October 23, 2018 Arts & Culture Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon By RL Goldberg This fall, I’m teaching a course titled “Masculinity in Literature.” The small seminar is attended by men, all in their twenties, earning their college degrees while incarcerated. Before we began our discussion of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues—perhaps the only “canonical” trans book, if such a thing as a trans canon can be said to exist—we generated a partial list of gender terminology: transgender, transsexual, agender, two-spirit, trans woman, bigender, trans man, FTM, MTF, boi, femme, soft butch, cisgender. The students already knew, at least in rough contours, how these terms were used. They weren’t contentious. What was contentious: man and woman, and the course’s undergirding premise that reading texts about masculinity that have nothing to do with cisgender, heterosexual, white men can teach us a good deal about masculinities. As the discussion progressed, our collective sense of what determines “masculinity” and “maleness” decalcified. One student grew impatient. “Words have to mean something,” he said. “Being a man means something.” He wasn’t frustrated with the abstract possibilities of fluidity, with the notion that some people are trans, or with the idea that identification is not a given. Rather, his concern was that, if gender identity is mutable for others, then what does that mean for him, an adult man who has never questioned his gender? That is, if we refuse the idea of biological essentialism—if “men” and “women” are more than the sum of genitals, secondary sex characteristics, and chromosomes—what does that do to the definition of his own maleness? On October 21, the New York Times published a piece titled, “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration.” The thrust of the article: the Trump administration may move toward defining gender as biological, immutable, and essentially determined by genitalia at birth, and transgender people could face a terrifying curtailing of civil protections and recognition as a result. As many people have said, such a move misunderstands the distinctions between gender and sex, and is viciously mean-spirited, a pathetic attempt to shore up support from a base whose hatred of “identity politics” manifests, paradoxically, as the inability to disconnect from them. In some ways, the redefinition under consideration by the Trump administration is what my student was arguing for: a coherent, unswerving, unshakable definition of gender that leaves no room for debate or deviance. You’re either a girl or you’re a boy, and how you feel about that is immaterial. Those words, and those roles, are left unexamined. But that’s not how my conversation with this student ended. He didn’t define me out of his reality, or choose to see the inconvenience of my trans body, my self, as a challenge to him and to the way he has, for the last two decades, understood the world. He tried, instead, to work toward a definition of gender by which our different truths wouldn’t invalidate one another. Lately I’ve been thinking about a corpus of texts that centers on trans writing. I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels. So it’s not a canon exactly, but a corpus. It’s something more like a body: mutable, evolving, flexible, open, exposed, exposing. It’s the opposite of erasure; it’s an inscription. Here are eleven books that have meant a great deal to me as I’ve tried to learn about both my own transness and experiences less familiar to me. I hope they might be recognized, read, and shared—which is to say, never erased. Read More
October 23, 2018 Arts & Culture The Missing Images of Chinese Immigrants By May-Lee Chai Still from The Curse of Quon Gwon (1917) The first known Chinese woman in America was nineteen-year-old Afong Moy, who arrived in New York City in 1834 on the steamship Washington. Three weeks later, she was put on display as part of an exhibit called the “Chinese Saloon.” For fifty cents, New Yorkers could purchase a ticket to gawk. Afong Moy sat from ten A.M. to two P.M. and then three P.M. to five P.M. daily. She performed for the crowds by using chopsticks and speaking in Chinese. Eventually she toured up and down the East Coast, and by 1848 was performing as part of a P. T. Barnum show. Then, her popularity eventually waned, and by 1850, she’d been replaced. There are no more records of what became of Afong Moy. All that remains is a black-and-white drawing of her performance that appeared in a newspaper. She appears as a tiny, round-faced woman seated on a large chair in the middle of her exhibition space, surrounded by paper lanterns and other artifacts of chinoiserie. Read More
October 22, 2018 Arts & Culture Simply Impossible By Mark Polizzotti Patrick Modiano Translation lore is rife with tales of linguistic derring-do in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. Gilbert Adair’s e-less Englishing (or Nglishing) of Georges Perec’s La Disparition is one. So are James Joyce and co.’s Italian and French permutations on Anna Livia Plurabelle, and Henri Parisot’s (and Antonin Artaud’s) gallicizations of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” Less spectacular, but far more common, is a hurdle faced by nearly every practicing translator, across contexts and genres. It’s the challenge of the seemingly unadorned sentence or expression that passes so naturally it seems to “write itself.” While the translation of these sentences can sometimes occur just as naturally, more often than not it requires vast amounts of hairpulling. Few things are as difficult as ease. As a translator, I’ve been grappling (so to speak) with the apparently straightforward prose of Patrick Modiano for the better part of a decade. Having now worked on nine of his books—his newest, Sleep of Memory, was published by Yale University Press this month—I’ve come to appreciate both the economy of his French and the complexities of ushering that economy into English. The familiar rule of thumb, that English is more concise than French by about 15 percent, doesn’t apply here: in my experience, Modiano is one of the rare French writers who can actually come out longer in English translation. Read More
