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Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"
Joe: "I wanted to write into my lover, to groove my words into her flesh"
Mission accomplished! (If you can't make out the words that Joe has "grooved into" Mallory's flesh, it says: 'I am a total piece of shit.')
There’s more in that Twitter chain. The full quoted text
“I wanted to write about my love affair with a lesbian named L—, and about the ways she has taught me to rename my body, as well as those parasomatic moods that govern my, for example, fidgetiness, or the psychosocial praxis that governs whether or not I am passable in a given frame. I wanted to write into my lover, to groove my words into her flesh, as I pump them out of her with my hand. This, I thought, would be an autotheory worth the name, would answer the stuntists and historical castrati, phallically would reconstruct the episteme of modernity from the lesbian pussy. I wanted to be born out of her into my own body, to birth her through my hole, and I wanted to mash my face into her clit until I gagged and choked, love and melody. Everything I care about is love; why does anyone write about anything else, ever?” (Lavery, 2024, p. 232)
“History has taken Linehan (b. 196 by surprise too, though he is a stunt autotheorist, who also believes that he can arrest the insanity of the present moment merely by exhibiting it, amplifying it in the emptiness of his own sensorium. It is a project of profound hostility to the auto, self-immolating in the service of a comic construction of history, as though Forrest Gump were himself trying to imagine the historical position of a Forrest Gump. The conspiracy, which is obvious to anyone inside this discourse and surreal to everyone else, is that the dating app Her, which claims to serve the lesbian community, in fact sells that community out by including men as sexual prospects. Perhaps there are examples of this, but the only one that anyone will cite is now Linehan himself, goofily mugging from the isolation of his own self-exile. Does such a project of historical self-erasure possess a motivation, beyond the obvious desires inevitably caught in the undertow of such steamy negations? (Which is to say, the lesbian phallus.) Perhaps this: that the trans woman Graham, who claims to be twenty-nine, has lied about her age and therefore performed a generational betrayal, and even (more fancifully) has traveled in time.” (Lavery, 2024, p. 232)
Some thoughts…. „Parasomatic moods” threw me. According to this artist, she made up the word and it means „a mode of embodiment which moves the subject beyond the immediacy of the physical, redefining the self as both its living body and its energetic exchanges. Applied to the reflexive self, parasomatism is an abnormalization, reference, expansion, and dissolution of the body as a fixed interiority.” Parasomatic fidgetting means he doesn’t just fidget but he annoys the shit out of Lily, I guess.
to groove my words into her flesh, as I pump them out of her with my hand.
The conspiracy… is that the dating app Her, which claims to serve the lesbian community, in fact sells that community out by including men as sexual prospects. Perhaps there are examples of this, but the only one that anyone will cite is now Linehan himself, goofily mugging from the isolation of his own self-exile.
Because he’s a public figure who deliberately did it to prove a point. Media is much less comfortable doing a story on private AGP figures unless there is another hook eg convicted rapist uses lesbian app. Now that’s a story. Find that and people will cite that instead of Linehan. Or, you know, forget Her and just look at women’s prisons.
Does such a project of historical self-erasure possess a motivation, beyond the obvious desires inevitably caught in the undertow of such steamy negations? (Which is to say, the lesbian phallus.)
What is the project? Linehan going on Her? Does he have a lesbian phallus? „I hear you’re a lesbian now Father Ted”
the trans woman Graham, who claims to be twenty-nine, has lied about her age and therefore performed a generational betrayal, and even (more fancifully) has traveled in time
Reject cisnormative capitalist copyright of Duke University, phallically reconstruct the episteme of modernity with liberated literature. (It's only Joe's chapter, though one of the other chapters is by that transman Beans person.)
Joe: "I wanted to write into my lover, to groove my words into her flesh" View attachment 6637242
Mission accomplished! (If you can't make out the words that Joe has "grooved into" Mallory's flesh, it says: 'I am a total piece of shit.')
