Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

Poor

& If There Is No Other Way, Long Live the Jugg

Because of the Times

Coping

Caleb Femi is a writer, director, and photographer. He is the author of 

, winner of the 2021 Forward Prize, now coming to U.S. readers via MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

gen-neue-world

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

A Lily Pad on the Muck

Baby-Making on Mars

In the 1990s, astronomy professor Joe Patterson wrote and illustrated a seasonal newsletter, in the style of an old-fashioned paper zine, of astronomical highlights visible from New York City. His affable style mixed wit and history with astronomy for a completely charming, largely undiscovered cult classic: Big Apple Astronomy. For 

, Joe shares current issues of Big Apple Sky Calendar, the guide to sky viewing that used to conclude his seasonal newsletter. Steal a few moments of reprieve from the city’s mayhem to take in these sights. As Oscar Wilde said, “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

January

(1801) On the very first night of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe Piazzi found a slowly moving starlike object, which he assumed to be a comet (at that time, only the planets of antiquity were known). But was it a comet? Maybe not, because it showed no tail or fuzz. Only a few precise observations were obtained before it was lost in the glare of the Sun. Fortunately, a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss—now regarded as the greatest mathematician since Archimedes—became interested in how to derive an orbit from merely three observations. He successfully predicted where it would be when it emerged from the solar glare…and later studies showed that the object moved in a nearly circular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Sort of like an actual planet!

The object was named Ceres, after the Roman god of agriculture. It was the first known asteroid, or “minor planet” (the currently favored term). There are now many thousands known, most quite small and in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroid names have gone berserk. They ran out of Greek and Roman gods a long time ago. For a good time, google “funny asteroid names”—and if you actually 

 an asteroid (plus solve for the orbit), you can even contribute to the madness.

There was another planetary puzzle that dogged astronomers throughout the nineteenth century: the motion of Mercury. It did not exactly obey Newton’s Laws and some astronomers thought there could be another planet, close to the Sun, that was tugging slightly on Mercury. It even got a name: 

(of course). On January 2, 1860, the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced that he had discovered (through calculation) the orbit of Vulcan. But no one ever actually saw it. Le Verrier was wrong. There were scattered claims of seeing the 

of unknown objects crossing in front of the Sun. But none were confirmed, and Mercury’s odd motion wasn’t explained until Einstein’s General Theory (in 1915) showed that the geometry of space in the near vicinity of the Sun is slightly non-Euclidean.

as close as it ever gets to the Sun, just 0.983 AU from the Sun. Amid January’s deep freeze, this may be surprising. But remember that the seasons are caused not by distance, but by the 

 of the Earth’s axis. The variation in distance (0.98 AU in January, versus 1.02 AU in July) is just not enough to make a big difference.

Still, wouldn’t you expect that the maximally close Sun in January and the maximally distant Sun in July would give the northern hemisphere warmer winters and cooler summers? The opposite

is true—the highest recorded temperature on Earth is 134°F (Death Valley) and the lowest is -109°F (Yakutsk, Siberia). Can you guess the reason for the extremes being reached in the North rather than the South?

The anniversary of Galileo’s death, in 1642. Still under house arrest from the Inquisition, Galileo hung on just long enough to get his magnum opus on dynamics (

) smuggled out to Holland, where it could be published. On this precise date three centuries later, another adventurer in space and time was born: Stephen Hawking. Hawking showed that the two bedrock principles of twentieth-century physics—relativity and quantum theory—can actually be reconciled if black holes emit some radiation. It has never been observed, but we’re still looking!

On these four nights in 1610, Galileo turned his telescope on Jupiter… and noticed four stars which moved around Jupiter—the “Galilean satellites,” as we now call them. Or the Medicean Stars, as Galileo called them, in an effort to curry favor with his patron, Cosimo de Medici (a boy of nine). This discovery did a lot to demolish the Ptolemaic model of planetary motions. It had previously been argued: “If the Earth moves, how can it hang onto the Moon?” Well, there was Jupiter up there, obviously moving around 

, and having no difficulty hanging onto its moons.

