for an Ernaux rec. With her signature removed, she explores the shame of an unwanted pregnancy, her near-death experience, and her strongest memories of the period. If you like it, you’re in luck, because several more of her books have been translated into English — Seven Stories sells a whole set.

Now it’s your turn: what books or short stories do you love? I’m always looking to add books to my overstuffed bookshelf.