When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took her seat on the Supreme Court bench on August 10, 1993, she became the second female to serve on the country’s highest court, joining Justice Sandra Day O’Connor(nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981). In the court’s group portrait from RBG’s first term, the nine justices, posed in front of red velvet curtains, wear flowing black judicial robes. The uniform is a simple but powerful symbol: concealing the individual’s body, it conveys impartiality and the somber, collective responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor flank the seven male justices.

There isn’t a dress code for Supreme Court justices—the black robe has been worn over the years out of tradition. For the seven male justices in this 1993 court photograph, the white button-down shirt collars and ties (and one cheerful bow tie) are distinguishing fashion choices. RBG and Justice O’Connor, meanwhile, set themselves apart from their male colleagues, each adorning their uniform with a traditional white jabot—a a frill of lace or other type of fabric fastened at the neck and worn over the front of a shirt or robe.

Their colleagues overseas inspired this sartorial accent—barristers in England have long worn jabots, along with gowns and wigs, as part of their customary courtroom attire. French magistrates wear jabots as well, known there as rabats. Lace was considered a marker of wealth and status, not gender, from its origins until the late eighteenth century, and lace neckpieces, such as jabots and rabats, were traditionally worn by men.

It is worth noting that although Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg accessorized their robes with jabots and collars that were seen as feminine in our time, they were appropriating what was once a symbol of masculine power. Purchasing jabots in the United States, though, proved challenging: “Nobody in those days made judicial white collars for women,” Justice O’Connor remembered. “I discovered that the only places you could get them would be in England or France.”

Their decision to feminize a traditionally male uniform was a radical one. By wearing these decorative accessories, both Justices O’Connor and Ginsburg communicated that a woman could be both intellectually rigorous and feminine. “[Ginsburg’s] collars re-inject the concept of ‘body’ into the disembodying judicial robe,” notes author Rhonda Garelick, “signaling not only the presence of a woman, but by extension, the presence of a biological human body—which demands acknowledgment and consideration.”

This jabot, although more decorative, is reminiscent of the one RBG wore in that first group photograph and in her earlier years on the Supreme Court. The lace collar—with its modern rounded flower petals, leaves, and scrolls—offsets the formality of the crisp, pleated form. Over the years, RBG’s collection of neckpieces expanded considerably in number and style, from classic white jabots like this one to intricate lace pieces to vibrant beaded collars. She acquired some in her travels, and cherished those gifted to her by colleagues, artists, and fans from all over the world.

*

“This is my dissenting collar,” RBG told Katie Couric in a 2014 interview, referring to a limited-edition glass stone necklace with a velvet tie. “It looks fitting for dissent.” Justice Ginsburg received the neckpiece, made by Banana Republic, in a gift bag when she accepted a lifetime achievement award in 2012 at Glamour Magazine’s annual Women of the Year ceremony. A few years later, in an interview with Jane Pauley, RBG elaborated—but just a bit: “This is my dissenting collar. It’s black and grim.”

Justice Ginsburg was known for writing precise and forceful dissents when she disagreed with the majority ruling. “When a justice is of the firm view that the majority got it wrong, she is free to say so in dissent,” she wrote in a 2016 op-ed in the New York Times. “I take advantage of that prerogative, when I think it important, as do my colleagues.”

Dissents become part of case law alongside their majority opinions, and can be referenced in future cases. In the words of an earlier chief justice of the Supreme Court, Charles Evan Hughes, often quoted by RBG, dissents are meant to appeal “to the intelligence of a future day.” RBG’s reading of her incisive dissents from the bench increased with frequency over the years, which she attributed to the ever more conservative makeup of the court: “After 2006, the sight of the tiny black-robed justice rising from the bench wearing her ‘black and grim’ dissenting collar and clutching her papers became a familiar sight,” wrote biographer Jane Sherron De Hart. Ginsburg drafted a hundred and fifteen dissents for the Supreme Court—between her first, in 1994, and her last, in 2020. “Every time I write a dissent,” she told Bill Moyers in her last interview, “hope springs eternal.”

In 2007, when she was the sole female on the Supreme Court—Justice O’Connor had retired the previous year—RBG delivered a sharp dissent in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. In response to the Supreme Court’s ruling in a 5–4 decision that an employee cannot sue for pay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unless she brings her claim within a hundred and eighty days of her employer’s discriminatory pay decision, she countered with these words: “Four members of this Court, Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, and I, dissent from today’s decision. In our view, the Court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.”

She appealed to Congress to correct the mistake made by her colleagues, and two years later Congress followed through, passing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed in office—a copy of which RBG framed and hung in her chambers.

She wrote another forceful dissent for the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, in which the majority struck down a key section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, deeming it unconstitutional. RBG did not mince words: “Hubris is a fit word for today’s demolition of the VRA [Voting Rights Act].” Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, certain jurisdictions with a history of discrimination were required to submit any redistricting plans to the US Department of Justice for preclearance before they could make changes to voting procedures; this was the key section at play.

Toward the end of her dissent, which was joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, Ginsburg offered this analogy to explain why eliminating the need for preclearance was senseless and shortsighted: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

According to her biographer De Hart, when RBG read the dissent aloud, she quoted Martin Luther King Jr. His words are not included in the written dissent: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But she clarified that it could only bend toward justice “if there is a steadfast commitment to see the task through to completion,” ending with “That commitment has been disserved by today’s decision.”

