so we'll have a fun bit of awkwardsilence while we allow for folks to comeon inokaywe've learned to accept silence so we'renever awkwardoh some of my colleagues oh yeahwow there's so many people alreadyso coolyeah if anyone wants to say hi in thechat you can let us know where you'rezooming in fromchange your chat settings so it'sfeatured to everyone so it's just hostsand panelists and then we can all chatand in another moment we'll get startedwow 10 off you guysthis is so cuteit's not cheap either i was kind of imeanagain obviously but but you know booksare expensivei know your book comes out and thenyou're likeyeahbut yeah you do like coloradohey colorado hi coloradowe are all here in brooklyn ohionew york[Music]where where are you in brooklyn rightnow germany oh my godgermany i am awake for this time inbrooklyn exactlyyeah well that's alex of course you'rein brooklyn oh my god you could havebeen herealex and ella know each other as wellhey durham hi alexoh my god we got a manhattan night damnall righty well we better get startedsince folks are here from germany so uhit's betterwell thank you everyone good evening andwelcome to tonight's live online authorevent with green light bookstore i'm kayfrom greenlight bookstore and we'rethrilled to host tonight's event withgrace lavery launching her new bookplease miss a heartbreaking work ofstaggering penis she'll be talking withelif batuman so you're in for anexcellent timebefore we start i just want to say ahuge thanks to grace and liv and theteam at seal press for making thishappen and all of you for showing upwe're grateful for your support and forthe chance to make space forconversation and connectionnow just a couple of housekeeping thingsin our zoom webinar tonight you can seeand hear the speakers but they can't seeor hear youthey can see that you're here though andthere are a couple of different ways youcan interact with the authors and witheach other throughout tonight's eventwhich we highly encouragethe first is the chat which you all havefound by announcing where you're comingin from which you can find by clickingon the icon that looks like one speechballoonyou're welcome to post your comments andthoughts in the chat it's a great way toshow your appreciation for both of ourpanelists and to interact with fellowattendeesif you have a specific question you'dlike to have answered by either panelistplease post that question in the q amodule you can find it by clicking onthe icon that looks like two speechballoons we'll be pulling questions onlyfrom the q a to be answered in the laterpart of the programand importantly tonight's featured bookplease miss is available for sale fromgreenlight bookstore you can shop inperson from 10 a.m to 8 p.m at both ourfulton street and flatbush ave storeswhere you can purchase grace's book andmany others on site you can also orderonline atgreenlightbookstore.com for quick pickup at the storeor for shipping anywhere in the u.s i'lldrop the buy link in the chatas thanks for attending tonight'svirtual event we are offering 10off the featured book enter coupon codegreenlight events 10 into the coupondiscount section at checkout online for10 offandfor some extra fun grace is stopping byour store to sign copies of the bookand rumor has it she may even give somepersonal wisdom in each signingso you can get a signed or evenpersonalized book by request whilesupplies last make sure to indicate yoursigned copy request in order comments atcheckout when ordering online bymidnight tonight or look for signedcopies when you visit the storeif you care about supporting the careersof authors and the ongoing existence ofindependent bookstores buying tonight'sfeatured book is a great way to showyour supportour interviewer tonight is elif batumanwhose new novel either or is forthcomingwith penguin press in may 2022yesher first novel the idiot was a finalistfor the pulitzer prize and wasshortlisted for the women's prize forfiction she is also the author of thepossessed adventures with russian booksand the people who read them a finalistfor a national book critics circle awardin criticism and is the recipient of awhiting award arana jaffee foundationwriters award and the paris review terrysouthern prize for humorshe has been a staff writer at the newyorker since 2010 and holds a phd incomparative literature from stanforduniversityshe will be speaking with our featuredauthor grace laverygrace lavery is an associate professorof english at university of californiaberkeley a prominent public intellectualand activist she has contributed to thelos angeles review of books autostraddle the new inquiry them theguardian foreign policy and slateshe's been sober since january 2016 andfull-time as a trans person since march2018 she lives in brooklyn new yorkgrace's new bookplease miss is a memoir like nothingyou've read beforepart literary theory part musicaltheater parody part feminist sci-fireboot please miss was hailed by toripeters of the transition baby as a can'tlook away performance of wit languageirreverence and delight and by carmenmaria machado of in the dream house asthe queer memoir you've been waiting fora dizzying mix of theory and pastichemetafiction and memory hilarious andsexy and terrifying in its brilliancegracewe would love it if you can start us offwith a reading from the bookand then grace will be talking with elifand with all of you so without furtherado please take it away gracethank you hi thanks thank you so muchyou know it's umi'm unbelievable uh to to to be herethank you so much to ella for agreeingto do this thank youokay so i was i have two bits that i wasgoing to read umthe problem with this book is that umyou know but part of the conceit of itis that all the different bits aredifferent from each other stylisticallyso you're experiencingstylistic shifts often meaning that if iwere to read you one bit you would thinkthat you knowthat that bit might represent the wholeand and there's no bit that is likeother bits soumyou know what i thought i might read toyou umyeah okay i'm going to just do one fornow and then if we want tocome backi'll tell you a little bit about this uma lot of the book is is is a trueaccount of things that have happened tome and some of it isvery muchnot true some of it is liesand some of it is stuff that almosthappened or or could have happened orhappened slightly differently to the waythat i i record it here soumwhat i'm about to record to you is uh afictionalizedum on the first piece ofhate mail that i ever received umand you knowi will read you the the the letterum but of course i just um i want you toknow thati wrote it you know i'm sure that'sobvious but i don't want anyone to thinkanywaythe following day was monday it wasand i received an anonymous note in themail it was postmarked new york new yorkand the handwritten address readprofessor grace library the newprofessor english department uc berkeleycalifornia united states of americaon the back of the envelope was thedoodlethe kind of doodle one leaves on theback of an envelope that happens to bein front of one when one is caught onthe phone with a distressed relativepoking out above the fold was a cruderendition of a sinister