Before the discovery scene in Bertolt Brecht’s play 

, a curtain appears with the ominous words: “January 10, 1610: Heaven Abolished.”

Last quarter Moon, rising near midnight. Also, Jupiter is at “opposition” tonight—meaning “opposite the Sun, transiting near midnight”… and therefore in a great position for telescopic observation.

 
The Orthodox New Year, which is New Year’s Day on the 

 calendar (as distinct from the modern calendar, which was instituted by Pope Gregory in 1582).

 
Five good overpasses of NYC (or anywhere nearby) by the ISS (International Space Station) occur this month. Here’s the schedule:

Magnitude -3 and -4 means “brighter than any star, and as bright as Venus.” For these ~five-minute apparitions, look first near the WSW horizon. It looks like a plane, except that (a) its light doesn’t flash, and (b) it disappears suddenly in the middle of the eastern sky (as it enters the Earth’s shadow).

The ISS moves at about 18,000 mph, so it travels about 1,500 miles during these quick visions. It’s strange that the station could be mistaken for a plane—yet it is, frequently.

ALL appearances of the ISS start from the west, and end (roughly) in the east.

The waxing crescent Moon passes pretty close to Saturn on these nights. Saturn’s rings are pretty close to edge-on this month, so they won’t present the beautiful view we all love. But if you have a decent telescope and a good southwestern horizon, give it a look. As a consolation prize, look for the brilliant Venus, low in the southwest, an hour after sunset. The medium-bright starlike object next to it is Saturn, as a telescopic look will confirm. But you’ll need a really good southwestern horizon.

First-quarter Moon. Excellent time for telescopic observation—when the mountains and crater walls cast long shadows, as seen from the Earth.

The Moon is next to the Pleiades tonight. Very nice target for observation through binoculars.

Things are getting a little crowded up there. On these nights, the nearly-full Moon is practically on top of Jupiter and the Gemini twins.

February

, as we have come to call it. This is the first of the four “cross-quarter days,” roughly the mid-points of the four seasons. The groundhog connection dates back to an old German legend about the predictive power of badgers. In Christian liturgy, it’s also called Candlemas (candles are lit during services).

BTW, since you’re reading a calendar, it’s a fair guess that you’re interested in such things. If so, indulge yourself, visit 

, read about this day, and find room for a new habit.

The nearly-full Moon is very close tonight to Regulus—the brightest star in Leo and the “backward question mark” of the winter sky.

For observers in NYC, the International Space Station (ISS) will make a pass directly over NYC at precisely 6:37 pm EST tonight. These overpasses are dramatic. You’ll first see it low in the NW, at 6:34 pm. It bears repeating that it may resemble a plane—except that it has no flashing lights and appears to be flying directly over NYC (which only hijacked planes do).

At 6:37, directly overhead, it’s as bright as Venus, and at 6:40 it 

in the SE, even though it’s still 30 degrees from the horizon (only UFOs do this). That’s because it’s entering the Earth’s shadow.

The ISS orbits at ~18,000 mph. When you first see it, it’s roughly over Minnesota. Three minutes later, it’s over NYC. You can see why “landing” this giant structure—a football field in size and requiring 42 visits by astronauts to assemble in orbit—will eventually be a gigantic engineering problem.

Theoretically, these overpasses happen a lot, but only a few are so conveniently placed and timed for NYC. The only other really good one this month occurs the next night, February 4, starting at 5:46 pm. Same progression and duration. A splendid reward for six minutes of observation!

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight.

On this day in 1913, sky-watchers from Saskatchewan to Bermuda saw a great procession of meteors moving rapidly across the sky. There were hundreds, throwing off sparks as they went and maintaining a near-perfect formation. This was probably a tiny comet or asteroid, which happened to strike the Earth’s atmosphere at grazing incidence. It might have dissipated or skipped off the atmosphere, like a flat stone skipping off a pond.

such objects are out there. Our detection methods mainly pick up the larger ones, and those are too few to pose a serious concern. 2021 had a real groaner of a movie about one (

 had some silliness too, but the science was spot-on perfect. A 400-foot tsunami roaring over Columbus Circle is just what you’d get with a deep impact in the ocean!

