In the early 90s, Gillian McCain—who later edited the Poetry Project Newsletter and then co-edited Please Kill Me, an oral history of punk—wrote a literary events feature for the Newsletter called “Dirt.” For the foreseeable future, Grayson Scott is bringing back the gossip column to our pages. Expect reporting on literary and cultural events, but, as you’ll read below, not just. —ed.

An old word for columnist is “stylite”: Someone who is on top of a column. A friend of mine told me a story from when she used to write columns, about how she sought out her country’s most prolific columnist, then retired, as her subject. When she asked him how he did it for so long, the columns, he panicked. Column and calumny are different words, but can be mistaken for each other when overheard.

I went to Frieze on opening night, abetted by my girlfriend, who has a profession. She explained to me that the opening was properly called a “vernissage,” which is an instance of euphony and therefore incompatible with The Shed, one of the most graceless buildings in the city. Like Sebald said, “there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific,” and I am accordingly uncertain how much can be said about Frieze. It is sponsored by Deutsche Bank, and the opening was the same day the bank was ordered to pay a $75 million settlement for helping Jeffrey Epstein traffic all those kids.

Under the misapprehension that I might get something for free, I went to the top floor in search of the origin of the discarded glasses littering trash cans and non-art surfaces. Up there was only $30 wine and an automat-style device that dispensed skin-care samples if you solved its riddles, which seems like something Andy Warhol would have made if Valerie Solanas had shot him in the face. There was free water from Vote.org, presented in a similar can to the ones Coors Light sometimes comes in now but stamped BANNED in impact font, intended to dramatize voter suppression in Georgia.

All of the young people were downstairs on the second level. Many were wearing pink, incidentally matching the copies of the FT staffers were handing out which had a story about the Sacklers above the fold but neglected the Epstein news. Re: the art, the Nan Goldin photos in the Gagosian booth were wonderful, and the beach shots reminded me of that Gregg Bordowitz short film from Portraits of People Living with HIV (1993) where they all go sailing, which I saw at the Triple Canopy series they did at BAM. Speaking of movies, Earth II, a film from the Anti-Banality Union, has recently been made available to stream for free. Made by re-cutting scenes from over 300 feature-length blockbusters, it is both a genuinely original climate-collapse narrative and the funniest movie I saw last year.

I arrived at the Triple Canopy Symposium as it was ascending to total illegibility, superintended by beloved artist and performer Alex Tatarsky. A white lady successfully rapped, a stand-up comic bombed, and The Illustrious Pearl made a waffle. After a lull, a Black MAGA intervention—a surprise even to some of the symposium’s planners—erupted. “FUCK WHITE BABIES,” bellowed Crackhead Barney as she launched some chairs around. Effective boomer-removal tactic for the Club Cringe DJ set. TC’s annual Benefit at Rule of Thirds, which I also arrived late to, sounded fun: Honoree Andrea Fraser smashed a pie decorated with TC’s operating budget into her face. Fraser is now eligible to join Wikipedia’s “List of people who have been pied,” alongside Friedmans Thomas and Milton, most members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and a seeming plurality of international bankers. On my way out I overheard someone say “I haven’t heard anything about whip-its in a while,” which made me despair for the speaker and their relationships..

Bladee and Varg 2, musicians who make songs for people who look like they’ll reenact the Cat Marnell home invasion on me, had a show at The Hole’s 86 Walker gallery. Mary Jane Dunphe, musician and Poetry Project Marathon alum, wrote the text for the show, which is good both on its merits and relative to the standard. Kaitlin Phillips was somehow involved in the show. I had work and missed the opening so had to go later, but Elena Saavedra Buckley wrote an excellent dispatch of the scene there for The Paris Review. The paintings put me in mind of the way YouTube comments are iterative without rising to the quality of memes, and are also Urbit-y in a way that is probably coincidence (“Worst shit I’ve ever seen,” according to a guy at the Montez Press Radio event who did make it to the opening). Some of the paintings had been spray painted recently, which, in evidence of how badly Eric Adams has fucked this place up, put me in mind of the first vigil for Jordan Neely. We, the protestors, were on the uptown F at Broadway-Lafayette, and I have a voice note on my phone where I say: “Fuck are we being kettled? [. . .] There’s a chemical smell, smells like spray paint.” The crowd moved and I could see someone had painted JORDAN NEELY MURDERED HERE on the floor. You can’t go look at it, because I returned a few hours later to check and it had been erased. Arielle Isack, writer and now editorial fellow at The Baffler, wrote an account for n+1:

Other publications learned something from 2020, since almost everyone covered Jordan Neely’s death. Like formerly homeless activist and witness to Neely’s death Johnny Grimas said in an interview with The New York Times: “We got to bust out right now, bust out for truth.”