clown black-eyedand gothydankly reminiscent of something that onemight find on the package of a poultryquotationthis wasn't the first time i'd receivedan odd letter at workmy first year on the faculty i hadreceived an envelope postmarked sandiego which contained a a very shortessay offering a history of the japanesenavy's conduct during the first worldwarbglossy magazine-style photographs ofamerican military personnel stationed insoutheast asia with my faculty profilepicture cut out and stuck onto thebackground and see the typescript ofwhat appeared to have been an old racistballad about japani had taken it to the campus cops iwouldn't do that now and they saidprofessor lavry i had some good news andsome bad newsthe good news is that everyone gets oneof these the bad news is that thisjabroni does seem to have a few lessspices than the average cut of salamibecause out photographs are a newdevelopmentso anyway i opened the envelope andinside was a note written in koreaunmarked and unsigned that read asfollowssoi don't want to sound like a nut ballhere but it's time for a real trueconfession i'm frightened of a clowni'm wary of his eccentric manner and hisunusual appearancehis choices make me feel ill at ease andthe language he uses well i find itunnervingno this is not satire friend i really amjust plain bloody chilled by a clown andif it's all the same to you i'd rathernot see him when he comes to my town orinvites him to my house for any purposei know this sounds crackers what alittle insane clown man america'ssweetheart you're probably sayingand it's truesuddenly it seems like the clowns areeverywhere doesn't itlike the sakura blooms at festivallike tarragon in my uncle buster'simaginative twist on the mint julepflowers swell fat with clowns and outthey burst young and masculine and juicyone runs a digit over the pod and insideit and finds the merry shards thatprovide so many american children withgenteel delightyet i am a feared of his taste in musicwhich i find perverseand perhaps i find it worse than that idemure from his sexual habits which heinsists on broadcasting i find hispro-style off-putting and though i amnot among those who will hold him solelyresponsible on this point nor will isubmit myself to further questioning onthe matteri will confess that the little clownfellow of whom i speak i find to bequite thoroughly overrated on that frontand many more besidesi wonder at the judgment of those whohave supported his career so farto me it is as though he has some kindof malevolent hold over his benefactorsso of course i don't wish my owndistaste to slip into outlandish andparanoid stereotypes this particularclown just isn't for me that's alli see his face before me as i write andto be perfectly candid i find it quiteunpleasant to contemplatei understand that others may find hisred nose to indicate merriment but to meit seems crashmany would find this clown smile whichstretches warmly between his ears to bewelcoming and playful but frankly ithink it verges on the sinisterhis playful tusks of hairwhich sprout at irregular intervalsacross his face and neck not to my tasteat all i'm afraidfor example does he commit crimes thislittle clown manpersonally i wouldn't have bear italthough now i ponder the matter morecarefully i wonder whether perhaps he'sshotless from time to timeor texts while he's drivingin most people i would consider thesesmall infractions to be charmingevidence of an appealing rebelliousstreakbut in the little clown man i find thempetty fogging anddishonest why should he flout rules thatthe mess the rest of us are obliged tofollow which we mostly do to the best ofour abilitiesi wonder even whether it isn't furtherevidence of that willful cast of minethat underlies many of the qualities ifind least tolerable in him hisinsistent being his presence his refusalto disappear or die act as i would thathe wouldit has taken me a while to realize thati'm not made angry by him as i initiallythought i believed that i wish toexterminate him by my own hand to showhim what it feels like and to say ha nowyou know what it feels like when so thathe would know what it feels like whensomeone says that to you not nice inshortbut no it's not anger not at rootsat its base i am afraid of what makes alittle clown man tick of his quiddityhis characteristic essencei shudder when i contemplate his innardsi worry franklythat he may have guts much like mineindistinguishable from mine even perhapsunder that lovely round belly of hiswhat if his guts are identical to minethe thought quite unravels me i findmyself disappearing into an echo ahollow whisper in my own cheeksi am cherry of a little clown manshould i see him i will surely repeatseveral merciless social maneuversfirst in all likelihood i shall receivehim coolly in the presence of othersothers will be left in no doubtconcerning the nature of ourrelationshipsecond i shall make dismissive eyes uponhim and tilt my hips just soto ensure that he knows that to my mindhe doesn't belong herethird i shall talk dismissively of hisfield of expertise without acknowledgingthat such is itfourth when i leave his company i shallconspicuously neglect to wish himfarewell but simply wander offcarelessly tossing my head perhaps as ifto say look at me i have just thwarted aclownlook at me americai have just thwarted a clownall shall know it the clown was a cipherthe clown never hurt anyone i knew whati was doing and i did it anyway theclown was a patsy the clown was ametaphor for the setting aside ofchildish thingsthe clown was a figure for literalitythe clown was me all along the clown wasunrepresentable joythe clown was fellowship fellowship andyouththe clown was sawdust and swept andsmiled the clown was liquidity and painti loved the clown i covered the clownplease clown come back and learn how tolove me teach me how to love myselfremind me of that which i have forgottencome back clown we are ready for you ilove you and always didthat's the end of the letter i'll readthe next paragraph it's difficultobviously when one finds that one'santagonists are clearly suffering fromsome quite devastating mental disabilityof course part of me wanted to mock theauthor of this letter to parade itaround the department flashing it tocolleagues as proofof both the kind of pressure i'm underas a public figure and also of the sheerlunacy of the anti-trans bigot to pesterme come bound for whatever reason is acommon term of abuse among them but ofcourse i couldn't be sure that havingdone so my colleagues might not thinkeither that i was inappropriatelymocking someone afflicted apparentlywith a delusional psychosis or which wasworse that the scrambled prose of mycorrespondent might in some way reflectbadly on me and so it was myresponsibility which i sometimes fearthat it is to obtain for myself a highclass of haterso i kept it to myself spending the restof the day wondering about clownsthe clowns i have known and lovedfor strangely i have known and lovedmany and those clowns whom i have everdislikedfewer in number but more vividly kept inmind if anything why americans do youthink that there is somethingtransgressive about finding clownfrightening in the first place you'resupposed