Robert Neuwirth: the 28th notebook

or: 13 things Cal told Susan[*]

annotated by their mutual friend with benefits Lisa[‡]

 

 

Let him who­ is without copyright file the first suit.

–THE BOOK OF DERIVATIVES®

 

 

 

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• I copyrighted the notebooks[3]

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• The 27 notebooks in the closet under the stairs[4]

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• They have my DNA all over them.[5]

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• You didn’t write them. It was more like emotional dictation.[6]

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• I have a new pronoun now.[7]

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• My name’s Calliope. Not Calvin or Khalid. But you can still call me Cal.[8]

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• One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.[9]

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• I haven’t told my Mom yet.[10]

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• It is the individual’s praxis, as the realization of his project, which determines his bonds of reciprocity with everyone. The quality of being a man does not exist as such.[11]

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• Can you explain dick pix? I’m sorry, but I have no one else to ask. I met a guy in a bar and by the time I walked to the bathroom, there was a photo of his penis in my DMs. I mean, really.[12]

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• Lisa, Monica and Yolande are all down with it.[13]

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• My brother’s OK with it, though he told me that now that I’m a woman, if I have sex outside of marriage he’ll have to arrange an honor killing.[14]

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• What’s the deal with blow jobs? I’m kind-of struggling with this, you know, because now that I’m on the other end of the dick, I get to look at the veiny, sweaty, open-holed thing up close, and I just don’t get the appeal.[15]

 

 

 

The free market is a codependent intentional community that lionizes bad intentions as unintentionally good.

–THE BOOK OF DERIVATIVES®

 

[*] The statements I am quoting in this document were acquired illegally. Susan received Cal’s call while at a conference in Connecticut, a state in which it is a crime not to have the consent of all parties to tape a phone conversation. Though she has played me the recording, and I can vouch that the quotes are real (and I am clear that the idea that something might be ‘real’ or ‘not real’ and how that determination might be made is at the root of subjectivity and the germ of many a philosophical food fight), she never asked Cal if it was OK for her to tape it, so she could be charged with illegal wiretapping if the quotes are made public. This is notwithstanding the fact that Cal also taped the conversation and played it for me (legally, because he was at home in New York, which is a state with a one-party consent rule – and Cal clearly self-consented by pressing record). Of course, Cal’s action could be considered implied consent for Susan’s taping in Connecticut, but this has never been litigated, so far as I know, and Susan has no intention of risking her freedom on an untested principle. Which is why she requested that I run this boilerplate pronouncement that she printed in block letters on the gummed 8 ½ x 11 legal pad with grey paper that was one of her notebooks, putting it in ALL CAPS and a funny font so you know it’s super-important: ALL QUOTES CONTAINED HEREIN ARE SPECULATIVE AND PROVISIONAL AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSTRUED TO BE AN EXACT TRANSCRIPTION OF OR TO HAVE ANY DIRECT RELATIONSHIP TO ANYTHING THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN SAID IN ANY PHONE CONVERSATION, ACTUAL OR PURPORTED.

[‡] I want to be nakedly transparent: I am both Cal’s and Susan’s ex. I have known Cal for 23 years. We met when we were both working as nude models to grab some extra cash just after college and had a brief fling – though we continued, for some months after we separated, to hook-up sporadically when we were in the mood. While we were involved, a photographer took naked photos of me for a hundred dollar fee. Later, he wound up exhibiting some of them in the Museum of Modern Art and publishing a book and Cal (who was not photographed because the photographer wasn’t interested in shooting guys) argued that I should sue, despite the waiver I signed, because if a person doesn’t own the copyright to their own image, what the hell do they own, and this despite the photographer’s undeniable skill and his legitimate claim of copyright.

I met Susan while she was leafing through that volume of nudes in a bookstore (the fact that I was in the book made for a good pick-up line, though I found out later, after she was intimately familiar with my body, that she still had no idea which photo was of me because the photographer was more interested in documenting the play of texture and shadow on the body than the body itself.) In fact, Susan met Cal through me, though she and Cal didn’t get together till long after she and I had broken up. And, though Susan and I continued an on-again, off-again sexual thing for several years after we broke up, I haven’t slept with either of them since they started living together (talk about personal ethics–ha!).

I am frontloading this convoluted history here in order to make my biases public: I love them both and tell them to go fuck themselves in equal measure.

[3] I mean, it’s totally like Cal to spit it out like this. Like not to explain, not even to say hello, just to blurt it out, to start things in the middle and force you to catch up, so that you find yourself nodding and saying “OK” and thinking everything’s reasonable, before you realize, just as you’re hanging up, that what you really meant, what you really should have been saying, was “What? Wait. You fucking did what?”

