Reading Wednesday 4.3.19

[breathedout]

Well last week I was at five currently-in-progress books and thought I might be down to four in a week's time; instead I'm back up to six. "C'EST LA VIE, as the Americans say," as my French friend Marie Christine used to say.

Anyway, early this week I realized that the April meeting of the queer book group I'm looking at trying out is coming right up, so I got a start on Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968) in order to be finished by the time the group meets. I'm now a little under halfway through and I can already say: it is going to be a very interesting conversation. The novel is super offensive; I'm not saying that in a bragging-approving way, although Vidal obviously was writing to be deliberately provocative; I'm saying: there are a lot of very legitimate reasons to be offended by this book, including but not limited to: casual racism, casual antisemitism, rape jokes and general complacency toward rape, allllllllll the homophobic slurs, depiction of a trans woman as a sexual predator and, simultaneously, a depiction of a sexual predator (the same woman) as broadly sympathetic. So you know, if any of that is a hard-line "no" for you, and I would hardly blame you if it were, give this one a pass!

All that said, it's also a pretty fascinating anthropological glimpse into its queer-historical moment, and, poorly as much of it has aged, other parts of it are genuinely very funny. The whole thing is a kind of carnivalesque satire, so all the characters are caricatures, but Myra, the trans woman protagonist, is, as I said above, both broadly sympathetic and an interesting data point for literary queerness, especially since she exists in a milieu and an aesthetic that is very recognizably gay-male. (Myra predates John Waters's Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble by just a few years, and we're definitely playing in the same ballpark; and the thread of Myra's cinematic obsession is continued in works like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976).) As such Myra's hardly the only queer in the village that is the third-tier acting academy in Westwood where she has landed a job teaching Posture and Empathy while trying to collect her "husband"'s land inheritance from the washed-up radio cowboy who runs the place. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is how she interacts with the other flavors of queer folks she meets (with slurs; yet also with recognition), as well as how she interacts with her own queerness. This passage, for example, in which a colleague invites her to a mixed-gender orgy ("Myron" is her past self, whom she publicly refers to as her late husband):

I was at a loss for words. On the one hand, the idea was definitely attractive. Myron sometimes enjoyed the company of four or five men at the same time but he did not believe in mixing the sexes. I of course do. [...] Although I am not a Lesbian, I do share the normal human response to whatever is attractive physically in either sex.

The suggestion that Myra's transition has enabled her to countenance more "mixing [of] the sexes" among her sexual partners than she was able to before it, is an interesting one. Anyway I'm sure I'll have more to say about it as I continue reading over the next week and a half.

Apart from the Vidal, I've been making some headway on Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, from which I posted a couple of excerpts as I went. I was mentioning to someone in comments that Kendi's book is an extremely high-level overview that's written for a popular audience, which makes it different than most of the history that I read, and I keep hankering after deeper dives on incidents on which Kendi spends 2-3 paragraphs and then moves on. Still, though, as a synthesis with a focus on the development of racist thought in the US, it's good, and it's helping me both to remember sections of US history I haven't thought much about since high school (what happened in the 1820s, anyway?) and to combine in enlightening ways various things I did know about, but hadn't related to each other. It's divided into five top-level sections according to the historical figure who serves as the sort of "guide" through that era—Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, WEB DuBois, and Angela Davis—and I've just finished the Thomas Jefferson section & moved on to the Garrison. This will be a long-term reading project, though: I've been checking it out from the library but there are always people waiting, so at the end of each three-week stint I have to return it and put my name back in the queue.

Also reading and re-reading a bunch of journal articles and book chapters for novel research, including a few chapters from Marjory Lang's Women Who Made the News: Female Journalists in Canada, 1880-1945, and a re-read of Craig Heron's "The Great War and Nova Scotia Steelworkers". Both of which are very useful for my purposes but I don't have a ton to say about them more generally. Though I will share this bit of doggerel verse in which editor JP McEvoy imagines a heavenly reception for a female journalist who reported on the circuit of turn-of-the-century women's clubs and charitable societies:

St Peter met her at the gate,
And took her by the fin
Said He: some sins we all must rue
But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—
Come in.