to find them frightening you'reamericanfinding clowns creepy as is intrinsic toamericanness as is finding kermit thefrog charming and genuflecting beforeyou sub before your suburban sangali mrrogersit's because you all hate pleasure andare uncomfortable with with ambiguityyou think clowns don't know what youthink about them that's why they'relasting they get it and you don'tand i'll stop thatoh i i muted myself so you couldn't hearit but all the chortling i had to sayyayi said yay at the beginning and then icame back well okay uh so first of allum i am uh thank you for that incrediblereading and i'm so excited to be hereand i'm already regretting um the way wewere kind of joking that books areexpensive because um everyone has to buythis bookwhich is now 10 off because it's notjust one book it's like you're getting40 books for the price of one book andit's like it reading it makes your brainfeel bigger and it is an experience notto be missed and everyone has to go tothat link now and buythe book and it's gonna just gonna lookit's just gonna be awesome um so thankyou for that reading um now i actuallyuh that kind of changed what i wanted toask you which is um i just knowwhat is this this time well so so thefirst thing i wanted to ask was umthat was really an aston that was reallya great reading this book is like i iread it once but i think i need to readit like 10 times okay i'm going to stoptalking and ask the questions soon um soi was just thinking as i was looking atit uhwow this isn't what i expect from amemoir so then i looked up memoir in thedictionary and then i found all thiscrazy stuff which is like it's it's alsoone of those books where like youafter you you put it down it's like likea really good movie like everything thatyou see just feels like it was inventedby that person and put there as a jokefor you so that's how i felt about theentry for memoir because it said whichi'm sure you know but i didn't know thisthat oh they're like oh it's from thefrench memoir which is uh when it meansmemory it's feminine but when it's abook it's masculine and because and theyfeel like the theory is that it was likememoir so you're having like the writingis masculine so you know what the is already in thereyour life and what you remember but itmeantit meant a lot more things it could be ait's based in the knowledge of theauthor but it could be about otherthings and then i was thinking in insome sense the memoir isthe memory and there's something aboutthis book that is so filled with likeum little trivia andit really feels like all the stuff thatlike more than any book i can think ofit feels like a representation of thestuff that a person carries around intheir head and like goes over all day soi was just wondering how you thought ofthe term memoir and do you think of yourbook and dialogue with other memoirs andum just memoir pleasethank you so much yeah it's a it's abeautiful question andyou know as italk a little bit about in the firstchapter andyou know i imagine many people arefamiliar with but there will be somepeople who won't be the term memoirscontroversial for for a number ofcontemporary readers but i thinkespecially for contemporary transgenderreadersumyou know i think a few years ago therewas akind ofa concern that began to circulatearound the possibility of on the onehand predatory onlineumpublishers who were payingkids straight out of college 50 bucks totalk about their worst ever orwhatever it was and there was this kindofumsalacious and exploitative trade in umin memoirs that was causing a kind ofmoral panic among um among roughlypeople my age and demographic andumyou know the trans version of that orthe kind ofthe the spinamong that in the trans community isthat so much of transition and and transbeing has to do with problems oflegibilitythat there is something aboutuh simplysaying who you are and what you haveexperiencedthat feels coerced under anycircumstances so you know vivian namasteand jay prosser in the 1990s made thiscase fairly strongly in the kind offirst generation of trans studiesumand you know it didn't it didn't doanything to stop thethe boom of trans memoirs over the last20 years and and nor should it butum but it has been a kind of consistentthing that people are worried about andsome of the the writers the transwriters trans um you know uh activistscommunity leaders uh you know peoplethat i look to for guidance are actuallyfairly awesome fairly skeptical ofmemoir and ii kind of sympathize with that and thewriters that i i'm i'm kind of really inconversation with in some way translatesi'm really in conversation with peoplelike you know morgan page um sybil lambuhpeople like that these people who reallyhave assured and complicated memoir so iknew that if i wanted to go back intomemoir i needed a specificreason to do soand you know i think i have a couple ofreasons to do so one of them is that isimply don't think that it's quitepossible toexpunge autobiography from any kind ofcriticalum or or literary exposure and secondlythat that's dangerous tooand it's dangerous too you knowbut i totally agree i think that that'swhere one it you know becomes this kindof uhanxious back covering kind of umone has a paranoid relationship to one'sown signification one's owndissemination that it was reallyimportant to me not tolean intobut the other thing for that was thatyou know if that's true if one can't uhexpunge the memoiristic tendency fromany other genre and certainly i meanlike you know i write literary criticismfor a living in my day job and i use thefirst person quite a lot and i talkabout my own phenomenological encounterswith texts and movies all the timeumand you know but if that's true thenit's true in the other direction toowhich is that one can in fact allowother genres into a process of composinga memoir and so that was why i often inthe course of composing this booktried to think abouttexts that people wouldn't generallythink of as memoir but which in someways struck me as as really disclosiveor really umintimately in in um in conversation withthe author's umaccount of herself or himselfso you knowthe books the book is as you if you'veas you've said you know right you knowpeople will like it or they won't butit's a book with a kind of fairlyencyclopedic umenergy sometimes it has this kind ofrattling through citations and there areyou knowum there are a lot of parts that involvereadings and references and fairly densekind but one of the touchstones i thinki think the two touchstones of this bookumactuallyuh and i don't know if i've really saidthis before but they're both authors whoum were both profoundly committed tomemoir and also never wrote a memoirand they were also authors whowere not alive at the same time but thelater one was obsessed with the earlierone and the earlier one is charlesdickens and the later one is fran kaskerand these are two authors thatumyou know there's something aboutthe way in which these two authors thinkabout style and perhaps especially thinkaboutwit as a verbal performance ofuma comic charisma or somethingthat is profoundly motivated byum intimate and even sort ofuncontrollable disclosures of the cellso you know umd.a mill has