I Read More Books.

I also channeled the spirit of Cookie Mueller, and went to India.

Firstly things, firstly - Ali Liebegott has a Substack. You should follow it post haste. Ali is one of my favorite writers, favorite painters, favorite people. Her Substack, Dad Bod, is about art, money, depression, trash, God, Emily Dickinson, jobs, emotions, supermarket sheet cakes, the sounds of your neighbors fucking, and more. Sometimes you get a little essay, or story; sometimes you get a nice, fat thought. Or a legit poem. Lots of art! Some things are only for paid subscribers and, I promise you, you will feel left out and demoted if you can’t slick on it, so pay up if you can and stave off the FOMO. FOMO is almost never real, but this time, it IS.

Ali Liebegott

Now I will tell you about some books I read last year, eventually launching into a book I would like for you to look into right now. You can order all these books from the DOPAMINE Bookshop.org Bookshop. We get a cut of your purchase, and it really helps us! Okay. You guys, I read Dubliners. It’s too late for me to care about a book like this. I would have had to been given it in a good school I never went to, when I was perhaps feeling romantic about my writerly Irish heritage - not like those fucking Boston losers who get real stupid about being Irish, not knowing that actual Irish-from-Ireland people would look askance at their dimwitted townie-ness and quickly scurry away. Because, as we really saw last year, in the inspiring swell of support for Palestine, the Irish care deeply about human rights and are against racist bullshit and colonization, unlike the white-pride-vibed Irish Bostonians of my youth. I do feel a little bad about not embracing national hero James Joyce but I am low-key obsessed with Irish writer Emer Martin, so certainly it evens out. And if Emer Martin were to ever, like, teach a class on why I should like James Joyce, I’d take it. Anyway. Enough about that guy. Please don’t come at me like some of you did for dissing Shakespeare last year.

I found the Young Readers Edition of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: The Secrets Behind What You Eat by Michael Pollan in a Little Free Library and I snagged it, and I read it. Whenever I think of Michael Pollan I think of him falling down after snorting tobacco in his tv show about psychedelics. I liked that show! I’ll probably watch and enjoy anything about psychedelics, though my favorite is probably Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, a 3-season Vice show where the drug-obsessed son of Errol Morris travels the world using himself as a guinea pig, in a very scientific manner, not that he’s also not in it for the good times. Which occasionally turn out to be bad times, as it is with drugs.

My man got me a copy of Manly Palmer Hall’s Occult Anatomy: The Body as Symbol. I was on a big MPH kick last year, finally having checked out some events at my local Philosophical Research Society, the very pretty, very storied venue, art gallery, library and book store started by the occultist founded in 1934. The Canadian mystic wrote over 150 books, including The Secret Teachings of All Ages, which is a compendium of all the occult secrets he scarped together through his life, pulling from the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, Indian mysticism, Freemasonry, Numerology, demonology, Kabbalah - it’s a sort of one-stop-shop for all that stuff. I had my mom get it for me for my birthday last year and I am slowwwwwwly reading it. I do not think it has made me any smarter, unfortunately, though I do like marinating in the vibes.

This $500 Taschen edition is *not* the one I have. Sigh.

I became aware of Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s writing many years go when I was lucky to publish a really excellent short story of hers in the anthology Baby, Remember My Name. I was psyched to learn she had a novel out, Big Girl, and really just so delighted for her to watch it blown up and collect lots of awards. I picked it up whilst on a book tour, in Memphis, at a really cute bookstore called Novel, where I also saw Ash + Chess’ Queer Tarot for the first time and lost my brains at the absolutely perfect colors of their risograph offering. But, Big Girl! It’s a coming-of age story, tracking 8-year-old Malaya Clondon as she grapples with the recent label, ‘obese,’ staying with her as she moves into adolescence and her Harlem neighborhood become gentrified before her eyes, familiar, comforting shops and restaurants, and faces, going away. Malaya’s mother is obsessed with trying to control both her own body and Malaya’s, and her grandmother, a thin, judgemental woman, seems to be the source of this generational abuse, but no more so, surely, than the world, and whoever raised her. MJS is really a masterful novelist, getting so close to these and other characters - Malaya’s more permissive, secretly smoking dad; he wild, inconsistent best-friend-maybe-more - spinning dense vibes around them and trusting us as readers to be able to take the often brief moments she gives us as the promise of so much more, such as Malaya glimpsing the unbridled joy of two fat, Black, exuberantly dressed women laughing freely on an escalator and watching, for a moment, transfixed. Such a great book.