That motherfucker. He's just straight up an abusive husband, no amount of postsecondary education or troonery can change that there isn't any meaningful difference between Joe and thousands of men who are currently in prison. He physically assaults her and gets off showing off the damage to his followers, who respond that this whole sad affair is "adorable." Fuck me.
Reject cisnormative capitalist copyright of Duke University, phallically reconstruct the episteme of modernity with liberated literature. (It's only Joe's chapter, though one of the other chapters is by that transman Beans person.)
Thank you for posting this wonderful piece of scholarship in its entirety. For those of you on the Kiwi Farms who are not capable of gleaning the deeper meaning from such a subtle analysis as Joe has provided, I have extracted the illustrations. There are three (3) in the entire piece:
The last one is kinda difficult to make out, but yes, those are tits too. A heterosexual male's idea of a lesbian, is our Dr Lavery.
Remember kids: "there is very little difference between the commonplace and the avant-garde."
Joe's a woman hating sadist and Mal's a self hating masochist. Nothing new to see there. These kinds of men and women have existed and found each other forever. Except now they're pop culture figures. The introduction of LaLa and then Rocco just widened and enhanced their 24/7 BDSM scene.
WTF is LaLa's deal, hooking up with these two sick fucks and producing a baby with Joe? Is she a combo of the other two? It is astounding.
Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
Obsolete ways of living, the Automat, dealing with an unexpected change in mealtime routine, and popularity.
Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
The Furrowed Middlebrow, which is an imprint of Dean Street Press, and neither an author nor a book, the Manhattan Zoning Resolution of 1916, and Turner Classic Movies.
Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
Had one baby with two women. Nice fat baby.
What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
I’m not sure! I don’t love the word trenchant, but I couldn’t swear to it that anyone’s ever actually called me trenchant before. Probably I would be too pleased over being complimented to kick over the word choice.
If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?
It can be difficult to break into another industry, but I’ve been able to cobble together some part-time work in elder care over the last two years that I’ve found both meaningful and a lot of fun. I would like to be able to make a day job of that at some point.
What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
I like writing dialogue. I’d like to be better at describing the way things look. I always feel deranged when I try to do that: “The building was there. It looked squat. They walked to the left, with their shoes on.” That can’t be right. I read books all the time that just say normal things about how a character’s hair looks, but I can’t quite seem to find my way there.
How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
I’m not sure hubris extends to “believing anyone might find anything I say interesting.” Niobe forcing the people of Thebes to stop worshiping Leto, saying, “Have I not cause for pride? Will you prefer to me this Latona, the Titan’s daughter, with her two children? I have seven times as many. Fortunate indeed am I, and fortunate I shall remain! Will any one deny this? My abundance is my security. I feel myself too strong for Fortune to subdue. She may take from me much; I shall still have much left. Were I to lose some of my children, I should hardly be left as poor as Latona with her two only. Away with you from these solemnities,- put off the laurel from your brows,- have done with this worship,” that’s hubris. “Someone might like to read my book” is a reasonable and well-ordered degree of confidence, I think.
Some Chatner to catch up with:
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
3h
twelve years ago the Telegraph published a wonderful essay by Joan Brady called "Why I Stole My Mother's Lover" that served as a partial inspiration for my favorite character in Women's Hotel
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
3h
"I have the same relationship to beauty that Lady Catherine de Bourgh has to music: There are few people who have more true enjoyment of it, or a better natural taste, and if I had ever had it, I should have been a great proficient."
"Why I stole my mother's lover" – a partial inspiration for "Women's Hotel"
Daniel Lavery | Nov 12, 2024
I got to do a fun group interview with LitHub that’s out this week, if you’d care to read it. [Pasted above; she pastes her fav question and answer below]
What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
“I like writing dialogue. I’d like to be better at describing the way things look. I always feel deranged when I try to do that: “The building was there. It looked squat. They walked to the left, with their shoes on.” That can’t be right. I read books all the time that just say normal things about how a character’s hair looks, but I can’t quite seem to find my way there.”
