Several years ago, when Trixie the cat and I were living in our cozy bachelorette pad, I got an ad in the mail from the London Review of Books. They offered me a year’s subscription to the weekly paper for some very low price, like 30 bucks, so I decided to give it a try. I thought the writing might be over my head – and sometimes it was – but I really enjoyed picking through the essays in there every week. (The classified section was a revelation, too. A quick look shows me that this week’s personals aren’t especially charming, but some very funny people submit ads to that paper, and following them week to week was a hoot. One of them, posted by a woman, ran for months with only her first name and one word: “Elegant.” Then one week that one ran as usual, but out of the blue a new one had appeared: “Natasha: Inelegant.”)
But there was one writer alone who made my pennies-on-the-dollar subscription worth every cent: Terry Castle. What a fuckin genius. Castle is a literary critic and a scholar, and most of her publications are academic books that never crossed my path. But she writes about books for a more general audience too, and in a bombastic and hilariously autobiographical way. I loved these essays and looked forward to getting updates on her life with Blakey, the woman to whom she is now married, and used to refer to by a funny nickname – I forget what now. She’d talk about a new book she was reading – with insights like an arrow to the heart – in the same paragraph that she described rummaging through cardboard boxes to get ready for a move, or sitting up in bed poking at her laptop and eating chocolates over the Christmas holiday. And somehow all these things were about the same thing. Her life and the the life of her mind were totally intertwined, in the most interesting way – she seems to make such good use of the things she reads, thinks about, and experiences, as if her whole life is a fact-finding mission on how to get through it. It’s really nerdy and pained and passionate. I relate to it.
Furthermore, she is funny as hell. After enjoying her work in the LRB I ordered her book of essays, The Professor, which I took off the shelf just now. I’m looking at the piece she wrote about a book on the jazz alto saxophonist Art Pepper, which she called “My Heroin Christmas,” but hastened to explain, “Not that I used any … I’ve always been afraid of serious drugs, knowing my grip on ‘things being okay’ was pretty tenuous already.” I relate to this too. Just now I found this (ALSO RELATABLE, though I won’t elaborate), in a LRB essay about getting gay-married:
“Despite being friendly and garrulous to a fault, my mother has always been somewhat averse to self-examination. Nor is psychological transparency her strong suit. Indeed, she might once have served as poster-lady for that delicate mental process Freud called the Censorship. Given all that seems to go on unacknowledged in her emotional world, these undated, untethered notes can often read – shockingly – like eerie and unprecedented eruptions from the maternal unconscious.
Witness a pencilled memorandum from one of the real-estate pads: ‘WE’VE BEEN THRU A LOT TOGETHER & MOST OF IT WAS YOUR FAULT.’”
If you’re not laughing right now I don’t understand you at all.
The reason I’ve got Terry Castle on the brain is because she’s coming to Philadelphia in November, to give a lecture. Hooray! And it’s a free lecture, open to the public, at Penn, that’s part of a themed series they do every year that is always excellent. This year’s theme is sex. See?
But it looks like the symposium is also, maybe mostly, about gender, which of course is not the same thing at all. Gender is something I spend about 30% of every day thinking about, and Terry Castle writes about it a lot as well. This talk she’s giving is called “No, I’m Not a Woman–I’m a Not-A-Woman: A Not-A-Woman Dossier.” Hee. This is Castle’s own term, according to the brochure, for “a person who looks and functions as a woman only in a nominal sense, having lost, refused, or neglected to cultivate standard markers of the “feminine.” Her examples include Gertrude Stein – okay, sure, no surprise there – as well as Hillary Clinton and Greta Garbo.
!!!
All of this makes me feel so happy and intrigued. I mean, Greta Garbo, could you die? This conversation also puts me to mind of Nuala O’Faolain, who I wrote about below, and who once, after being introduced as the Only Woman to Such-and-Such at a lecture she gave here in Philadelphia, said plainly, “I’m not a woman. I’m an honorary man.”
Woof. There’s a lot to think about here. Learning about Castle’s lecture came at an interesting time for me, because just yesterday I finally started reading that stone cold classic, Stone Butch Blues, which I saw was being given away for free as a PDF. As a not-very-obvious gender weirdo, I found the childhood stuff in the beginning relatable and tough to read; the book already feels so important to me. Maybe this will be the year I sort out some of my feelings about my gender, for once and for all. Maybe I never will, but instead I’ll keep on reading and writing and thinking about it forever. I guess I could be alright with that too.
Indicative Mood 