The Stripper

by Mitchell Sunderland 

Straight dudes cry in my arms because even though they’re crying, I’m still the one who’s a fag. Girls treat me like I’m their therapist because they assume that I know their pain and don’t want to fuck them. I hear a lot about other people’s relationship problems, is what I’m saying, even though I don’t know shit about relationships.

My resume’s heavy on one-night stands and low on love – and it’s not because I don’t want love.  I do want an excuse to drive with the windows down, bawling as I blast Meatloaf songs.  But something about where I’m from has always made love seem unappealing, maybe impossible. Something in Florida drove people nuts: all the mothers popped pills, and all the kids chilled with mobsters and snorted blow.

When I first arrived at Sarah Lawrence, I chased after catches, but things kept going terribly wrong.  I’d go home with people like Harvard Boy, a “native New Yorker” who was taking a year off at his parents’ Chelsea pad to “intern and explore the world” (suck cock).  He brought me home after a rave. He was so WASPy, so Manhattan, I had to lead us to the L train. He described his mother as “pretty and twenty years younger than my father” and me as “a total queen.” When I asked him what he thought of the Forster novel on his bedside table, he laughed. What would a boy who wore fishnets know about Forster? The next morning he kicked me out of his apartment, because the handy man coming in ten minutes would tell his parents he was gay. He was slumming. I was the slum.

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Because it’s broken

by Sady Doyle

It’s easy to read the buddhist as a feminist text. It’s also easy to read it as a book about dissolving the boundaries between high and low art, or a performance piece about obsession, or a book about the abuse of spiritual authority. It’s even possible to read it as simply a book about abuse and its aftermath. Bellamy explicitly acknowledges that her subject — an ex-boyfriend, whose gruesome break-up tactics and even more gruesome post-break-up communications demonstrate him to be an endlessly creative and energetic mindfucker — was psychologically abusive.  She acknowledges this about halfway through the book, at which point I was already suppressing the urge to mail her my copy of Codependent No More.

But maybe all of these frameworks are deployed — politics, religion, art, a healthy dose of psychotherapy; all the neat little devices people use to extract meaning from raw experience — precisely because none of them work. The book sucks in frameworks, chews them up, and spits them out, one after another. One after another, each coping strategy is found insufficient to the experience at hand. At its core, the buddhist is a protracted fight between two people for the right to know what happened. 

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In Case You Missed The LIKE A BOSS Panel

 
 Working as an assistant is a way some people become mentees. In Inferno, a young Eileen Myles became close to James Schuyler while working as his assistant; Sigrid Nunez’s relationship with Susan Sontag began similarly. Of the panelists, though, only Emily and Will had been assistants. Heidi and Alex experienced mentoring mostly within the context of school, and Doree experienced it in a lot of workplaces. Everyone agreed that in any context, if a person is courting a potential mentor, it serves her well to approach the mentor with ideas and questions to discuss—especially if they are meeting for the first time or if the desired mentor is an Important and Busy Person. Doree added that if such a person cancels once, or even twice, potential mentees shouldn’t take it personally. In fact, she said, persistence from the potential mentee’s end can often pay off. Flattery doesn’t hurt, either. Will said all it takes for him to be interested in someone is a compliment and the prospect of a free drink. 

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Dashed Hopes

by Emily Cooke

In grad school, getting an MFA in writing, I cried in the office of every workshop professor I had but one. In spite of the sensitivity with which as a rule these people responded, the episodes filled me with shame. Post-cry, I assiduously avoided my teachers. When I couldn’t help but see them–in class, or in the coffee line–I tried to be nonchalant, wry, recovered, but I think mainly I projected skittishness and a sort of tense and inexplicable cheer. I was looking for guidance, and I seemed capable only of procuring first aid.

 A woman named Mary taught the second-to-last workshop I took. She was quick-witted, blunt, motherly without being coddling. She had just received some special recognition and had a series of speaking engagements, and early in the semester, in order to attend these, she cancelled two classes. That felt like a lot of class to cancel given that workshops were three hours long and only once a week, and we students grew resentful. Having turned against her, we criticized her among ourselves,cataloguing the tics in her advice, her insistence on a series of “craft” principles all of us had heard before, the fact that she didn’t type up her responses to our work but handwrote them in hard-to-decipher cursive. Her motherliness, we concluded, bespoke her condescension. For a while, focusing on her shortcomings helped me avoid admitting mine: I was having a nearly impossible time sitting down to write, and when I did sit down the writing came out in dribs and drabs and was invariably hateful to me. Finally, in office hours, Mary asked me what was going on. Every time it was my turn to submit I’d turned in late, and now I was telling her I had nothing for my final round. What was up? Miserably, (crying a little), I told her I couldn’t write. In response she was briskly sympathetic, even bossy. She seemed to know exactly what to do. “Come back on Tuesday,” she said. “I have an idea, a little trick. You’ll see.”

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