Collected Agenda with Gordon Glasgow

Guest Edit #8

Drawing on the diary as a medium of both confessional interiority, and visceral engagement with the physical world - guest edits ask creative people to share What They Did and What You Should Do.

Introducing Gordon Glasgow (Instagram) (12 Questions by Gordon Glasgow)

I feel as though I owe Gordon more of an introduction. Gordon Glasgow is a writer in New York. He writes and edits 12 Questions by Gordon Glasgow - a publication that is seemingly self explanatory in its title, but far more layered in actuality. The premise is; Gordon Glasgow interviews other writers and artists - he asks them 12 questions and they respond. I think the most interesting parts of these interviews, though, are Gordon’s introductions - expansive short stories, letters, and diary entries in their own right, investigating the subtle (or not) ways in which his perspective and every day life is influenced and interrupted during the process of interrogating his subjects mind and work.

Gordon’s interviews and introductions are strikingly subjective. “You explore the concept of loose women, female cyphers comfortable with their sexuality, a bit mischievous and deviant, taking advantage of their pornographic attraction to play and have fun, existing yet subverting a ‘masculine gaze.’ … I wanted to ask, where do you think sexual exploration ends and being a slut begins?,” he asks painter Emma Stern. “Any healthy, thriving literary/arts scene has rivalries…. Who are your rivals and why?,” he asks editor of the Mars Review, Noah Kumin. The majority of Gordon’s introduction for writer Matthew Davis is devoted to a somewhat tortured grappling with his own, strong, personal, dislike for Davis.

A good “interviewer” is often considered to be someone who can draw out some larger truth of the “interviewee”. Friends, for example, are often considered good matches for A Conversation With…, because the comfort is there, the prior knowledge of the others subjects, personality, soul. The subject is The Topic in the traditional interview. The interviewer shall tread lightly. Lest they steal the spotlight.

To attempt the Gordon Glasgow approach, I’ve grappled with whether or not I consider these interviews to possess an arrogance. The heavy handedness to the questions, the introductions that are decidedly, often, more about Gordon, about brutality and the bourgeoisie coexisting in New York, about two months without a cigarette, or the parallels of interviews and tennis than they are, explicitly, about the subject of the interview. I was surprised, given the personal nature Gordon’s introductions take, that in guest edit Camille Sojit Pejcha wrote for me, she mentioned a conversation with Gordon prior to her forthcoming 12 Questions, and described how “when I try to turn questions back at him, he doesn’t take the bait.”

On further consideration, this surprise was misguided. 12 Questions is a different approach to an interview - one I haven’t really seen before, and one that creates unique depth in interrogating the work of those around you. The interviews are written - Gordon sends the questions, his subject sends responses. They are not, in this sense, conversations at all. The 12 Questions create a framework within which the subject explains themselves and their work, and then Gordon considers this framework, often over extended periods of time, and considers wider life through the lens of this framework. A narrative emerges that is representative of the subjects influence in practice, brought to life. The introductions alone, brought together, becomes a vivid snapshot of how art, when considered deeply, alters reality.

Gordon Glasgow is also working on three books - one titled - I Prefer the Inside (about a restaurant columnist), another titled Bad Latina (a Mexican cartel Neo-noir), and a third titled Endurance (about a SoulCycle influencer circa 2012)

Some days from Gordon’s life, from September 2024, to January 2025:

September 5th, 2024

A summer spent in Spain, in the warm and provincial city of Valencia, a place where I knew no one upon arrival. It was beautiful to say the least, one of those rare things in life that live up to expectations, all hope and desire. And on this aforementioned date, the 5th of September, 2024, I arrived back in New York City, where the olive oil, wine, and cigarettes are more expensive, if not totally inaccessible.

The bread I would proceed to eat over the course of an interminable fall would be filled with chemicals, like potassium bromide.

October 15th, 2024

I could hardly afford the apartment on the Lower East Side where I’d been living for sixteen months, so I sublet it to a founder of a tech company that manages the software security system for zoos, or perhaps it was something involving research with grasshoppers and gorillas—I don’t remember.