written a lot about theautobiographical signature in forinstance um you know david copperfieldis the obvious one but but i think it'sall over the place and this this mymemoir contains as you know it's afairly lengthy and unexpected reading ofum the old curiosity shopi hope unexpected i don't imagine thereare too many people thinking that thefinal chapter is going to begin with asort of 20-page account of like kind ofnarrative conceits of the curiosityshock but um and the casket stuff iseverywhere and in that in that clownletter that i was just reading um youknow i was really tuned in this time tothinking about umthethe short stories in which kafka writesin the first person clearly isn'ttalking about himself so for exampleumhe has a story which you know it's justone of the funniest and weirdest thingsthat there is and i think um is is amongthe kind of central text for this bookof mine which is called in german elcerna or umin uhin english 11 sons and it's an 11paragraph story um each paragraphdescribes um each one of this person'sson first person to raise it i have 11sons my first son's like this and eachparagraph begins with what seems to bekind of vaguelyaffirmative statement of the time myfirst sonhe's great he's masculine he's heartyhe's strong uh the girls love him he'skind of stupid uh he doesn't reallynotice the effect he's having on peoplearound him um he's never going tocome to anything but he's you knowumhe's not the worst person you canimagine i mean it's like you knowi don't enjoy talking with him but uhand then so that's the end of the phonemy second son's totally different mysecond said witty and precise and wiseum and you know since since he was younghe had this incredible facility to sortof really intuit what other people wereexperiencing and you know yeahsure like he's kind of shy i guess youknow he kind of like runs away somethinghe doesn't like you know he can't hecan't like speak um technically orwhatever but you know you sense yousense and so anyway my point is like isthis guy just trying to convince himselfconstantly that uh he can defend eachone of his sons and being unable to doit and i think that's that's what i kindof think of his memoir because of coursewhat casper's doing thereis imaginingthe way in which his father might talkabout him everything in kafka is abouthis relationship with his father'srelationship with him and um he's sortof rehearsing various differentpossibilities so that's the last thingi'll say about memoir i realized likeyou know taking this question around thehouses is that if one thinks through andwith psychoanalysis which i always doand probably always will um[Music]you know one of the things that's kindof amazing about language from the cycleanalytics perspective is that um eventhe language that one puts out into theworld that one emits one transmits inthe analytics session or in the text orwhatever has been given to one fromsomewhere elseso in fact it's possible toumplay with addressee and uh and speakerum in the most complicated ways evenwhen one is simply thinking aboutoneself once an experience so that theexperience of memoir has at least asmuch on the one hand it has to do withlike telling your experience but evenmore than that i think it has to do withum interpreting the signs that one isgiven in the worldand again you know i meant i'm a scholarof literature and culture so i'm i'm imean i interpret things and i think ifthe book is a memoirit's lesser memoir because it tells thestory of what happened to meum and it's more it's more memoir in thesense that it is a it's a set ofattempts to interpret things that arehappening to meand umand so this is just sort of an examplein this moment that i read it's like ireceive a letter it's bizarreum obviously i actually wrote it but atthe same time there's this question inthe text of like how do i takeresponsibilityum for this tax that i've been given andthat i have to now encounter anyway youknow so many different possible answersto that question but there's the otherpart okay last class last thing is thatumfor so longand and i haven't answered this questionyet you know i haven't solved thisproblem to my own satisfaction but forso longpart of the struggle of finding atransition and finding a way totransition has been about finding aa style to write inand part of the problem of transitionwas that there was a style i used tofeel pretty comfortable in i used tolove and i still love it and i've beenteaching it this weekum which is the style of likegay cultural criticism in that like d.amiller's you know i i went to gradschool because i wanted to be d.a millerum iuh i've always wanted towritelike dear miller who wants to write likecrawl and bath he wants to write likemyself please um who wants to write like19th century like his understanding ofwhat 19th century japanese would soundlike in frenchumand that's the kind ofyou know and it's amazing and the answeris like you end up with something that'slike kajo shiguru and we're bothcompared to literature phdsbut you know that essayistic traditionoflike brilliantbaroque gayumprecisionis both a a tradition in whichand it's a tradition in which thisquestion of like what is disclosed andwhat's withholdingis really present you know if you read atext likeuh d.a miller's book bringing out rolandbuffit's very much concerned with thisquestion of likewhat is umwhat am i giving away when i when i wheni writebut at a certain point i i just realizedlike i can't write in the style thisisn't my style this isn't who i want towrite like and iumand they think thatmemoir isyou knowlet me put it this way i think if d.amiller had written the exact same bookpeople wouldn't be calling it memoirpeople would call it criticismor maybe they'd call it a kind of likeum auto theory or something i don't knowumbut the memoir is i think a kind offeminizedresponse tothe kind of spectacularof the closet in a tradition of 20thcentury gay male writingumand when i think about like who are thequeer womenwriting in this kind of likepost-partisan traditionthat umyou know it's so valuable to meone of the one of the figures that'sjust been so indispensable and continuesto be as terry castleum and if you think about like theprofessor or the essays and theprofessor and especiallykerry castle umessay on susan sun tag which remains myyou know favorite piece of writing ofthe 21st century to dateumyou know that's a text as well that hasto do with like how do we think aboutthe fact of a livingbodyin relation tothephenomenaleffects indivergations he used barbara johnson'sword by stefan melanieyou know how do we how do wedeal with the fact of a body as adifferent kind of phenomenonuh to the phenomenon of like thistextual disseminationi've definitely stopped thereoh thank you that's so muchumyeah i don't think i never thought abouti mean listening to you talk about it ii wasi couldn't see the relationship betweenpastiche and memoir and now that seemsso it just seems like the clearestpossible thing that of course and alsoso what you were saying about umdickens and kafka and because i wasthinking likeso one of the questions that i wanted toask you was umyou you kind of already answered butuhso reading