Galileo’s birthday in 1564. Very nearly the day of Michelangelo’s death (February 18). Perhaps the greatest scientist and artist of the last millennium.

First day of Ramadan, probably. The mullahs in Mecca will be carefully scrutinizing the western sky tonight, to glimpse the thin lunar crescent (just following the New Moon). If they see it, Ramadan starts. But they do have modern calendars, so they might bend the rules a bit to allow for cloudy weather.

On this day in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered a faint moving object beyond Neptune, soon named Pluto, after the ruler of the underworld. It was considered the outermost planet of the solar system, until it was ruthlessly dethroned in 2006. (Basically, it was deemed too small, too distant, and more closely resembling the “dwarf planets” in the debris at large distances from the Sun.)

This decision was massively unpopular among America’s children, partly because of what they had learned in school, and partly because of Pluto the Dog. Astronomers be warned: Don’t mess with Disney characters.

Tonight, the thin crescent Moon gets very close to Mercury in the early-evening sky. It won’t be a barn-burner of a sight, very low in the southwest. I’ve only seen Mercury a few times—and supposedly, even Copernicus never saw it (he relied on Arab observations from earlier centuries). But if you have a clear SW horizon, give it a try! If you see a stationary point of light very near the lunar crescent, that’s Mercury. No telescope needed, of course—only naked-eye observations count. (Maybe binoculars are OK, in a pinch… but get away from any buildings in the southwest!)

Having visited Mercury yesterday, the lunar crescent pays a visit to Saturn in tonight’s early-evening sky. But no big deal—Saturn is on the Moon’s usual menu for monthly visits.

Birthday of Copernicus in 1473. Copernicus is often hailed as marking the great transition from medieval to modern ideas about the universe. But historians of science tell a somewhat different story. He seems to have published his master work, 

, from his deathbed in 1543—probably at the urging of his student, Joachim Rheticus. Perhaps despairing that the master would ever publish the full work, Rheticus pre-published his own version in 1540 (

Ironically (in view of what happened to later advocates of heliocentrism), Pope Paul III expressed interest in the idea, while Martin Luther called Copernicus “a damn fool.”

Tonight, the Moon is just north of that famous “Pleiades” star cluster—otherwise known as the Seven Sisters. Great sight in binoculars!

On February 27, 40–60 minutes before sunrise, look low in the southeast for a thin waning crescent Moon. Above it is Mars, and above Mars is the brilliant Venus. On the morning of the 26th, the planets are in pretty much the same place, but the Moon is to the

 (as you view it) of the Mars-Venus pair.

You’ll need a good horizon and clear sky (but not crazy-good and crazy-clear) to see these.

March

The 50th anniversary of the launch of Pioneer 10, humanity’s most ambitious venture out of our home solar system. The spacecraft was designed to study Jupiter (which it did in 1973), but then went sailing past Neptune—into what you might call “interstellar space.” It’s still there, coasting along at 51,000 mph in the direction of the bright star Aldebaran. It’ll arrive—well, get close, anyway—in a mere two million years. It bears a plaque showing who sent it (a man and a woman), where it came from (third planet from a star), and even a suggestion for what frequency to use in sending a return radio message (1420 MHz, the “song of interstellar hydrogen”).

Seems unlikely the Aldebaranites will figure all that out, but it’s worth a try—assuming, of course, that Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson don’t mount a recovery mission to add Pioneer 10 to their private collections.

Full Moon and a total lunar eclipse, because the Moon is now exactly opposite the Sun. Unfortunately for most of us North Americans, it occurs slightly too late at night to be easily visible. It’s mainly a Pacific Ocean affair. On the west coast of North America, you can see most of it if you have a clear view to the west. Mid-eclipse is at 6:34 am EST, so folks in eastern USA will see only the beginning—and even then, they'll need a very clear view down to the western horizon to see the Moon at all.