The sublessee, Sandy, ended up leaving early without paying. He said his girlfriend was pregnant and in Texas, two things I have no interest in. He blocked me on social media after he posted a story of him and his friends sitting in a hot-tub in the Catskills; I guess he must have made a pit-stop on the way to Austin. He never actually mentioned that his pregnant girlfriend was in Austin, I just assumed that’s where she was, if she even existed in the first place; the man didn’t look very potent. He had thin blonde hair and a long, skinny face.

Where did I live while subletting? Well, my sister, Shayna, moved in with her boyfriend in Park Slope; she had two months left on her lease in a rent-controlled, rundown apartment on Thompson street; it was owned by a friend of a friend’s family friend, an heiress by the name of Rwanda Albucito. It appeared to be a good option.

Rwanda spent most of her time in Westchester and neglected to take care of the eighteen buildings she owned, well inherited, in SoHo, so there were all sorts of electrical and plumbing problems, all the ones you can imagine in a pre-War New York complex. Apparently Rwanda was temperamental and didn’t like to be bothered, so we chose not to let her know that I’d moved in for the last two months of my sister’s lease. A known fact about Rwanda was a disdain for dogs, or pets in general, something I ignored before entering the unit with Alfie, my ten year old Labrador.

Upon arrival, that most notorious and over-contemplated of banal enigmas, Alfie began to provide me with quite a bit of trouble. I came home one day from a hot yoga class (the studio would end up fleecing me for everything I’m worth, but that’s another story altogether) only to find that Alfie had chewed up my new mattress and pillows, my laundry hamper and two pairs of pants. This was bizarre to say the least. In all his ten years Alfie had never been one to chew up clothing or furniture, but something in the new apartment apparently activated him, made him nervous, a sound I couldn’t hear or a subtle smell I didn’t notice, or perhaps Rwanda’s malevolent trust-fund energy, her hatred of all things related to domesticated furry companions. The next day I closed my bedroom door and left him alone so I could go to the hot yoga studio again, my one respite from my desk and various levels of masturbatory anxiety. Nothing calms my nerves like long periods of sweat. I came back to the three hundred and fifty square foot apartment to have my nerves immediately re-heightened; Alfie had decided to chew up his dog bed and a small portion of the couch. The next day I put the dog bed and all of my couch cushions in the bedroom and barricaded the sliding closet door with the small dining room table and a large metal suitcase, but Alfie found a way to open the closet and ended up chewing up a bunch more clothing, two winter coats, and one of my ‘weekend bags.’ As if that weren’t enough damage, Alfie unplugged the WiFi box and chewed up the cords, leaving me without WiFi for a week, until a man from Verizon named Maurice, who also knew Rwanda from the neighborhood, came to install the new system. ‘She’s a piece of work,’ he said.

‘Are all women, in some sense, a heavy piece of work?’ I asked in return.

‘That’s above my pay-grade.’

During the period without Wifi, I had an important call over Zoom that I had to cancel. It was with an awful tech CEO in London who I was ghostwriting emails for. He asked why I was moving our meeting and I said it was because my dog chewed up my WiFi box, and I wouldn’t have enough time to get to any sort of office space for our 8:00 AM call. He thought I was lying, but I what else was I to do? Have you ever had to lie in order to avoid someone thinking you’re lying? Sometimes the truth is just that ridiculous. And choosing the ridiculous truth was the worst thing I could’ve done, because I got fired the next day. And when I threatened the CEO, telling him I’d sue if he withheld pay again for all those emails I wrote, or for the speech for British Parliament I’d composed in his Linkedin-inspired, numerical voice, he blocked me on Instagram.

How many powerful men in tech would decide to block me on Instagram, all in one season?

