The following three short essays describe Ntozake Shange’s experience with psychoanalysis. After the success of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, she struggled with bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and drug addiction. Her mental health challenges continued for decades, and she was remarkably open about them and diligent in seeking help through psychoanalysis and traditional talk therapy. Characteristically, Shange’s complicated emotional landscape is rendered with tenderness and beauty, which is particularly important given our collective recognition of the importance of mental health care. In this, too, Shange was ahead of her time.

—Imani Perry

Editor’s note: Except where a change was necessary to avoid errors that altered meaning in the work, Shange’s original handwritten notes and misspellings are how they appear in her archives. The editor aimed to maintain the integrity and urgency of Shange’s writing style, and to publish her work as she left it.

I was in an Uber Pool (I guess they’re not called that anymore) with some stranger, both of us going to Brooklyn from Manhattan. Our driver crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, took the first exit, and then followed its loop all the way back onto the bridge, going in the opposite direction, reentering Manhattan. I wasn’t paying attention. My co-rider looked up, at the skyline that was supposed to be behind us, and said something. “Are we going the wrong way?” Our driver laughed. Yes, he had made a wrong turn.

This was a very time-consuming “wrong turn.” We had to go all the way back over the bridge, then get off somewhere in the Lower East Side and find a way back onto Delancey, which isn’t simple, since U-turns aren’t possible, there are so many one-way streets, and there’s always traffic. My co-rider wasn’t done asking our driver questions. What was he doing, instead of watching for the exit? He laughed again and pointed to a phone that was mounted to the left-hand side of his windshield, away from the GPS, which was mid-dash.

“What is that, a gossip website?” she asked. I looked at the small screen (phones were smaller then), making out a pink-and-purple layout; tiny photos of celebrities; text moving upward, ticker-like, in another language, maybe Korean; hearts and sparkles and whatever animating everything. It would be impossible to make out one headline, much less read these articles, and drive, I thought, and I guess that was being proven. Our driver was still smiling, pointing as if we could see the miniaturized information, as if we could read the foreign text and recognize the faces.

I knew from his wordless gestures that something huge had just happened to one of these celebrities, and he was too excited by this event to care about anything else. I was not as mad about the tardiness the detour had caused as I was about the indifference toward it, the way this guy was so elated by some gossip, or, more likely, the way in which he had received such gossip—in the middle of one of those maneuvers that make his job obnoxious, like taking the first exit off a bridge—that he could forget about the exit, about us.

Who is Sharon Olds? Sharon Olds is an American poet, born in San Francisco in 1942. She has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and made her debut as a writer in 1980 with the poetry collection Satan Says. Since then, she has established herself as one of the most read, most decorated, and most controversial North American contemporary poets. “Sharon Olds’s poems are pure fire in the hands,” Michael Ondaatje has said. She became particularly well known after she refused to take part in a National Book Festival dinner organized by Laura Bush, then First Lady, in 2005, and wrote in an open letter: “So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.”

The way I discovered her was through a poem on a particular penis, which came as a recommendation from a Finnish Swedish colleague: “Read Sharon Olds’s ‘The Pope’s Penis’!” How reading this little poem about the Pope’s sexual organ became contagious, I don’t know, but the fact is that at almost the same time, I got a text message from another colleague, who wrote that she was sitting in a waiting room somewhere reading Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis.” And here I must grab hold of you, reader, and shout, as though by international chain letter: Read Sharon Olds’s “The Pope’s Penis”! Let’s quote it in its entirety:

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

The poem is an introduction to certain motifs—the body, darkness, the desire to confront, imagery, et cetera—which often appear in other equally unsettling, gripping variations and combinations elsewhere in her poetry. For example, here, in this extract from “Self-Portrait, Rear View,” in which the poem’s narrator is standing in a hotel room and, in another mirror and another light, catches sight of her fifty-four-year-old backside, “once a tight end”:

It was the full-body ache of our hangovers and the cigarette smoke stagnating in our hair that compelled us toward the pond. We were sat in the debris of a house party, on a sofa that had recently doubled as an ashtray, when Janique said we should go for a swim. I suggested the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond, which is free of men and harsh chemicals. 

