1. What does it mean to be well-dressed?

If you go on a date and you forget what you’re wearing, then you’re well-dressed.

If I were searching for clothes that ‘say something,’ it is a mistake. Clothes don’t speak but might squeal or giggle or moan. Maybe they grunt or take up armed resistance. To be well dressed is to be aligned in shape and texture and mood, to look effortless. To be in outfits that—whether a black polyester jumpsuit with a deep v and decorative rhinestones on the collar or a chopped-to-cropped t-shirt-to-muscle tank and short shorts or indeed one of several neutral-pastel muscle tanks at the appropriate crop and armpit hole length—appear to have always belonged to a body. This is one meaning of well-dressed. In certain instances it might be correct to take on a uniform (e.g. your girlfriend’s gardening jumpsuit; your therapy track pants). This is also a meaning of well-dressed.

If you are sufficiently well-dressed, we should either find it impossible to imagine you without your outfit, or impossible not to.

2. Can we say what we mean?

Yes, mostly only by accident.

Yeah, unfortunately. To me this question is related to a bunch of other questions that people pretend they don’t know the answer to, such as “is translation possible,” “can I ever understand or experience X in the way you understand or experience X,” “is there more than one of anything,” “is there anything more I can do,” and so on. The answer to questions of this order has to be, again: yeah, unfortunately. Unfortunately I don’t have time right now to explain why. But I’m guessing at this point someone reading this might be thinking, “Nora, you bitch, you fucking cow, if that’s so then how can you explain blah, blah, blah? Because if you maintain that we can say what we mean, and that this is unfortunate—the way you’re doing right now, you dunce, Nora, you fucking clown—then you can’t possibly also maintain, as you do, this, that, and the other thing.” To which I can only reply: “please stop being so goddamn mean to me! What is wrong with you? What did I ever do to you? Calm down!”

3. What is accidental writing?

Many textual appearances contain a gap between thought or intent or sound and result (the marks on the page i.e. “the writing”). What is written cracks open what was unwritten and that necessary gap is the prerequisite for the accident, which is to say: most writing is accidental, nevermind the way a mouth reaches for words that are sonically adjacent or reciting meaning that happens to rhythmically delight. Accidents are the result of thinking into meaning. A cousin of automatic but by marriage.

4. Who's your crush?

I don’t really get crushes. For me it’s pretty much either eternal love or I can’t remember your name.

A bartender colleague who I recently had a filthy sex dream about, so different from any sex dream I’ve previously had in the past 29 years that I now find it difficult to stand next to him without repeating the words he spoke to me in the dream. Also, my Sicilian American Male Boyfriend.

5. What do we want to happen to ‘the bad man’?

Long ago, I wanted to talk with the bad man. If I had the opportunity and the ability, I might find the exact language to make him face his crimes, to trap him with speech so accurate that there was no escape. The mid-century politico in his existential black suit—“sick, dissatisfied, unloved,” as Allen Ginsberg wrote—acknowledges his crimes with a cry of despair and he sees the justice of punishment, like the inhabitants of Dante’s inferno, where sinners unite with their fate and the story of a life can be told. Is this experience of language still mine?—to purvey the irrefutable. Has my relation to language changed now that I just want to kill him? I leave it to you to imagine all the creative ways. If my imagination has been polluted by the overwhelming violence in our culture, then I suppose your imagination has suffered too. Now the bad man seems to be pastiche, no more alive than a tin bunny or rat in a shooting gallery. Can this be true? Maybe this lack of reality comes from the top down. To the bad man, I have no more reality than a cow, something that may increase his wealth, but not something that needs healthcare. Would imagining his humanity be a form of resistance?

I don’t know, I’m not bisexual.

We want him to suffer sudden onset empathy and collapse in the street shitting himself about it, and we want him to smell like shit. Above all we want him to stop fucking his undergraduates.

6. Is 'shyness' a moral failing?

I once had an eternal love on this girl who—actually, never mind, I’m just going to skip the explanatory story and say, yes.

Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life that you’d like to. Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life that you’d like to. So if there's something you’d like to try, if there’s something you’d like to try, ask me, I won’t say no, how could I? Shyness is a moral subject insofar as fear is a political subject. Public sex is a self-evident good.

Shyness is a reasonable reaction to finding oneself in the presence of two terrifying poet-scholars who openly prize conversation above all other forms of art or sociality, Rainer and Violet.

Yes.

If you’re going to be shy,

I mean, treat it like Americans treat cursing, or smoking,

or fucking: we don’t forbid it of consenting

adults, but no one should wither near children.”

The other panelists were too shy to deliver their remarks,

and the great wisdom of shyness remained unspoken.

7. What constitutes a good reason to dislike someone?

They wrong you or someone in your family, you know, in the broad sense of that term. Or they are one of the bad men.

If they’re never shy.

Fascist, disagreeable with servers, rude to bus drivers, superiority born out of academia or class position, burlesque, pathetic behavior as a weapon.

8. How would human culture change if we kept different animals as pets?

The speakers got to sit—the table repurposed

from its typical use at galas or weddings or other occasions

for abused leeks to re-stiffen in a yellow, congealed

edible fatty substance made by churning a cow’s cream

on plastic plates that make an unpleasant scrape against the

“linen” obscuring the circle that would later grab its toes

in a standing forward bend—before placards indicating

their assigned bestial case studies, as they prepared to answer

the question

“How would human culture change

if we kept different animals as pets?”

while the audience, beyond

those who’d snagged an iron bench, was forced to mill

about in crowds, increasingly interrupted by creatures

that the speakers were too focused on their time-

constrained discussion to at first notice coming through

the door to the Parish Hall, starting with a stalking

tiger whose teeth were clamping down on a bleeding book,

followed by a giant capy sharing his wheeled basin

of water with a friendly eel, pushed by one arm

of a polar bear who was, with the other, holding

a stack of the most recent issue of the Poetry

Project Newsletter. The speakers said:

1. I’m representing Freshwater Eels.

I want to say not much would change if ‘we’ kept eels—animals,

by the way, of which Freud dissected hundreds in search of testes

before giving up—except the obvious (production of unagi rolls

would be somewhat lower, depending on how wide

the habit of adoption spread) because:

I.  Eels are already kept in domestic captivity, despite

our knowledge this halts their metamorphosis (after

oceanica larva, glass, and juvenilia, they’re meant

for full pigmentation, impossible indoors); and because

II.  We haven’t learned from dogs, except to beat them.

2. I guess I’m representing Big Cats.

But what if the problem my colleague identifies

is a consequence of dogs themselves?

We’ve modeled schools, courts, gyms, towns around

Pavlovian ideas of responsiveness to being told we’re “bad.”

Even small cats could help, if we could “train”

our feeling, I mean feline, selves, to bite

when hit, to piss until we’re pet, to shred the couch

until we’re given towers. I had a neighbor growing

up who kept a lion, and down the road,

close enough that they must have sometimes heard each other

roar, I think there was a tiger. I find it strange

that people go for “exotic” and wind up

with a housecat zoomed in 28x.

3. I’m representing Polar Bears:

We haven’t actually shown much adaptation

to the conditions of our choice of pets. Take a polar

bear home, and most “owners” would ask it

to tolerate the wood floor, the wall-to-wall carpet,

without considering constructing an ice foyer.

4. Representing Beetles:

She has a point! I was planning to spend my 30 seconds

envisioning what human ideal of cuteness might imitate

the rhinoceros beetle’s wings, but if we kept them

as we do cats, we’d just stomp our friends underfoot.

5. Capybaras, here:

We need them not as possessions, but as Gods,

so we could obey their chill example, defying the old

Lord who made us abuse lambs so often, to take a bath.