November 5th, 2024

Through emotional terrorism and destruction of property, the animal had won our petty psychodrama; for the next month and a half, until I moved out of that God forsaken apartment, Alfie was never left alone again. He stayed with me throughout the day and accompanied me wherever I went, which included restaurants, cafes, the barber, and an amusement park in Philadelphia where they let dogs ride the ferris wheel (Alfie peed in the ferris wheel, all over my new shoes). Sometimes I’d leave Alfie with my parents, when I would go do hot yoga, a few weeks or so before they began charging my credit card for things I’d never purchased (they didn’t block me on Instagram after our vitriolic dispute—‘how do you feel about utilizing self-help platitudes and superficially preaching the most basic aspects of a variety of disparate ancient religions, all with the goal of financially scamming vulnerable consumers?’— but they did block my email).

Remember remember the fifth of November. I was in my underwear sitting at the tiny circular living room table, editing something I’d written, when I heard someone breathing. I looked up to see Rwanda standing over me and shrieked. Alfie began licking the moisturizing cream off her legs. ‘I knew there was a dog in this apartment! Who the hell are you?’

‘What? You can’t just come in here!’ I responded.

‘I, I was just checking the locks.’ She said, before storming out of the unit and adding: ‘you’ll be hearing from me!’ over and over again. Alfie began to bark in her direction and then peed all over the floor, the first time he’d pissed indoors since he was a puppy.

‘Your shitty fucking energy has really screwed up my dog! And me, for that matter, you psycho bitch!’ I yelled as she descended the stairs with the malignant quality of confident righteousness, an indignant self-importance only a scion of wealth and property could possibly possess. As soon as someone becomes a landlord, they obtain a sense of power. And as soon as someone obtains a sense of power, horrific evil arises. With each apartment one owns and then rents, the evil multiplies, and begins to devour everything in its path. I suppose with my subleasing scheme I was somewhat of a landlord myself.

Rwanda messaged my sister to say that she’d be withholding the security deposit for having an ‘unknown middle-aged man’ with a ‘smell-full canine’ living in the apartment without her knowledge. They’re currently in litigation. I apologized to my sister, and she said it’s OK, ‘it’s not your fault.’

‘Yeah,’ I responded. ‘It’s not!’

Rwanda sent my sister a series of long, barbiturate induced emails, one which exceeded five thousand unintelligible words, and with an admittedly creative syntax: you shall know the devil in the hardship of managing a collection of buildings in but one if not many of the most satisfying blocks in the city that everyone comes strongly to with all their hopes and some dreams only to give me trouble and hardship again and again, and then what do you do, you give me this dog, and this man I don’t know, and there is only more hardship, what you say to that, or to yourself, miss Glasgow? Don’t lie.

When Shayna blocked Rwanda’s email she began dm’ing her on Instagram, so Shayna blocked her there too. Apparently this information is all part of the litigation. My sister might walk away with a good bunch of money, which is all relative anyway.

November 12th, 2024

Various things that have never annoyed me before begin to annoy me with violence. I become to disdain the way English people say the word banana—buh-naww-nuhh. Why can’t they just say it the normal way?

Fall is now over, but this still bothers me.

November 17th, 2024

D.H. Lawrence labeled winter as satire, spring as comedy, summer as romance, and autumn as tragedy. Fall is my least favorite season. The idea of it being the best season is a perverse myth. D.H. Lawrence has a logical point about fall, what with the nice weather in September which would be drowned out by muddy, amber leaves, the onset of snow, and the absolute mortifying period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, where everyone who’s not rich or in a good mental space looks around and weighs the idea of blowing out their brains.

December 28th, 2025

I didn’t, in fact, blow out my brains.

On the 28th of December I find myself in Los Angeles. I moved my belongings out of the godforsaken Thompson St. unit and left Rwanda’s keys at a grocery store in Brownsville, informing her that she had to pick them up herself, that there was nothing in my sister’s contract that said I couldn’t leave her keys at a Malaysian grocery store near JFK. The contract merely stated, ‘the keys shall be left securely for Rwanda.’

In Los Angeles, I meet up with Conchita, an old family friend from Monterrey, at the AMC in the Century City mall. Two hours before showtime, we eat dumplings and noodles at Din Tai Fung and begin to discuss several theories of dramatic tension. ‘Tragedy is’a when someone they make the big, life decision based on wrong informacion, or the misinformacion,’ Conchita says.