In 2014, she wrote and delivered another eviscerating dissent in response to the Supreme Court’s 5–4 ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. The ruling asserted that a corporation cannot be forced to provide its employees with insurance coverage for contraception when doing so violates the corporation’s religious beliefs. The decision effectively imposed the company’s religious views on its employees. RBG explained that the employers and all who share their beliefs may decline to acquire for themselves the contraceptives in question. But that choice may not be imposed on employees who hold other beliefs. Working for Hobby Lobby…in other words, should not deprive employees of the preventive care available to workers at the shop next door.

She wore the dissent collar in the courtroom but also on significant occasions off the bench, including the day following Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Banana Republic reissued the piece in 2019 for a limited time, now called the Notorious Necklace, donating fifty percent of the proceeds to the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project, which Justice Ginsburg cofounded in 1972. The company reissued it again in 2020, as a tribute to the late justice, this time donating the proceeds until the end of that year, up to a half million dollars, to the International Center for Research on Women.

“Justice Ginsburg’s dissents were not cries of defeat,” Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt reminded mourners when she eulogized RBG in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. “They were blueprints for the future.”

*

This white beaded collar from Cape Town, South Africa, was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite. Among a variety of milestone moments, she wore it to President Obama’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2009; for his State of the Union, in 2010, when he described the country’s “deficit of trust” in the government and the imperative of fixing it; in 2011, after the Democrats had lost control of the House a few months earlier; in 2012, as Obama geared up for the fall election; and for Pope Francis’s address to the joint session of Congress in 2015—the first time a pope addressed Congress.

It was also the collar she chose to wear for various court group photographs, for her own portrait that hangs in the Supreme Court, for her 2015 portrait as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people, and for Nelson Shanks’s 2012 portrait The Four Justices. Shanks’s epic, large-scale oil painting depicts the four female justices who had served on the US Supreme Court since 1981—Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.

“After Sandra left, I felt very lonely,” Justice Ginsburg remembered, and it was the wrong image for the schoolchildren, particularly, to come in and see this bench with eight men and one very small woman. Now, I sit toward the center by virtue of seniority and Justice Kagan is on my left, and Justice Sotomayor is at my right. We look like we are all over the bench. We are here to stay.

It is fitting that her favorite collar is from South Africa: she had great reverence for the constitution of the Republic of South Africa, ratified in 1996, which she described as “a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights” with an “independent judiciary.”

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Excerpted from the book The Collars of RBG: A Portrait of Justice by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Copyright © 2023 by Elinor Carucci and Sara Bader. Photographs copyright © by Elinor Carucci unless otherwise noted. Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

I make a martini, Gordon’s or Barr Hill, every night at seven with, in my mind at least, a matador’s formality. I use dense, square ice cubes. Like the pop of a cork exiting a bottle, a martini’s being shaken is one of civilization’s indispensable sounds. The martini is the only American invention, Mencken wrote, as perfect as a sonnet.

I like my martinis shaken rather than stirred because they seem colder and because the ice crystals that swim briefly on the surface are ethereal. I also like mine extremely dry. I was pleased to read, in the 2018 Times obituary of Tommy Rowles, the longtime bartender at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel, that his secret was to omit vermouth entirely. “A bottle of vermouth,” he said, “you should just open it and look at it.” Modern cocktail orthodoxy is not kind to me, or to Tommy. Stirring, these days, is in, and vermouth is poured with a heavy hand. T. S. Eliot would not have minded. He was a vermouth man, so much so that he named one of his cats Noilly Prat, after his favorite brand. When I do add vermouth I apply Hemingway’s formula, 15:1, in honor of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, who liked gin to outnumber vermouth in the same ratio he wanted to outnumber opponents in battle. The toast I make, with whoever is present, is usually the one I learned from the late Caroline Herron, a former editor at the Times Book Review: “To the confusion of our enemies.” The toast Jack Nicholson makes in Easy Rider—“To old D. H. Lawrence”—isn’t bad, either.

“The world and its martinis are mine!” Patricia Highsmith exclaimed in her diaries. Martinis inspire this sort of enthusiasm. Frederick Seidel, in his poem “At Gracie Mansion,” refers to an ice-cold martini as a “see-through on a stem.” The poet Richard Wilbur liked to add “fennel juice and foliage” to his. I’d like to be like Eloise, in the children’s book by Kay Thompson, and keep a bottle of gin in my bedroom. If you want to go broke quickly rather than slowly, drink your martinis outside the house.

Occasionally I’ll mix a vodka martini, recalling that Langston Hughes appeared in a Smirnoff advertisement. Vodka martinis flush out the snobs, who don’t consider them martinis at all. Roger Angell, whose New Yorker essay “Dry Martini” is the best thing I’ve read on the subject, admitted that he and his wife moved from gin to vodka because vodka was “less argumentative.” The best paean to the vodka martini appears in Lawrence Osborne’s amazing book The Wet and the Dry, which is about trying to get a drink in countries where to do so is against the law. Osborne decides that, with its olive, his vodka martini tastes like “cold seawater at the bottom of an oyster.”

Don’t get all excited, as did Kenneth Tynan, and try to take your vodka martini rectally. Tynan had read, in Alan Watts’s autobiography, that this was a good idea. Tynan had his girlfriend inject the contents of a large wineglass of vodka, via an enema tube, into his rectum. “Within ten minutes the agony is indescribable,” he wrote in his diary. His anus became “tightly compressed” and blood seeped from it. It took three days for the pain to abate. “Oh, the perils of hedonism!” he wrote.