The date of the semi-annual rip in the fabric of time, scheduled for 2 am EST on Sunday, March 8 (“spring ahead, fall back”). It’ll go into effect just about everywhere in the U.S., except sunny Hawaii and Arizona, where they presumably don't need any help saving daylight.

Last quarter Moon, rising around midnight (1 am EDT).

The anniversary of the discovery of Uranus—the first planet to join the planets of antiquity—by William Herschel in 1781. Uranus was the father of Saturn and the grandfather of Jupiter; William was the brother of Caroline Herschel and the father of John Herschel—famous astronomers all! Although the discovery date is credited as March 13, the object was sighted and catalogued as a star many times previously. On March 13, Herschel realized that it changed positions in the sky, and he therefore classified it as a comet. (Since all

were known in antiquity, the idea of “discovering” a new planet was just too weird to contemplate.) After tracking it for two more years, he realized that it had no tail, and orbited in a near circle outside the orbit of Saturn. QED: PLANET. Herschel wanted to call it Sidus Georgium (Star of George) to curry favor with the English monarch. But Americans will recall that during 1781–3, George III had to deal with issues more serious than planets.

Also the exact anniversary of the 1986 flyby (within 600 miles) of Halley's Comet by the European spacecraft Giotto, which snapped some amazing photos

The original Giotto painted a famous fresco, 

, likely in the year 1320. In it, the Star of Bethlehem is represented as a comet, and we know that Comet Halley visited the inner solar system in 1301. Had old Giotto been around for Halley's 1986 visitation, he would surely have painted the comet in the background of Bill Buckner's famous error to “win” the World Series for the New York Mets.

Prof. Joe Patterson is a professor of Astronomy at Columbia University, an observational astronomer, and a baseball enthusiast. (He was also our editor-in-chief’s first astronomy professor.)

sci-ameliapro

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

Miranda July: Circle Jerks

Is a River Alive?

Scientific Controversies: Deep Thoughts of Artificial Minds

A Thousand Julys

Toward a Maternal Gaze

Garth Greenwell Is Too Much

Picture This: Adinkras

Compatible Perversities: Maggie Nelson

Lunar Time

Scale

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

Marshall Allen's Infinite Voyage

Best of Broadcast 2025

 memorably opens with a scene of feral vulnerability: I love you—the words, Maggie Nelson writes, “come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had 

 by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? 

 you asked, then stuck around for an answer.”

A few days later she sends Harry Dodge—of the aforementioned you, an artist and Nelson’s now long-term partner—a passage from Roland Barthes comparing the Argo, whose parts are replaced while the ship’s name remains the same, to the nature of love’s expression over time. By mid-book, Nelson is pregnant and Dodge is taking T and getting top surgery. About their changing bodies, she writes, “On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”

With its shrewd integration of memoir and theory, maternity and queerness, since its publication in 2015 

 has brought new life and new audiences to autotheory—a term used since the ’90s to describe work, with early innovations in women of color feminist writing, that combines autobiography and embodied subjectivity with theory and philosophy. Nelson's book feels exemplary while defying classification. 

 tells the story of many forms of love, wrestled with and renewed with hot abandon and scrupulousness. In her writing before and since, Nelson has taken up subjects as specific and wide-ranging as the color blue, freedom, love, cruelty, chronic pain, and profusion with her distinctive sensibility: a thoroughness of thought that seeks to see beyond the options first presented, often leading her and her readers to different, more interesting questions.

With creative precision, poetry (how she came up) meets form (how she creates the container each book calls for). Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that “the test of a book (to a writer) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say.” Nelson’s various, and very different, projects are a testament to this observation, and to another made by her teacher Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “In every language the loveliest question / is, You can say that?” Describing the nominative of the theory she helped pioneer, Sedgwick called queer “a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, 

. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” A “perpetual excitement,” Nelson adds, like the Argo; like love naming itself, again and again.

Nelson meets this difficult flux unlike any other. Her friend and teacher Wayne Koestenbaum has described her style as “bathing in the light that comes from irresolvability.” Or, as Nelson puts it in 

, relating Barthes and Sedgwick, hers is a presence to writing and thinking that “demands an attentiveness—a relentlessness, even—whose very rigor tips it into ardor.”

