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A year or so ago I was talking to my friend L. about an experience we have in common—with each other and probably with a bunch of you—which is the periodic longing to contact someone we cannot, for health reasons, have in our lives in any capacity. I was feeling pretty self-congratulatory about my frankly MSW-level analysis, which was: “you don’t want to text her, you want to text the person you wanted her to be for you, so the question is, what do you need that person for right now?” And I was about to go on to say “there must be another, healthier way to get those needs met.” Except I realized: no, there probably fucking isn’t. Or rather, there’s probably a healthier way to get those needs met, but like most healthy alternatives it will simply never be as satisfying. What’s so heartbreaking about leaving someone in the past, someone you felt strongly about, is that you will never feel precisely the way you felt around them ever again. Even if that feeling was mostly bad, it’s lost, and it’s the loss you grieve for.

Let me tell you, I ambushed myself with that one. I didn’t feel so smug after that.

The first time we went to Sleep No More, my friend spent the whole first hour needing to pee.

If you haven’t been to Sleep No More, the show that basically invented immersive theater, I hope you’ll get a chance. They’re currently booking tickets for October, and if New York’s Covid numbers stay good… well, we’ll see. (I suspect that, like many things, it will never be exactly the same again; it’s hard to imagine a group indoor entertainment in which the most coveted event is getting into a small room with a stranger and taking off your mask. But then again, in many ways the weirdest thing about our cautious reopening has been how unexpectedly normal it feels.) Anyway, even if you haven’t seen it, you may have some idea of its general deal—maybe you saw it in the New Yorker, or on Gossip Girl. It’s the one where the audience members put on spooky white masks (wearing masks used to be strange!) and make their own way through a massive five-story theatrical set that is by turns a bar, hotel, hospital, apartment, forest, and town. There they follow, or randomly intersect with, or avoid actors playing wordless scenes in a play that is mostly Macbeth but a little bit not. If they’re lucky, one of those actors will take them into an empty room and close the door, and it’s more fun if you don’t know what happens after that.

That’s the shape of it. But I’m not here to talk about what happens at Sleep No More. I’m here to talk about getting inside. And to do that, I need to talk about the bathroom.

I was working on something a little more substantial but it’s not done yet, so here’s something from the deep archives.

After we said goodbye to Huxley I was thinking about the time Sonia Weiser absolutely fried him to a crisp:

Last week was my second wedding anniversary, and while it has a few advantages over the first—we're comfortable getting a drink outside at a bar, for instance, and we're vaccinated, and we're not thoroughly freaked out the way we were in May 2020—it also has continued and new disadvantages, to wit: there is still a pandemic, and my dog is gone. All of which is to say that we celebrated by getting a hotel room and then mostly ordering food and watching TV. I just wanted to look at different walls.

One of the things we watched on TV was the Eurovision Song Contest. The music of Eurovision is, in theory, engineered to be as catchy and crowd-pleasing as possible, and yet I have no idea how almost any of it goes. I am unusually good at remembering how tunes go—I can usually learn the bulk of a melody if I hear it once or twice. But over nearly 50 years of Eurovision winners, I can confidently hum one song. ("Waterloo," obviously.) I watched the whole 2018 contest and all I can tell you is that the winning entry was culturally appropriative and something, maybe a piano, was at some point on fire. I watched the 2021 contest two days ago and the tunes for the most part leaked immediately out of my head. Who cares? I am here for the fire pianos.

So it feels significant that I remain obsessed with Iceland's entry, "10 Years" by Daði og Gagnamagnið. I can't find the video that aired during the performance (which was actually their rehearsal, because one of the musicians tested positive for Covid and they couldn't perform live—he feels okay last I heard), but here's a video that I think is from the qualifying round, which has more things on fire than the final performance anyway. (All the images from here on out are video thumbnails but I think you have to click through to actually watch the video.)

I’ve had a hard couple weeks, and in a bid to distract myself I tried playing two different video games. One was Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a massive beautiful open-world adventure that everyone loves except, apparently, me. The other was Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet, which is very silly and small and a little amateurish and a self-aware knockoff of the games, and therefore perfect.

In the last week or so I have fired my agent, quit my job, and scheduled euthanasia for my dog. So if you’re wondering why there wasn’t a newsletter last week, well.

The dog has inoperable osteosarcoma and we’ve known for a while that we were on borrowed time; in February we were not expecting him to make it to May. Still, there’s a big difference between knowing something will happen and knowing when. (Next week.) The other two were also a long time coming, although they’re different in almost every other way, bittersweet at worst instead of tragic. What they have in common is a sense of transition: a time before, a time after, and between them, a moment of change.

I talked on the Longform Podcast last month about how personal writing is like a cow with a hole in it, so I thought I’d write that up for posterity. So: personal writing is like a cow with a hole in it. Here is what that means.

Someone from the Today in Tabs commentariat pointed out that I might want to send out a short excerpt of Women and Other Monsters as a newsletter, which was a really good idea! I was going to send some slaughtered darlings to paying subscribers, but honestly it seems more generous to send you guys the parts I decided were good enough to keep in, rather than the parts I cut. This is the opening of the chapter that goes on to be about the monster Scylla and the inescapably corruptible human body.