I read Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton. How did this book even get into my house? Seems like a leftover schoolbook from my husband, but whatever, I’m glad it’s here. I really liked it! I mean, they were awfully mean about the wife, right? I’m so sensitive to being manipulated into hating a woman, in books or movies. But I couldn’t help but really sympathize with Ethan’s desperate love for his wife’s cousin, come to stay, and even though I was like, no way, she’s not gonna go for him, what sort of male fantasy is this - she does! And, I bought it! Why not? It was an enjoyable ride I didn’t want to get off, and it gets pretty unhinged and ends with horrible tragedy! Great writing, so snowy! Five stars.

Yes to this cover depicting the SLED TRAGEDY

Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica Written and Edited by Jessica Hundley. Do you know about these Taschen Library of Esoterica books? They’re frigging gorgeous. It’s as if they understand that people really love big, occult volumes, but it’s really about the vibe, and so they loaded up these books - others are about tarot, and astrology, and witchcraft - with fantastic art, classic stuff and contemporary, and the writing is also good but it’s more about casting a little aesthetic spell on yourself with this collection. I get really excited whenever a new one comes out. ALSO, another luscious Taschen book, The 12 Steps: Symbols, Myths and Archetypes of Recovery by Kikan Massara came out this year, and I read it / vibed it. So meaningful, actually, to see the tradition given such beautiful, respectful treatment, really reverent, held as a legit spiritual practice, which I’ve found it to be. Really lovely. I have many times imagined a new less artful but perhaps more lowbrow photography book that would be just pictures of rooms where recovery meetings happens, with attention paid to those amazing details like: coffee pots, portraits of Lois, banners of the 12 steps in that font (IFKYK). Any sober photographers want to do this with me? Meeting rooms are so weird and perfect.

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus. I noticed this book at my local Barnes and Noble and was very intrigued. Then, while meeting with brilliant genius designer Fay Orlove, talking about the covers she was doing for some DOPAMINE books, I noticed she had a copy! Because she designed it! And Jamie Loftus is her friend, lucky duck! I don’t care how you feel about hot dogs, you love them, you think they’re vile; somehow, your point of view will be upheld in this book, but more than that, it won’t matter. All that will matter is the radioactive sass with which Loftus tells the story of a summer-long roadtrip with the boyfriend she’s bound to break up with, taste-testing famous hotdogs across the USA while talking about the behind-the-scenes stories of everything what scumbags the meat industry were during the height of Covid, to how the little cult-fave mom-and-pop hot doggery came to be. When it’s over you’ll feel like you’ve lost your best friend. That’s how I feel. And it’s extra weird because my imaginary lost best friend is actually my friend’s real best friend. Maybe they’ll read this and feel bad for me and invite me over for a pity-dog. Veggie, please.

I was sooooo happy to get the re-release of Chloe Caldwell’s lez classic Women: A Novella. I remember when it first came out, I was like, ‘Women?’ Take that, Bukowski! If you like gay gossip and dyke drama and angst and obsessive crushes and messy girls and really just putting it all out there, you will love this book. I love this book! Very exciting that such a celebration of unhinged femme feeling is getting respect, and of course it gave me the reason to read it again, and it’s a delight. Just got an ARC of Caldwell’s forthcoming Trying, about her efforts to get pregnant, and it’s got that same immediate, incredibly honest, intimate, funny vibe. Another book who will be your best friend for the duration. I’m going to be in conversation with Chloe at Skylight in LA this August, is we all haven’t fled to Portugal/Vancouver/Mexico City/Costa Rica/New Zealand/Amsterdam/I don’t know - where are you going to go????

This is a great author photo. Chloe Caldwell.

Sometimes you get a book, because you do an event with a writer, and they’re really great, and you enjoy their reading, and you want to support them, and then you get home and it takes you literal years to read it. And, it doesn’t matter! That’s what is so great about books! It’s never too late to read them! They never expire, they’re there for you when you are destined to come to them. Which happened last year with Pamela Erens’ novel Eleven Hours. I was at Tin House with Pamela what feels like a million years ago, and I got this book, and man, do I wish I read it earlier? Maybe, cause I loved it, but coming to it a bit after the fact gave it the vibe of a buried treasure in my bookshelf, and makes me wonder what other brilliant literary gems are sitting there, waiting for me to get my shit together and crack their spines? Well, if you’ve seen my home you would know that the answer is a lot. Eleven Hours takes place over the eleven hours a woman is in labor, and its both her story - Lore, a white woman, estranged from a love triangle, alone - and the story of her nurse, Franckline (best name), a Haitian immigrant, also pregnant. A really great book about pregnancy, becoming a mother, the physicality of it. Really loved it.