I make my first drink on the late side because I like it too much. I also want to prolong the anticipation. Alcohol is, as Benjamin Franklin noticed, constant proof that God loves us. I drink more than most people but less than some. I don’t have an especially big tank; my tolerance is not Homeric. But almost nightly I drink two martinis and, with dinner, a glass or two of wine, without negative effects in the morning. If I have that third glass of wine, my morning at the desk becomes an afternoon at the desk.

Drinking alone doesn’t depress me, the way it does some people. Franklin didn’t recommend it. “He that drinks his cider alone, let him catch his horse alone,” he wrote. But Christopher Hitchens said that solo drinks “can be the happiest glasses you ever drain,” and Norman Mailer, in his novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance, praised what he called “that impregnable hauteur which is, perhaps, the most satisfying aspect of solitary drinking.” When alone, I’ll put on good loud music, of the sort my wife, Cree, does not especially like (jazz or Hüsker Dü) and read magazines and eat cheese until I get tiddly and head for bed. But I prefer companions. When I learn that someone new is coming over, I mentally ask the same questions Kingsley Amis did: “Does he drink? Is he jolly?” Alcohol can bring out the poetry in a person’s soul.

In 2006, Gary Shteyngart, the irrepressible author of novels such as The Russian Debutante’s Handbook and Super Sad True Love Story, gave an interview to the Denver-based magazine Modern Drunkard. It’s one of the great interviews of the new century and some enterprising young editor should print it as a chapbook. In the meantime, find it online and send the link to your friends. James Baldwin may have said, “I don’t know any writers who don’t drink,” but that was a long time ago. Shteyngart’s complaint is that writers don’t belly up to the bar with the enthusiasm they once did. “We’re this sterilized profession, we all know our Amazon.com rankings to the nearest digit,” he said. “The literary community is not backing me up here. I’m all alone.” He added, “It’s so pathetic when I think about my ancestors. Give them a bottle of shampoo and they have a party. And here I am with the best booze available.” I’ve tried my best to keep Gary, from my own apartment, company.

“Why didn’t everyone drink?” Karl Ove Knausgaard asked in Book Four of My Struggle. “Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful.”

Dawn Powell made a similar point in her diaries. “A person is like blank paper with secret writing,” she wrote, “sometimes never brought out, other times brought out by odd chemicals.” In his novel Submission, Michel Houellebecq wrote, “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.” Amis—a copy of his book Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis should be in every home—put it this way: “The human race has not devised any way of dissolving barriers, getting to know the other chap fast, breaking the ice, that is one-tenth as handy and efficient as letting you and the other chap, or chaps, cease to be totally sober at about the same rate in agreeable surroundings.”

America’s founders understood all this. Barbara Holland, in her book The Joy of Drinking, reminded her readers that in 1787, the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention “adjourned to a tavern for some rest, and according to the bill they drank fifty-four bottles of Madeira, sixty bottles of claret, eight of whiskey, twenty-two of port, eight of hard cider, and seven bowls of punch so large that, it was said, ducks could swim around in them. Then they went back to work and finished founding the new Republic.” Fifty-five delegates consumed fifty-four bottles of Madeira? Which founder let the side down?

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Excerpted from The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading by Dwight Garner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2023 by Dwight Garner. All rights reserved

The early nineteenth-century press offered readers dismissive accounts of new fashions, specifically scolding women for their “silliness” in acquiescing to “the very inconvenient custom of being without pockets.” Women were more willing to relinquish their free agency as consumers than to challenge fashion, so the charge went. Reporting on the tribulations of one such follower of fashion in 1806, the Weekly Visitor ran a story about a young woman intrigued by the sight of a peddler’s wares. She was hoping to make a purchase but had to admit she couldn’t because she didn’t have any money. The reason? She hadn’t worn a pocket. Desperate for a customer, the peddler was forced to follow the unprepared woman home to collect his payment. A 1789 sketch was less indulgent and forgiving in tone. Titled Fashionable Convenience!!, it depicts a young child asking for money to buy cakes. Mamma replies, “How can you be so vulgar, child, have not I told you a hundred times I never wear pockets!” Women conformed to fashion’s dictates at the expense of convenience, sacrificing even those little but meaningful things like treating their youngsters to sweets.

The mockery got no better for women when they sought a practical alternative in reticules. In carrying reticules, women were essentially exposing their pockets, a once-private accessory. Pockets were previously classified as undergarments, so these displays were an unseemly spectacle to many. An illustration from 1800 makes that connection apparent while ridiculing women for their impractical dress choices. Fashionable ladies are shown in their winter dress wearing floral hats that impede their sight, transparent dresses that show off their nakedness and hardly protect from the cold, and reticules that swing lower and lower down their stockingless legs. The English promptly chose to mispronounce the French word for the fashion accessory and referred to it as a “ridicule,” or, perhaps further punning on its tiny, impractical size, an “indispensable.”

Tie-on pockets came to be associated with the habits of more traditional women, industrious housewives, and “old ladies.” In them housewives carried everything they needed. They were an “honest” and useful receptacle, according to various laments on their demise. A 1796 letter from a mother to her son indicates the politics involved: don’t marry one of those reticule-carrying women, a so-called “Anti-Pocketist,” warns the prominent Mrs. Ridgely of Delaware. To make her case she compares the young man’s sisters with an attractive, “simpering” young visitor who professed herself astonished to find the Ridgely sisters busy sewing. The simpering visitor self-righteously claimed that she never carried scissors, thimble, needle, or thread about her, “for it was terrible in a Lady to wear a pair of Pockets—the French Ladies never did such a thing.” The disuse of tie-on pockets by fashionable women constituted a disavowal of traditional women’s crafts and, for Mrs. Ridgely, a strike against any young woman hoping to marry into her family.