All I did in Vienna was eat cake and look at medical oddities. It’s a wonderful city for the history of medicine, a field I’ve been drawn to since college—and in particular, it’s a wonderful city for my preferred interaction with the history of medicine, which involves less learning dates and more looking at slightly gruesome displays in haunted-looking museums and cluttered Wunderkammers. Vienna’s museums specialize in wax moulage. The rooms that circle the Narrenturm, the ring-shaped building that houses the Museum of Pathological Anatomy, are adorned with lovingly crafted wax faces, buttocks, and genitals, each peeking from a cradle of pinstriped cloth, each crusted or warted or eaten away with disease. The history of medicine museum at the University of Vienna’s medical school, known as the Josephinum, features rows of wax bones in cases, severed legs with veins made of wax-dipped thread, and full fleshless bodies standing in upright glass boxes as though you’ve caught them in the shower. It’s like a cross between Madame Tussauds and an abattoir.

In the middle of one of the rooms, laid out in a glass coffin like Snow White, is the figure of a beautiful nude woman. She lies on her back, in a pose suggesting intoxication or orgasm more than sleep: one knee slightly bent, hands rucking the silk sheets beneath her, her head tilted back in abandon or ecstasy. She has been slashed open from throat to groin. Her breasts hang to the sides, just flaps of wax, and her guts are a bulbous dark mass against her alabaster skin, coils of intestine resting on a pristine hip. On top of her long blonde hair, which spills prettily around her shoulders, is a delicate circlet of gold.

Hi folks. I'm trying out Buttondown as a Substack alternative—I like that it's no-frills and doesn't seem like it's trying to force me to make a whole magazine. The more I read about Substack the more I don't want to pretend mid-tier writers like me are going to make any kind of living doing this! Speaking of making a living, though, don't forget you can buy my book, and I'll also be doing a virtual event with Ijeoma Oluo on Friday at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern.

https://twitter.com/ambernoelle/status/1377629799640879105

We say “April is the cruelest month” because it’s a thing you say, when it’s April. So much of poetry has become just a thing you say. “I contain multitudes,” we say when we act out of character. “Hope springs eternal,” we say when we are fools. “O captain, my captain,” we say when standing on our desks at the end of a schmaltzy movie. Poetry offers so many things to say. Why not say a thing?

Hi folks! For reasons you’re either painfully, annoyingly aware of OR would be bored by, I’m looking into ways to move this newsletter off Substack. However, I’m also in the throes of book publicity right now, which makes it hard to figure out these kinds of strategic moves. It is also, frankly, really hard to make myself write for a company I’m extremely mad at while also distracted with other stuff, even though the “for” there is doing a lot of undeserved work. (I’m not writing this FOR Substack, I’m writing it for you! And yet.) So here’s what all that means: I will be writing less for the next few weeks, then making a move with one of the services that allows you to transfer your subscribers, i.e. makes it as easy as possible on all of you. I’ve paused monthly paid subscriptions; if you have an annual paid subscription and you want a refund because you paid for it on the premise of weekly emails, I will process those without complaint.

In the meantime, I’ve done two podcasts recently, and I have four book events and one work event coming up! So actually you have access to more of me than you could possibly want.

My friend has a concussion (snow fell on her head off the BQE!!! I asked, via voice memo, whether it was okay to tell you guys that and she said yes, please make people aware of the dangers of Robert Moses, and also that icicles are not the only potential death from above in the winter) and can’t look at screens for extended periods, so she asked if I could record the latest newsletter so she could read it. So as long as I have it, I thought I might as well send some bonus content as a thank-you for subscribing. Substack won’t let me embed a private Soundcloud file, and this is just for you guys so I don’t want to make it public, but if you have a ten-minute gap between podcast episodes to fill you can click through for an audio version of this week’s newsletter. It might be terrible, I recorded it on my phone very hurriedly in between work and dance class and I refuse to play it back, but it exists and if I do another one it’ll be better!

Hi folks, this is a brand new venture, please sign up and tell your friends!

I used to get sincerely worked up when people talked about prepping for disaster. By “worked up,” to be clear, I don’t mean to imply that I ever bought even the smallest can of beans about it. That was the problem: no matter how carefully someone broke down the steps I should take to be ready for the worst, I knew I was never going to do a single one of them. I didn’t discount the likelihood of disaster—disaster of some kind always seemed more or less assured—but I recognized the vast unlikelihood of me buying non-perishable food and a foil blanket and water purification tablets and a fire kit. (Where would I even keep those things? My apartment doesn’t have closets.) And so every article about feeling secure in the face of likely threat, every quick checklist and easy budget go-bag solution, made me a small amount more anxious about impending catastrophe and a huge amount more anxious about my own inevitable failures. 

I keep talking about maybe starting a newsletter and in the meantime I keep generating all these bits of writing that aren’t quite essays but aren’t journal entries, either. If you sign up, I will send them to you periodically! Will they be good? Listen, we’ve all been living in a thick soup of uncertainty for the last five years minimum, I’ve lost all ability to envision the future and so have you, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.

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