The Argonauts can be described as a book that has hit its cultural moment, a book that has come just in time. No notebook, definitely no phone. I’m obsessed with what he later says to his classmates in the playground, talking about his little brother. It’s an important and impassioned book, one you will be better for having read. I was flipping out over the book and knew she would too, because she's a nonfiction writer and she's dated trans men. How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? There’s a gendered edge to Krauss’s critique (“the knee-jerk quarantining of the feminine or the maternal from the realm of intellectual profundity,” as Nelson puts it), but it is also about something more general. This made me think of your book "Bluets," which has become an object of cultish devotion. “I knew,” she writes now, of Iggy, “that my time with him has been the happiest time of my life.”. And mingle with the cool people.” Listening to you talk about your shitty waitress jobs and drinking at Max Fish gave me a pang in my chest for my early twenties in New York. And it’s important to remember that it works both ways — however self-righteous you may feel after some interaction -- i.e., “can you believe this person said X to me?” -- you likely dish it out in ways you’re not even conscious of. “If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth,” Nelson wrote then. Get book recommendations, fiction, poetry, and dispatches from the world of literature in your in-box. Gallop’s presentation involves a slideshow of family photos—snapshots that her husband had taken of her with their baby son. On a live Joni Mitchell CD, before she plays "The Circle Game," she muses, "It's funny, painters never get requests or demands like, 'Paint Starry Night!' Nelson describes a seminar she attended in graduate school with the literary theorist Jane Gallop and the art historian Rosalind Krauss. I don’t want to repeat myself too much on this account, as I just wrote a piece about Eileen for the Poetry Society of America, and I also wrote a lot about both her and studying with her in my women & the New York School book, so I’ll just say here that Eileen has meant everything to me for over 20 years now. In some ways juxtaposition is the whole game; that’s something poets know well. These days it seems like one is making a big statement by saying that, but since I barely know what they are or how they work — they’ve just kind of passed me by — it isn’t something I think about very often. Or did you never go there? What’s the last book you read for pleasure? (She came around fast, but not before Dodge gently reassured her: “Hey, I was born female, and look how that turned out.”). That Harry did not fulfill the place of a mother, but was not your average father either. Harry goes to the bathroom and a woman at the table asks if you've been with other women or if Harry is your first. The fear Harry had of the possibility of having a transphobic judge deny him his parental rights to his child. It wasn't long before she realized that Harry Dodge had made her a tuna melt at Red Dora in San Francisco back in 1998 or so. You’re very visceral when talking about your body. In the book you say, I feel quite certain that my character is too weak to withstand the temptations and pressures that would come with hoisting it onto the stage of Facebook, and truly amazed by the fact that so many others — or all others, so it sometimes seems — bear it so easily. "The Argonauts" makes a similar impact. Dodge is married to the author Maggie Nelson, with whom he has a child. “She was hanging her shit out to dry.” It is, Nelson thinks, “a start.” Gallop finishes with her slides, and then Krauss—the immaculately groomed embodiment of intellectual rigor—calmly proceeds to destroy her.