112 essay Copying & Lying From For Now Eileen Myles 2019 has been a chaotic and exceptionally beautiful year, right, crowded with incident (horrible) and time itself had a kind of optic quality (full of great and awful things to see and the year has been busy getting copied—that way being memorable) and these are the things I’m always feeding into my purpose which is to write and maybe to get this part over with right away—because I need an alibi. Alibi of course implies a kind of “elsewhere” and as you translate it into many languages it remains alibi, what’s the word for alibi in Czech. It’s alibi. Copying & Lying | 113 I have been arming myself with philosophies for years that support the notion that the point is to be here, to be present, which I think is the truly hard part, and yet I keep coming back to it; it’s undeniably true and writing it turns out is the easiest way to copy that feeling. I have been doing it for years. I would like to be here, I think I’m here, and the more I write, and the more you read it the more it’s simply a fact. So that’s pretty much done and now I’m living here. I have been living in an apartment in New York for 42 years so that’s where most of my life has occurred. My living, my thinking, my copying. It’s one of those East Village rent stabilized apartments and my building had just been sold in 2017 for the umpteenth time, and pretty soon after my lease was up, I guess probably in June and the new landlady totally took her time getting the new lease to me, actually all of us, which of course spelt danger, finally I got an email from her, Elaine Moosey, my landlady, saying she wanted to meet each one of us to hand us our leases and I thought that’s sweet and a few weeks later she’s standing right there in my apartment. She’s a conservative looking woman I bet about ten years younger than me and as soon as she got inside here, apartment 3C, she goes, I’ll give you 75,000 to leave. That’s a visitor, right. I chuckled and rejected her offer and she went on to say that she knows that as well as living here in the small very inexpensive apartment I also have a house in Marfa Texas. Which is not illegal, but a fact. And that she Elaine Moosey knows it. I’m being watched. That was the feeling I got. Then she asked me what I do and I said I’m a writer I didn’t say poet which was interesting. I generally do say that because it is far more perverse— people generally don’t know what a poet does—but in the moment with my landlady I also grabbed a fat book of poetry out of a brown box sitting there right next to the tub and I flashed it even thinking maybe it would be nice to give her one (also wondering if there was anything incriminating in it) and she looked right through the two of us, my book and me, and then she said smiling wouldn’t you rather write in Texas. 114 | Eileen Myles It’s always very unpredictable where you will receive counseling in your life. There’s a philosophy that everything is a gift. If everything were coffee that might be true. The implication is that even Elaine Moosey my landlady is a gift. But I’m actually still thinking about the utter banal Buddhism of my landlady giving me advice and it’s too bad we couldn’t have had an actual conversation about it cause I genuinely do prefer to write in Texas and that’s why I have my house, but I will never leave my apartment on E. 3 St. because this is my home that I love. I love the sweet worn quality of my apartment, historic stove, ancient sinks. Were people shorter in the past or was...