#Daniel Lavery

[asoftepiloguemylove]

BUT I WAS LITTLE TOO // ON THE FAILURE OF FATHERS

Michael Wasson This Dusk In A Mouth Full of Prayer // Ocean Vuong Someday I'll Love Ocean Vuong // Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells // Mitski A Burning Hill // Franz Kafka Letter to His Father // Disco Elysium (2019) cr. ZA/UM // Sharon Olds I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died // Daniel Lavery & Cecillia Corrigan FROM THE MAKERS OF "TWO-MOM ENERGY DRINK," IT'S "LET YOUR FATHER DIE" ENERGY DRINK // pinterest // pinterest // @inkskinned Red Blood, Black Ink // Arcade Fire Windowsill

[shamebats]

After living 30 years as Mallory Ortberg - a single, financially independent person acclaimed for her feminist writing - Lavery felt prepared to risk the possibility of regret for an opportunity to make an interesting change. He told himself that if living as a male and didn't like it he could also detransition, as others have. "Essentially I thought [female to male transition] would be a really good, fun, interesting, compelling thing to do and so far at least I think that it has been."

Lavery now lives in New York with his wife Grace Lavery, a fellow writer who transitioned from male to female at the same time as his own transition. Grace had been thinking about it for decades so it was "a real delight" for the couple to start transitioning together, Lavery says, sometimes sharing their old clothes with each other and finding their own new personal style in parallel. No one got hurt or lost anything in the process of their individual gender transitions, he says, and the process was "fairly easy and good".

So-called trans-exclusive feminists, who invoke fear and anxiety with the message that men transitioning to women involves women losing rights, have it wrong, he says. "Most people don't transition because they've been persuaded that men are better and there ought to be more of them or women are better and there ought to be more of them. [More often, people undergo gender transition because they think] 'I think I'd really like to be a man' or 'I think I'd really like to be a woman."" Lavery's choice to live as a male doesn't represent a rejection of femaleness, he says. "I loved what I got to do before and I was ready to do something else."

Daniel M Lavery: the awkwardness of gender transition

[bluegarners]

Louise Glück, from “Blue Rotunda”, Averno//solar flares//Batman: Year Three (1989)//Daniel Lavery & Cecilia Corrigan, From the Makers of “Two-Mom Energy Drink,” It’s “Let Your Father Die Energy Drink”//solar flares

[faintingcouchguy]

everyone's trans in the last unicorn

Oops it's the supermoon and I stayed up all night writing what'll have to be the first of 2-3 effortposts on transness and gender roles in Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn. This one is about the three main characters' trans-coded introductions, plus Daniel M. Lavery's 2017-2020 writing on transition as intertexts/reception of the book. All the rest under the cut.

"We all know the unicorn and Molly Grue are transgender," I said flippantly to @literarymagpie yesterday, and it turns out maybe we do not all know this, so now it's finally time I write the essays I've been drafting in my head for five years about The Last Unicorn and the things Peter S. Beagle didn't know he knew.

My secondary source for this theme is Daniel Lavery, who, in his 2017 essay on gc2b binders, described the first stages of his transition as follows:

I knew nothing of the subject. I became aware of the subject. I immediately, and carefully avoiding too much direct thought about the matter, sought consummation with it. Since that day, the subject has rarely been far from my conscious thoughts. It has felt, alternately and sometimes simultaneously, thrilling, calming to the point of near-stupor, destabilizing, reassuring, necessary, mundane, intrusive, overwhelming, compulsory, and desirable.

Beagle's last unicorn lives in a lilac wood, and she lives all alone, oblivious and content for over a century. Upon overhearing that there may be no other unicorns left, she considers her identity and questions her place in the world for the first time. Here she is on pp. 6-7, quite certain at first that she belongs in her familiar forest:

"Oh, I could never leave this, I never could, not even if I really were the only unicorn in the world. I know how to live here, I know how everything smells, and tastes, and is."

[...]But suppose they are hiding together, somewhere far away? What if they are hiding and waiting for me?

From that first moment of doubt, there was no peace for her; from the time she first imagined leaving her forest, she could not stand in one place without wanting to be somewhere else. She trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms.

I'm not even sure I want hormones. I'm pretty sure I don't want them, because I think about going on hormones all the time, and those thoughts always end in some variation of "I can't, not ever," and if I really wanted to try hormones obviously I wouldn't keep thinking about how I can't try them. I think about them all the time and have to constantly stop myself, so I must not really want them. You know how when you're profoundly curious and sick with longing about something, it usually passes pretty quickly.