6. Consider the cockroach:

It lives alongside us but asks for no affection—

in fact, it thrives on our carelessness. Certain pets

are best kept by means of neglect, and they teach

the value of distance. Perhaps care oughtn’t always

follow cuteness, but neither do the ignored creatures

universally demand cuddles.

7. The porcupine, too:

It accidentally pricks any love object too soft,

but thereby literalizes the truth of all intimacy:

its quills suggest that attraction survives only

if the lover learns to love at a safe distance.

The rotund rodent tempts our fingers, though,

unlike the fish which must be kept quarantined.

There’s no love in the pure voyeurism of that

total distance, where we can abstractly appreciate

that fish live in a little room within our room.

We too shy from whatever regulates our environment.

Q., the moderator, turning their attention to the mobile

mic, to start the Q&A, stood, and promptly stepped

into a pile of shit deposited by a horse whose head

was busy drinking from a bird bath. “What the fuck?”

they asked the crowd, who’d begun to understand

this was not “part” of the roundtable, but disruption:

“I have a question,” a man who had a question said,

“Did your hypothetical animals consent to their use

as evidence in this stupid conversation? You want to

categorize the human animal as whoever overlooks

what they hadn’t been looking for first, guarder

of their personality, the non-adaptive beast demanding

animals aspire to their same complacency. You pretend

to put the animal first, in order to judge man. But your clients

have no fur, scales, gills, fangs, or hunger; they are neither

polyphasic nor nocturnal; they do not reproduce

because they are imaginary. I’ve brought these counterexamples

to force you to consider the material fact of animal

existence, and to hereby announce the formation

of the Summit’s Harmful Animal Representation Committee,

SHARC, which must approve all uses of animal examples

before their incorporation in future panels.”

9. Is conversation art?

If you’re having a conversation and you forget what you’re wearing, then it’s art.

Do you think I’m capable of having panache?

The only art form that’s possible/fun to master!

L.: Right, I’m thinking of Kant’s guide to dinner party conversation, where the number of guests should be no fewer than the graces and no more than the muses (somewhere between three and nine). All conversation should proceed from narration to ratiocination to jest. But now we’re back to just being nice guys together, imagining every housewife in history who’s thought about which of her husband’s colleagues to invite to a dinner party was serving a meaningful role as a curator.

C.: And why not?

L.: All “humanism” at once overstates and understates what’s unusual about people—here, just that we talk, and on purpose? Forgetting, too, that silence also speaks. Last night I dreamt that a couple came to my garden supply store with their forlorn beagle—I worked as some combination landscape architect and animal behaviorist—to ask for my help getting the dog to stop digging unsightly holes. In the dream I stalled the conversation, pretending to be called by other tasks, rearranging flower pots, and so on, until the couple became so impatient they protested. I noted that the dog had not even twitched his paws in the loam’s direction in the time we’d been waiting, that he exhibited no symptoms. “He digs because he’s anxious,” I ruled, “and he’s calm with me.” This dream dog demonstrates . . .

SHARC: Stop right there. We are enforcing our ban against animal examples for human purposes.

10. What can the libertine and the nun teach each other?

The nun and the libertine don’t realize how to solve the problem till later. And being distressed but not the way you think—it’s our hard bargain for reanimating our friendship—going up and down the apartment depending on who’s on the floor, it being embedded in the mountain, everyone comes up to me, each floor opens up and it’s these guys—so, we’re both embedded. But not to escape pleasure. The nun says, “I’m” in the bottom floor of the house and they keep coming at me. I have a penis in the dream or something like it, and the guys are coming into the house no matter how high I go. When they go up, the ceilings fall apart—all these guys and a pile of them. There’s the king of them and he says there’s only one way, to win. At first I think it’s taking it from him, seemingly easier, or at least customary, in it not taking the nun out of themselves. Then we realize—he means—“no, you have to top me”—with the penis-like thing—then the field goes tan and I collapse, well. Green the libertine smells wet. Tan the grass is outside and blue sky and she (the big she) recognizes us in the outline of their hot face at night and smelling and not stopping.