Lucy McKeon

—how does it feel for the book to be a decade old? It’s been so influential in conversations about autotheory (you’ve said you stole the term from Paul B. Preciado’s 

), genre, and formal experimentation. It’s become a classic in queer and feminist circles. I wonder how you feel 10 years and many books later about this important work of yours.

Maggie Nelson

In some ways 10 years doesn’t feel like that long, though it is a while. I think I probably don’t see its influence as much as people on the outside do. What you just described, I was like, 

. I think I don’t quite know that exactly, but I know the tremendous unexpected journey that the whole thing took me on. It was my ninth book, or something like that. I was happy enough going along publishing books, so I wasn’t really thinking that this book would be any different in terms of its reception in the world. I’m really grateful.

With any book, you do the best you can do with the project you’ve set for yourself, and then either it has a greater sum of its parts or it doesn’t. And it’s been super happy-making to be like, 

Wow, I don’t think all of this would be happening if the book weren’t somehow greater than the sum of its parts

. I’ve recently had conversations about its international reach, doing book events in other countries, seeing translations, and hearing stories of passages read at weddings. That it’s been meaningful to other people—it’s something I never imagined.

When I think about the moment that the book was written compared to the political moment we’re in right now, that’s super dismal. I don’t know what you could say was expected or unexpected, but certainly it’s not the queer conversation, 

What will we do when we get all these rights and we lose our pervy hearts?

I did want to ask about that, the moment of writing versus now. In the book you and Harry get married just as Prop 8 passes, and in 2015, the year it came out, the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal nationwide. 

 famously troubles the line between the so-called radical and the so-called normative, and, as you say, we’re in a very different moment now. But it still feels as important to trouble that line, if maybe for some different reasons and some similar ones but in a different context.

There’s a kind of normcore reading of the book that could be like, 

Oh, we’re just like you, we’re making family and experiencing love and care, why can’t we all live together?

 But I think that to me, both when I wrote it and today, I see a different discourse. Which is what someone like Judith Butler has been reminding us all along—that it’s not any particular identities that we’re necessarily fighting for, but it’s against the forces that would discipline and punish people for wanting to live their lives however they choose to live them. Whether that means the life of a householder or a radical childless queer. The book’s last line, which ends with something like, “ablaze with our care, its ongoing song”—that care and that song are so fungible. In that sense, it doesn’t feel to me outmoded in the least.

Maybe it’s the feeling that this refusal to discipline difference is even more important when codifying identity seems like the main event, whether in opposition or protection. You mention Butler. The work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, so present throughout the book, also feels relevant.

I think all the time about what Eve would’ve thought about this moment we’re in, especially because she was facing the very oppressive right-wing of the AIDS era and of the discipline and vitriol that met queer studies at its inception. She wrote really eloquently about all that [in her collection 

, especially her essay “Queer and Now"]. I think people my age have been thinking a lot about that time and what habits or strategies we can learn from it, what we’re facing now and how it feels different. Rather than the kind of homicidal neglect of that era, now there’s more of a sadistic reaching into the communities themselves, or the zealots they have going through all the different language used in gender studies departments. I’m like, 

Wow, you guys know more about this field than I do

Your writing is rightly praised for its precision, but it’s also often so funny. There are humorous moments in 

, which is better known for its other qualities. In 

 earlier this year, the narrator relays her dreams:

“I see a text this person has sent him—it’s very touchy-feely, jargon-filled—I think it’s beneath him.
Yet it’s so different from me, I can see its allure.
H says something about her ability to brainstorm. And I think to myself, I will never 'brainstorm,' I’ll keep my ideas private until the last minute, I will never be what you desire.”

This makes me laugh and internally cringe (with recognition?) in part because it holds within it such a range of complex feelings, and I wanted to ask how you think about humor in your writing, and even specifically in writing about love and sex.

Well, that’s really nice. I try to amuse myself. And I was also interested, especially in 

 where I’m writing about chronic pain, in a tone or a sound that was not melancholic through and through, but that actually had the theater of the absurd attending to it.