Because, I mean, who the fuck copyrights notebooks anyway? I mean, copyright is the antithesis of notebooks, right? Copyright is heavy. It’s about ownership and dominion and control. Notebooks, by contrast, are light. They’re spontaneous and improvised. Notebooks record things you would never want to be made public, useless things, reprehensible things, like this tidbit, written in red ink in the spiral-bound notebook with the yellow hard cover (Susan has reconstructed all the passages cited in this annotation from memory and told me which notebooks they were in; despite having filed for copyright, Cal will not be able to deny that these excerpts – totaling ¼ or ½ a page at most whereas the notebooks comprise more than 2700 pages – fall under the category of fair use):

FAILED ATTEMPTS AT SUBALTERN PORN

1. She pulled back her veil and put her lips around the fat cock of the West.
2. The guy next to him in the darkened South Asian bar reached over and gave the West a hand job.
3. On Belgravia Road, the mulatto transvestite in stiletto heels hiked up her miniskirt and showed her pubes as the West walked by.
4. The boy on the jam-packed commuter train surreptitiously rubbed the West’s crotch and whispered, “Joe, G I Joe. Come with me. Make love to my ass.”
5. Without taking off her skirt, she pulled aside her panties, impaled herself on the hard prick of the West, and begged him to come inside her.

Note how “the West” is always a guy and always accepting sex – of any kind – as if it is expected and is his right. In his own mind, the white male colonial overseer doesn’t have to do anything to be admired and desired. Veneration is included in his self-identity. The other is always ready, always randy, always horny. This is the insane fantasy life of colonialist white male privilege: he is never violent, never oppressive. Rather, he transmutes his own power into the spurious enthusiasm of others to be violated. His viciousness is fabricated so it can seem a response to the desire of others, making it consensual. Susan’s words here are a critique in the form of fake porn, showing colonialism as the corrupt, bloated, dangerous form of narcissism it really is.

When I told Susan I wanted to quote this section, she tried to talk me out of it. Then she stopped herself and laughed. “No great writing without a history of crap,” she said.

But this brings up a question: does Cal really want to claim credit for this stuff, does he want to be forever known as the author of these five Failed Attempts at Subaltern Porn? Or is this a catch-and-kill operation reminiscent of the one the National Enquirer did for President Trump, designed to prevent Susan from publishing things that might be damaging to Cal?

And here’s another issue: the U.S. Copyright Office does not investigate any claims filed with it. Rather, it presumes that any person who copyrights anything is acting in good faith (whatever “good”and “faith” mean, a dispute worthy of the Gods.) So Cal will be awarded copyright automatically simply for filing, and if Susan is to contest this, if she is to get control of the notebooks ever again, she will have to go to court. And court, with its procession of binaries – plaintiff and defendant, opposing lawyers, exchange of papers, objections sustained and denied, guilt and innocence – is the epitome of a male arena. Indeed, some legal historians have suggested that court is simply rationalized battle (just 200 years ago in England, according to legal scholar Charles Rembar – see chapter 2 of his 1980 book The Law of the Land, available on google books – you could petition the judge for the right to skip all court formalities and try your case in actual battle.) So, in copyrighting the notebooks, Cal is challenging Susan to a kind of duel, a wargame, and in so doing is daring her to change her gender, to become a boy named Sue, to become a man.

Susan, to her credit, doesn’t take the bait. She remains silent and lets Cal do the talking.

[4] This is another way Cal is surreptitiously challenging Susan to become a man.

Susan has no idea how many notebooks she has accumulated over the years. She keeps track by the color of the cover – most are black, but there’s also blue, yellow, red, purple and green; by binding type – most are stitched, but she also uses gummed and spiral; by size – mostly 8 ½ by 11, but also A4, childhood composition book, and chemistry notebook; by paper style – predominantly lined, but also dotted, wide- or narrow-ruled, graph and perforated; and paper color – most of her notebooks feature white paper, but some are cream or green or gray.

You might put it this way: men are interested in amassing, in number, and the details hardly matter to them. Women are interested in process, in the journey, and the sheer number is irrelevant. Counting is male, describing is female. Agglomerating is male, arranging is female.