—Lavery again, from Something That May Shock and Discredit You, "The Stages of Not Going on T" (p. 60).

Speaking of T and not going on it, Beagle's next introduced main character is Schmendrick. Schmendrick is a wizard living in an insecure, stagnant, uncomfortable state that is explicitly symbolized by the fact that he can’t grow a beard and would like to. I don’t even need to make a case here. (I will anyway, though, in another installment.)

Our other main ally is Molly Grue, "a thin thorn of a woman" who stands out as the steel spine of Captain Cully's otherwise all-male, ridiculous crew. She's tough, smart, grizzled, kicked around by life. Her relationship with Cully is ambiguous; her feelings are clearly not warm. When Schmendrick scatters the merry men with a chaotic summoning, Molly's the only one to land on her feet and follow him into the wood.

Then she saw the unicorn. She neither moved nor spoke, but her tawny eyes were suddenly big with tears. [...] "Where have you been?" she cried. "Damn you, where have you been?" She took a few steps toward Schmendrick, but she was looking beyond him, at the unicorn. [...] "Where have you been?" Before the whiteness and the shining horn, Molly shrank to a shrilling beetle, but this time it was the unicorn's old dark eyes that looked down. "I am here now," she said at last. Molly laughed with her lips flat. "And what good is it to me that you're here now? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you, how dare you come to me now, when I am this?" With a flap of her hand she summed herself up: barren face, desert eyes, and yellowing heart. "I wish you had never come, why do you come now?" The tears began to slide down the side of her nose. The unicorn made no reply, and Schmendrick said, "She is the last. She is the last unicorn in the world." "She would be," Molly sniffed. "She would be the last unicorn in the world to come to Molly Grue." She reached up then to lay her hand upon the unicorn's cheek; but both of them flinched a little, and the touch came to rest on the swift, shivering place under the jaw. Molly said, "It's all right. I forgive you." "Unicorns are not to be forgiven." The magician felt himself growing giddy with jealousy, not only of the touch but of something like a secret that was moving between Molly and the unicorn. "Unicorns are for beginnings," he said, "for innocence and purity, for newness. Unicorns are for young girls." Molly was stroking the unicorn's throat as timidly as though she were blind. She dried her grimy tears on the white mane. "You don't know much about unicorns," she said.

(pp. 96-98)

It leaps out to me that the crux of Schmendrick's jealousy is not the wish that he could touch a unicorn. More emphasis is placed on his envy of Molly's emotional experience—the recognition, the sobbing relief. Schmendrick needs this magnitude of affirmation too, but won't get it until the end of the book, and from a different front. More on his weird gender stuff in the second and probably third installments of this that I have to write next.

I'm not the only one to note this scene's transgender resonance. I first got it, once again, from Lavery, who borrowed Molly's despairing cry for a monologue in Something That May Shock and Discredit You. "Do You Know Athena Used to Be a Tomboy?" spoofs transphobic responses to trans men coming out, Greek drama style: the listener is "encouraged" to remain a woman by the goddess Athena (I didn't want to be a girl either, but then I learned to love myself, and to become the tutelary of Athens. Have you tried being the tutelary of Athens?); a Chorus: ("Well, of course we'd all be trans now, wouldn't we? Anyone born nowadays, that's just a given, they just—someone tells you at school, or something—everyone's trans now."); and a Deuteragonist, whose concern-trollish speeches gradually reveal more and more intense personal gender anxieties. From the final meltdown (pp. 188-189):

I mean, if I were thirty years younger—if I were twenty-five years younger—if I were eighteen years younger—God, if I were just ten years younger—if I were a year and a day younger—if you'd asked me just five minutes ago, four and a half even, if I'd picked up on the first ring instead of the third, I'd transition. Hell, I'd transition. Oh my God, I wish I could transition. Ask me again, but sooner. Come back yesterday. Come back a week ago. What good are you to me now, when I am—this? Where were you when there was still summer in my heart? Come back a month ago, a decade, but come back to me before I had to forgive you. Just come back and ask again; I'll wait if it takes forever this time.

I don't have much to add to that, really.

Next post will have to talk about the transformation of Amalthea. I'm not the first to observe that it's a potent dysphoria metaphor, but I've got more to unpack about Schmendrick's perspectives if he's trans, and there's a lot to dig into re. the love story with Prince Lir. I've also got some intense takes cooking on the tower scene with Haggard, if I get there. Anyway, thanks for reading! And thanks @endetithei for sharing this book with me as much as you have. (Sorry that this is how you'll find out I was up all night.)