I had a lot of fun writing that book and working with my dreams. Part of what I liked about it is that I might wake up feeling really sad, like, 

I’ll never brainstorm. I’ll never be what you want

. And then when I would look back on the file later, all my dreams just struck me as idiotically funny. In part it’s transparency, their anxieties and the details.

Secrets, what’s said and what’s not said, and how that can be both the grounds for great tragedy and also often the grounds for great comedy, is an interest of mine. What people know and don’t know about themselves or about others.

The medicalized scenarios are also encounters with who knows and doesn’t know: Does the patient know anything about herself? Does the other person know? It’s kind of funny, but also kind of tragic, because what if they do know and you don’t know? What it means to have a face, in a metaphorical and real sense, and to expose it to other people; what they can see about you and what they can’t—it’s the condition of all of our connection. And because of that, it’s also totally anxiety-producing.

Exactly. It feels like you’re describing the act of writing, too.

“I will keep my thoughts private to the last minute” is kind of a description of my writing process. It’s as if the character in the dream doesn’t know that she keeps making things public. She’s like, 

 in this text that’s not very private. You know what I mean? So again there’s this question of what she knows or doesn’t know about herself.

I think perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change. The book is about the thrill of finding something in the moment, but also knowing that a moment is one moment.

There are many different stories of love and care in 

—about Harry, about your stepson, about your baby and the erotics of the baby-mother relationship. About your own actual mother, as well as the “many-gendered mothers of my heart,” a kind of intellectual family whose words are interwoven with your own using Barthes-inspired marginal citations. And then, your thinking about language and expression feels like a central labor of love, too.

You’ve spoken about the kind of party you can create with a book by bringing together the voices of people you admire and love, and in 

in particular it feels almost musical or compositional, this collective subjectivity. I know you think a lot about form, and projects finding their right forms, and I’m curious what this form allowed you. I’m also particularly interested in the teacher-mentor/student-mentee relationship, which runs throughout your work—Christina Crosby being one such important and recurring figure.

I have a friend, Michael Snediker, who wrote this book called 

 that I really liked. After all this queer [theory about] shame and negative affect, I think he was taking up this question: Is it possible to find happiness interesting? That was kind of the theoretical undercurrent of 

. There are certain relationships, mother and child is one, teacher-student might be another, where there may be some kind of light shame blanket over them because it was [assumed that they were] just not interesting.

Sedgwick taught a class I took called Non-Oedipal Models of Psychology, and the family romance is obviously a nuclear family. The question of her class was, around the birth of psychoanalysis, what were some of the competing paradigms that might’ve taken hold instead? In 

, I wanted to put it all together: friends, people that you read, adopted family, blood relations. I didn’t really want it to be one or the other. This notion of the many-gendered mothers [from poet Dana Ward] was something that helped me do that. Cruising for intellectual mothers without quite knowing what I was doing. I don’t think I was looking for mommies, but I was looking for something nourishing that maybe wasn’t maternal, or at least not in a strict sense. I was interested in staging all of that in the book. With the marginal citations, I did really think of it as a party. All these people were helping me think this through. I wanted the book to have some sense of the rush of novelty, when you’re experiencing something you’ve never experienced before, like having a kid, but you're also relying on all the people who’ve thought about a lot of these things, who are there to help.

Okay. I think we need to talk about compatible perversities.

There’s of course the sex. (“You pretend to use me, make a theater of heeding only your pleasure while making sure I find mine… No matter what we do, it always feels dirty without feeling lousy.”) I also appreciate how you use the phrase as a kind of framework for how different peoples’ intellectual or political styles are compatible or not. It feels like a useful way of understanding something about how we meet and miss one another.

It’s funny because when you started off asking about a decade hence, one thing the book was kind of on to, but that can get lost sometimes, is this conversation about how we [both Harry and I] were aging—moving from transition or pregnancy or hormones, whatever, to putting an emphasis on change and time. All of which is to say that I think perversities can be compatible, but then perversities are not static. We all change. The book is about the thrill of finding something in the moment, but also knowing that a moment is one moment. And then, because we all contain multitudes, what next?