The other implications in Cal’s statement involve the closet:

• The closet under the stairs is the place where people put unimportant stuff or stuff they can’t throw out or re-gift because someone important gave it to them. For instance, when I was a kid, it was where my parents kept an ugly pink vase that my great aunt – my father’s mother’s sister – gave them. They hated the thing, and kept it stashed away most of the time, but they retrieved it and put it out when Aunt Freddie came to visit. I once came home and Freddie was sitting on the couch in a garish pink dress, making her a matched set with the massive, shocking bowl next to her, and I blurted, “Whoa. What the fuck is that?” Which gave away the game. So much for pretense: we all have a closet under the stairs and we all stand exposed for using it. Here, Cal is implying that the notebooks were detested afterthoughts, ready for the trash, and not the main vehicle of Susan’s creative preoccupations.
• The closet under the stairs is also often a place you have to bend down to get into. In many cases it’s hardly a closet at all, just an unimproved storage area – a place where the final flooring was not installed, so you can see the rough, unimproved subfloor, full of splinters and smelling of dry rot. Leave the odd-shaped Lilliputian door open and you can watch dust motes that have been there since the house was built float on motionless stacks of air. They seem almost stationary, though some of them have adhered to the complex of cobwebs that carpets the underside of the staircase slats. The closet under the stairs might be the place where you stash the vacuum, but it’s also the place you never vacuum. Cal’s implication here seems to be that Susan hardly cared about the notebooks, that they were only collecting dust.
• There’s also the closet as in “in the closet” – a description of forbidden male identity – an allusion, perhaps, to Cal’s implicit challenge to Susan to “man-up” and take charge of her notebooks.

For Susan, however, the closet under the stairs was simply less intimate and public than the other two closets in the duplex apartment they share, one in the entry hall and the other in their upstairs bedroom. Her decision to place them there was that naïve. In other words, as she has written in the gum-bound A4 notebook with dotted cream-colored paper, sometimes a closet is just a closet.

[5] This is gross and super creepy. I don’t even want to think about what Cal’s been doing with the notebooks. I mean, what’s Cal talking about here? Sweat? Splooge? Saliva? It’s just way too palpable. And informing Susan about it this way seems intentionally nasty and cruel. To be fair, though, this description goes hand-in-glove with something Cal told me years ago when we visited his Mom in Hamtramck: when he was a kid, the closet under the stairs was the hidden place where he would go to masturbate.

[6] Talk about sexist. Cal is asserting that Susan was a kind of rote transcription service, simply a vessel into which stuff was injected, all of Cal’s gooey and inchoate outside feelings and fantasies, which she took in and transmuted into words and narratives. Susan readily acknowledges that she and Cal talked a lot about all sorts of subjects, and that she used Cal as a sounding board for many of her imaginings, particularly about sex. But Cal’s image of emotional dictation conceptualizes their conversations in an objectifying power dynamic that apes the abusive mechanics of male power porn. For the man: insert hard penis, make her gag, pull out, squirt; for the woman: open mouth, take squirt, swallow, smile. It also mimics the way in which creative women were only initially allowed to enter the workplace in subordinate positions, as typists and secretaries and archivists.

[7] Vintage Cal. Don’t come out and say it. Wait for Susan to name it. Super passive-aggressive.

By bringing up copyright first, with no warning, Cal coldcocked Susan. And, since Cal hasn’t supplied the specific pronoun, Susan told me she felt as if she was punch-drunk as she tried to figure out what he meant.

Did Cal want to be a woman as a pure identity in the world, recognized by other women – by Susan and me, for example – as a fellow traveler? Did Cal want to be a woman to sleep with men? Did Cal want to be a woman who continues to sleep with women? Or did Cal want to become the idealized woman Susan and I were supposed to be but never were, so that every time Cal masturbates, no matter how that can be accomplished, with a dick or a surgically-made vagina and clitoris, Cal can finally make love to the she he always wanted his companions to be, the she he has now become.

Susan foreshadowed this fuzzy transition in a passage she wrote in the stitched green-striped hardcover A4 notebook: I make this absolute distinction: I am a man with a vagina, not a man with a pussy.

[8] Cal’s father converted the family to Islam when Cal was in high school. Howard transformed himself into Hakim (his new nickname, Hawi, was pronounced the same as the old one, Howie), Calvin into Khalid, Cal’s younger brother James into Jamal (still known as Jamie), and their mother, Mildred, into Melek (she’s the only one whose nickname mutated, taking the long journey from Milly to Meli).

I will not get into a disquisition here on the ways various sects of Islam treat homosexuality or gender dysphoria. Cal’s family is an American family, their tale of reinvention is an American tale, and Cal’s new chapter simply adds a chapter to this American story.