I also really loved Luster, by Raven Leilani, another book about family, and you probably know all about it because it was sort of a smash hit, but if you don’t, it’s about Edie, a downwardly spiraling, young, Black girl who sort of shows up on the doorstep of the married man (white) she’s having an affair with while he’s out of town, and sort of bonds / sort of is hated by his wife (white, sort of punk) and becomes close to their adopted daughter (Black). So many dynamics! I love stories about messy young women - who doesn’t? The young woman in this is an artist, and you just root for her so hard as she sort of gets her shit together in the unlikeliest of places. Certainly this will be a movie any minute, no? Ayo Edebiri as Edie? Matt Dillon as the guy? I’m the casting director, I can do what I want. Linda Cardellini as the wife. You’re welcome, Hollywood.

This is my vision and it’s good.

Dead in Long Beach California is another noir-vibed book, this one with a young, Black lesbian protagonist who gets herself in a a real pickle when she starts pretending her recently suicided brother is still alive, answering his text messages to his daughter, etc. It’s one of those books that make you go ohmygod why are you doing this????? But of course are so grateful for their bad choices as it makes a most suspenseful (stressful?) book. Also, the point is, grief is a head-fuck, and it will destroy you and glue you back together sideways and full of cracks. The main character is a sci-fi writer, and we get story-within-story, giving the whole book an experimental feel, with a vibe like a southern California strip mall on a real hot day, no wind, no AC. Sort of flat, keeping you pinned like a bug beneath it all. The miserable, paralyzing, hot sun of grief.

A Cookie Mueller Encyclopedia by Mallory Curley was a birthday gift years ago from my dear friend Clint Catalyst, who actually is an entry in the book, and yes, I was jealous. Obviously I love Cookie Mueller so much that this past year I started channeling her. Who am I to think I can channel anything??? Well, I just figured, I’m 53 years old, have been flirting with the occult arts for decades, if not now, when? So I chose Cookie as my chosen ancestor, and started a relationship with her. She wasn’t so sure of it all at first - a sort of ‘And you are….?’ energy. I imagine lots of people want Cookie’s astral guidance, people who were actually loved by her, who knew her. But I thought it couldn’t hurt to ask, and so I asked. It has actually been a bizarrely profound experience. Whether I am actually in contact with her or have brought my delusions to the next level, I sort of don’t care, it all feels very sharp and real and meaningful. She told me she wanted to be on my altar, and that there was an icon waiting for me at the Goodwill near my house, and I went there and found the most psychotic little vintage doggie on a book statue, hidden in a weird place. She told me she wanted a hot dog, so last time I was in Provincetown I ate one for her, a real one, not to anger her with a veggie. When I was just in India - I went to India! On a spiritual pilgrimage! - I was required to do things that normally make me want to die, such as choreograph movement that interprets what my lowest moment feels like, and I did it! And as i was doing it Cookie came through very loud, very clear, saying, This I gotta see! Or, was it I gotta see this! Ribbing me, but supportive. Some of Cookie’s ashes were scattered in India, and it was right after I asked her to work with me that I found the teacher who led this pilgrimage, who I’ve been working with for over a year now, and it’s become a very important, centering part of my life and I think it might all be because of Cookie?

I finally read How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti and I loved it so much, duh, you knew I would! I really loved how unabashedly sexual, even slutty, she is. Do you think slutty only means you get it on with many people, or can it also mean that you just become sexed up in the most unhinged manner for a particular person? That’s the sort of slutty she is in it. You all have probably read this many years ago so I won’t go too deep except to say I loved it. Same for Heroines by Kate Zambreno, her passionate, sprawling, memoiristic defense of, championing of, the mid-century women authors who withered in the shadows of their more-famous husbands. I felt consumed with this book while reading it, it’s really magnificent, and such an inspiration for allowing yourself to really run towards those historical figures you feel kinship with, who you maybe were in a past life, whose shoulders you’re standing on.

Cannot HANDLE this riot grrrl photo of Jane Bowles. WTF.