In 2012 The Telegraph published an essay by writer Joan Brady [link | archive] titled, wonderfully, “Why I stole my mother’s lover.” It’s frank and remorseless and libidinal and I return to it often. When I wrote my first novel Women’s Hotel, I knew I wanted most of the characters to be original, but three of them are (very loosely) based on real people – Stephen the elevator operator (based on Stephen Donaldson/Donny the Punk), Lucianne Caruso (based even more loosely on Lucianne Goldberg), and Gia Kassab, inspired by that Telegraph essay.
I like thinking about how physical beauty can enhance one’s sense of determination, and I like thinking about unpopular types of relationships, and what dating a much older man can provide a young woman with, socially. There’s a pleasure in being talked about in scandalized tones, a pleasure in upsetting one’s contemporaries and elders, a pleasure in ruffling feathers and holding the monopoly on youthful beauty in one’s relationship, that doesn’t always get acknowledged in what one might call “age gap discourse,” that can make for vicious and interesting fiction (Phantom Thread comes immediately to mind, as does Shadowlands).
The mother’s lover in question was Dexter Masters.1 He was a writer too — I would say “in his own right,” although “in their own right” is an expression I loathe. It’s only ever used defensively, about a person who is best known for their relationship to someone more famous, and always carries with it the air of a consolation prize: They really were very good on their own, you know! But it’s never convincing. I can never hear that someone was impressive or talented or accomplished “in their own right” and felt like the person saying so really believed it. “In their own right” sells itself out, as a defense. Dexter Masters was a writer, and a good one too, but he never wrote a perfect essay for The Telegraph about stealing his mother’s lover, so I cannot love him in the same way I love Joan Brady.
[freebie ends]
An installment of Shelf Awareness (link | archive) tags along with the above. Is it old? Already on the thread? I'll delete if so. A cursory search didn't bring it up.
THE WRITER'S LIFE Daniel M. Lavery: On History and Humor
Daniel M. Lavery is beloved for his intelligent humor and insightful observations honed through years at The Toast and as Slate's Dear Prudence advice columnist. His bestselling Texts from Jane Eyre and Something That May Shock and Discredit You proved his nonfiction skill, and with his first novel, Women's Hotel (HarperOne), he aims "to meet historical fiction on its own terms," introducing readers to a memorable cast of characters making their homes in a New York City residential hotel in the 1960s.
There is a certain tone in your work--slightly elevated, slightly detached, and utterly hilarious. Has this writerly voice always come naturally, or is it something you've cultivated?
It is something I have cultivated, particularly for Women's Hotel. In the last five years or so, I've spent a lot of time reading reissues of novels by minor women writers from the 1920s to the 1960s, titles like The Day of Small Things by O. Douglas, about these snobby Scottish aristocrats who are slightly down on their luck but handle their degradation with graciousness and do a few small things. I love that tone, that style of writing. It's a tone that I associate with mid-century domestic fiction, so that's something I wanted to hone in Women's Hotel.
I also think about Jane Austen, the way her work takes aim at a tight-knit community full of people that you do, in fact, care deeply about, but who behave in ways that make you hate them. And yet you can't bear your own hatred for them. You have to see them tomorrow. There's humor in that, born out of an intimate knowledge of other people, an inability to get away, and a need to find some sort of resolution that feels light. Like with Kitty--she's always looking for an angle, asking for something, and the other characters, especially Katherine, try to navigate her neediness politely. Someone who's not willing to be rude is often a good source of humor.
Like Austen, Women's Hotel focuses on traditional, domestic issues (changes to breakfast, dating, marriage, clothes), with economic precarity as a constant undercurrent. What role did women's hotels play in providing opportunities to women in the early stages of financial independence?