The infatuation with narrow goddess dresses was brief, however, and women’s skirts widened by the 1820s. Some women returned to wearing tie-on pockets (which happily fit again), but many women began to experiment with integrated, masculine-style pockets sewn into dresses at side seams on the hips. For a time, inset pockets fit under the voluminous skirts of the 1850s and 1860s. But this tentative exploration did not gain traction. When bell-shape hoop skirts went out of style, women’s pockets migrated in haphazard and unexpected ways. By the 1870s and 1880s, dresses flattened in the front and skirts were pushed to the back, forming an enormous bustle at the rump. Dressmakers did the best they could and, seeking the area of greatest volume, placed a lone pocket in the folds of the cantilevered bustle.

Artfully tucked under all that drapery, pockets seemed to be buried “in some innermost recess” of one’s being, complained one writer. They were more difficult to locate than “paradise.” One woman reported salvaging material from one of her used gowns: to her surprise, she discovered an entirely unworn pocket so cunningly hidden away that she had never known it was there. Reaching such pockets involved struggle and contortion. Pockets were “practically inextricable” when needed, observed the writer T. W. H. in Harper’s Bazaar in 1893. She reported an exasperating experience involving an impatient horsecar conductor waiting to take her fare. As she twisted around, fumbling at her bustle, trying to locate her money, he and a lengthening line of waiting passengers demanded that she accelerate her search. “How can I possibly hurry up when my pocket is in South Boston?” she indignantly retorted.

T. W. H. further wondered whether contemporary clothing limited the mobility of an entire sex: What if one were to undertake a “statistical inquiry” comparing the pockets of men and women and boys and girls? What would one find? An 1899 New York Times article confirmed the writer’s hypothesis: the “world’s use of pockets” was strikingly uneven. The headline made the situation clear: “Men’s Clothes Full of Them, While Women Have But Few.” The article notes while men’s pockets had “developed, increased and improved,” women were actually “losing ground” after having jettisoned tie-on pockets.

The effects of this lost ground were sketched with more detail in popular fiction. In one of his many adventures in the 1908 book The Wind in the Willows (now considered a children’s tale, although Kenneth Grahame meant it for adults), Toad dresses up as a washerwoman to escape from jail after stealing a motor car. His experience cross-dressing is a “nightmare” because he misses the vest pocket “eternally situated” over his left breast. Unable to access his wallet and thus the money he needs to make his escape, he finds his options severely limited when it matters most. Wearing women’s clothes, Toad observes with surprising frankness, leaves him “unequipped for the real contest.”

*

In the meantime, a number of women had begun to “agitate with much earnestness in behalf of the right of women to have and enjoy pockets,” fervently believing, unlike Toad, that a woman was “undoubtedly made to be a pocket-wearing person.” The most sustained attention came from women’s rights activists, who made women’s clothes in general—particularly unwieldy skirts and debilitating corsets, as well as pockets—a political issue. With barely contained irritation, activists published cogent analyses of sartorial inequity. Their demands for “equality in pockets” sound disconcertingly familiar, just like the demands made in the present day.

Women’s rights advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton was incensed by the contrast between the utterly encumbered woman walking down the street—one hand holding up a majestically sweeping skirt, the other clutching an umbrella, pocketbook, and other small necessaries—and the man who charged down the same street “free as a lark.” A dearth of pockets was one of the “unrecognized disabilities of women,” claimed other progressive women commenting at the turn of the century. It was her “greatest lack.” Feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman pointed out that the design of the material world had marked social implications. Ready access to tools and devices enhanced one’s practical and psychological “preparedness,” giving one the confidence “to meet all emergencies.” Without pockets, women really were “unequipped for the real contest,” as Toad had opined.

In her 1915 sociological study, The Dress of Women, Gilman observed that the pocketless, cheap calico housedresses worn by the majority of housewives and women laboring in other people’s homes neither prepared them nor protected them from wet, dirt, grime, or the fire hazards of the pre-electrified kitchen. Under these conditions, what women should really have been wearing was a protective “leather apron” or a waterproof “oilskin cloak,” she argued. That housewives did not shored up the fiction of happy domesticity while it denied that women were performing actual work. Gilman made a point of outfitting the characters who inhabit her all-female utopia, Herland, in costumes that readied the wearer for any kind of work, including the important business of administering a nation. Emphasizing the wearer’s personhood above their gender, Gilman stepped away from the trouser and skirt binary to propose a garment stripped down to the essentials: a bodysuit “fairly quilted in pockets.” These pockets “were most ingeniously arranged, so as to be convenient to the hand and not inconvenient to the body, and were so placed as at once to strengthen the garment and add decorative lines of stitching.” Gilman’s fiction was not widely recognized in her time, but in it exists a challenge that remains relevant: pockets could be integral to anyone’s clothes in ways that served structural, aesthetic, and practical ends.

Conservative commentators for the most part scoffed at the notion that pockets made a difference, that but for lack of pockets women would be the titans of Wall Street. Such arguments were easily brushed off as so much nonsense, and as one reporter wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1913, suffragists were “now dragging the pocket into the female emancipation problem.” According to these mostly anti-suffragist critics, it seemed as though women had been easily lead astray by an unimportant, irrelevant side issue. Some hoped that women would remain lost in the weeds. Perhaps all those upstart suffragists who “clamor” for the vote should just demand pockets instead—that was the “real grievance,” according to one cynic.

