What's in a Word

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a hell of a unique read. Smart, bold, and an intimate memoir involving things that for a freaking long time were taboo. It's a clinic on gender philosophy and how we talk about who we are. This is totally a book I'll come back to over and over. And you know what? It wasn't even that long.  

The Argo, by Lorenzo Costa

The Argonauts is a memoir of author Maggie Nelson's pregnancy and relationship with her partner Harriet/Harry Dodge-- the formation of her family and how to describe it. The title alludes to the ship "The Argo" whose parts were replaced over time but whose name stayed the same. New boat, same name. And doesn't this happen all the time in language? "Words are good enough" (p3) but "once we name something ... we can never see it the same way again" (p4) and "words change depending on who speaks them" (p8). What is radical, and what does it mean when one person describes another as radical? Queer? Gay? Lesbian? Male? Female? Gender and language fluidity go hand-in-hand throughout the book. 

The middle quote really struck me as YES moment: "once we name something ... we can never see it the same way again". I think about this whenever I read an article about the latest advances in quantum physics, which is one of the few fields where new identifying nomenclature is being coined anymore. Some poor journalist is trying to explain quarks and bosons and I'm over here thinking about these particles existing since the beginning of time but now they have Been Named. This happens a lot in science. Once you name something, you can work with it, you can subjugate it and contextualize it with language and other names. 

Nelson points out that often the listener is trapped at the label assigned to the speaker (e.g., gay/lesbian) and can't get beyond it to meaningful discussion (one may observe the parallels to political discourse in this country). Although, while Nelson notes this, I felt like at certain points the book was guilty of it -- Nelson is almost hyper-aware of comments or conversations that could relate to her atypical relationship. "Not everything is about you," I crankily critiqued the memoir ...  

Another section I found interesting was a reference to Judith Butler's idea of performative (not performance) gender. To elaborate, in Butler's own words:

"We act and walk and speak and talk that consolidate an impression of being a man or being a women ... we act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or simply something that is true about us. Actually, it is a phenomenon that is being produced all the time and reproduced all the time."  

There is a whole body (puns!) of literature on this, so my limited initial understanding is that your (gender) identity is many ways a reflection back from an audience. The production and reproduction of a gender impression involves repetition of societal gender norms and complicit participation in historically gender-based power structures. Bookmarked for further contemplation/reading. 

For more: On Judith Butler and Performativity by Sara Salih
And something less dense: Gender Is Not Just a Performance by Julia Serano ... FOR THE COMMENTS SECTION

Other fav moments from The Argonauts:

"[Queer pride is] a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you." (p18)

"How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality -- or anything else, really -- is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?" (p53)


Bottom line: Excellent. Come prepared to make notes and learn shit and be enlightened.
Book clubs:

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay -- TBD AND I AM VERY EXCITED

I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai -- TBD

The Handmaid's Tale -- It's everywhere! It's in my next blog post!

Small Great Things by Jodie Picoult -- Even though this book involved a bunch of tropes and ham-handedness, it made me mad and it made me reflect. Mostly it made me realize that several things I do could be construed as racist, and that was mortifying. I'm surprised at how much I haven't stopped thinking about this book. Looking to tie this into a future post at some point; just waiting for the right companion book. 

The Orphan's Tale by Pam Jenoff -- Fluff. 

A Brief Interlude

1)  I was recently educated on the existence of Land Art thanks to Geoff Dyer's White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, which was not a favorite read but did spur many Google searches.  I both can and cannot believe I've lived this long in America and never knew of these places. Just when you start thinking the country is completely overdeveloped, you find out someone's hidden a huge field of metal poles, a futuristic cityscape in the desert and a giant stone spiral in a lake.

Luigi Ghirri (unrelated to Land Art but I think I'm a fan)
"The Lightening Field" by Walter de Maria
"The Spiral Jetty" by Robert Smithson
"Watts Towers" by Sam Rodia
"City" by Michael Heizer

 2) As part of a new years resolution to get back to reading and away from the internet (ha!), I've joined two book clubs that both meet monthly. I may work some discussions into this blog, and hopefully I'll be able to keep up the pace and find time to work on my personal to-read list as well. Optimism is rampant.

Last month:

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins -- hated every character but read this in under 48hrs

This month:

Swing Time by Zadie Smith -- first race-related book I've read in forrrreeeverr, looking forward to discussion; also reminded me that her books "White Teeth" and "NW" are on my to-read list too

Small Great Things by Jodie Picoult -- TBD

Borges Then & Now

I can't start this entry without first linking the hell out of critic Dan Green's excellent blog post, What Is To Be Done? about you-know-who.  In particular:

"Nevertheless, formally adventurous writing, like all truly challenging art, remains itself "subversive" in the way it provides its own kind of resistance ... It resists reduction to pure discourse, to just another way of making an argument or asserting a point of view, which in an era of increasingly simplistic political rhetoric must still count for something. Most importantly, it resists the temptation to certainty, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) disclosing the contingency not just of our beliefs and actions but as well the very medium such writing uses to depict those beliefs and actions."

The debate between "formally adventurous writing" and politically relevant critical writing is also reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's critics during the Peron presidency in Argentina (i.e., we have major real-life problems now, forget your existential magical writing crap) -- see also this article in Slate, of all places. I think Borges replies to this in The Paris Review's Art of Fiction interview: "[Joseph] Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious," a view that he evidences in his writing with plenty of Schopenhauer the-universe-is-not-rational references. Most of his collected stories in Ficciones are intertwined with truth and fiction, and in the Art of Fiction interview, Borges says of Ficciones: "They were all more or less autobiographical."

Despite his claims to write plainly, you can pretty much craft a separate thesis from every story in this collection. Stylistically, it's like the lovechild of Kafka and Gabriel Garcia Marquez; weirdly magical stories with nightmarish undertones. What are dreams? What is reality? There are labyrinths, non-linear paths, theories on infinite and the functions of time and math, and a mystical obsession with libraries, books and writing that I really enjoyed. The earlier stories in the collection stuck with me more, but maybe by the end I was just having Borges fatigue. Some favs: "The Babylon Lottery", "The Library of Babel", "The Garden of Forking Paths" and "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". They were so interesting I hate to relegate them to a single sentence all bunched together, but honestly I'd need to reread them like three more times to put together a semi-comprehensive post. Ain't nobody got time for that right now.

Random recurring allusions: Thomas DeQuincey, whose 1882 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater must've been a stylistic influence for Borges, and Martin Fierro, a famous epic Argentinian poem with a John Wayne / Clint Eastwood-esque protagonist.

Bottom line, part I: I'm not head-over-heels with Borges, but I'm intrigued enough to read more of his work (or re-read). What I'd really like to get my hands on and wrap my mind around is a solid Kafka-Borges-Marquez comparative piece.

Bottom line, part II: Going back to the beginning of the post, required reading #2 is to go to Borges' Selected Non-Fictions, page 430, "L'Illusion Comique": "Thus there were two histories: the criminal one, composed of jails, tortures, prostitutions, arsons, and deaths; and the theatrical one, tales and fables made for consumption by dolts."

The Paris Review; The Art of Fiction