But 'Worthy of the Event' is Worthy of Your Attention by Katie Lee Ellison On page 230 of her new book, Worthy of the Event, Vivian Blaxell writes, “steer clear of Suicides.” To that I say, whoopsie daisy! My life has been rife with ’em. Still, this book gripped me and stole my attention. Though Blaxell said that some have worried about her over it, that they hear nihilism in it, to this reader, there is humor, resilience, and a learned fearlessness of death, or perhaps pain (though I didn’t confirm with her). Vivian Blaxell is an academic, a translator of Japanese poetry, a whirling dervish of contradictions that continually surprised me and kept me sharp for our hour-and-a-half conversation, and a trans woman who has always wanted to be “in the world” not just “in the community.” Worthy of the Event shows its resistance to form starting with the subtitle. It's called "an essay," but you could also say it's composed of many essays, or sections. In this series, Blaxell has created a voice that is not her own. The speaker is a character, which she describes later in this interview—a trans woman of her own creation. Yes, reader, here we are again in that spin of genre, never to be found properly notated on the bookstore aisles, and to gorgeous ends.  We learn the meaning of the title of the book when Blaxell describes monks surrounding their teacher, the 16th Gyalwang Karmapa, on his deathbed. “Grief beams on their faces like ten thousand suns in a noonday sky as their leader slips away… They enjoy the event. They are worthy of it.” I sat with these lines a long time, as I made my way slowly and utterly compelled by her nearly 300 pages. Blaxell is brilliant at serving up new perspectives cheekily and constantly, furiously and beautifully, always flipping the angle and point of view.  I spoke to her as she began her book tour in New York City, having traveled from Melbourne, Australia, and she did not disappoint.   The first essay of the book is called “the disappointments” and I wanted to ask you about what's disappointing you lately. That's such a difficult question because mostly I'm disappointed in myself. That's the whole point of that chapter. There's one line in it which says, “I'm afraid of myself and that's logical.” Some people have misconstrued that to mean, I'm afraid of what I might do to myself. Some people think that there's a stream of nihilism running through the entire book, but actually, I'm afraid of disappointing other people. I think I've disappointed a lot of people in my time. I'm concerned about that. I wouldn't do it any other way, but I'm concerned about it.  I don't think I'm ever disappointed in other people. I'm sometimes disappointed in the way that relationships with other people unfold. In a relationship between two people, even between groups, people go in with expectations about the way people are going to behave, what they're going to get out of it, and what service that relationship will provide to them. Rather than what service they will provide in the relationship, and that always seems to end up risking great disappointment at some point. Sometimes it takes years, but it seems inevitable to me.  I've loved lifelong friendships that have vanished over the years, and are still vanishing at this age, people that I've known for 50 years. We disagree on something and decide we're not going to be friends anymore. I do it. I just say, “You're absurd. I can't stand you anymore. Goodbye.” I think the disappointment is just a prologue to something else. Disappointment isn’t an end to anything. Expectation precipitates disappointment. I think that's right. I don't think there's anything wrong with expecting people to behave well, and expecting oneself to behave well, or expecting things to turn out well. I think most people expect. Hope is really a pathetic thing. I have nothing good to say about hope. When something starts appearing on Hallmark greeting cards you know that it's empty.  If we're talking about the difference between expectation and hope, my understanding of a Buddhist approach would be that you cannot will anything, that it would be pointless to try. So my understanding is that hope is expectation without the will. I think that what I take from the message of the Buddha is go ahead and will all you like. But be conscious that that's what you're doing and that it's not you, it's just thoughts, and that your thoughts are not who you are. I think will is necessary, don't you? I don't like this idea that people have about Buddhism and all sorts of things, that people can just float along on the river of life, so to speak, without doing anything. That's not possible. Making a cup of coffee requires an act of will. But hope, it's futile. Hope is hopeless. I don't hope at all. I don't know if I've ever hoped. If I did, I gave it up fairly early, as a child. Not in a dismal way. I just realize that hoping is not an action, it doesn't make anything happen. It's almost the very definition of useless. In that context, hope seems inherently selfish. If my life has proven anything, it's proven you correct. Hope is dopey; it's not going to do anything for you. It could make you feel better. But feeling better is temporary.  How did this book come into existence? At home during Covid, I still needed to teach, because I actually don't have a lot of money, like a lot of trans women my age. I was teaching on Zoom at home, so I had a lot of time to myself.  At the same time, a mainstream literary magazine in Australia had a call out, so I wrote this thing, and they turned it down. An old friend I've known since I was 16, a major Australian poet, called me, and when I told her they rejected it, she asked, “Are you disappointed?” I said, “I'm really disappointed.” And she said, “Write an essay about it.” I said, “I don't want to. I'm an academic. I've done that for so long.” But I sat down and I thought to myself, I'm just going to write it the way I want to write it. I have all this background in philosophy and theory, I had to try and understand disappointment in that way.  