But in the midst of making major social and political advances, women also wanted the flexibility and assurance pockets provided, and they worried about the dangers of acquiescing to the no-pocket tradition in women’s clothes. “By-m-bye, no pockets for the female sect will settle down into hard and fast law,” warned a contributor to a domestic magazine in 1907. The worry seems well-placed: several social traditions were being reconceived as natural by conservative forces opposed to change, from the notion that mothers were not fit for careers to the design of clothes. In a lighthearted but insightful satire, the suffragist Alice Duer Miller pointed out the circular reasoning involved in invoking either tradition or biology to reaffirm the status quo. If women really wanted pockets, they would already have them! Ergo, suffragists must not “fly in the face of nature” by demanding pockets, Miller wrote in her 1915 poem “Why We Oppose Pockets for Women.” If you could claim tailor-made pockets as a natural right, you could do so for just about anything, including the right to vote.

Miller’s humor was lost on all those detractors who felt acute anxiety about maintaining traditional gender roles. Conservative voices tended to identify all suffragists as gender-nonconforming, singling out queer female suffragists in particular as deviant. The lawyer, activist, and president of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Gail Laughlin, for example, was chided in the St. Louis Star for her refusal to appear in a dress that lacked pockets. “Only on rare occasions does Miss Laughlin take off the mannish garb that she usually wears,” the reporter noted. The journalist mocks Laughlin for being arrayed in a brand-new gown for a federation event and having made it to that point in her life without realizing that such “creations” typically did not offer them. Pointing out her intransigence, the journalist wrote: “Miss Laughlin declined to wear the thing until a pocket was sewed on.”

Anti-suffrage cartoons and propaganda were just as negative, representing suffragists as starkly unattractive. The plot of Charles Hoyt’s 1899 musical comedy, The Contented Woman, involves a wife who runs for mayor against her husband as comeuppance after he rudely tears off a button she has diligently sewn onto his suit, if in the wrong color. The wife’s impulsive retribution, satisfying in the moment, has lasting consequences, according to Hoyt’s play; the image on the cover of the playbill alludes to the changed demeanor of any woman engaged in the “vulgar clamor for rights.” Among the many “horrid” habits she might pick up, the “speechifying” suffragette would need someplace to stash her hands “like a man,” adopting one of his worst mannerisms. But for the suffragette, “pockets mean business,” from being “equipped for the street” to enjoying a gesture considered a bad habit that, because it was defiant, just so happened to be authoritative as well. As one lawyer lamented, she could not approach the jury with the same commanding nonchalance as did her lawyer husband. “Is anything so convincing as that easy attitude a man takes when he plunges his hand deep in his pocket and says, Now, gentlemen of the jury?—”

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From Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close © 2023 by Hannah Carlson. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books.

I think artist Richard Wentworth pre-empted the idea of Instagram through his brilliant series of photographs titled Making Do and Getting By (1974 – present). A hugely influential body of work, his images document a surfeit, ‘ a creativity beyond functionality, a transformative repair.’ He has changed the way we look at the world, and stylistically a large number of diverting Instagram images owe a great deal to him, even those made by Instagrammers who don’t know his work.

Richard writes: Put simply, I think my pictures are unremarkable, except in the way that they talk to each other and remind us that humans read the world every time they look. We sense ‘intention’ and causality in everything we see, the basis for the awful announcements on the Tube for ‘reporting anything unusual.’

I have posted over a thousand images on Instagram. A stream of consciousness that helps hone my eye, alerting me to potential wherever I am. It helps generate new ideas for future artworks. It allows me to rail against social injustice, express political views, and visually indulge: the platform provides a fair bit of cat pilates, found abstracts, backs and undersides of objects, and miscellaneous stuff. I might be a late adopter, but I have made up for lost time, and have had the pleasure of meeting many of my followers in person along the way.

—Cornelia Parker, “A Brush With Instagram” 2023

*

The publication of a book is a strange occasion for the author – a mix of disengagement and nervous anticipation. What happens in the long aftermath is another matter. Receiving copies of the Urdu translation, by Fey Seen Ejaz, of A New World from the Sahitya Akademi has given me joy, especially as I wasn’t expecting them.
—Amit Chaudhuri

I went over to see Edna O’Brien tonight.
—Andrew O’Hagan

Weather’s changing.
—Cornelia Parker

The A in Humanity is a bird.
—Kamila Shamsie

Completely love this. Everything you need to know about the Raj in one page from an 1890s anthology of useful Hindustani phrases. Hard to choose a favourite but either The cook is drunk again, The bullet just passed over my head or Why did you allow the goat to come into my house?
—William Dalrymple

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From Seeing Things: The Small Wonders of the World According to Writers, Artists and Others. Edited by Julian Rothenstein. Used with permission from the publisher, Redstone Press.

In London in 1892, everybody—or, at least, everybody who was anybody—was talking about one thing: green carnations. Nobody was sure, exactly, what wearing a green carnation meant, or why it had suddenly become such a deliciously scandalous, dazzlingly fashionable sartorial statement. All anybody knew was that one day, at a London theater, someone important (stories differed as to who exactly it was) wore a green carnation, or maybe it had been a blue one (stories differed about that too).

Green carnations may have had something to do with sexual deviance. They may also have had something to do with the worship of art. And the whole thing somehow had to do with Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant playwright, novelist, and fame-courting dandy who—as he never tired of telling the press—put his talent into his work but put his genius into his life. Wilde lived his life as a work of art (or let people think he did). The affair of the green carnation gives us a little glimpse into how.