October 19, 2018 Arts & Culture Surviving Unrequited Love with Ivan Turgenev By Viv Groskop I found out about Ivan Turgenev’s existence at a crucial moment. There had been a very small leap for me between obsessing over Anna Karenina in my midteens and deciding that learning Russian was my destiny. There was, unsurprisingly, an even smaller leap between becoming obsessed with learning Russian and becoming obsessed with unsuitable men who spoke Russian. This culminated in my acquaintance with a man whose name—Bogdan Bogdanovich—translated as “God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift.” In many ways, he lived up to his name. He was a man whom I loved with the passion that Anna Karenina first feels for Vronsky, but he regarded me with as much affection as Levin holds for the ladies who stink of eau de vinaigre. This is where Turgenev comes in. No one writes better about unrequited love. Real life is about quiet, slow, awkward moments of humiliation. And what greater humiliation is there than loving someone far, far more than they love you? This is the kind of embarrassing, self-inflicted fever that Turgenev is brilliant at describing. In August 1994, I was twenty-one years old and spending the summer by the Black Sea in Odessa, Ukraine. It was the last few months of my year abroad. That summer was a blur of strong cigarettes, black bread, tea and jam, and whispered invitations on a Saturday night. I spent a lot of time drinking samogon (moonshine), eating pig fat, and being in love. He was in a rock band. They played songs in terrible English with titles like “I’m Not Drunk, It’s Only Fucking Funk.” I was his groupie. He was my world. We went everywhere together. We kissed. We laughed. We ate pig fat. I was drunk a lot of the time, but I was never too drunk to know that God’s Gift, Son of God’s Gift, did not love me in the same way that I loved him. Luckily, while I was plowing my way through Tolstoy with a dictionary, I also happened to be reading in translation Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country. It is a cruel and hilarious cautionary tale about unrequited love. Turgenev himself experienced this unhappy state for more or less the entirety of his sixty-four years. From around the 1840s to the end of his life in 1883, Turgenev adored the married opera singer Pauline Viardot. The exact nature of their relationship is hotly debated. But it seems to me to be one of the most extreme examples of one-sided love in history. Turgenev represents his complicated feelings about this state of being through the mournful, resigned, comically self-pitying character of Rakitin. Read More
October 18, 2018 Arts & Culture Virginia Woolf’s Little-Known Biography of a Cocker Spaniel By Erin Schwartz Sawrey Gilpin, English Springer Spaniel on a Cushion, 1807 In her 1911 opus Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors, Judith Blunt-Lytton, sixteenth baroness of Wentworth, great-granddaughter of Lord Byron, wrote, “It has cost me years of research both in the British Museum and in the picture galleries of Europe to disentangle the truth from the cocoon of falsehood into which it was spun.” What Blunt-Lytton sought to recuperate from the cobwebs of history was the lapdog’s true form. Blunt-Lytton contended that many breeds had recently strayed from their roots, in large part due to the Victorian proliferation of “dog fancying”: a British term that evokes, at once, a group of people who like dogs and a group people who fluff up dogs’ fur and tie ribbons around their necks. Of the spaniel, Blunt-Lytton asserts that the contemporary model “was introduced comparatively recently, certainly no earlier than the year 1840,” and compiles visual evidence of its transformation. The spaniel in Titian’s Venus of Urbino is technically correct, as are eighteenth-century pooches painted by George Stubbs; for comparison, her book contains a mug shot of a puppy described as “noseless atrocity, bred by author,” while another dog’s portrait is captioned: “noseless toy spaniel, with wrongly carried ears and bad expression.” Read More
October 17, 2018 Arts & Culture The Erotics of Cy Twombly By Catherine Lacey Cy Twombly in Grottaferrata, 1957 ©Betty Stokes Early in Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, author Joshua Rivkin confesses that the book “is not a biography. This is something, I hope, stranger and more personal.” What, a reader may wonder, could be more personal than a biography? Chalk is one answer to that riddle. Cy Twombly, a prominent abstract artist whose popularity has only grown since his death in 2011, is best known for his large, abstract paintings—“passionate splashes of color … curves of white chalk looping through darkness.” Rivkin describes the artist’s work as an actualization of “the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling.” Twombly’s most staunch admirers are ecstatically unnerved by his canvases; a woman once spontaneously kissed one painting, leaving behind a lipsticked print. (She was, as lovers often are, unrepentant.) But, outside the art world, Twombly’s messy, seemingly thoughtless style inspired confusion and disdain. His scratchy, hectic paintings have led the unimaginative to shrug, “My kid could do that.” Rivkin is intensely focused on the “complex arrangements of love and domesticity” that filled Twombly’s life—from his early love affair with a married Robert Rauschenberg, to his impenetrable and improbable marriage to the Italian heiress Tatiana Franchetti, to his decades-long entwinement with his assistant and rumored paramour, Nicola del Roscio. Read More