There are five ponds in a row on the eastern edge of Hampstead Heath. They run (from south to north): the Highgate No. 1 Pond, the Highgate Men’s Pond, the Model Boating Pond, the Bird Sanctuary Pond, and, finally, set slightly apart from the others and sheltered by trees, the Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. It is accessed by a long path, behind a gate with a sign that reads WOMEN ONLY / MEN NOT ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. There are two holding pens off to the side of the path, one for chaining bicycles, the other for chaining dogs. There is no pen for young children, who are not (unlike dogs and bicycles) allowed past even the first gate. As we walked through the park, I regaled my North American companion with the pond’s lore: 

The women’s pond is “a transporting haven” with a “wholesomely escapist quality” (Sharlene Teo). To swim in its “clean, glassy,” (Ava Wong Davies) “velvety water” (Esther Freud) is to “enter a new state” (Lou Stoppard)! (All of this comes from the 2019 essay collection At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, in which every piece contains the verb to glide.)

We arrived at the meadow, which, I assured Janique, is a haven of nakedness. On this particular afternoon, as we sat in the sun to change, I noticed that I was the only person who was actually naked. 

I seem to find a reason to go to CVS several times a week. Sometimes these reasons are medical, but much of the time, I am tracking down some household item or another—especially when I need something faster than it can be delivered, or I don’t want to be party to the low-level violence of same-day delivery, and I don’t feel like subjecting myself to the psychic keelhauling of a Target run. There is a unique air of desperation to most CVS locations. This is probably because CVS, as a health-care company stapled to a convenience store chain, blends the special emotional terroirs of the hospital and the gas station snack aisle. It could also be because the stores are often seriously understaffed, presumably in part due to the corporation’s recent move to slash pharmacy hours at thousands of locations. The decor is what you might call austerity-core. It is both corporate-loud (garish displays of next season’s decorations) and minimalist-clinical (pilled gray carpeting, fluorescent lights). People in pain and in search of relief, people picking up the prescriptions they need to live, and people who really want a soda all stalk the aisles.

The one unalloyed delight of CVS, though, is the soundtrack. One of the first things you notice once you start paying attention to the in-store music is how much whoever is in charge of programming loves Rod Stewart. “If you want my body and you think I’m sexy, come on, sugar, tell me so,” Rod demands as you ponder the locked cases of flu medicine. “Young hearts, be free tonight,” Rod bellows while you compare the prices of soap. Sometimes he hides behind an additional layer of mediation, as in Sheryl Crow’s version of “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” a song also notably covered by Rod. These are not the sexiest Rod songs. In fact, they are the songs where he sings from a place of impotence or regret. His lover threatens to crush him; she is too impossible to talk to; love will tear them apart. Like the shoppers whose attention the in-store loudspeaker announcements periodically try to seize, she is to be guilted, cajoled.

Big feelings reign on the CVS soundtrack. Sometimes they are overheated. Other times they are gushy, like the Sixpence None the Richer cover of “There She Goes,” the heroin anthem by the La’s, jacked up a treacly minor third from the original. (There are lots of covers on the playlist.) The emoting has a tendency to ambush you. Earlier this week I was picking up trash bags when, all of a sudden, I heard the distinctive plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink-plunk-plink of the sad-sack opening guitar riff to “Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol. The song depicts a couple, secure, or maybe trapped, in a bubble of self-sufficiency: “We don’t need anything or anyone.” While Rod sometimes sounds like he is delivering his come-ons with a campy wink, “Chasing Cars” contains no prophylactic against its own sentimental excess. It is an almost unbearable song to hear in CVS, regardless of the circumstances that bring you into the store. “If I lay here, if I just lay here, would you lay with me and just forget the world?” the chorus goes. Here?

The basic experience of shopping at CVS is one of doing something desperate at worst and banally unpleasant at best while swimming in a warm bath of muted musical intensity. No other retail chain is so committed to the power ballad as a musical form. A Spotify playlist of “CVS BANGERS,” apparently sourced from hard-won knowledge, features a stacked lineup: Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”; Cutting Crew’s “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight”; the Cars’ “Drive”; Toto’s still-inescapable “Africa.” One song on that playlist that I absolutely have heard in my local store is Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”—the nineties adult-alternative equivalent of a power ballad, a spoken/sung tale of a marriage crumbling under the weight of too much gender. Some philosophers claim that the emotions artworks evoke are really “pseudo emotions”; we feel them at one degree of remove. I can think of no better support for this thesis than the experience of listening to Paula Cole in CVS. The hopes of young love, the disappointments of middle age, the curdling resentment that ensues: I feel some inkling of it all. But mostly I’m just tapping my foot as I wait to pick up my prescription.