While it’s considerate of Cal to keep the family tradition of choosing a name that retains its customary diminutive, his choice tends to confirm something Susan and I have long wondered about: that many of the famous men who transition into women seem to be seeking an all-purpose idealized femininity which is heralded by what Susan has termed, in the yellow narrow-ruled A4 hardcover “No Stress” composition book she bought in Brazil, bunny dip names. So Bruce becomes Caitlyn and Bradley becomes Chelsea, and now Calvin/Khalid becomes Calliope. No one ever chooses to become Jane or Priscilla or Bertha – because those iconic female names don’t connote the fetishized femme archetype these famous transitioning men seem to be seeking. This is, Susan continues in the notebook, gender as logo, femininity as nametag, identity as soft-core Calvin Klein underwear ad.

Of course, Susan is also aware that this raises an implicit question regarding whether Cal was ever satisfied with her – or me, for that matter, back in the day – because we failed to embody or inhabit this kind of false feminine ideal.

[9] The famous line from Simone de Beauvoir. I am surprised that more trans activists have not turned to The Second Sex in support of their gender transformations. I mean, if a woman becomes a woman as she lives her life, what’s to prevent a man from making the same journey? The idea that chromosomes and testosterone and the social roles we have elaborated to go with them are destiny is preposterous. I mean, Germaine Greer may think so – she’s made some inflammatory comments about men identifying as women who have previously been married and raised children as men not being real women – but she’s a dickhead. Which proves that you don’t have to be male and have a dick to be a dickhead. Talk about gender fluidity. (And, while I’m on the subject, this would be a good time to note the two divergent meanings of the term dickhead, because dickheads, the things in themselves, I know from having dealt with many over the years, are soft and overly sensitive, whereas dickheads, the people in themselves, I know from having dealt with many over the years, are hard and unfeeling.)

At any rate, I told Susan she should come back at Cal with Brillat-Savarin, who de Beauvoir was likely riffing on. He wrote in The Physiology of Taste, “One becomes a cook: one is born a roaster of flesh.” Which seems to fit: Cal has always been good at barbecue but is terrible in the kitchen – and this is unlikely to change, whatever pronoun ultimately emerges.

Beyond all this: I submit that any gender proclamation, any act of publicly acknowledging a sexual identity in the world is related to a claim of copyright, but not in a direct way. Sex – whether in a monogamous long-term relationship or a one-night stand or among friends with benefits is interpersonal. It is an act of communion and community, a commingling of flesh and fluid. Sex as the gender role you choose to inhabit or assume in the world demonstrates a worry about the other – how the other perceives you, engages you, respects you, which implies that you respect, engage and perceive the other. Sex is a relationship. Copyright isn’t. Copyright is an assertion in opposition to everyone else. It may be communally accepted – but only because it carries the force of law with it. It is a coercive self-involved individual declaration. It says: my work is mine, and fuck everybody else.

As Susan put it in the blue-spiral 8 ½ x 11 notebook with the perforated pages: A work is not born yours – which is what copyright suggests – but rather becomes yours as you live your life in increasing accord with its demands. This is what it means to say that you are the author of your own life.

                  You could also say this is true of gender identity.

[10] I’d say this is a clear invitation for Susan to call Meli.

[11] Jean-Paul Sartre, from the Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1. This, of course, is only a more verbose and clumsy way of reiterating de Beauvoir – from the male point of view, which, come to think of it, is always more verbose and clumsier.

Still, there is something significant regarding gender here. Sartre’s “praxis” differs from de Beauvoir’s “becoming” in one essential regard: it is motivated. Thus, Sartre seems to suggest that a man can choose to take on the project of being a man while de Beauvoir seems to imply that a woman doesn’t get any choice other than to be formed into a woman.

Combine this with the fact that dialectical reason is just as binary as any legal proceeding, that thesis and antithesis are no different from guilt and innocence or male and female. Their togetherness is only imminent – dependent on the synthesis emerging. And that synthesis will in due course generate its own antithesis, thus extending the binary eternally. Dialectics – even materialist dialectics – does not create eternal linkage and commonality. It is, rather, a clever attempt to rationalize and institutionalize eternal separation. It also creates a new binary – that of the past and the future – because the meaning of the present can only be established in the future when the synthesis appears, while the truth is always retrospective – located in the future but only capable of being understood by looking back at the thesis and antithesis.

In a sense, then, a couple in a committed relationship plays at faux togetherness while being eternally untethered because their true synthesis can only occur in the future. Which gives intelligibility to the male fantasy binary of being totally involved and totally independent at the same time, one foot in and one foot out.