Nakba Day, organized by Within Our Lifetime, continues to be the best time you can have while still conforming to the Noahide laws. The $100 million Strategic Response Group—founded as an anti-terror unit, but since 2020 ubiquitous at protests—hassled us when we started marching and played that stupid DISPERSE NOW recording. The cop who holds the speaker is probably always a different guy, but invariably looks like he’s just been dredged from one of the digester eggs and avoids making eye contact with any of the protestors like he’s trying to suppress a hard-on during his niece’s dance performance. The march was more subdued than last year’s, but the speeches were great and nobody went to jail. Min al-maya l’il-maya, Falasteen 3arabiye!

n+1 threw a party for the launch of the “Attachment Issue” at their still-new-ish office in Greenpoint. Mark Krotov read an excerpt from the issue’s editorial note, eliding the part where they greatly exaggerated Bookforum’s death. Good news for hipsters. I caught actual party reporter Andrew Fedorov lacking in front of his boss Gabriel Snyder, who is from the nice part of my home state. There were more people there than I’ve seen at a legacy magazine event since 2020, and it maintained an admirable one-to-one ex ratio.

I’m not even sure Verso does events anymore, which is sad, but The Poetry Project has them all the time. A brief inventory of phrases uttered there recently: “White people have been making yogurt since before they were invented,” (Bob Glück); “He just looked so cute,” after abrogating a Q&A to hug writer and professor Alexander Zevin (Gary Indiana); “I wrote that yesterday and might feel differently tomorrow,” (also Gary); “Work your ass off to change the language and don’t ever get famous,” (Colter Jacobsen quoting Bernadette Mayer).

Remarks aren’t literature, but remarks about literature can be a column. Dorothee Elmiger’s novel Out of the Sugar Factory (Two Lines Press, trans. Megan Ewing) takes the “I should feel as if I had been pirouetting” from Middlemarch—the sense following after you’ve been overwhelmed by the vastness attendant to any commodity, the trace of the people who made and moved it—and spins it out. She writes: “[S]omething seemed to reveal itself to me that I couldn’t articulate but could only rediscover in circumstances of similar or analogous structure—as relationships, repetitions, parallels.” The book almost mocks pareidolia; its range recalls Paul B. Preciado’s remark “Happiness lies in the ability to feel the totality of things as being part of ourselves.” Elmiger’s erudition and restraint are a model for how a serious person should engage material like this.

There is an epigraph in A. Alvarez’s Savage God:

Blake Butler has written a book, Molly (Archway Editions, November), about his late wife, Molly Brodak. Brodak shot herself in a park by the couple’s house in March of 2020. Janet Malcolm wrote in The Silent Woman that suicide is the “erotic” alternative to other kinds of dying, and most reviews of this book will be elaborations of whether it is good or bad to reproduce your wife’s suicide note or provide a catalog of the infidelities she concealed while you were married. For me, reading Molly was like realizing the incandescent lightbulb you put in your mouth has cracked and that you now must chew.

Molly was blurbed by Michael W. Clune, whose memoir about being a grad student who uses heroin, White Out, has been reprinted by McNally Editions. A friend texted me this review: “The Michael Clune book about how communism/group feeling basically solved his heroin addiction really moved me.” It has some of the funniest stories about drugs I have heard and I used to be a line cook.

I only listen to music that could be on a playlist called “Overheard on the B6,” but Blank Forms’ Tyler Maxin was so damn nice to me at the launch for Lary 7’s Larynx that I regretted not having a turntable to play the LP he gave me. I used a friend’s to listen to it, and it’s fascinating—Larynx is 7’s first retrospective, detailing decades of music made with his collection of discarded and obsolescent technology. This is genuine freakdom, and its preservation is a benison.

7 spun dub reggae and possibly something called “furniture music” (NB: writers, name your forms like musicians do). He had a plant on his turntable that was identified to me as both “Lary’s totem” and a fern but was in fact a lotus, which to his credit is not an easy plant to care for, something 7 reportedly has done for ten years. I went to get some beer from the deli on Canal and Orchard and found it totally packed with people from the launch, amplified when someone walked in and announced “What is this, Berghain?”

Back upstairs, I asked Tom LaPrade about the huge rock on the floor underneath the trestle table where Lawrence Kumpf and 7 had set up. He said it was left over from the previous tenant and too heavy to move, then admitted not knowing what kind it was and proposed a rock identification app; I countered that this existed and was called Shazam. He took this with equanimity and this is a credit to him. An attendee, who I can only describe as wearing a soul patch and a fedora, gleefully pressed a small AM/FM radio playing a live transmission of the show against my ear and declared “IT’S WORKING,” which reminded me of the part in Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser when the protagonist puts Colonel Sander’s hand in his mouth. A noticeable quantum of intergenerational flirting was developing on the dance floor, and I left. I thought I saw fictional real-life Hanya Yanagihara character Yeonmi Park by the McDonald’s on Delancey, where both my friend Matt and my girlfriend separately ran into BLP Kosher a couple days later and were granted implausibly similar selfies. His show at Market Hotel is hotly anticipated.