One story about what exactly happened comes from the painter Cecil Robertson, who recounts his version in his memoirs. According to Robertson, Wilde was keen to drum up publicity for his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. A character in the play, Cecil Graham—an elegant and witty dandy figure who rather resembled Wilde himself—was ostensibly going to wear a carnation onstage as part of his costume. And Wilde wanted life to resemble art.

“I want a good many men to wear them tomorrow,” Wilde allegedly told Robertson. “People will stare…and wonder. Then they will look round the house [theater] and see every here and there more and more little specks of mystic green”—a new and inexplicable fashion statement. And then, Wilde gleefully insisted, they would start to ask themselves that most vital of questions: “What on earth can it mean?”

Robertson evidently ventured to ask Wilde what, exactly, the green carnation did mean.

Wilde’s response? “Nothing whatsoever. But that is just what nobody will guess.”

It’s unclear how much of Robertson’s story is true. If any large group—including the actor playing Cecil Graham—wore green carnations at the Lady Windermere’s Fan premiere on February 20, nobody in the press commented upon it. That said, the author Henry James, who was in the audience that night, remembers Wilde himself—the “unspeakable one,” he called him—striding out for his curtain call wearing a carnation in “metallic blue.”

Within days, carnations were everywhere. Just two weeks later, a newspaper covering the premiere of another play, this one by Théodore de Banville, reported a bizarre phenomenon: Wilde in the audience, surrounded by a “suite of young gentlemen all wearing the vivid dyed carnation which has superseded the lily and the sunflower,” two flowers that had previously been associated with Wilde and with fashionable, flamboyant, and sexually ambiguous young men more generally.

A little over a week after that, a London periodical published another piece on this mysterious carnation. It is a dialogue between Isabel, a young woman, and Billy, an even younger dandy—heavily implied to be gay—about the flower, which Billy has received as a gage d’amour (the French is tactfully untranslated) from a much older man. Billy shows off his flower to the curious Isabel with the attitude of studied nonchalance: “Oh, haven’t you seen them?…. Newest thing out. They water them with arsenic, you know, and it turns them green.”

The green carnation is something desperately exciting, understood not by ordinary society women but by Brummell-style dandies, shimmering with hauteur. It’s deliciously dangerous, perhaps even a tad wicked; the carnations are colored with poison, after all. It’s also, in every sense of the word, a little bit queer.

The green carnation’s appeal as a symbol of something esoteric persisted. Two years after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan, an anonymous author—later revealed to be the London music critic Robert Hichens—published The Green Carnation, a novel that appears to be very obviously based on Oscar Wilde’s real- life homosexual relationship with the much younger Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.

That relationship would prove to be Wilde’s downfall. In 1895, Wilde would be arrested on charges of “gross indecency” at the behest of Bosie’s influential father and spend two years imprisoned at Reading Gaol.

Wilde would emerge penniless and psychologically shaken, and he died in effective exile in Paris a few years later. Indeed, The Green Carnation, despite being a work of fiction that Wilde didn’t even write, would be presented at his trial as evidence of his moral and sexual degradation. The press, meanwhile, took Wilde’s own propensity for carnations “artificially colored green” as another admission of guilt. By then, it was allegedly common knowledge that such a flower was worn by “homosexuals in Paris.”

In The Green Carnation (the novel, that is) we see Oscar Wilde reimagined as the playwright Esmé Amarinth, the “high priest” of what we learn is the “cult of the green carnation.” Amarinth and his followers are all dandies. Their religion is a passionate worship of the artistic and the artificial, which they believe is superior to the meaningless, empty, and brutal world of nature. Like Rameau’s nephew before them, they are fascinated with originality and the way in which a soupçon of carefully chosen transgression can help them ascend the dull, natural plane and reach a higher, more divine form of existence.

Placing a green carnation into his buttonhole, one of Amarinth’s devotees, Reggie, muses how “the white flower of a blameless life was much too inartistic to have any attraction for him.” Rather, we learn, Reggie “worshipped the abnormal with all the passion of his impure and subtle youth.” Meanwhile, Amarinth predicts that the artificially green carnation will soon be replicated by nature.

Just as Wilde’s seemingly arbitrary decision to promote the green carnation had, within years, transformed the flower into a gay fashion symbol whose origins nobody could seem to remember, so, too—in Amarinth’s telling, at least—would reality change to fit the fantasy. “Nature will soon begin to imitate them,” Amarinth is fond of saying, “as she always imitates everything, being naturally uninventive.”

The Green Carnation is not a very good novel. Oscar Wilde, who was briefly accused of being its anonymous author, declared angrily that he most certainly had not written that “middle-class and mediocre book.” He had, of course, invented that “Magnificent Flower”—the arsenic-green carnation—but with the trash that “usurps its strangely beautiful name,” Wilde had “little to do.” “The Flower,” he concluded, is “a work of Art. The book is not.”

Be that as it may, The Green Carnation, though it is certainly a satirical exaggeration, can tell us much about this strange, new class of young men cropping up not only in London but also in Paris, Copenhagen, and so many other European capitals during the nineteenth century: the dandy. Inheritors of the mantle of Beau Brummell but far more flamboyant in their affect—John Bull would certainly have turned around to look at them in the street—these modern dandies didn’t just live their lives artistically.