Comments

[starshipfox]

I was just reading Joseph Cassara's House of Impossible Beauties, which has a long scene involving a trans woman reading Myra Breckinridge while on a subway ride. I'd never heard of it before then, so now I've gone on a journey from "Maybe I should pick this up" to "probably this book is not for me". It's certainly interesting to have such a controversial choice the first time you go to this book club! Everyone will be getting all their cards on their table. I'm currently running an LGBTQ book club at the local library, but my choices so far have been... probably more tame.

[breathedout]

Yeah! I'm very intrigued by this group based on their having chosen this book. I hope it means they're up for some meaty, substantive discussion and that they're interested in thinking about the differing queer communities in specific historical moments, over time. I mean I suppose the alternative is that they're just a bunch of transphobic assholes, but they specifically market themselves as trans-inclusive and the author of their May selection is a trans woman, so that seems... hopefully unlikely.

Either that or they somehow just had NO IDEA what they were getting into, in which case I will probably be seeing a lot of horrified faces next week, LOL.

[felinejumper]

an actual irl lol @

But you did clubs one winter through,
And that is hell enough for you—

Same, if I was setting heaven-metrics!

[breathedout]

Ahahahaha I know right. So #relatable.

[verymorstan]

re: myra b: in the immortal words of diplomat-speak, 'there's a lot to unpack here.' *grins* it sounds... intellectually interesting and emotionally cringey? maybe? hope your book group enjoys the discussion!

[breathedout]

Ha, yes, I hope the discussion is good!

Honestly for me personally the reading experience is much more on the intellectually interesting side & less on the cringey side; for better or worse I've read enough 1960s lit by white men that I'm actually pretty impressed by the degree to which Vidal is sympathetic to Myra and lets her be a complex/flawed human even within the cartoonish, comedic world he's set up. And of course I'm interested in the place-and-time queer artifact aspect of it. But yeah, I would definitely hesitate before recommending it to anyone unless I was very sure that was the experience they really wanted to have!

[magnetic_pole]

Do you know, I didn't realize until reading your comments that I'd read most of Myra ages ago, back in the 1990s, in a used bookstore near Lake Merritt in Oakland. I'd completely forgotten, but the memory came back so vividly just now.

I'm just so envious you've got a queer book club! M.

[breathedout]

Yeah I hope it's a good group! Looking forward to finding out, for sure; I'd love to have a good group of folks to chat about queer lit with every month over some wine. It's right in Berkeley so I guess both our Myra Breckinridge memories will have a distinct East Bay cast, ahahaha.

[oulfis]

Myra sounds like a fascinating book! Which I will enjoy having you tell me about at length, rather than reading directly, ha.

I find the "late husband" framing particularly compelling: it's a very tidy solution to a very tricky problem, namely, how to think of and discuss this person whom you no longer are? Let's pretend my name used to be "Lavinia"; I do feel like Lavinia is a person I used to know, who (unfortunately for her) never got to leave those most terrible teenage years. I have a lot of fondness and sympathy for Lavinia now, which I did not have at the time. And often her perspective or experience are very relevant to things! But also, there are a lot of places where I can't just say things like "back when I was a lesbian" to explain my anecdotes. Pretending that my former self is another person could be useful, and also not inaccurate...

This is something that, really, I think is not so unique to the trans experience -- what's unique is mostly that we get two nicely-delineated names for the before-and-after of one of our crucial identity shifts.

[breathedout]

Yeah, the repercussions of the "late husband" framing are one of the most compelling parts of the book, I think. It leads to things like: Myra refers to things that she and Myron used to do together, you know, as a married couple. They went on a research trip to X place; they had this or that acquaintance. Which gives Myra herself this longer-term existence: in a sense she was there with Myron, she had this back-and-forth relationship with him; she shared things with him. But she also refers to things that ONLY Myron did, like fucking several men at once but not being open to sleeping with women, or writing his book on Hollywood films of the 40s, a life's work which Myra is now hoping to continue in his memory despite the fact that there are points he makes in it that she disagrees with. Of course some of this is just canny posturing, but the extent to which she keeps it up even for the reader suggests it's also at least to some extent how she legitimately thinks of herself and of Myron, or at least a handy shorthand for how she thinks of them. Which, like you say, resonates for me too, even though I'm not trans: I am definitely in dialogue, argument, and /or communion with my past selves on a regular basis.