‘Fantasy is when someone indulges without true harm in their illusions and ideals, only to find out that all their illusions and ideals were misplaced, and need to be reconsidered,’ I reply.

‘Drama, true drama is when’a someone is’a block from getting what they want, what they need, and then’a they go crazy. What’a bout’a romance? What you say that?’ Conchita asks.

‘Romance is when someone indulges with harm in their illusions and ideals, but against all odds comes out ahead, before perhaps being let down in the end, or not, the ball never really stops rolling. There’s only hope and the sheer force of will of two people to, despite all outside forces and considerations, exist within a shared conspiracy. That’s romance. And what about comedy?’

‘Comedia! El mejor. Comedy is a mixture of all four that we said, it’s’a everything and nothing and anything that’a can and could take’a place in between, then it is.. como se dice… abstraida?’

‘Abstracted.’

‘Si! Abstracted, it is everything abstracted and’a twisted for alivio estetico… aesthetic relief! Comedy is aesthetic relief. But, in this’a case, can it even have an aesthetic? Is’a comedy content, or is it art?’

And the conversation went on. We ate quite a bit of dim sum because we had a big day ahead of us. We were going to see a double feature of The Brutalist and Babygirl, BabyBrutalist, or Brutalgirl, if you will. The Brutalist was almost four hours and afterward I peed like’a never before. I didn’t enjoy it at all (the movie, not the peeing), and found it contrived and self-serious, aesthetically a rip-off of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. The movie didn’t really subscribe to any of the genres that me, Conchita, or D.H. Lawrence considered. Rather, it called itself an epic, which is like me describing myself as a man with big penis energy. An epic cannot be self-aware, nor delusional, nor both.

Conchita and I debated whether to still go to Babygirl but decided fuck it, or ‘fuck eet’, as she said. With previews and ads considered we timed the double feature perfectly and were able to sneak into Babygirl without a ticket.

Our 9:40pm show was almost packed, so we were left with the seats in the front three rows. The movie began and ten minutes later I noticed that the man sitting two seats to my left was draped in a long, woolen blanket, masturbating to the film’s very dull erotic tension; how many times is Nicole Kidman going to play a high-powered business woman who in reality just desires to be tamed, to be fucked to complete submission; it’d be more interesting, I think, if she did blackface; that would even have me going to the theater to masturbate. The man to my left continued wanking with delight, making all sorts of sounds. It wasn’t necessarily the masturbating that bothered me but the unpredictability of what he might do next; shoot up the theater, perhaps? You never know; it’s Los Angeles, after all. It’s America, indeed, America, Los Angeles in the dead period that lies between Christmas and New Years, two weeks before the city was to be set on fire by the breath of God. Anything can happen. I open the notes app on my phone and write man to my left is… and Conchita signals that she notices, and starts laughing. I sit for a while more and see that the man has a very large backpack and can’t help but wonder what’s inside, and I’m racked with concern which turns not-so-slowly to debilitating fear. We change seats, the ones for disabled people that are always empty. I think it’s a law that if someone next to you at the theater is masturbating with vigor while covered in a long blanket they brought with them, you’re allowed to go sit in the disabled seats, even if you are, luckily, not disabled.

In the end the man was harmless. Well, harmless, depending on your moral perspective. I wonder how many times he managed to ejaculate. He walked out of the theater with calm, in a pink cowboy hat and a knee-length satin coat.

‘Oh my God’a look!’ Conchita said. ‘That’s heem.’

January 17th, 2025

Conchita’s a well-known sculptor, but, also, one hell of a writer. Unless I improve, it’s likely that I’ll never really be able to read her in Spanish. I’m therefore condemned to a variety of mediocre translations of her various novellas. We keep a regular correspondence, one or two letters month, and for that she writes in English, which is incredibly unjust. They’re filled with certain gems of perspective on everyday life, on love and on trust, recurring themes of the correspondence (for the past twelve years she’s been in a dramatic, tense relationship with a man named Juan Atocha Jimenez, a musician in El Salvador). ‘When a woman’s needs are neglected, the relationship will soon end,’ Conchita once wrote as a piece of advice in response to one of my romantic woes, and she was right. In another letter there was the very interesting: Don’t bother telling someone what you mean if they don’t listen to you in the first place, best to make them guess, it’ll get those types listening. My least favorite quality in a person is when they decide what they’ll respond before the person’s finished speaking. It totally devalues the philosophical basis of communication, and of connection.

