She showed up smoking marlboro lights and talking about a ribbon store nearby. This was on west 38 street, where I’d rented, for 250 dollars, a studio for the recording sesh. My voice was ragged, frayed, like late period Dylan, on account of a cold I acquired in Greenpoint, at a play, and three classes a day on the Metamorphosis: I encouraged my students to notice patterns, the transformations within transformations, the repetition of the word deliverance--they drew dung-beetle dicks on the whiteboard, and, lost myself in the mutiny, I told them Gregor Samsa’s sister was Greta Thunberg. Lauren and I had been waiting for her on a bench by a clothing store, which induced Lauren to tell me about Reformation, she called it slutty Anne Boleyn, but before the bench we’d gone to CVS to buy lauren an android charger and a big bag of ricolas for my ruined larynx. Oh and before the CVS we’d gotten coffee and croissants and salad from the Quotidian Pain. There were drilling, burrowing sounds coming from somewhere adjacent to quotidian pain, and so I couldn’t talk at all, couldn’t even try to talk over them, so I tried to read about Karl Ove, I mean read his book,  the coat sliding off a hanger, his dad’s fingerprints, dead, on a teapot, and she said she’d done the reading, our guest---Dasha--she said she was a speed reader; but, after I’d sent her the PDF and the page numbers--labeled DASHA START HERE on page 417, in my stunted hieroglyphic--and after I’d reminded her of where to meet, at Gotham Studios on w 38st, she’d said that today’s section--the final part of book 1--was a “a bit of a bore.” But then she was in the thrum of glamor, premieres and screenings and writers rooms, and so perhaps she couldn’t attend to the subtleties or whatever of the text, which was fine with me, since it was coup just to get her here, just to watch her walk up to us on west 38 st and to listen to her tell us about ribbons and the nearest brasserie, what was the difference anyway between a bistro and a brasserie, and I knew the episode would be a tedious success when, once we got recording, on the 10th floor, she launched into her day: rotten bananas, red smoothies, Equinox. There was perhaps even a kind of sleepy glamour to her mundanity, and her itemization (such as it was) almost redeemed my sandblasted tonsils and the wallet I’d lost, for a spell, at Metrograph, which I would tell her about, later, at Match 86, after a cucumber martini;  redeemed Lauren’s spasming shoulder and migraines, too. Dasha redeemed most of literature herself-- “all books are basically good,” she said. Then we took a cab in the rain to the bisto or was it a brasserie and we ate pate and tartare and escargot, doused in parsley sauce, and outside, after, we smoked American Spirit Yellows. I can hardly speak, there’s nothing more to say, though, I think.

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