The Longform Society: Meeting #2: The Argonauts

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The Longform Society: Meeting #2: The Argonauts

wheelercentre

Hi! Welcome to Wheeler Centre Discussions for The Longform Society's second meeting, The Argonauts.

This meeting of the Longform Society will range broadly across the entirety of Maggie Nelson's lyrical, questioning memoir, The Argonauts. If you can, we recommend reading it in print (the e-book format isn't able to replicate Nelson's original layout). It's dense, but short.

Otherwise, here are some extracts to give you a sense of the writing and the ideas it contains:

• 'Love, Identity and Genderqueer Family Making' at Longreads
• 'In the Pain Cavern' at Harper's
• A brief excerpt at Literary Hub
• Further notes on The Argonauts and lyric essays at Longreads

We'd love to get this discussion started during tonight's live chat, beginning with your thoughts on the book – and continuing on to what we didn't get the chance to cover on stage.

In the mean time, enjoy your reading, create an account on this discussion forum if you haven't already, and feel free to share links to other longform writing that recalls the style or content of Nelson's work for you.

Live-streamed video of our discussion (hosted by Sophie Cunningham, with Hannah McCann, Onyx Carmine and Quinn Eades) will begin from 6.15pm (AEST) this Tuesday 11 July, right here. If you're able to watch YouTube videos on your device, this'll work just fine.

bbq

Really enjoying the quite personal responses the panellists are giving to The Argonauts - the excerpts they've each chosen and why.

seedling

This is really good. I have to confess to feeling unqualified to chime in on any of the ideas, because a) mine is the ebook version and b) I haven't finished it! But I am feeling kind of emotional thinking about some of it now, and really want to go back and finish it off now. Thanks, guys.

AnnaGould101

Thank you for a great panel discussion. I am half way through the book and it has taken me back to my undergraduate degree days of feminist theory and women's studies. I was finding it hard to get into the structure of the book but as I kept reading I was reminded of what it was like to be in my twenties and excited by contemporary theory and literary criticism. Thank you Sophie and panel experts for shedding some light on some of the topics.

Debbieann

Enjoyed the panel discussion- would love a list of Australian writers that are covering this subject. Quinn mentioned them, but it went by too quickly. I really loved The Argonauts and enjoyed the discussion. I love the way Maggie Nelson weaves things together.

SophieCunningham

Debbieann I can't remember the entire list Quinn gave, but it included Kathleen Mary Fallon and Marion May Campbell. I'll ask him to remind me of some of the others on the list then post it here.

wheelercentre

SophieCunningham Debbieann The other writers of 'feminist and queer ficto-critical writing' that Quinn Eades mentioned include: Alison Bechdel (Fun Home, Are You My Mother?) and Kathy Acker, and in Australia, Marion May Campbell, Anna Gibbs, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Ros Prosser.

bbq

Loved this discussion too - thanks Sophie and panellists. And really enjoyed the Argonauts. One thing that I found a bit strange about the book - or that maybe didn't quite ring true for me - was that there was very little sense of the day-to-day/the domestic/the ordinary in this portrait of two people who live in close quarters. In such an eloquent meditation on normalcy/radicalism, I was so curious about Maggie's experience of banality and routine. The book is, to a large extent, about radicalism and about the most profound, wild and intense experiences people can have (sex, childbirth, death, exposure to amazing ideas etc etc) and i found the book really romantic at times. I didn't expect Maggie to describe the boring stuff - it would be dull if she did - but, I don't know, maybe allude to it? Routine and banality are a bit part of intimacy (between parent and child/between couples/between siblings) and I guess a big part of normalcy. Maybe the real reason for this comment is that the world of the Argonauts seems quite glamorous in a Californian/academic/queer kind of way and I just want to be reassured that these people have dull and stupid moments too.

SophieCunningham

I thought I'd relay some of the quotes the panellists chose. Hannah read out and spoke to this: 'I know that Edelman is talking about the Child, not children per se, and that my artist friend is likely more concerned with jamming the capitalist status quo than with prohibiting the act of childbirth. And I too feel like jamming a stick in someone’s eye every time I hear ‘protecting the children’ as a rationale for all kinds of nefarious agendas, from arming kindergarten teachers to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran to gutting all social safety nets to extracting and burning through what’s left of the world’s fossil supply. But why bother fucking this Child when we could be fucking the specific forces that mobilize and crouch behind its image. Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of ‘no future’ won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say.' (from pps. 94-95 of the Text edition of The Argonauts).

SophieCunningham

Here is the quote that I read out (it's from p. 31 of the Text edition of the book). 'One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain ‘same sex marriage’ over and over again is that I don’t know many — if any — queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being ‘same sex’. It’s true that a lot of lesbian sex writing from the '70s was about being turned on, and even politically transformed, by an encounter with sameness. This encounter was, is, can be, important, as it has to do with seeing reflected that which has been reviled, with the exchanging alienation of internalised revulsion for desire and care. To devote yourself to someone else’s busy can be a means of devoting yourself to your own. But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.'

SophieCunningham

Quinn Eaders read this quote, from pps. 65-66. 'How to explain – ‘trans’ may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (‘born in the wrong body’, necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some – but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, ‘transitioning’ may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others – like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T – it doesn’t? I’m not on my way anywhere, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? [Beatriz Preciado: I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.] How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK – desirable, even (e.g., ‘gender hackers’)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? 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?'

SophieCunningham

The quote Onyx read was too long for me to replicate here, but it began, on p.3, with : 'Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one much be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.' They then spoke to the ways in which The Argonauts worked with this paradox, expressing the inexpressible, and they ways in which bodily experience cannot always be replicated by language.