I wrote Conchita a long letter in the middle of fall that detailed all the problems I was having with Alfie. She responded with a story about her two cats, Olivera and Leandro. A few years ago, Conchita was on a flight from Mexico City to Monterrey when her cats began to diarrhea in their carrier bag. To summarize Conchita’s poetic response, her theory was that the cats shit themselves—in turn smelling up the whole plane and causing a scene—not only because of nerves, but because Conchita neglected to speak with them before moving back to Monterrey, to ‘really look them in the eye, and, without any self-awareness that you’re speaking to another species, ask them in earnest what they would like to do.’ As soon as she began asking her cats for their opinion on major life changes, the ensuing issues would lessen, and she could tell that they understood her, and always, somehow, would manage to communicate their preference.

For research on a book, I learned I would have to go to Berlin for a little over a month at the start of the new year and had no choice but to bring Alfie with me. We were already back in the apartment on the Lower East Side. Sans Rwanda energy and among our own furniture and belongings, Alfie stopped chewing things up. But I was worried that, in a new environment, he’d continue. I also noticed that he’d developed cataracts in each eye and, after speaking with a friend who’s a vet’s assistant, confirmed that sudden behavioral changes, like destructive chewing, are a normal consequence.

Following Conchita’s advice, I sat down and asked Alfie, in the most sincere way possible, if he’d like to come with me to Berlin and if he was OK with the flight. I said blink if you want to stay in New York, and he didn’t blink. I said blink if you want to go to Berlin with me on the research trip and if you think you’ll be OK, and he blinked. I then put one of the same treat in each of my hands. The right hand was Berlin and the left hand was New York. I put both hands out, and he went toward my right. On the plane he was perfectly behaved, but in Berlin, in the short-term sublet, he began to chew some of my friend’s sheets and pillows, as well his dog bed.

I’m very aware that at this point you think I’m a crazy person, but please indulge me a little while longer. Five days days ago, I sat down with Alfie on the floor after a particularly chaotic bout of chewing. He knew he did something wrong and went into the corner and started shaking. I patted him and forgave him for chewing up two sweaters and a remote control. I kissed his forehead. I looked in his blurry eyes and explained, in detail, how stressful and destabilizing his new habit was, how expensive it gets, as well how nervous it makes me to go out and run simple errands, never mind have a social life. We made an agreement, and shook on it: the dog bed was already compromised, as were the sweaters, two pillows and a duvet — he could continue going for that. In addition, there were three chew toys I bought him that were fair game to be destroyed. I would always leave treats, if everything else wasn’t enough. For the last few days our negotiation has been respected and it seems that we’ve begun to reach, on this foreign land, a rational sense of harmony. The future is uncertain, but I will continue, no matter what, to truly habla con Alfie.

January 18th, 2025

The general perspective that humans are superior to animals is altogether misguided. There’s an argument against euthanasia, against pulling the plug on people in vegetative states, that says a living being should be judged not by their potential for utility, not by the way they interact with the world, but by their unique ability to exist and contemplate within themselves. Much like disabled people who can’t successfully interact with people or things, animals have a complex, emotional interiority which we’ll never understand. But we love them, and should care for them, because they obtain an endless mystery and represent, fully, the persistence of life, of life in all circumstances. It’s incredible the way they preserve themselves. Everyone is equal in the grave. So too is it true that every entity with a heartbeat has it’s own bizarre sensibility that can never be fully grasped, only experienced and lived.

Winter, this winter, has provided not a sense of happiness, but a feeling that the future is not merely full of doom. The capacity for joy, long-lasting and stable, has in a way returned. I’ve been eating bread that’s organic, made with unmolested grains.