this book i had this thefeeling that i'm reading something thatwas unlikeall other books but it was sofunny and i was thinking is that it'soften a characteristic of books that arenot like other books is that they're notfunny and i was wondering if that isrelated tohumoris drawing on some kind of community andif you're you know consciously trying togo outside of that it's very hard tosort of bring the apparatus of humorwith you but what you just said is theexact opposite and it made me realizethat like the reason it feels like abook and it's which everyone should buyuh is thatthe thing that you feel cushioned by andthe lack of any of the apparatuses thatyou're used to is the thing that youjust said the wit the thing from thekafka and the and the dick is this humorthat you feel cared for as a reader justthere's like always a delightful jokeput there to delight youumi guesshow do you do that how do you how do youcreate that um that feeling ofunchartedness and that feeling of likewe we all know what this joke in a veryi mean i hadn't actually thought ofdickens but it does i mean he it doesfeel like a very kind of like inclusivedickensian kind of moveyeah which feels like thedickens really is the encyclopedian umpar excellent you know dickenson's wholeway of thinking aboutuh the world is to stuff as manydifferent bits intoa text as possible and then to startthinking about the connections betweenthem andallows the connections to develop in oddways and obviously you know there's alot to be said and if i was wearing ascholarly hat there would be a set ofquestions about like various differentmoments where dickens is exertinga strong form of control over thediversity of elements in his tags as weknow you know like he did when he satdown to writezombie and son that was the first onethat he he supposedly kind of reallyrigorously worked out but umyou know at the same time even in thoselate dickens texts which are really sorigorously plottedthere are still misflight birds you knowand umwhenwhen we as readers encounter that listof misfit birds um something happenswhich is not rigorously controlled orcontrollable and you know andrew millerwho's adickens scholar that i admire very muchuh has thisreally wonderfuluh line where he says that umthe the the capacity of the dickensianthe distinctively dimensional the thingto think of their measure of mckenzieand style is the capacity forself-surpriseumthat you know there are moments indistance and i think this slice birds isone of them i think there are momentswith skimpole as well and the same novelum that are like this whereumyou know you catch him really surprisinghimself with what's happening andthere's a kind of unexpected delightso um but butyou knowthe answer to this question in a kind ofagain literally historical term would belike the reason why this is possible andthe reason why the dickensiancharismatic voice is able to sustainthis kind of differenceis um you know you do the police indifferent voices or um you know becauseit's a performance because uhit is a uha virtuosicumtheatrical uh experience is what the thethe the scholar david koenig has writtena great deal about that dickens likemany 19th century novelists wanted tohave been a playwright and in fact youknow made a great deal of money and andspent a great deal of time touringaround the country reading his novelsand doing the different voices of thedifferent characters and and that'sthe sort of charismaticcentripetal energy that he produces andit's not true in kafka like dude so it'ssort of opposite of kafka butumbut the part that is similar i think orthe part where i would want to draw athrough lineis through this you knowi realize i'm sounding so much more likean english professor than i wanted to ijust want to sayyou know the book has a lot of dickjokes so if you're reading thislike i just don'ti mean literally there is a list of likepornographic umtitles for all of the dickens uh novelshard slimes being the one i'm proudestof but umbut uhanyway you know so but the the thingthat is similar is this genre of comicwriting was broadly comic racing thatnorthrop frye talks about in the anatomyof criticism which he called umwhich he calls the manipian satire umand you know i don't know enough aboutmanipus or manipheus to tell you howaccurate thedesignation is but umbut what what he specifically has inmind is a classical genre that existsthrough the 18th 19th 20th 20th 21stcentury obviously he's writing in the50s so he's not talking about the 21stcentury but it continues to exist and ithink this book is one in some ways umwhich is a sort of satire of thephilosopher who claims to knoweverythingumso you know some of the examples wouldinclude robert burton's the anatomy ofmelancholy which is a big big fat bookum that is a sort ofearly modern treatise on melancholy thatis also this kind of deeply melancholicand paranoid text in itself that refusesto articulate any straightforward claimsum and you know uh northrop pride alsoargues about the essay form in themontana setting it's kind of amanipulative satire in the traditionalsense in the modern setting in the 18thcentury we have um twist from shandy bylawrence stern which is everyone knowsit's a totally bizarre book that hasmore ummore digression than textum and because it has more digressionthan text then it raises the question ofwhat a digression actually is umand uhyou know then another one that'simportant to me is thomas carlylesartoriusand but i think in any case this way oflike joking aboutthe philosopher's claim to knoweverything becomes part of thedickensian way of thinking about theworld in general in the way of thinkingabout the comic in general so you knowit often it often seems like slightlytourist and even slightly conservativein dickens which has this sort of umyou knowa kind of skepticism about uhabout world making that you know isclearly in his case motivated by the onething that isn't funny in dickens whichishis absolute loathing of black people umisvicious inability to imagine a world inwhich uh there is black freedom or blackpleasure um i mean it and it it's youknow in in bleak house in fact the mrsjellybean stuff it's really reallyintense um and it's a moment where thiskind of satirical treatment of theliberal do-gooder actually becomesindistinguishable from kind of likeas it was for carlisle absolutely kindof intense intense racismum butuh it's not merely this kind of likeconservative or reactionary dimensionand i think it actually becomes thisother way of holdingumholding somethingabout world making something abouttotalitarianism at bay and that's whathappens in kafkaum whereyou know every whenever anyone readskafka for the first time they're alwayslike oh my god it's so pressing and whenyou're really catholic for the secondtime your response is always like oh mygod it's so funny um and those thingsare kind of both trueandit's thatflipping between those two things thatyou think comes from the manipulationdimension that kafka is picking up fromdickens and just like you know he saystheir thing because i don't say it inthe book because casket doesn't even getmentioned by name in the book but it'slike if you know kafka you will i