Le Quotidian Pain (ft. Dasha Nekrasova)

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.