This may explain why the Western canon of dialectics is full of theatrical asides that, sotto voce, belittle women. Susan copied down a few in the green soft-covered stitched A4 notebook: Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil: Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Søren Kierkegaard, from the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, on the feminine practice of saving the most important thing (if there is anything important in connection with the whole matter) as an afterthought, in a note at the end. (Kierkegaard, of course, could be referring to this annotation.) And W.H. Auden from The Prolific and the Devourer: His penis never fully belongs to a man. I mean, just what does this mean? And would it mean something different to say, “her vagina never fully belongs to a woman.”?

[12] The sad truth is, whether erect or at ease, the penis is preposterous. And dick pix are ridiculous.

But there are a bunch of other important questions here: Do women take and transmit dick pix? Do women who become men automatically start sending dick pix? Did Cal send them when she was a he? Cal certainly never sent any to me (though we were together long before mobile phones with cameras were a thing) but Susan tells me there was one time, early in the relationship, when they were still excited about sleeping with each other, when Cal sent a few to her. Which she confesses she found strange, because the photos were somehow pampering and self-admiring and adoring, and this seemed wrong, because part of the thrill of being in a committed relationship is a monopoly on each other’s objectification – meaning that if Cal was going to enjoy and admire and objectify any body part in a sexual way, Susan wanted it to be a part of her body. Finally, do the people who take dick pix own the copyright to their pix – or do they relinquish their ownership rights once they press send, given that they don’t know how the people they send them to will respond, and that they can assume that almost any phone is at risk of having its contents scraped and intercepted and shared at any moment? I mean, if you’re sending a pic of your dick to someone, someone you may not even know that well, if you love your dick that much, why would you worry about copyright and privacy?

Here’s the point: dick pix pretend to be enticing while being self-admiring and homoerotic. Copyright is of a piece with this narcissism: it is a socially acceptable form of self-love. You contend you’re protecting yourself from anyone pirating your work but in reality you’re worshiping your own work so much that you marry it and register it (in this sense, being paid for your work is like receiving wedding gifts.) Copyright is the dick pic of personal creativity.

[13] It’s important to be clear: Cal told each of us about increasing feelings of gender uncertainty, but said nothing about any plan to copyright the notebooks.

Understandably, Susan feels this distinction is irrelevant. She is pissed that Cal called the three of us before calling her and that none of us reached out to her afterwards. It’s one thing to be blindsided and another to discover that your partner, the one you committed to as the most important presence in your life, has gone to your friends behind your back before talking with you, and that your friends didn’t give you a heads-up. That’s pretty much the dictionary definition of collusion. Susan’s angry at all of us for keeping Cal’s secret and enabling him to retain the copyright in his own sexual identity.

It’s true: we failed Susan. I have apologized to her personally and I hereby apologize publicly.

We are unified on the issue of gender. All of us accept Cal’s gender transition – I mean, if this is what Cal’s true self is, we all say, “You go, girl.” But there’s a limit: just because Cal’s Calliope now doesn’t mean she can simply join in when we all go out for dinner or drinks. The simple truth is that it’s not all that simple.

On the other hand, we are split on the issue of copyright:

— I’m with Susan.

— Monica told me that she never saw Susan write anything, nor did Susan ever show her the notebooks, so she has no idea if Susan wrote anything at all, and cannot be supportive one way or the other.

— And Yolande is backing Cal – though she apparently knows his claim is a lie. She told me she saw Susan writing the notebooks and that Susan read excerpts to her and she is clear that Cal had nothing to do with them. But, Yolande told me, there are things in the notebooks that involve her and, in particular, her propensity to give blow jobs to strange men in bars. So, as a means to prevent those stories from coming out, and to spare herself from having to ask Susan to redact the notebooks – a request she’s sure Susan would refuse (“no shit,” Susan told me) – she prefers that Cal retain the copyright because she thinks he is less likely to publish them.

In sum, Susan was right when she wrote and circled a phrase in the wide-ruled grade school composition book with the red speckled cover: after all our years of suffering and solidarity, we have now proved that Cis-terhood is not so powerful after all.

[14] Cal always had an unfortunate sense of humor and this hasn’t changed with any purported new pronoun. To be fair, though, this sounds exactly like something Jamie would say to cover his discomfort over having to redefine his relationship with his sister-who-used-to-be-a-brother.

[15] It was here that Susan broke her silence.

“Oh, you know how it is, Cal,” she said, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a cocksucker.”

Which was a dickhead thing to say, she knows, but was also super-satisfying and, right after she said it, Cal hung up on her.

When we talked later that evening, Susan was distressed, worried her words had hurt Cal. She asked me to apologize on her behalf. But Cal had a different message. “It’s a killer line,” Cal said. “Tell Susan: if she doesn’t copyright it and put it in the 28^th notebook, I will.”