I wanted money and expenses to be present throughout the book. For these women, living in the city is affordable, but a lot of the social structures that would have underpinned their lifestyle in the '20s and '30s are no longer there. The guaranteed weekly rate of a Biedermeier room can help somebody hold on toward the end of something and enable others to jump up a little further; for others, they're treading water, just a step away from sliding downwards.
Being in a residential hotel removes you briefly from a recognizably domestic sphere, but you still have to know where you're going to get your meals, to figure out how to relate to the people around you, to decide what kind of relationship you're going to have to the marriage plot, and so I wanted there to be a sense of maybe I can get away from those sort of questions for a while, but they're not going anywhere. They're just outside the door.
Of the residents, Katherine is my undisputed favorite, especially due to the authenticity of her journey. Do you have a favorite? Was any character more delightful to write than the others?
I also have deep affection for Katherine. Her backstory took up more pages than I had originally anticipated, but I was really happy with it. In some ways, I think Gia might have been the most fun. It's like she was airlifted in from a totally different book! She knows what she wants, and everything goes exactly according to plan. She's like a Dale Carnegie character come to life! So that was quite a lot of fun. Similarly, I think Lucianne is a character who was a lot of fun, in part because she spends so much time with people she's also thinking about undermining. She likes them, but she's also just wondering about how to dress in such a way that will make her look better than Pauline or make Katherine look like a dead bird.
Yes! We know so much about Katherine, as you note, and with Gia, we get a few fairly intimate details but only as it relates to her particular project. That partial intimacy really works with the hotel setting, where some people become something of a fixture and others drop in and just as quickly drop out, known for little more than the way they look in the hallways--completely real and completely mysterious at the same time.
Gia is one of a handful of characters inspired by real people. She's loosely based on a writer named Joan Brady. Ten to 15 years ago, Brady wrote an essay called something like, "I married my mother's ex-lover, and I'm not sorry!" The basic outline was that her husband, writer Dexter Masters, had previously dated her mother, they didn't see each other for a decade, and then they connected in the city and hit it off. I took it in different places, making it Gia's goal the whole time, but I love that unapologetic Oedipal notion.
For Gia, if you're beautiful, you're a ballet dancer, you control your body perfectly, then you also control the world around you perfectly--it's the fantasy of somebody who really does get everything she wants. She says, I want to live with the man that I love and I want to die in the penthouse of an expensive hotel. So for her, her trajectory out of the women's hotel just takes her into a better hotel, which is very different from the other character who marries toward the end of the book. She moves in with her husband and mother-in-law, and for those left behind, there's a real sense of "we're losing you." With Gia you're taking this to its highest logical conclusion: you're going to live in the sky and have gold shoes.
What was your research process like?
For the first six months, I was at the New York Public Library every weekend doing research. I read archived newspaper and magazine articles, and a lot of books, deciding what kind of people I want to include, what kinds of movements or experiences would feel meaningful or important. For instance, Jimmy Breslin and the backdrop of the newspaper mergers, which we see in Lucianne's story. I had to verify details like when did the New York Horse Show move out of Manhattan? What types of restaurants were around the '50s and '60s (the NYC streets as well as the decades)? It's always possible to do more research, so at a certain point you just have to say what I know, I know, and I want to write something now. --Sara Beth West
Srsly manly pic accompanying Shelf Awareness item above, srsly...
She's at Sarah Lawrence tomorrow. Is Joe riding along in the jump seat?
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
Nov 11
btw I am briefly back in New York for a talk about Women’s Hotel this Wednesday at Sarah Lawrence at 2pm. it’s open to the public so if you’re bored and free midweek come see me!
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery
Nov 11
will be talking midcentury women’s literature (including the one weird plot point that Passing, The Group, and SATC all have in common) and historical fiction! https://sarahlawrence.edu/news-events/events/detail/16494
Heimbold Visual Arts Center HEIM 202 Donnelley Film Theatre
Open to the public
November 13, 2024 / Wednesday
2:00pm-3:00pm
This talk will focus on the brief phenomenon of the women's hotel, of mid century women's fiction and the curious plot point a number of bestsellers had in common from the 1920s to the early 2000s, in the context of researching historical fiction.