[thelibraryofsylphide]

let your father die energy drink by daniel lavery and cecilia corrigan

[incendavery]

daniel lavery//richard siken

ive recently read both 'something that may shock and discredit you' and 'war of the foxes,' and as a result, ive been rolling these two quotes around together in my head

(image description in alt text)

[araekniarchive]

Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Richard Brautigan, Your Catfish Friend

The Mountain Goats, Hair Match

Natalie Young, Notes on Earth Life

From psychicdonuts uquiz, ‘what will you do this summer?’

JxsmineSky, Malnutrition

Disco Elysium (2019), created by Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov

Daniel Lavery, Dirtbag Catallus

[lgbtqreads]

New Releases: October 15, 2024

Middle Grade The Ghostwing’s Lie by Rebecca Mix This is the sequel to The Mossheart’s Promise Something rots within the wood… Ary Mossheart has done the impossible: The terrarium is shattered, and her people are free. When the folk of Terra are welcomed in by the fairies of Siltshore, an abundant treetop village filled with light, food, and peace, Ary promises herself that her days of saving…

[wizxrdpendrxgon]

from FROM THE MAKERS OF “TWO-MOM ENERGY DRINK,” IT’S “LET YOUR FATHER DIE ENERGY DRINK by Daniel M. Lavery and Cecilia Corrigan

[goatsandgangsters]

Daniel Lavery's book "something that may shock and discredit you" is so good overall but that line "more of me afterwards, not less" absolutely knocks the wind out of me every time

[whenthegoldrays]

I squeaked like an old dog toy at this

[shakespearenews]

GONERIL: “I’m Cordelia, I don’t understand figurative speech”

REGAN: “What’s hyperbole, I’ve never heard of it, even though I live in a royal court where pretty much everyone deploys over-the-top language to demarcate rank, status, and power pretty much every second of the day”

GONERIL: “I’m Cordelia, I only speak shepherdess”

[hawkeyefrommash]

"I am also firmly of the belief that Captain James T. Kirk was, and is, at every age and in every incarnation, a beautiful lesbian; I fear that now I will be called upon to explain myself and that I will be unable to do so. I can only repeat myself with increasing fervor: James T. Kirk is a beautiful lesbian, do not ask me any follow-up questions. Like Goldwater, in your heart you know I'm right. There is plenty of stupid, surface level evidence I could marshal forth in defense of my argument -- people criticized Shatner for his weight, and women are often criticized for their weight; Shatner was beautiful in a way that women are generally beautiful; James T. Kirk lives with her longterm girlfriend (Spock) and her ex-girlfriend (Bones) in a benevolent feelings-and-sex triad and generally observed the campsite rule when it came to bringing short-term partners around; James T. Kirk is vulnerable and anxious and riddled with sincerity and in love with her car; James T. Kirk wears motorcycle boots and seems to spend a lot of time on her hair, doesn't want kids and rereads Dickens and doesn't feel comfortable showing her feelings in front of anyone she's known less than ten years but that doesn't mean she won't do it -- but those things aren't really what make James T. Kirk a beautiful lesbian, I don't think."

from chapter 'Captain James T. Kirk Is a Beautiful Lesbian, and I'm Not Sure Exactly How to Explain That', Something That May Shock And Discredit You by Daniel Lavery

[starful-emporium]

parasocial relationships as a trans person are so weird. like yeah several of the reasons i made the most impactful, life-changing, life-saving, decisions i've ever made are real living people. and they have no idea i exist.

cory mccarthy made me realize that "trans" does apply to me, actually (via their book man o' war, go read it)

ally beardsley is the reason i stopped seeing transition as exclusive to binary folk

daniel lavery articulated being trans and raised christian better than I ever could (something that may shock and discredit you, awesome book)

ash hardell introduced me to genderqueerness years before i saw it in myself

anna-marie mclemore taught me about queer joy and made transness feel possible

[settingorange]

"[...] but that didn’t stop me from wishing all men were on bikes and beautifully lit up and riding around changing colors, and that the rest of us could all tell them how much we loved their vibes, and that I was always driving my friends home at the end of a really good night."

-Daniel M. Lavery, Something That May Shock and Discredit You

[adfamiliares]

Daniel Lavery, The Several Mortes D’Arthur

Catullus, Carmina XIV(a)

Ada Limón, The End of Poetry

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

on Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings