“Are you here for Hot Literati? I had a feeling it might be you.” This is how HaileyCognetti, a
writer for Hot Literati, found me at the Whitney.
Before that, I had been kind of nervously slinking around the gift shop, not knowing what to
expect. After a year or so being a Hot Literati lurker on social media, I had responded to an
invitation online, a night for Dostoyevsky lovers. Our task was to find a painting by Norman
Lewis in the postcards section. It all felt kind of like a film; like a note a mysterious girl would
leave for the main character. Meet me by the Norman Lewis painting.
After chatting a bit and sending Hailey photos of the postcard so that she would know we found
it, she sent us our next message. This car is coming to pick you up. The driver took us to a little
old-school style diner, where Hailey was waiting for us with a plate of fries in front of her. It had
been so long since I had been to a place like this. It reminded me of the diner in Twin Peaks a bit.
I’m still new to New York, and one of the things I was looking forward to with regards to my
move was how many creative things happen here, especially in the literary sphere. Authors even
go on tour here—it’s unheard of where I used to live, or generally in the South. Since I’m in
school for something very unrelated to most of my hobbies, it hasn’t been as easy as I expected
to find substantial commonalities with the people around me daily. This Hot Literati event, I
thought, was the perfect place for me to start doing things that really interest me, even if it means
going in blind. Or going alone.
I’m partial to how Hailey does things with Hot Literati in particular. She’s a breath of fresh air in
an online literary community where “booktokers” and “booktubers” treat reading like a sport,
filming lifestyle-type content designed to be consumed. 24 Hour Reading Marathon. Top Ten
Must-Reads for Unhinged Women. I Read 246 Books in 2023. And, of course, the endless book
hauls, many people filling their shelves with brand-new books they never even read. Full
disclosure, I’m a book collector myself, but I’ve noticed overconsumption making its way into
the online literary space; people need to churn out lots of new content, keep the algorithm happy,
etc. I like that Hailey and Hot Literati are basically the antithesis to this. She talks only about
books that are meaningful to her, they’re usually secondhand, and she takes her time. She’s not in
a rush.
The three of us started talking, and it was the sort of conversation I felt starved for in my daily
life. We spoke about books, the Internet, language/translation, girlhood, weird dates, and really
everything in between. Hailey gave me some gloriously battered old Dostoyevsky paperbacks,
The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, and she gave us new Hot Literati t-shirts. I was
particularly amused by the one that said, “need 2 kiss a Dostoevsky lover tonight”. What a
proclamation, honestly. Funny but weirdly vulnerable to admit you need a kiss from anyone.
Maybe this is the type of earnestness my life is missing.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately, how to find it and what that looks like.
I suppose I thought New York is so big it would be a simple thing to do, but I was wrong. Hailey
Cognetti and I spoke about this in the Whitney gift shop—big city ennui can take you by
surprise, but it clearly exists. The feeling of being lonely in a crowd. Our conversation reminded
me of a similar one I’d had with my local bodega man recently. He had shaken his head, telling
me, “No, it’s not easy here. This country is different.”
I guess there’s one thing I know for sure: community isn’t something you stumble across by
accident, or something that comes to you. You have to act intentionally, make effort, and go find
it yourself. This is something I’ve said before: it can be so embarrassing to admit that you’re
actually trying. And yet, it’s kind of the only thing to do. As Plath would say, “Go out and do
something. It isn’t your room that’s a prison, it’s yourself.”
(Join book club through a paid membership on our Substack for delightfully niche experiences like this one)