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I'm very interested to see (I assume there are further provocations yet to be seen) what you deem as putting you on the edge of respectable leftism, although as someone writing my own novel covering somewhat similar ground on gender, I know just what you mean. On the Gadsby nonbinary point- I suspect this is related to the curious phenomena where natal males don't really "get" to be nonbinary in a way that natal females do in the public eye- but that could be its own essay. My own provocation is that we're all probably nonbinary at this point- whether we like it or not (I like it, even if I share JCO's contention that the singular "they" makes for exquisite confusion within a novel, and would rather that you just called me "he" or "she".) And yes, very interesting times. Somehow feels less dangerous than last year or the year before, but I guess we'll see if that feeling is unfounded soon.

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Provocations aplenty to come—who knows what body parts they'll say I need to lose next?—but I'll reveal now that there are three words used without irony in the objective voice of the third-person narrator: "the girl's penis." (Theory I'll elaborate someday: RedScare-ism can go in all sorts of right-wing directions but can never fully accommodate the "TERF" worldview since this is premised on the second-wave victimology Paglia, Didion, Lasch etc. so strenuously reject. I thought about this last night in the used bookstore while buying for novelty's sake a trashy old mass-market paperback of Play It as It Lays and gently trying to explain Didion—I was invited to do so—to the Zoomer enby working the register.) Agreed on nonbinary—it goes back to the Nancy Armstrong thing where "women" became the placeholder term for everybody who even modestly disaffiliates from straight-white-male. I suspect nonbinary arose in the years since partially because "woman" when modified with "white" was stigmatized as tantamount to straight-white-male. A merely verbal race to the merely verbal bottom of the social hierarchy has no winners, however. But yes, even just considering our technological condition, universal nonbinarism should go without saying—literally.

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I’m tempted to say you could explain Didion with “style over substance” but that may also be the grumbling of an (almost)zoomer enby. I jest though – her kind of nihilist conservatism is not my style, but that prose! One of the few semicontemporary prose stylists you read and despair that you can’t write like that. Along similar lines to the red scare thought- was thinking the other day (reading Paglia railing against exactly this tendency in its prime) how odd it was that second wave feminism embraced and became associated so strongly with TERFism in its dotage, given the vein of at times explicitly Promethian ambition running underneath so much of it.

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It's possible to overrate her nonfiction, but Play It as It Lays is at least as good as The Sun Also Rises, maybe even as good as The Great Gatsby, truly a great short novel in the American vein. That's the other thing about the second wave: the Prometheanism pointed toward universal nonbinarism, which the latter-day acolytes with their "sex-based rights" don't seem to grasp! It offends my sense of orderliness: it really should be feminists+LBQ vs. GT, but instead we get the much less sensible feminists+LGB vs. TQ. ("Q" is by design a bit of a wild card in any arrangement of the terms, but still, you see what I mean.)

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I think with Didion (as perhaps more contentiously Baldwin) the essays are often great, but the novels are the main event. You're onto something with the GT idea (perhaps in a broader sense than you'd suppose) although I'd add the B's as a wildcard too. That said, I'm sure these categories like people's lives are too broad for our orderly impulses. You're on the money comparing Didion to that scene (not just Red Scare, but an entire type of millennial/zoomer artsy woman-as-public-performance) half wounded lost girl, half brutal and eviscerating, a malign eye that butchers everything in its path. Also, and finally (I keep forgetting to say this) you have such civil commenters.

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Lol, look at this. MAGA Woke Brutalism:

https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1665494430306975746

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Lol indeed, especially at someone in the replies saying that "Trump didn't win in 2016 by being a jerk." A crucial thing about Trump mostly obscured by the general wingnuttery-verging-on-something-more-frightening of his cabinet picks and his refusal to disavow the more openly white supremacist elements of his base is that he has (or at least had 8 years ago) his finger remarkably on the pulse of the entirely native ambient bigotry of a type of middle to petit bourgeois white American, which is wholly distinct from the simmering rage of a party apparatchik like Walsh or Raichuk. In that sense it makes perfect sense that he'd be to the left of DeSantis on this- youth transition and women's sports aside he just doesn't care that much, and from what I've seen, neither do the masses mostly.

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I love girls like that, honestly. Dasha's movie pays homage to Ghost World, one more recent pop-culture source of the type, but it goes back further than that, maybe to Isherwood's Sally Bowles at least. Yes, my commenters are decent and honorable people, aside from the "your prick should be removed" thing.

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As someone who's been greatly looking forward to the Joyce, I do hope it happens — but follow the Muse!

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Thanks for understanding—something will materialize, I promise!

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