I’ve always been interested in Gayle Rubin and other thinkers who ask why—beyond all kinds of repressive and puritanical histories—do we respond to other people’s preferences either with repulsion or a desire to repress or reign in or make illegal? It’s very unfashionable, I know, and I kind of grappled with this in 

—I’ve heard it described in a dismissive way as the kind of pro-sex amoral lens that I grew up with and really responded to, that people now say is this libertarian ethos at its most extreme—but I still maintain, there’s much to be found in this space of using the language of compatible perversities.

, I have this one essay on the artist Matthew Barney, where I needed to go through the whole etymology of the word “perversion” and really describe what it means and how it is different from “transgression” or “subversion.”

 is your collection of conversations and essays with and about artists and writers, some of them old friends like Eileen Myles. Its title refers to Hilton Als: “Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love.” It’s another kind of party.

Our diagnosis is similar but our perversities aren’t compatible

, about a political group that leans heavily on “comrade”-ing one another.

I think we’ve all had experiences of our perversities not being compatible with someone’s, and the kind of judgment that can rain down on that. And sometimes our perversities are compatible, but they don’t bring out the best in each other. So it’s a complicated brew.

I’m teaching a whole class on Roland Barthes this year, and I’ve been reading a lot of him in preparation. He wasn’t apolitical, but he was more analytical about politics than he was politically committed. His perversities were not compatible with bellicose language from the right or the left (Sartre and this idea of politically committed literature, the Marxist vogue and its effect on French letters). It was really not his jam. And it’s very interesting to read his analysis of that.

There’s a lot of conversation right now about what kind of new left might be born out of this insane moment. Not everyone’s styles have to be the same. What seems important is finding a container that can hold enough stylistic offshoots in a plurality so that people can feel like they’re a part of something without having to sign onto a mode of expression that feels alienating to them.

I don’t think I was looking for mommies, but I was looking for something nourishing that maybe wasn’t maternal.

And this goes back to not disciplining difference.

Totally. It’s a cliché, but we need forms of solidarity that people can feel at home being a part of. And that means we might not agree with each other. Our perversities might not always be compatible. But you have to be able to tolerate that without expelling people from the tent.

Barthes’s mantra was “pluralize, refine, continuously,” which was something that Sedgwick took up too: “pluralize and specify.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot more seriously. It is a task of writing—there’s something in the spirit of the thing that wants to be pluralized, a lot of doors for different kinds of readers to enter through, but it has to be specific to your own experience. A few years after 

Why isn’t it about this? And why isn’t it about that? And where is this experience here?

 I think that’s kind of a mistake, that politically invested readers or academic readers often have this imagined ur-text that could hold everything. But that’s not quite how it works. Art is specified. But I think at its best many people can find their ways in.

I wanted to return to the chapter on sex from 

 (the other chapters deal with art, drugs, and climate). There are many layers of history and thinking going on in this chapter, so those curious should read it, but for our brief purposes here, I wondered if you’d be willing to say more about your own interest in staying close to questions of subjectivity and agency, even—or especially—while considering structural or external forces.

I’m still kind of hoping that chapter on sex has its day in a different time. It feels like one of the chapters that has been most reduced to me [in responses to it]—as you say, there is a lot going on—but that didn’t surprise me. There isn’t a sexual agency some young woman’s going to find that isn’t constructed around the dangers that exist. However, the Foucauldian in me was also trying to point out throughout the book that there’s never Freedom, there are degrees of freedom.

I recently had a conversation with Shon Faye about her book 

Whatever happens with this book, I wrote a book in which a trans woman is the protagonist of her sex life story

. She’s not someone done unto, she’s not a victim of everything that happens, she is the protagonist of this story. And it kind of moves the world, but it does come at a cost. And part of the cost is you never do it totally right. And it can literally be used against you. What I was trying to get at [in the chapter] is that price—which is so hard to pay, whether or not you publish about it or just live it—is in becoming a sexual subject who’s not absented.