Yi Sang (1910–1937) was a writer in Korea during the thirties, when the country was under the rule of the Japanese empire. His poems, stories, letters, and essays, written in both Korean and Japanese, are celebrated as some of the finest Korean literature of his time, and bear wide-ranging influences: the Chinese classics, the general theory of relativity, and Dadaism and surrealism, both of which he is credited with introducing into the Korean literary lexicon. He wrote during a period when Koreans could be jailed without trial on the basis of mere suspicion of thought crimes, and, shortly after being imprisoned in Tokyo by Japanese authorities in 1937, succumbed to tuberculosis in a hospital at the age of twenty-seven. 

Nearly ninety years after his death, Yi Sang is perhaps best remembered for his intricate poetry, which features striking, complicated images. In the poem “Crow’s Eye View: Poem No. 15,” he writes, “I sneak into a room with a mirror. To free myself from the mirror. But the me-inside-the-mirror always enters at the same time and puts on a gloomy face. He lets me know he is sorry. Just as I am locked up because of him he is locked up shuddering because of me.” Like many of his contemporaries, Yi Sang also contributed guest columns to newspapers. These writings, collected under column titles like “Early Spring Sketches” and “Miscellany Under the Autumn Lamp,” offered incisive, humorous, and compact observations of life in Seoul in the thirties. He captured the grace and chaos of urban existence among anonymous fellow city-dwellers going about their daily routines.

The pieces that follow come from the column “Early Spring Sketches,” which was serialized from early to late March 1936. Encountering Yi Sang through these sketches offers a glimpse into a luminous spirit whose disillusionment with the modernity of his era didn’t culminate in despair but rather, as the poet John Ashbery once wrote, “broke into a rainbow of tears.”

—Jack Jung, translator

On July 24, the Crystal Lake Public Library in the northwestern Chicago suburbs had a bomb threat. It came through a phone call. No bomb was found, and the incident was assumed to be isolated — just days earlier, the library had announced a new partnership with the local school districts to ensure any student who wanted a library card could acquire one, whether or not they lived within the tax boundaries.

This may have been an isolated incident at Crystal Lake, but over the last week, several more Chicagoland public libraries have received bomb threats. These include Wilmette Public Library in the northern suburbs, Warren Newport Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received a second bomb threat on August 21), Morton Grove Public Library in the northern suburbs (which received not one, but two threats), and Park Ridge Public Library, also in the northern suburbs. All of those happened Thursday, August 17, within a span of several hours, and all of the threats came via the various library “chat” reference tools.

Then on Monday, August 21, another bomb threat. This time to Oak Park Public Library in the western suburbs. The threat came via email the night before, Sunday, claiming that there were planned explosions the next day.

In under a month, that is six bomb threats within a small geographic area of Chicagoland, all at public libraries.

As of writing, there’s been no further information about the individual or groups behind these threats, and there’s been no information tying any of these incidents together. Whether or not they’re being explored is itself unclear — the above-linked article from the Chicago Tribune about the cascade of bomb threats on August 17 is, of course, paywalled.

How many adults read comics? My quick perusal of the research found a lot of older studies, but approximately six percent of millennials read comics every month.

How many adults talk about reading comics publicly?

What about graphic novels? Or graphic nonfiction?

Comics and graphic novels aren’t always seen as “reading,” even for kids. Parents, adults, and even educators fall back on tropes about how it’s not “real” reading, when in fact, the benefits of graphic novels have been long known: they can help engage reluctant readers, build vocabulary, help those with learning difficulties or diagnosed learning disabilities, encourage interaction with the text, and much more. Even for adults, graphic novels can help revitalize a reading slump, add interest to a challenging text, and make complex concepts similar by adding a visual component.

But graphic nonfiction…sounds much more “literary,” though I hate that term. It conveys a seriousness to the story or book. It’s often an apt descriptor, yes — but so might be “comic strip,” defined in Merriam-Webster as “a series of cartoons that tell a story or part of a story.”

