argonauts v. suicide museum
a tale of two gay books
Just this to acknowledge it’s been a long time since I’ve written. I would say “sorry”, but it’ll probably happen again, so I guess I’m not that sorry.
One reason I haven’t written lately is that I’m not sure what makes for good substack content. Phil told me I should write a listicle about my favorite mass settings and that that would be good content. (Maybe that kind of thing will be coming down the pike. I do like putting things in hierarchies.) But today I feel like writing some brief thoughts about what I’m reading and the way it’s freaking me out.
I’ve been contending with two books these days: trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. I’m about halfway through each of them. They’re both deeply personal, highly idiosyncratic, genre-defying memoirs about gender stuff. I’m having a great time with Hannah. And a terrible time with Maggie.
Reading Hannah Baer is what has given me permission to write down my real-time experiences of her work and share them publicly. In the foreword of trans girl suicide museum she writes, “I wrote a lot of this when I was thinking about things for the first time. The part of me that’s perfectionistic wants to hide all of this beginner thinking…Some of the things I wrote about below, I feel differently about now, or just more relaxed about. But I also think beginner thinking can be helpful for people to see, especially young people and trans people who are beginning, and that’s partly why this book is this way.” And she’s right, the beginningness of her thoughts has been really helpful for me. Seeing a snapshot of a person of a person’s thought process is valuable to me, often much more so than seeing the Fully Formed Thought. I’m coming to understand that I’m much more interested in the processes that lead to abstract ideas than the abstract ideas themselves.
Which brings me to The Argonauts. Zooming out a bit from the content of the book (having a trans husband, motherhood, getting reconstructed and reworked by these things), it seems to be about the unknowableness and inexpressibilty of… well, things, I guess. In trying to express what Nelson herself seems to think is inexpressible, the book takes on a scab-picking quality that seems common to me in a lot of Books About Queerness. There’s a wait, but why? wait, but why? wait but why? to it that, like a three-year-old who has just learned about this question, pisses me off. Not that it’s bad to wonder “wait, but why?”. It’s just that doing that in public about your own personal life and citing a lot of sources about it seems incredibly narcissistic—not in a pathological way, necessarily; but in a primitive way, like a three-year-old. Nelson read Sontag and Butler and Wittgenstein and Winnicott and lots of other heavyweights to make sense of her own experience and then went to the trouble of showing us her work, and then got plenty of lofty critical acclaim for so doing. I’m sure that made her inner three-year-old feel good. I’m not done with the book yet. I’m trying hard to stick with it to see if she puts a band-aid on her scab, if she gets a satiating answer to her wait, but why?.
I’ve never read Maggie Nelson before, but many of my Literary friends have, so I consulted them after picking up this book and feeling really pissed off at it. Are you guys seeing what I’m seeing? Why is this making me so mad? In these talks I gleaned that this scab-picking is sort of Maggie’s thing, and that I’m apprehending it accurately. As for why it’s making me so mad, well, that would require me getting really personal on the substack and doing some navel-gazing of my own, and I really don’t feel like it. Suffice it to say that my anger is defensive. I’m defensive of gay stuff; I don’t like it when people think gayness to death. I’m also defensive of Winnicott and developmental psychology as a discipline; I don’t like it when egocentric people go “hm” about it to justify their own egocentrism. And I’m also defensive of myself: thinking gayness to death and narcissistically going “hm” about developmental psych are two of my darkest drives, and I don’t like seeing someone else doing those things brazenly and getting commended for it.
I’m not sure that I want to stick with Maggie. As I said, I’m having a much better time with a different navel-gazing book, one which was written with a lot more humility. And that’s the thing I guess I’m trying to say. Hannah Baer is navel-gazing. Here’s my navel. It’s making me feel crazy. I like to do ketamine about how crazy it makes me feel. Maggie Nelson is developing Critical Navel Theory. Can a navel be known? Where does my navel begin? “My” navel, if it can be so called, is very special and peculiar; this is why I have to cite so many sources about it. Reading Hannah Baer’s dynamic navel-gazing is what freed me up to conceive of the two books this way, what invited me to zoom out and think more deeply about the epistemology of each. Reading Nelson’s Critical Navel Theory just makes me want to pick my scabs and burn down the academy.