Speaking of I went to India, last year I read Jnaneshwar’s Gita: A Rendering of the Jnaneshwari by Swami Kripananda. Briefly I will tell you about Jnaneshwar, whose samadhi shrine I visited on my pilgrimage, spending a couple days in Alandi, where the temple that has been built around his tomb is. Jnaneshwar was one of four children who lived in the late 1200s. His dad screwed up and renounced everything, including his personhood, his existence, to become a monk, but was already married, so was sent back to his wife to be a husband, only now he was technically not a person, so he had no place in society, and he and his family were outcasts and their life was very difficult and he felt awful about it. While trying to change their fate by having them all hike the perimeter of a holy mountain, Jnaneshwar’s older brother was chased by a tiger into a cave where a holy man was meditating. Through his extreme spiritual prowess, the holy man enlightened the boy, and then sent him back to his family, with the instruction that he become his siblings guru. By working with him, Jnaneshwar became in touch with the divine, liberated, enlightened. When he was just 16 years old he translated the Bhagavad Gita into his regional language, Marathi; before that, it was only in Sanskrit and accessible to only to higher-caste people. Jnaneshwar brought the teachings to the common people for the first time, and even so young had a passel of disciples, all common folk and laborers, including a sex worker. Meanwhile, his sister also gets liberated, and is bathing in the river one day, aside a pack of water buffalo, and some hotshot yogi comes by, sees her naked and makes a big show of looking away. And his sister, Muktabai, is like, How come you’re not looking away from these other naked animals? Seems like you’re still seeing difference. Guess you’ve got some more work to do! Because in the teachings everything is one, we’re all God or Shiva, or Cookie Mueller and the whole point of a liberated holy person is to know this so deeply that you live within it all day long. Muktabai then became this guy’s guru. So cool. Anyway, eventually Jnaneshwar hits 21 years old and decides what he really wants to do is transmit his energy. In these ancient Indian traditions, just being close to an enlightened person, feeling their energy, is enough to trigger your own enlightenment, or at the very least nudge it along. And Jnaneshwar takes living samadhi, which may sound very spooky to an American not raised with any knowledge of Indian spiritual traditions, but it is in fact not so uncommon: he was entombed while in a state of deep meditation and oneness, allowing his energy to be potently concentrated in this earthly place, forever. I learned all of this through working with my teacher, Harshada, and here is where you can follow him on the interwebs if your curiosity is piqued, and you can message me too if you feel drawn to.

Also, Jnaneshwar is called ‘mother’ and has queer vibes.

Oh my god I feel like I have been writing this forever. And what I really wanted to do was share an excerpt of the book DOPAMINE is publishing this month: Days Running, by Shawn Stewart Ruff. It’s about a gay, Black teenage boy in 1970s Cincinnati navigating the aftershocks of a brutal gaybashing. It’s about queerness and family and mental illness, about Blackness in America, about violence and survival and revenge and what its like to be a horny teenager with dreams of getting out. Here’s very tiny excerpt:

‘The garage is as dark as it was that night. I still don’t remember being worried about being seen kissing Chip goodbye. Maybe I don’t remember because I wasn’t worried. What I remember most is lust and love. But it seems now that maybe I did notice someone peeping through the glass panes of the garage door, and at the time I just didn’t care. So, I told Chip he could go, I would be fine. I got out of the car, walked to the store entrance, and it seemed the psycho motherfucker did, too, but from within the store, arriving at the same time I did. He opened the door, staring at me as if I had just exited a spaceship, and I stepped inside, smiling like I was happy to see him, and the lights suddenly went off. The psycho motherfucker was in a rush, saying he needed to close down because of the weather. I waited while he switched off the signs, locked the air hose outside, the gas pumps. It was completely dark except for the light coming from Montgomery Road. I remember the snow howling and flowing sideways like a river. And then he announced he was done. I remember he smiled at me. He seemed almost bashful. I wasn’t afraid. At all.’’

Just a tiny bit to lodge in your brain and make you need to know more. Shawn Stewart Ruff, has a bunch of really great events lined up, possibly near you. He’s in NYC at the Bureau of General Services - Queer Division on February 28th, in conversation with Jacqueline Woodson, a prolific, award-winning, very important Aquarius author. The next day, March 1, he’ll dash over to Brooklyn, for an event at Hive Mind Books with the beloved essayist/poet/novelest Carley Moore. Then he’s jumping on an aeroplane and heading to Los Angeles for an event at the best, Skylight Books, on March 5th, in conversation with novelist Larry Duplechan, whose book Blackbird was made into the film starring Mo’Nique! Okay! From there he goes back to New York, for an upstate event at The Spotty Dog in Hudson on March 8th, with Jill Dearman, who is a novelist but also an astrologer, author of the classic Queer Astrology books! I wish I could be there and ask her what signs she thinks all of the characters in Days Running are! In Washington, DC, on March 20th, Shawn is at Lost City Books with Academic Historian / Friend of DOPAMINE Marcia Chatelain, whose book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America won the Pulitzer Prize. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Dang. Shawn wraps it up with a stunning solo appearance in Philadelphia at the iconic Giovanni’s Room bookstore on March 21st.

Book tours are grueling, people. Thrilling, yes, also, grueling, and, frankly, weird and strange. Get out there and support this writer.

Sorry about the typos.