thinkfind a lot to recognize in the bookumbutyou know we we know from kafka's diariesthat he read dickens consistently andand was kind of worried thatum dickens had already said everythingthat he wanted to say which is bizarrebecause no one reads tasker and thinksyou know this is the kind of likecapacious jawlity of like this isyeah no i mean it's so weird but ofcourse like you knowon the one hand it has something to dowith the position of the law and theum the way in whichyeahthe way that dickens thinks about lawbut it actually also has something to dowith i think the way in which dickens umtreats knowledge and the the idea of theknowable and the ways in which we buildthe social through these kinds of likecomic networksthis really i i was i didn't notice thisthe first time but your copyright yournote on the copyright page oh also um wealready have one question which is veryrelated to what we've been talking aboutand that's going to be fantastic andpeople should be preparing their otherquestions but yeah um i just have onequestionwhich is um yeah how did you get towrite the like how did you think of whatdid they want you to write could youread that does it exist yeah totallyyeah so i have like this kind ofslightly pretentious umnote on the copyright page right whichis just like herewhere i've written umin on truth and lies in an extra moralsense nature defines truth as a sum ofhuman relations which have beenpoetically and rhetorically intensifiedtransferred and embellished accordinglyreaders should not expect any activewritingto depict the non-fictional worldwith anything like unmediated accuracyand certainly not one authored bysomeone pretentious enough to remindthem of the facts on the copyright pagewhat they mean is certain names andidentifying details have been changedumsoyou know i have to say the idea for thiswasmycame from my wonderful wonderfulwonderful editorat uh at seal claire potterum and claire just said you know we needto write something aboutthe relationship between umthe text andyou know we need to write somethinglegally indemnifyingfor thefor the for the for the book because youknow everyone has to do this andyou know as you can probably imaginehaving read it there were somefairly tricky legal questions that wereraised around like you know for exampleimputing umdescribing a story in which like myunclebeat up my mother in front of me andthat was that's a story that i tellpretty directly and like you know weneed to talk to lawyers about that butthere's also like you know a set ofreally cruel jokes about conrad blackand robert webband the lawyers were kind of nervousabout that and like the kind ofdifferent intellectual property stuffwith the past issues that are coming upso you know it was like just we justneed something simple but claire's ideawas that i could write something thatmight actuallysay something worth sayingabout uh the connection betweenthe book and the world that it wasdescribing and i don't know i didn'twant to write an essay and i didn't wantto write anything that was going to beso awfully pretentious as to totallyscotch the um you know ideally peoplewould i want people to buy the book soyou know a little reference to thefamous nietzsche essay nietzsche as welli think is a great thinker of the umfemininity and satire especially thelate uh the late nature it's very muchabout like i'm not really interested insaying anything but what i'm interestedin is having fun with the impossibilityof sayingumand you know i think it's no surprisethat nietzsche actually himself was likeweirdly interested in thomas carlyleum as was jill deluz strangely enoughand delirious is like again a figurelike maybe a kind of manipulationsaturatedso you know i think that's what i'mdoing there just trying to say like umthis is a book that really actuallywants to play with the lawumand i guess uh i love thatyou know it's a book that wants to playblue in a few different ways one withcopyright right so like for exampleyou knowthere's this one sequence towards theend and i'm going to see if i can findit just so i can show you what it lookslike on the page where i am umquoting a buddy holly lyricand we simply could not get thepermission for the buddy holly lyric somy suggestion was that weblack out every word except for a coupleto make a little statement so it nowsayswhy you care psyum and then there's another moment whichis like over the over the way there'slike a pastiche of hamiltonumand you know it was like the pastiche ofhamilton so i mean i can read it outit's like moved in with this cousin butthe thing is i'm what i'm saying is i'mgoing to read this out now but when iwhen i did the audio book i wasn'tallowed to sing it because although thewordswere parody if i sang it to the tunethen it wouldn't town and they would bein violation of the laws like becausemoved him with his cousin his cousincommitted suicide a suicidal cousin wasa wound to the family pride a friend ofhis cousin said you gotta mind yourhealth alex you've been treated so theurban saidumand i can like i can do it in thissetting because you know we're notthis isn't uh the same kind of thing ihope i can maybe someone's gonna likemaybe lin-manuel miranda is about tobatten down the door and tell me thatyou know i i owe him money but i i'd besurprised umanyway my point being that this is thebook that wants to with the law andand it wants to with libel and itwants to with um intellectualproperty and he wants to with umyou know various differentquestions in which you know a booksituation with which a book situatesitself in relation to the law and youknow this actually gets me a beautifulplace to end because it gets me rightback to that question at the start aboutlikeare the genresoutside of this kind of like baroque gaymale critical tradition in which a transwoman can begin to write herselfumand you know i mentioned terry castlebut the other big one and the person who with the law better than any otherwriter that i can think of is janetmalcolmum your ears while colleagueand umyou know when janet malcolm writes aboutthe law especially in relation topsychoanalysisyou know she makes it feelso vital and so fun and so sexy and youknow the idea of going to war againstone and going to the law against someoneis kind of incredible umincredibly dynamic thing so anyway youknow as you know ellis i've suffered forthat yeahsorry yeah no she did i mean absolutelyshe did yeah no and i meani really hope conrad black doesn't shootto me but it's something that i reallyadmire about her work in in you knowit's it's kind of eros in its relationto the writing subject as aas a body and the writing subject as alegal person is something that shereally helps me think about butum you know as you know i've alreadywritten this umnovel which is kind of a follow-up toplease miss but the next thing i'm goingto write the next kind of creative thingnext crazy project i'm engaged inis um a legal rom-comand uhtrying trying to write aboutlawyers falling in love and it's also aserial killer narrative but you know umbut a legal rom-com because you knowyeah exactly i think i mean it's gonnabe like ali mcbeal meets like thebuffalo bill plot in umin silence of the lambs