In my relationship, at least, the libertine and the nun have taught one another that what the nun considers “god,” without whom the love of humanity would be impossible, and what the libertine considers “humanity,” for love of whom it is first necessary to give up any notion of god, are not terrifically different concepts, and that the form of worship is what matters.

11. What does my nipple piercing mean for your nipples?

I’m answering your question from inside the NYPL—what does that mean? But really, what insight do books yield about pleasure and reciprocity that experience alone does not? My experience consists of having unpierced nipples that do not augment or inaugurate my arousal and having a wife with one pierced nipple whose capacity for feeling pleasure we both, I believe, greatly appreciate. Given the situation, I can only answer your question partially:

I. Knowledge is different than pleasure.

The pierced nipple of my lover provides relief, because it suggests the existence of a pleasure I cannot access, as well as a free-floating anxiety, due to my insufficient knowledge about this pleasure. For example, I feel the need to suck or flick or bite or slobber over the pierced nipple in perpetuity, which betrays my lack of understanding. (On rare occasion I’ve been told to stop.)

II. Pleasure is what is ultimately sought.

The pierced nipple of my lover has produced in me another kind of arousal, to pierce my own nipples, as if to see if their piercing will make them more like hers. This arousal is also weak and incomplete: I’ve voiced this desire many times and remain unpierced.

III. Books only ever provide us with models.

One night, five drunk friends enter Tile Bar. Over a late round, we each pull out copies of Spinoza’s Ethics. Given the uneven nipple sensitivities of the table (ranging from my mute to wild), it’s wagered that auto-stimulation of nipples while reading Spinoza’s geometrically outlined philosophy—articulated via different lines and points of contact; or modes of extension and thought—about how reality is a kind of activity, might result in each reader’s nipples feeling aroused, which might lead to each reader’s general arousal, which, then, might lead to a collective arousal, all the readers being modes of extensions of the same throbbing pierced nipple, the same aroused substance. I try this over several nights and fail at step one.

IV. I misread your question, which has to do with meaning not arousal.

My nipples care less about meaning than I do. What might require reflection is how I want to fault my nipples for this, rather than exalt them.

I’d enjoy—and put to good use—the gift of easy exact knowledge that would grant me the ability to answer this question. My nipples like your nipple piercing, the way the titanium rubs against my skin.

A rising tide lifts all boats. When attention is drawn to your nipples, the chance of attention being paid to mine increases, whether it’s only through a shirt or in a more kinetic fashion, your gain is my gain.

12. What makes sex good?

Being in love.

Abjectness.

This question reminds me of a wonderful moment in my youth. My friends graduated high school more or less unfucked and scattered to various colleges. We gathered some following winter or summer (in Southern California, so who knows—the memory is sunlit) in a park, still dizzy from our various defloration, and compared notes. A friend, in love, shared that he now understood that sex was not, on its own, good. Intimacy alone made sex good.

I had had sex by then with a number of people I did not particularly like or know, and I had enjoyed most of it, so I ventured to disagree. He shut me down—hand waved, in fact—with the authority of a 19-year-old aware that he has landed on a philosophy that will keep him in permanent supply of a girlfriend. And in fact our other friend swooned for his answer.

Casual sex in that era occurred mostly through the pushed-aside crotch of a leotard, so maybe he was right.

Oh, but he wasn’t. Love makes sex love, and love is not good or bad.

A pervert who knows how to speak too much but not narrate, and also knows when to shut up. Not too many questions, not too many answers. The right amount of tongue and a little understanding. Not too much laughing. Willingness.

13. How to say goodbye?

This is the absolute last question that I have an answer to, sorry. I’m not sure I’ve ever said goodbye to anything. Probably because I’m so shy.

I don’t think I can say goodbye any more than a dog can. Goodbye doesn’t compute in a social pack animal, as it were. Hello, yes. Hello.