Rather, as Hichens’s novel suggest, they had discovered in their obsession with beauty and self-fashioning a new kind of religion, a worship of the unnatural and the artificial as a means of escaping from both the meaningless void of “nature” and the equally meaningless abyss that was modern life.

These dandies believed—or at least made out that they believed—that the highest calling a person could have was a careful cultivation of the self: of clothing, sure, and of hairstyle, but also of gesture, of personality. And behind that belief lay a kind of bitter nihilism, as poisonous as arsenic itself. Nothing meant anything, unless you decided it did. A green carnation could signify homosexual desire, or aesthetic dandyism, or “nothing whatsoever,” depending on your mood and what you felt like conveying to the world that morning.

Self-creation was possible, even desirable, even godlike, precisely because there was no meaning in the world without it. The world was nothing but raw, formless material for the clever and the enterprising to shape to their will. Truth was not objective, something out there in the ether. Rather, it was something for human beings to determine for themselves by shaping the impressions and responses of other people.

“Reggie was considered very clever by his friends,” we learn from Hichens, “but more clever by himself. He knew that he was great, and he said so often in Society. And Society smiled and murmured that it was a pose. Everything is a pose nowadays, especially genius.”

Vivian Grey’s “sneer for the world” had become something every dandy needed to possess.

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Excerpted from Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians by Tara Isabella Burton. Copyright © 2023. Available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

As a feng shui consultant and design magazine editor and lifelong book obsessive, I am often asked by clients what to do when a collection of books moves from a state of abundance into what feels like a design problem. That moment arrives when people notice they are emotionally overwhelmed by the visual of overflowing bookshelves, or when they have encountered advice elsewhere about how to style shelves and the visual example shelf has only three books on it.

First, let’s all agree that for passionate readers, a personal library is nothing less than a soulful archive of the ever-changing self. We book lovers catalog our transformations, our influences, our ways of being, and our interests through our volumes and develop relationships—perceived or existing—with the people who created them.

Where once a library might have been a way to signal status to visiting society, today, a room full of books tells us a story about us: Where we came from, how we have struggled, what has lifted us, what we know for sure.

You can love everything about books and book culture but still feel a sense of overwhelm when faced with packed shelves. That’s why I often find myself counseling people on how to rethink their displays. Here are some ways that you can integrate a love of books into a life while acknowledging a range of human desires for beauty, balance, and space.

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Let your space dictate what you display.
One place book lovers who have become book collectors can start is by letting their existing space dictate how many books they allow themselves to have. In other words: be a goldfish that only grows to the size of your own fishbowl.

I have learned so much about how to think about collecting from a woman named Lauri Romanaggi, a Portland collector of vintage memorabilia, who lets the spaces she has for display guide how much she allows herself to purchase. For example, if her display shelf is only wide enough for eleven 1950s aluminum mothball canisters (true story), then she can’t acquire any more unless she plans to resell them on her Etsy site. She allows the exact space limitations of her 1934 Tudor home to dictate just how much she can acquire.

It’s a fun challenge, but difficult for most. So when this feels impossible, I remind people that we live in a time when we use social media to tell our stories to the world, but are using our spaces to tell our stories to ourselves. I counsel people to ask themselves: What is the story you are telling yourself about yourself in this space? How might books help you tell this story?

Choose your medium.
Get even more thoughtful about what books you choose to keep. The world of e-readers and digital books has given us so much freedom to curate our libraries towards personal meaning. I learned early on in my relationship with my own e-reader that some types of books read better on screen and don’t need to have a permanent place in my personal space. Their value for me is in the information presented or the quick-read status.

Business books always stay digital for me, as do quirky romances, but literary fiction and design books always gets a hardback room on the shelf. Choose which categories that are important to your life story and honor them in paper in your library. The rest can stay on the Cloud.

Edit your collection.
It can be a fun and freeing exercise to let go of any books that are not integral parts of the story you want to tell yourself about yourself in your space. If you are well-read, you don’t need a library filled with every book you have laid eyes on to know that at your core.

About half a decade ago, I got rid of all but one of my entire collection of tiny German Reclamheftchen. These are small, often bright yellow volumes mass-produced for students of German literature, which I once was. There was a time when they were essential to my identity, but I no longer need them to remind myself of the person I used to be. I saved the volume of classic German poetry, which I love, but passed along the others.

Understanding this opens up a lot of room for curating your own collection the way a museum curator might identify a defining theme for an exhibition. Think of the following themes you could use to cull your collection, or create your own:

⋅ Books from childhood that you loved so much you could recite them
⋅ Stories that changed the way you see the world
⋅ Authors whose work you genuinely fangirl or fanboy over
⋅ Volumes you reference regularly
⋅ Genres you obsess over
⋅ Novels you are eager to read
⋅ Beautiful books
⋅ Expert nonfiction author you consider your tribe
⋅ Narratives that remind you of the formative people in your life

Once you decide what your particular categories are, you will be more open to letting go of any books that do not serve the story.

Consider how you use the space.
As much as we might love thinking about having a dedicated library room, most of us have our books tucked into other spaces. Your library might be in a bedroom, a shared living space, or more likely these days, a work-from-home office. The latter situation can be especially difficult as an overloaded bookshelf can send a strong visual of overwhelm to sensitive folks.

For writers, and other people who work from home, overflowing bookshelves can pose a particular energy suck. A writer looking to publish more might be sending herself the visual cue that there is no room for her on the shelf, or that every story has already been written. Or someone struggling with too many ideas—and wondering which one to actually pursue—might find that packed bookshelves become a visual metaphor for their inability to focus or prioritize the right project.