We see the accomplishment listed among the best novels: just above the title or the author is the disclaimer “New York Times Best Seller” or “New York Times Best-selling Author.” But according to recent reports, nobody knows the inner workings of what exactly makes a book a bestseller on this list outside of those who work for The New York Times.

According to the NYT themselves, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” And that’s pretty much all they have to say about that, at least on the record. They say it takes into account sales numbers from all kinds of retail storefronts, be they big box stores, online retailers, or independent bookstores. But ever since the NYT Best Seller List made its debut in 1931, there’s been rumblings in the literary world of certain authors attempting to hack the system and “buy” their way onto the list.

According to an Esquire report from last year, the NYT has long denied using resources like ReaderLink or BookScan to accumulate sales numbers, since they aggregate data. They also only typically look at sales numbers from Amazon and other giant chains like Walmart or Target. Using resources like these would take away from the contribution of individual sales accrued at independent bookstores or specialty stores, and are therefore easy to manipulate.

“To my knowledge, The New York Times tracks sales of books, and the sales are what is ‘supposed to’ decide where those books sit on the list. However, the truth is, it’s much more editorialized,” stated a literary publicist quoted in the Esquire report. “There is quite a bit taken into consideration — i.e., are the book sales mostly bulk buys? Are they mostly indie bookstore sales? Are they mostly Amazon sales? Even which list the book would be considered for has a huge effect.”

In 1995, The New York Times Best Seller List introduced the dagger symbol, which indicates a book that has been bought in bulk and whose sales might not accurately represent its standing as a bestseller. This came after Michael Treacy and Fred Wierserma were accused of having spent a quarter of a million dollars that year on copies of their own book, The Discipline of Market Leaders.

To whoever is reading this: this is for you. While maybe that statement doesn’t have such a grand implication that, say, a 100,000-word novel would, nonetheless the meaning is the same. I spent my time, my effort, my very thoughts on this piece of writing for you to read. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, but you and I both know there’s never a guarantee there when it comes to writing. Regardless, this is for you.

Author dedications are one of the most personal and human-seeming parts of a published book. The acknowledgments, too, give an insight into the who behind the bound book in a reader’s hands in a way the author bio’s couple of sentences does not. But the dedication is so very personal, I can’t help but infer what is meant in the white space around the handful of words.

But where did this practice of writing the briefest love letter at the beginning of a novel come from? Dear reader, let’s take a little walk back through history and find out together.

I didn’t grow up a reader. I grew up a storyteller and writer, but not a reader. There are a lot of reasons for this: my undiagnosed ADHD, my parents’ strict rules around consuming any non-Christian media, lack of access to books (my tiny Christian school didn’t have a library), ignorance that there were books available for kids my age, and fear, to name a few.

In college, I majored in English. You’d think that an English major would be reading non-stop for their classes. For neurotypical English majors, you’d be right. I can only remember finishing one book for school at the time. In the campus bookstore, I brought stacks and stacks of required reading to the checkout desk. “English major?” the clerk inquired.

“English major,” I confirmed. While I bought all these books and used all of them in my classes, I never finished them. I went to class, paid attention, took copious notes, and read just enough from the books to pull quotes for supporting evidence in whatever paper I was writing. I wasn’t stupid, even though I questioned that at the time. I found coping mechanisms to get through college. I knew that if I majored in something that I could write my way through, instead of test through, there’d be a good chance I’d graduate.

It was a weight around my soul, the secret shame of being an English major who didn’t read. I decided to take up reading the classics I missed in high school (see Christian education). As many times as I picked up The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, I couldn’t finish. I’d fall asleep, even when reading at the dining room table.

Then I found Twilight and Chick Lit, which was at its peak, and I started to read in earnest. But the shame remained. I didn’t want to like these books. I wanted to like books I thought of as the Great American Novel. I wanted to be a serious reader and a serious writer. So I stopped reading YA and Chick Lit. But the problem was, I didn’t start reading anything else.