is the ideait's good it sounds itself um okay solet's i'm gonna uh so related to thething that to what you were just sayingis this reader first reader questionfrom katie clapp uh could you speak towhy you chosejust to include fiction in your book andhow is the reader we're supposed toaccommodate the blend as someone whovalues truth and honesty i find myselfnot trusting anything if something inthere could be falseyeah do you want to with the lawbut you don't want to with thereaderyeah i definitely that's definitelyright i don't want you to not trust meum and i definitely think that the bookis an attempt toearn your trust um andit it it is an attempt to make myselfworthy of that trust in a few differentways umone of them is to get really reallyhonest with uh myself and with you as areader about the ways in which iumnecessarily fictionalize just by the actof making land straight the moment thatwe we speak inthe moment we speak we speak in a speechgenre the moment we're using a speechgenrewe're abiding by certain kinds of rulesand therefore you know we can feel thecontours ofum genre pulling against us so what i'mreally trying to do is use genre to sortof pullumpretension away and strip down languageto its most possible disclosure statewhich is why again you know and let'sget back to ella's first question umyou know comedy is so important to mebecause comedy is a place in whichdishonesty is impossiblebecause it's a response that bypasseswrathionationif something is funny then the level onwhich it is trueum bypassesuhdoubt you know and and of course doubtwill come back inumbut that's what i i hope is the case andi'll tell you like you know i think ingeneral and i hope alex will agree withme there are moments there are very fewmoments in this book where you're notsure if something happened or notum that's true likeyou know i there there are wholesections where this stuff is clearly afantasyum but there's no moment that doesn'tfeel like a fantasyum that that was one you know there aremoments that are umthat are sort of lightly edited orwhatever but they're remote so actuallyyou know just before i came uh herewhere i was out withuhmy my friends my collaborator my umsomeone i've known and loved for a verylong time his name is cecilia who is youknow an inspiration to me in a lot ofdifferent ways and it's also kind ofmassive uh intellectualuh influence on me as well um and sheshe and i were talking about the scenein the fourth chapter which um in whichshe appears the first half of the fourthchapter is a kind of attempt to relaya conversation that she and i haveumthe first time we met after i hadtransitioned andyou know she was saying uh today when wewere just about to start she was justsaying she remembers like word for workthese things being saidand you know i was contacted again by afriend in the uk last weekyou know his copy of the book arrived onfriday and started reading it she waslike oh my god i remember when thathappened andagain it's like there's a real attemptto be extremely precise about thedetails um if there's any attempts topersuade you that something reallyhappens but there's also some attempt toreally get honest withum and refuseuh in fact polemically to refuse theumthe the comfortable logics by which weum acclimate ourselves to genericconventions of life writingi i was just thinking aboutwhat uhwhat a bold move it is for to do afantasia on your own hate mail and doingdoing that as a reading there'ssomething so an incredible rhetoricalmove and the kinds ofumi mean you make your hater quite smart ii don't knowit was just something that i was yeahuh there there's there's readerquestionstoo wait um that are more important thanmyill-formed thoughtsoh uhanyone is asking me what's the word uhit's not made out by by barbarajohnson's referenceyeahum it's not made up it's taken from themelamed it's diva guestion divergationum splitting like that a lot ofpost-structural critics were superinterested in various different vaginalimages or spatial arrangement umand you know this wassplitting of a single meaning into twowhich is different to the daridianmotion of imagination which is when twothings curl back and make an enclosurelike thatum you knowso we all learned a new wordbut the important one is the one thatthey didn't actually talk about isseclusion which is a text that uma word that is like conspicuously not inthis book but soclesian is another textto thinking about the vaginal enclosureum but it's a way of referring the wayreferring to umthegrasping and pulling in of an objectlike this right with the penas an active move so it's a transitiveact of clenching in which the object isthe thing pulled inrather than um penetration so you knowjust sort of like attempt and feministsort of sexuality studies to think aboutpenetration in such a way as toprivilegeumthe the seclusive rather than thepenetrating and to think of theseclusive as the active rather than thepenetrated to the activeumand you know that's something that thebook thinks about in various differentways and it's you know the word penis isin the title and as they say there aredick jokes everywhere but there is thiskind of question of likewhat does it mean to stop thinking aboutthe penis as a kind of umactive or penetrating uh objectumthank you for that oh we gotta thank youumare there any more audience questionsor or should wei mean now i'm thinking about i can reada little more because the thing is youknow we've got timeyeah we have uh we don't have very muchtime we have uh three minuteswell so let me just read a paragraphbecause the thing is they just saw thatthere were a couple of people in theroom who actually were in this momentthat so this would be a greatopportunity for me because i just sawthat someone in this room who was um agrad student in a class that i wasteaching um when i was you knowundergoing transitionand so uh i'm just going to read a partthat describes uhyou knowthat moment of of of coming into classand umanywaythomas carlyle at green light it soundslike he was there signing booksa penis is not a dick a penis isdefinitively not a dick a dick is thething that a penis is not insofar as thegiven object is a a penis it is there toalso be not a dickthe day i came out at work i spent sometime trying to work out whether thecharacteristic part of a barrow pig thathits the title character in the face ofan early chapter of judy obscure with apenis or a dickand there's a quote from judy obscure inhis deep concentration on thesetransactions of the future jude's walkhad flattened and he was now standingquite still looking at the ground asthough the future was thrown there on bya magic lantern on a sudden somethingsmacked him sharply in the ear and hebecame aware that a soft cold substancehad been flung at him and had fallen athis feet a glance told him what it was apiece of flesh the characteristic partof a barrow pig which the countrymenused to greasing their boots as it wasuseless for any other purpose pigs wererather plentiful hereabouts being bredand fattened in large numbers in certainparts of north wessexcharacteristic part is not phrased thisis me again since it implies a part thatis more than a part that