Daniel Lavery is the author of Women's Hotel and a cofounder of The Toast.
This event is colloquium credit eligible.
Final slop 'n roll: They don't seem to be that active on Bluesky, yet anyway (and the lesbian whose name starts with L is not there under her real name at least), but for future ref:
Balder but a little happier than usual, Lumberjack Danny links up with high school buddies who are wonderful, apparently because they have gotten better looking. If they judged Daniel on the same scale, a "wonderful" rating may not have been achieved. .
I love my wonderful friends!!!! if anything they are better looking than when we met in high school...simply cannot be beat
ETA - A lonely soul's warbling about friendship on both Bluesky and X, noteworthy only because Mal hasn't been posting much on Bluesky pre-Harris defeat. One cute thing: She so hopes friends want to see Conclave with her.
Bluesky:
X:
Nothing from Joe or the lesbian whose name begins with L.
Oops, the T has hit the hairline. Being a short female with no hair doesn't read "male" it reads "I recently had cancer".
I wish she'd post more about her elder care job. Imagining Mallory's wordy posh white self trying to wipe ass alongside the usual US North East elder care cohort: vicious Jamaican grandmas and Philippine overtime automatons, would be so fucking funny. It's a built-in sitcom. The actual men working as elder care care aides are always interesting and unique snowflakes +/- meth so I'm confident she'd find a lot to relate to there.
My personal opinion is she had artistic aspirations, maybe dreamed of being a radical LES art scene queen, but wasn’t very good artist. She took the more practical road to teach art, but in that milieu the more transgressive the cooler you are, esp to students.
Lilly has suffered the effects of a trying to be ultra cool and impressive to art school students as a woman in her late 30’s. Being a lesbian dog mom just didn’t cut it anymore, esp if she wanted to be a mom too.
Add in the whisper-thin toothbrush moustache and it gives "now that I've completed chemo, I'm trying to get back to work in my job as a Hitler impersonator at a drag bar."
Oops, the T has hit the hairline. Being a short female with no hair doesn't read "male" it reads "I recently had cancer".
I wish she'd post more about her elder care job. Imagining Mallory's wordy posh white self trying to wipe ass alongside the usual US North East elder care cohort: vicious Jamaican grandmas and Philippine overtime automatons, would be so fucking funny. It's a built-in sitcom. The actual men working as elder care care aides are always interesting and unique snowflakes +/- meth so I'm confident she'd find a lot to relate to there.
It seemed like they hired masculine Mister Danny for a clerical job, lacking as she does NY's baseline 40 hours of caregiver training. Michigan's is only 8 hours and after a few days on the job there Mal could buckle down on a new novel, Silver Ward. Umm, or Night Doody?
I like writing dialogue. I’d like to be better at describing the way things look. I always feel deranged when I try to do that: “The building was there. It looked squat. They walked to the left, with their shoes on.” That can’t be right. I read books all the time that just say normal things about how a character’s hair looks, but I can’t quite seem to find my way there.
This is Pretty Good Mal, imo: self-aware, wryly funny. The voice I remember from her early days is there, and if it’s not matured it’s at least restrained. Most importantly, it’s true.
It stands in contrast with basically everything of hers I’ve read recently, to say nothing of the garbage Joe can’t stop pumping out.
I guess that makes sense. Imagine how bogged down your mind would get having to regularly parse texts from Joe about, like, general household maintenance stuff.
Women's Hotel is going into its third printing.
Joe sees Mal's Sarah Lawrence and raises her a Vassar.