I don’t mean you’re responsible for everything that happens to you, a protagonist can suffer or she can be bewildered or bad things can happen. But she’s not absented by a system that wishes her no agency. And that really is meaningful to me. I was trying in that chapter to construct an archive of writers across various feminist and queer discourses who had taught me what that sounds like. But again, it’s not for everybody.

In your chapter on drugs, you draw out the tensions between choice and compulsion, particularly in literature about addiction.

I’m really interested in these questions and paradoxes about choice and compulsion and chance, maybe, as the third leg of that stool.

I follow all the debates about heteropessimism or heteronihilism. It’s interesting because, again, there’s so much going on—you read articles about these guys watching all this porn and trying to do crazy shit to their partners that they don’t want to do. But also, if you come from a sexually perverted community, reading article after article about the horrors of anal sex, the horrors of choking, you can see how easily they bleed into this kind of feminism-never-gave-us-anything-good narrative: 

Now we’re just triply unsatisfied because the workplace wasn’t good, our sex lives aren’t good

. The problem is there aren’t enough people in mainstream rags, 

 or whatever, who are willing to take on the need for—what’s Gayle Rubin’s phrase?—“benign sexual variation.” There’s no conversation that there could be a benignity to any of these practices. It really bothers me. There’s just this kind of relentless doxa of what meaning is already a given, about what’s humiliating and what’s dangerous. I read these things and I think, 

Wow, anybody who’s reading this who likes to do this or is figuring out something about what they like just feels doubly shamed now. 

And that creates more self-hatred and more taboo, and more of the things that disallow sexual subjectivity.

It’s a cliché, but we need forms of solidarity that people can feel at home being a part of. And that means we might not agree with each other. Our perversities might not always be compatible.

Adding to all the Sedgwick we’ve already discussed and that lives so lovingly in 

, at one point in the book you’re reading 

, her account in haibun—prose plus haiku—plus her therapist Shannon’s notes, of her treatment and relationship with him. I wondered about your interest in the psychoanalytic or therapeutic relationship.

The inception of my serious interest in literature had to do with psychoanalysis and the scene of reading as an invitation to the activities of both interpretation and transference. I think from the very start they were paired activities to me. Basically, as a reader, are you the analyst of the text or are you the patient of the text? Your reaction to it, the transference, is going to tell you something about yourself or about the world. That’s always been really alive for me.

In our very highly therapized age, I have a lot of curiosities and some phobias about the role the therapeutic has in a text. I’m wary because I see therapeutic language in writing that acts as a deadener. We’re in this great golden age of diagnosis. We’re in an acronym-bedazzled space. And yet we’re all noticing that the more diagnostics and acronyms are not corresponding to a better life for a lot of us. Ben Lerner has a new book coming out called 

 that takes on that gap, which I think is super interesting.

In three places I can think of in my writing, I’ve let myself have a therapist speak. In 

, I kind of rehearse my feelings about it when I get an assignment from a therapist to write a letter from my dead father (

 But then the joke was that letter ends up as a kind of climax to the book.

So many people are in a care crisis, seeking help wherever they can find it. With 

 I felt like, how California am I going to let this book get? How many acupuncturists, how many gurus? I was thinking about Hervé Guibert’s book 

. He is on a quest to not die of AIDS, and he’s talking to everybody under the sun about it. I found myself noticing that every age has its search for healers, and it sounds different at different times.

, about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift, you investigate their shared and diverging forms and technologies, and explore fame, lyric, and why people hate women who pour and pour forth with their life-art. There’s this great part where you anatomize the new disguise donned each decade by vitriol against personal art made by women—let me just quote you:

What Day Isn’t a Headlock?

A Lily Pad on the Muck

Baby-Making on Mars

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Big Apple Sky Calendar: January, February, March 2026

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

Maggie Nelson: Compatible Perversities

The Most Daily Feeling

The Most Daily Feeling

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

13 Ways of Looking: Heather McCalden

Miranda July: Circle Jerks

EMEL | Pioneer Live

Issue 03, Available Now

Death Poems from Eileen Myles

When Baseball Threw Physics a Curve