Road trips are often the subject of uplifting or heart-tugging stories — tales of friends bonding as they travel across the country, couples rediscovering why they love each other, or family members hashing out old arguments and ending the journey with a deeper understanding of each other. But sometimes, road trips can take a dark turn. You can break down and end up stranded in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by hostile people. You can end up fighting to survive harsh weather or hostile landscapes, risking freezing to death in the snow or being swept away by tornadoes. And let’s not even get into the terrifying possibilities that could occur after picking up a seemingly-pleasant hitchhiker.

A road trip always has the potential to turn into a horror story, and many writers have picked up on this. Horror road trips are a small but fun niche in horror, and they give the writer a lot of scope to structure their story in an interesting way. Horror road trip stories can be wide-ranging, using the scope of a long journey to build the horror; conversely, if the author decides to use the “we’ve broken down” trope, they can use the small space of the car or van to create a tight, claustrophobic story that ramps up the tension. However they play out, horror road trips can make for terrifying reads — so pick one up, settle in for the ride, and make sure not to stop the car for any strangers.

Just as artists explore other genres or forms of art, authors also dabble in new literary territories. Generally, when a new author starts their publishing journey, they must decide whether to go “young adult” or “adult.” That is, they must decide whether to write for young adult or adult audiences. A YA romance is vastly different from adult romance. YA contemporary fiction is not the same as new adult fiction. As a voracious reader, you would definitely tell the difference.

Although it’s possible for an author to write for both, usually only those that already have a solid history of work can manage to pull it off successfully. First-time authors don’t usually have this privilege because publishers don’t like to risk confusing readers. What if the author’s YA fanbase stumbles upon the adult (and steamy) book of the author? The experience can be jarring, messing up their unestablished branding. Thus, most authors in their early careers are advised to focus on one audience. Some writers get creative by using pen names for each genre or audience they want to write in, allowing them to easily switch between different writing styles. But the general consensus is that writers should build a strong foundation in one genre or audience first before trying out another one, or that they should make a transition or crossover to a closely related genre (for instance, from middle grade to YA, not YA to medical nonfiction all of a sudden).

Writing for a different audience is vital for career longevity and creative freedom. Here are eight YA authors who made the switch to adult audiences:

I like to think of literature as a second language—especially the second language of the monolingual. I’m thinking, naturally, about those of us who never systematically studied a foreign language, but who had access, thanks to translation—a miracle we take for granted all too easily—to distant cultures that at times came to seem close to us, or even like they belonged to us. We didn’t read Marguerite Duras or Yasunari Kawabata because we were interested in the French or the Japanese language per se, but because we wanted to learn—to continue learning that foreign language called literature, as broadly international as it is profoundly local. Because this foreign language functions, of course, inside of our own language; in other words, our language comes to seem, thanks to literature, foreign, without ever ceasing to be ours.

It’s within that blend of strangeness and familiarity that I want to recall my first encounter with the literature of Alejo Carpentier, which occurred, as I’m sure it did for so many Spanish speakers of my generation and after, inside a classroom. “In this story, everything happens backward,” said a teacher whose name I don’t want to remember, before launching into a reading of “Viaje a la semilla” (“Journey to the seed”), Carpentier’s most famous short story, which we would later find in almost every anthology of Latin American stories, but which at the time, when we were thirteen or fourteen years old, we had never read. The teacher’s solemn, perhaps exaggerated reading allowed us, however, to feel or to sense the beauty of prose that was strange and different. It was our language, but converted into an unknown music that could nonetheless, like all music, especially good music, be danced to. Many of us thought it was a dazzling story, surprising and crazy, but I don’t know if any of us would have been able to explain why. Because of the odd delicacy of some of the sentences, perhaps. Maybe this one: “For the first time, the rooms slept without window-blinds, open onto a landscape of ruins.” Or this one: “The chandeliers of the great drawing room now sparkled very brightly.”

Although our teacher had already told us that everything in the story happened backward, from the future to the past, back toward the seed, knowing the trick did not cancel out the magic. The magic did come to an end, though, when the teacher ordered us to list all the words we didn’t know and look them up—each of our backpacks always contained a small dictionary, which, we soon found, was not big enough to contain Carpentier’s splendid, abundant lexicon.

Was that how people in Cuba spoke? Or was it, rather, the writer’s language? Or were we the ones who, quite simply, were ignorant of our own language? But was that our language? We discussed something like this, dictionaries in hand, while the teacher—I don’t know why I remember this—plugged some numbers into a calculator laboriously, perhaps struggling with his farsightedness.