VASSAR ENGLISH DEPARTMENT PRESENTS POLITICAL DEMONOLOGY AGAINST THE THEORY OF SEXUALITY
A MAJOR LECTURE BY GRACE LAVERY
THURSDAY
NOVEMBER 21
6PM
TAYLOR 203
Lavery's lecture deals with invocations of transsexual demonic possession possession by demonic or ghostly figures sexed differently to the bodies they inhabit. The talk expores the peculiar challenges posed by transsexual self-understanding to the secular form of rationality known as neoliberalism, specifically in relation to the phenomenon usually referred to as "sexuality" or "sexual orientation." By severing the connection betweeen sexuation and its representation, the transsexual confutes the neoliberal politic of "the theory of sexuality." By definition, the transsexual cannot "have" a sexuality -- it would be truer to say that she is a sexuality -- and the attempt to bring the transsexual under the same framework of civil rights of gay and lesbian people has had the effect of dismantling the theory of sexuality as a generalizable condition of human beings."
Sponsored by the Dean of Faculty, English, Women, Feminist & Queer Studies
Co-Sponsors in anme: Global Nineteenth Century Studies, Media Studies, Film, Philosphy
Individuals with disabilities requiring accomodations or information on accessibility should contact the Campus Activities office at (845)437-5370.
Joe on IG:
if you’re anywhere close to Poughkeepsie next Thursday, do feel free to stop by Vassar College at 6pm, where I will be delivering a lecture from my current project on demonology. The talk is called “Political Demonology: Against the Theory of Sexuality,” and it’s an argument about the fraught and (I argue) finally mutually-annihilating theories of gender identity and sexuality, which together constitute “LGBT” as the subject of liberal civil rights claims. It’s also an attempt to think what might be organizable (in practical terms) for those queered by the state and by capital, after the collapse of liberalism as a governing ideology. come through!
the image on the poster is a detail from composition towards a portrait of me by the amazing @pseudanonymity.
(btw “major lecture” is a category of lecture at Vassar. I’m not above that kind of preposterous self-aggrandizement, but in this case I’m not guilty of it.)
It's a retread of the Johns Hopkins talk that was not made public. Maybe we can grab it this time. Comments:
Bald lumberjacks are lactose tolerant. They have stylish and gorgeous friends.
entering my Noho Hank phase with the most stylish and gorgeous old friends on the planet...Ialso want to thank God for my profound and inborn lactose tolerance, which serves me so well as I approach my 40s and can still put away milkshakes of profound size and depth
Mal tells X that she knows how to make Norma Desmond and Henry VIII sane. Why does she not do this for Joe?
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery 8h
I could have made Norma Desmond so happy and sane. I used to feel the same way about Henry VIII and tbh most of my tactics would be the same — dark mirroring, the creation of small-scale problems to keep her mentally active & enrich her environment, emotional lockstep
the megan mash @ozymegdias 7h
that didn’t go too well for my buddy max
Daniel M. Lavery @daniel_m_lavery 7h
lack of hustle/skill issue
by surprise too, though he is a stunt autotheorist, who also believes that he can arrest the insanity of the present moment merely by exhibiting it, amplifying it in the emptiness of his own sensorium. It is a project of profound hostility to the auto, self-immolating in the service of a comic construction of history, as though Forrest Gump were himself trying to imagine the historical position of a Forrest Gump. The conspiracy, which is obvious to anyone inside this discourse and surreal to everyone else, is that the dating app Her, which claims to serve the lesbian community, in fact sells that community out by including men as sexual prospects. Perhaps there are examples of this, but the only one that anyone will cite is now Linehan himself, goofily mugging from the isolation of his own self-exile. Does such a project of historical self-erasure possess a motivation, beyond the obvious desires inevitably caught in the undertow of such steamy negations? (Which is to say, the lesbian phallus.) Perhaps this: that the trans woman Graham, who claims to be twenty-nine, has lied about her age and therefore performed a generational betrayal, and even (more fancifully) has traveled in time.” (Lavery, 2024, p. 232)
the megan mash
