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A review by katrinky
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
4.0
"You've punctured my solitude," I told you. [...] "I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize. (5)
"The sight of Carson's brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable." (49)
(This book is, among other things, a fetishizing of SAYING. Of deeming it all worth writing down, worth publishing. The problem of the first, as with the L Word- it's not normal yet to have the minutiae of queer life and thought presented in book form, particularly rooted in philosophy and theory, so this is the representation we've got, and it chafes where it doesn't match my personal taste. It's an overshare and it's really a book of a smart person typing her thoughts about anything she wants and calling it a book, but it's vital for being a queer state of the union address when there are so few reaching an audience the size of Nelson's. And much of her process of falling in love with Harry- avoiding pronouns instead of asking, stumbling through how to talk to waiters and government officials, etc- is hugely valuable as a roadmap, a forgiveness, and an urging to be better to anyone trying to expand their understanding and language around gender fluidity.)
"And now, after living behind you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness—as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, however loose)—I'm no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free." (52)
"a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains unpolluted by procreative femininity." --susan fraiman (67)
TO READ:
Luce Irigaray
Christina Crosby
Susan Fraiman
Dodie Bellamy
Beatriz Preciado
Winnicott on the Child
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
"The sight of Carson's brackets made me feel instantly ashamed of my compulsion to put my cards more decidedly on the table But the more I thought about the brackets, the more they bugged me. They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable." (49)
(This book is, among other things, a fetishizing of SAYING. Of deeming it all worth writing down, worth publishing. The problem of the first, as with the L Word- it's not normal yet to have the minutiae of queer life and thought presented in book form, particularly rooted in philosophy and theory, so this is the representation we've got, and it chafes where it doesn't match my personal taste. It's an overshare and it's really a book of a smart person typing her thoughts about anything she wants and calling it a book, but it's vital for being a queer state of the union address when there are so few reaching an audience the size of Nelson's. And much of her process of falling in love with Harry- avoiding pronouns instead of asking, stumbling through how to talk to waiters and government officials, etc- is hugely valuable as a roadmap, a forgiveness, and an urging to be better to anyone trying to expand their understanding and language around gender fluidity.)
"And now, after living behind you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness—as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, however loose)—I'm no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free." (52)
"a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains unpolluted by procreative femininity." --susan fraiman (67)
TO READ:
Luce Irigaray
Christina Crosby
Susan Fraiman
Dodie Bellamy
Beatriz Preciado
Winnicott on the Child
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick