Key Figures. “I thought the passage was romantic,” writes Nelson, who favours the ability of words to generate a multiplicity of meanings. (Part 1). Instead, we are watching Nelson dance on her lover’s toes; we are watching her ply the eraser-side of a pencil to smear a sketch drawn from a rear-facing mirror. Site designed in collaboration with CMYK. “Emily retained her ghosts for years,” Nelson writes in Jane: A Murder, referring to her own older sister. I need those colored bricks to chip away at, because the eating into them makes form. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson was a choice for my book club this week, a book highly anticipated by many other LGBTQ people. “So far as I can tell,” Nelson writes, “most worthwhile pleasures on this earth slip between gratifying another and gratifying oneself. Maggie Nelson. Rishi Sunak’s middle way on Covid-19 is the worst of all worlds, Why the rise and decline of the AfD party in Germany is a parable for our times, The brilliance and brutality of Lucian Freud, NS Recommends: New books from Megan Hunter, Bradley Garrett, Safiya Sinclair and James Ball. In this way you can have your empty church with a dirt floor swept clean of dirt and your spectacular stained glass gleaming by the cathedral rafters, both. Maybe It’s Time to Do Away with Anonymous Reviews.
“You” is her then lover, now husband, the artist Harry Dodge, who was born a biological female and who, in the course of the book, undergoes treatments that render her body more masculine though Dodge has no desire to identify wholly as male.
…Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’, its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very... -- The Author, quoting Roland Barthes I feel safe in saying that Nelson’s decision to bear a child at forty does not represent the author’s debut experiment with obliteration. Pages 125-143. The thud of that eventuality is far from the gradient transformation implied by the phrase ‘one day turning,’ and in the chapter “A Situation Of Meat,” Nelson reels from the crucifixions of Francis Bacon to the ruminations of Simone Weil to Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony,” staring flush at the brutal instantaneity wherein a sentient, subjective being becomes unminded, a penetrable sack of tissue flesh and flab. In numbered points, she then traces her collected shades — found and given mementos, musings on the history of indigo and ultramarine, the blues of Joni Mitchell, Billie Holliday, and Young Werther — creating a deep-hued outline that expresses the shape of the inexpressible: a broken heart.
[Spoiler Alert: re-reading Bluets with an eye-trained toward those moments Nelson compels the mind/meat switcheroo is a very good way to spoil a re-reading of Bluets.]. “Why can’t you just write something that will bear adequate witness to me, to us, to our happiness?” Dodge asks (hypothetically), with Nelson playing her own devil’s advocate. They dance in the living room to Janelle Monáe; they share warm blankets and chocolate pudding; they endure the touchy struggles of step-parenting and the terror of serious medical scares. “It is idle,” she says of language, “to fault a net for having holes.”. Yet at the same time she allows love as a necessary complement, because its sympathetic urges enlarge the realm of the ethical. really?) The act of childbirth, however, succeeds in bringing The Argonauts to heaving breathless hypomanic life.
Nelson argues that it is wrong to see this “performativity” as a gender-identity free-for-all. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.”, [A Brief Personal Aside: I tended bar long past the age it could be considered a passing phase, and as that night life grew unsustainable, during my shifts I would cap off hours of mounting consumption with a shot I dubbed “The Ol’ Brain-Blower” — Fernet or Grand Marnier or Rumple Minz poured thick in a tumbler, aiming to annihilate any last trace of myself and leave a disembodied set of hands to plunge in the ice and ply the shaker, an autopilot mouth cracking easy quips and counting out change.]. Flux and motion provide the book’s title, with Nelson pointing out that over time a seagoing vessel such as The Argo can have all of its structural parts replaced and the ship will nonetheless remain ‘The Argo.’ As The Argonauts proceeds, revised, Nelson employs her vast array of materials and expertise not to create an image but to obscure one: rather than turn an absence into a presence, she sets about doing the opposite. devoted?
Some would call that an ethics.” In her book about narrative, Love’s Knowledge, the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts love outside the realm of ethics – given that one of its characteristics is a willingness to transgress ethical boundaries. Death, the same. -- The Author
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“The writer,” Nelson writes, quoting Barthes again, “is someone who plays with his mother’s body.” In The Argonauts, Nelson the writer plays with her own “mother’s body”. What’s in a word? (Part 1)
This Study Guide consists of approximately 43 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Harry Dodge makes films, makes sculptures, makes art out of found household items. The book is, at heart, about the ongoing creation of family.
Maggie Nelson agrees: “Just as the Argo’s parts must be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use,” she writes in her memoir The Argonauts. The operations of love upon the ethical cannot be conveyed, Nussbaum argues, by “conventional philosophical prose, a style remarkably flat and lacking in wonder – but only in a language and in forms themselves more complex, more allusive, more attentive to particulars”. “You read it as a possible retraction.”.
Maggie Nelson’s first book of nonfiction begins with a perfectly balanced sentence: “She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head.” Within that book — Jane: A Murder (2005) — the subject (she) and object (the gunshot head) set the coordinates. Significant health issues aside, nothing appears a more immediate threat to their family unit than Nelson’s determination to capture it on the page. Stinging and abrupt, these couplings are negations, with Nelson — bereft — becoming object. Nelson, Dodge, their two boys — theirs is a loving family. He is pessimistic about the possibilities of words, which, he believes, are “corrosive to all that is good, all that is real”. Malloy. The result itself is somewhat mixed. Nelson also argues for the vir- tues of “particulars”, defending the literary theorist Jane Gallop’s “troublingly personal, anecdotal, self-concerned” baby photos, presented in a seminar in which they were dismissed by the art historian Rosalind Krauss as vehicles unfit for thought.
“The spectre of our eventual ‘becoming object’ — of our (live) flesh one day turning into (dead) meat — is a shadow that accompanies us throughout our lives,” Nelson writes in her ranging critical study, The Art of Cruelty (2011). Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. “Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time,” she writes. An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family .