I lived in Moscow during the summer of 1992, just after I graduated from college. The attempted coup by hardline communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev had failed, the USSR had collapsed, and Russia was officially open to the West. Religious organizations were flooding in—including the one I’d signed up with at my university. We were there to teach English using a simplified version of the Gospel of Luke, a strategy I didn’t question back then. Most of my students wanted to learn American slang. One young man brought in a Sports Illustrated he’d purchased on the black market. He asked me to read aloud phrases he’d highlighted, then repeated what I said, copying my accent and cadence. Those were my favorite sessions.

What a time to be there, amid the influx of Westerners shopping in the dollars-only markets. Not the people I was with. The mission organization believed, rightly, that we were guests in the country and should live as the locals did. We waited in breadlines, milk lines, egg-shop lines, pretending that for us, too, times were hard. But there was no ignoring the imbalance between our dollar and the ruble. I hired a cab to take me from my hotel—the Hotel Akademicheskaya, a mile from Gorky Park—to the American embassy. The total cost was 300 rubles. For me it was the equivalent of about thirty cents; for a Russian, it was tantamount to spending $300 on a twenty-minute car ride. A bottle of Fanta was forty rubles, or about four cents. Imagine spending forty dollars on a bottle of soda. Still, in the tiny apartment where we were sharing a meal, one of my students pulled out bottles of Fanta and said, “I am sorry it is not Coca-Cola.”

I was reminded of this lost world in June, when I saw the photographer and filmmaker Diana Markosian’s “Santa Barbara” at the Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm. The show opens with a placard displaying Markosian’s words:

When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.

August is coming to its end—a blessing or a curse, depending who you ask. Here’s what the Review’s staff and friends are doing these days, before we all go (metaphorically) back to school.

Summer Streets, August 26: It is the last weekend of New York’s Summer Streets, so take advantage now, runners, bikers, and amblers. Huge stretches of the city will be shut down between 7 A.M. and 1 P.M. this Saturday in Brooklyn and the Bronx; vendors will be hawking wares like coconut water, ice cream, and Coca-Cola. Our web editor, Sophie Haigney, will be jogging merrily along the car-free expanse of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

New York Liberty vs. Las Vegas Aces at Barclays Center, August 28: Our assistant editor Oriana Ullman encourages everyone to turn out for the tail end of the WNBA season, one of summer’s great sporting pleasures. “This is the last matchup of the year between the league’s two superteams,” Oriana tells us. “The Liberty just beat the Aces in the Commissioner’s Cup, but go to get another preview of what the Finals showdown will probably be.” (The playoffs begin September 13.)

The U.S. Open at USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, August 28–September 10: Our managing editor, Kelley Deane McKinney, recommends going on opening day, when there will be matches happening on twenty-two courts. A day pass will get you access to twenty-one of them. She advises anyone attending to skip the main court, Arthur Ashe: “The stadium is too big for tennis and the good seats are all corporate boxes full of people who don’t know or care about the games and chat loudly the whole time,” she says. “Real heads know that Louis Armstrong is the better show court, only seating fourteen thousand.” A tip: sections one and two get the most shade during the day, but every seat has a great view! You can skip the signature cocktail, the Honey Deuce, which features tennis ball–shaped honeydew pieces floating in spiked raspberry lemonade “for, like, twenty-two dollars. This year I bet it’s twenty-five.”

I began writing this essay while putting off writing another one. My apartment is full of books I haven’t read, and others I read so long ago that I barely remember what’s in them. When I’m writing something, I’m often tempted to pick one up that has nothing to do with my subject. I’ve always wanted to read this, I think, idly flipping through, my eyes fixing on a stray phrase or two. Maybe it will give me a new idea.

In this moment of mild delusion, I’m distracted. I’ve always wanted to write an essay about distraction, I think. Add it to the laundry list of incomplete ideas I continue to nurse because some part of me suspects they will never come to fruition, and so will never have to be endured by readers. These are things you can keep in the drawer of your mind, glittering with unrealized potential. In the top row of my bedroom bookshelf is a copy of Flaubert’s final novel, Bouvard and Pécuchet. Something about it seems appropriate, though I’m not sure exactly what. I pluck it down.

***