isindistinguishable from other parts andtherefore not exactly a part at all orwhose particular qualities determine theidentity of the whole under sometaxonomic schemeblahblah wasn't sure that the students wereespecially interested in thisdistinction but the difference between amaterial body and the body as it isfantasized into existence formalized andmythologized was all that was on my mindand i'll end there and just becausesaying this and recounting this willhopefully at least prove to someone inthe room uh who was in the room whenthat when that very thing happened thatum i'm pretty serious about being honestaboutthings that i upthank you so much this is fabulousumthere's there's actually now there'sanother uh audience questionumdo you want to read that or uh it'scoming you want to readit's written by a non-black queerteacherwho's thinking about moving throughspaces as a trans teacher and howstudents demand legibility in their ownway as a non-black trans teacher workingwith predominantly black students iwonder howyou navigate different spaces anddemands for legibility from those whoseexperiences of oppression are differentbut are also experiencing problems oflegibility that's an interesting thingyeahit's a big and big big big interestingquestion um you know just to be clearabout their syntax because it may nothave been obvious people who are justhearing that rather reading it but umvin's friend was saying that they are aperson who um works primarily with blackstudents i don't work primarily withblack students um rightyeah yeah i don't know i mean that wasall very clear and you're reading it inthe comment but it was just you know iwanted to be clear about that myself umyou know i uhit's so hard you know i remember theweek that i came out at work literallythe week after that it was umprospective grad student recruitmentweek at berkeley and i had someone cometo me on my office and andjust asked me what it was like to betrans at berkeley and i was like i'vegot no idea like i've been doingthis for less than a weekumask me in in five years and even theni'll give you a very good partial answer[Music]that's higher yeah exactly i'll give youa manipulator about how like five yearskind of like impossible and maybe youknow and and the thing is like there'sso so so much especially in like transof color studies about the limitationsofvisibility and legibility as rubric totransition and you know i i'm veryfamiliar with reading um you knowimportant work in this subject bytourmaline by che gossip by eric stanleywho's a colleague of mine at berkeley umyou know it's it's it's a topic that iseasy to theorize but in terms of thepedagogy of um what does it mean to beout and how does outness work for whitetrans peopleum it is a complicated question becausethe thing is that a significantmajority of queer and trans out studentsat berkeley and community members ofberkeley are not whiteumand you know i'm not sure that i knowexactly why that is um but i've beenpart of the uh you know i currentlychair the chancellor's advisorycommittee on lgbt communities so i knowthat there's statisticsanduh sorry there's a clarification fromthe questionthat's saying that they're not white butthey're not they're not black so it's nono no no i realizedbecause that's what i bring into theroom um anduhyou know again it's not umit's not a question that i know how toanswer uhyou knowwell all i can say is that umi find that queer and queer and transcommunity is a place where it ispossible to gethonest and open about the racial logicsof visibility um andthat's rare in this world because thisis a world that tries to stop us fromtalking about the racial logics ofdisability that tells us that the onlyum dignified response toum racial hierarchies of existence is topretend not to see them which is youknow a horrifyingabnegation of social relations soi find thatyeah totally um and so i i find thatit is umit is useful and important to be able toavow and acknowledge um differences andat the same time to know thatuh i'm sometimes positionedyou know as i say i'm chairing thiscommittee and committee's largely whitemy co-chair isn't white thank god butyou know i'm sometimes positioned as akind of uh visible figure and i'm veryaware that in fact my visibility isum troubling in certain ways you knowthe argument that morgan paige makes inher essay in uh in trapdoor which is agreat collection on what you know thethe paradox of visibility for transpeople the only morgan page makesstraight admire and struggle withbecause it you know it's one of thesethings where if it's true like i'm i'mnot doing the right thing but i strugglewith it but morgan page says you knowthroughout the history of trans peoplethat have been trans celebrities whohave been mostly white mostly privilegedmostly kind of like not exactly cispassing but mostly kind of passing andlegibly trans feminine they're kind oflike caitlyn genocides of the worldum and they get on the front cover ofmagazines and people give them a lot ofmoney and all they do is draw attentionto the community and what that does itescalates impression of everyone who istrans that is not on the front cover ofvanity fairand um so that visibility itself for umyou know the kind ofstereotypically white charismatic uhtrans feminine heroineis this it's a way of actuallyincreasing and escalating andintensifying oppression of especiallytrans people of color who do not havethe same institutional protection it's avery very powerful argument and theythink about it all the time um and myvisibility is not your visibility andour visibility is not their visibilityand that you know these are these areimportant distinctions to to abound toacknowledge and at the same time i amaware that when i have been inconversation with community around someof these issues um it has been possibleforyou knowfor honesty and disclosure to be to bemade possible and i'm really moved bysomething that ella said about feelingthis was a book that was in some waymoving outside ofthe the implicit community of genrewhich i think is trueand i also think that this is a bookthat is desperatelyin love with community and um in need ofqueer and trans community andumqueer and trans community is is vital tome it's it's how elephant i know eachother you know how this event ishappening because likewe'requeer writers in new york together orwhateverum and it's uhit's essential to me it's essential it'snot not something i can dispense withthank you both so muchi i feel badly to say like time's upbecause i feel like youjust got started and i know thosequestions can only just continue to rollon inthank you everyoneplease please go support grace in herdebut please miss a heartbreaking workof staggering penis available atgreenlight you can buy it online 10 offwith the coupon code in the chat you canalso pick up a personalized copyirl thank you both so much for thisconversationthank you thank you all so much this isamazing thank you um so much kaya beautifully captain name there andthank you so much ellisumi am so so grateful to you i i canhardlyyou are so brilliant i can barely stayon this chair i'm almost falling offwowthank youcongratulations to you tomorrowsee you tomorrow bye bye