That first essay was published really quickly, I think because of the first sentence: “My vagina disappoints me.” I didn't add that until I'd written the essay, and thought, What am I going to do to make sure these people that really don't want to hear from me just can't resist it? Then I met the editor of that journal at a colleague's book launch and he said, “Are you writing a book?” And I said, “That's not your business what I'm doing.”  But later I thought about what the great philosophical issues have been for me, in my life and my work. So the next one that came up was about the cruelty to animals, and immediately all this stuff I already knew about theories of animals and posthumanism came up. I proceeded in that way, and by the time the essay “Nuclear Cats” was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for literature, I already had eight philosophical topics.  Can you talk about Gertrude Stein’s influence on your writing, and your take on the importance and power of repetition? And how did you come to your syntax and your voice?I'm much more interested in form than in content. I don't really give a fuck about the content very much as long as the form is what I want. I wanted the voice to sound like somebody speaking, and without it being quotable direct speech. Gertrude Stein is really the only writer that does prose where it actually sounds like somebody talking, and she does that by repetition. Because when we speak, people repeat isolated words, sometimes more than once and quite close together. And the way [Stein] manages punctuation invokes the speech act in what is, in fact, not quoted prose. It's not dialogue prose. It's just the opposite. Really, it's quite high-flown intellectual prose. I thought this was a way of creating this sort of transsexual voice.  I had to change “the disappointments” a lot from the original to make the voice consistent. I had to go through everything and texturize it really carefully. I wanted it to sound like [the narrator is] speaking directly to you in a quite urgent way, and you can't ignore it. You have to keep up with it even when she does that sort of panning, where everything gets a bit blurry because she's [covering so much] so quickly. Can you speak to that in the context of transition as a craft tool? I was very deliberate. One of the reasons it's written in a lot of short pieces is because that's the only way I could control the connections between all the pieces. Otherwise it would have been too dense, and the short pieces meant I could move them around really easily, reposition them to make this sort of rotation around a central axis, to make it clearer.  What would you call the voice, or the style of this book which is supposedly nonfiction?I have no idea. Call it whatever people call it, whatever they want. I don't care. The only thing that makes me laugh is when people send me messages and stuff saying, “It's so good to see you had such a great relationship with your mother.” I'm like, maybe that narrator had a better relationship with the mother than I had with mine. Can you talk about the lessons you learned from studying poetry, which the narrator talks about in the book?She's actually talking about translation. And what happens when you are required to translate a whole set of Japanese poems by a modern Japanese poet, not classical poetry, and you make the most accurate word-for-word translation, but it's not a poem you end up with at all. I can read Kaneko Mitsuharu's poems, [who uses] a Kanji which is very obscure, and that's part of the pleasure of reading that poem in Japanese. But you can't replicate that. You can't repeat that in a translation. So what do you do? You end up writing a new poem that tries to capture the spirit and the meter. The sense of the original poem. I read poetry quite a lot, but I can't write poetry. I read it because it teaches me something about how to use language. It teaches me how to be lyrical in prose, which is important to me. I like to write about landscape, and poems teach me how to do that better, because I think it's hard in prose to write lyrically.  I wonder about what you would say about the value of putting really unpleasant or gross shit in art. What does that do for us?Maybe it wakes us up. Maybe it makes us aware that we're alive, and that's good. I'm a trans woman, and we're kind of shocking by definition. Certainly in my generation we were. I think I've made clear points in the text, my mother saying, “will Centaurs be next?” It's good to make people feel revolted or disgusted. I read things I'm disgusted by and I see movies that disgust me.  Your lyrical language is stunning and it seems to appear in moments that are absurd or ugly in order to create contrast.It's been my experience that being able to see beauty when other things are really very difficult, has the power to preserve trust. I think there's nothing—apart from kindness, which is a kind of beauty itself—more important than beauty. I'm not talking about people. I think my purpose in juxtapositioning lyrical description close to difficult things was a lesson.  One of the times I was living in Japan, I was invited to a dinner party at Arashiyama, which is a very beautiful area of Kyoto by the river, in the middle of the cherry blossom viewing season, and there was a Rinzai monk who had some seniority there. He and I had to leave together, late at night, because we both were using the same train. We walked across the bridge over the river and there was a huge riverside promenade. Lines and lines and lines of very mature ancient cherry trees. They were all in full blossom in the night. It was very quiet, because all the people that are usually out enjoying themselves were home in bed. He said to me, “How beautiful, how beautiful that is!” And I looked, and I said, “Yes, but look at all the shit they've left behind, these people,” and he said to me, “Look up, Look up.”  I've never forgotten the lesson that he gave me. That was all he said. “Look up, look up!” That's why I write lyrical stuff next to stuff that's not so nice. It's like, “look up, look up, look up.”   Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event is out on LittlePuss Press. ...read more read less