In these situations, I encourage people to do a quick check-in to ask themselves whether working surrounded by books is helping or hindering them. It all comes down to knowing yourself, identifying how you respond to space, and being open to trying another way. Once people identify their particular problem, the shift happens quickly, and the rest is just moving stuff around.

Assess your needs for visual chatter.
On a similar note, consider just how much visual stimulation you need at all in a space.

Looking at design magazines, it is easy to come away with the feeling that most of us are doing it all wrong when it comes to styling books. In design spreads, books are incorporated as design objects on shelves and are given a lot of room to breathe while sharing space with sculptural objects, small artworks, houseplants, and the odd collected item.

They are chosen to tell a balanced aesthetic story through a unified color palette, varying object sizes, and texturally contrasting materials. The goal for creating a beautiful image is to engage the eye.

In real life, each of us has our own response to visual stimuli based on our unique personality traits and how perceptive we are within spaces. Environmental psychologists have long posited that introverts have needs for more calming spaces, while extroverted humans need much more stimulation from outside of themselves in order to feel good. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, it makes sense to look at your library in light of how much sensory messaging makes you feel your best.

One of my favorite interior designers, Lauren Liess, whose projects favor natural textures and a sense of timelessness, keeps a collection of old R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike novels from her youth on a shelf in her library, with the papers facing front (to avoid the garish neon of the covers). It’s a calming visual that still honors the collection without harshing her mellow, and when she is ready to engage with them, she can just reach in there and any volume will do.

In my own home office, I vary shelves that are packed with ones that have more negative space. I’ve identified that I am one of those people who moves between introversion and extroversion, so a balanced space with some full shelves of books and some devoted to objects feels just about right.

So I store the home design books and magazines right behind me, have two shelves devoted to personal objects of meaning, and then another two shelves above that with more beloved design books. The entire bookshelf carves out a little corner I consider to be my office.

Lean into maximalism.
Then again, if you’ve noticed that the heaviness of full shelves does nothing to your sense of wellbeing or productivity, then consider this: It might be time to go all in on living a life of books and investing in an aesthetic of cozy maximalism. I’m talking about assessing your budget to honor the value books have in your life in favor of building entire rooms of built-in bookshelves.

Surfaces stacked high in piles, favorite novels displayed across a piano, tiny tomes tucked under an occasional chair, books stacked high enough to hold your coffee. Not everyone thrives in a pared-down space, even when it pops up again and again as a dominant image in our visual culture.

If this is you, certainly, lean into it. A stack of coffee table or art books twenty-high makes a glorious coffee table next to your favorite chair. A shorter bookshelf built as a pony wall can help create boundaries between rooms where they don’t exist. A vertical stack of books can feel as classic an addition as a traditional column.

A set of shelves in the cramped space under the stairs might make a person feel supported. A console piled high with books invites visitors to get a peek into your passions and persuasions. A wall of books can feel as engaging a visual as the most charming wallpapers. And a room of books can feel like floating in a sea of everything you love. 

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Find Yourself at Home: A Conscious Approach to Shaping Your Space and Your Life by Emily Grosvenor is available via Chronicle Books.

My mother trained as a costume designer and is a self-made cinephile, so the background noise of my childhood and adolescence was the classic films channel. My sister and I grew up to the scratchy deadpan of Bette Davis; the swell of strings under Fred Astaire’s feet; the rapid-fire sniping of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

Layered over all of that was our mother periodically calling out something to the effect of, “Look at that hat!” We’d look up in time to see Bette Davis in Now Voyager, looking out at us from under a hat that perfectly frames her newly steady gaze, and get a quick breakdown of how now that her clothes fit right and her headgear locks our eyes on her best feature, we know that she’s come into her own and is ready to change her life. As we learned to follow plots that turned on dialogue, we also learned to  follow costumes: when done right, a costume design will tell us everything we need to know about everyone’s means, motives and trajectory.

So when it came time to dress the characters in my debut novel, Lucky Red—that is, to add more detail to a montage of nineteenth-century brothel life—I texted my mom:

Me: Quick historical question: is “duck canvas” an accurate material for cowboy pants? I’m looking for the inexpensive, hard-wearing opposite of wool suiting.

Mom: That would be perfect. …Denim wasn’t a big thing yet—it’s a true San Francisco fabric. [heart emoji][clap emoji][sunglasses emoji]

Me: Thanks! [many heart emojis]

Mom: And they’d wear clothes to death. Remember, “Deets don’t quit on a garment just ‘cause it’s got a little age to it.”

While I could have just written something about stiff new pants, or plain “canvas,” I like the rhythm of “duck canvas.” I’m also pleased that it’s historically accurate costume design.

As writers, we don’t really think of the clothes our characters wear as “costumes,” but it’s hard to think of a better term for what they put on (or take off) throughout the story. Good costume design isn’t about making people look fabulous so much as it’s about taking us into the world of the story. Even if we don’t consciously notice it, the age, color, texture and fit of a garment can give a wealth of information about a character’s self-image, social position, finances, and relationships to others in the story.

A fantastic recent example of costume design that communicates purposefully like this is HBO’s Game of Thrones. As background for those who managed to escape this torturous cultural phenomenon, the series involved an incredibly wide cast of characters from different families, with constantly shifting loyalties, and costumes were immensely helpful to the audience for keeping track of all this.

Each family had a distinct color scheme that made all members from the highest lord to the lowest man-at-arms instantly recognizable: House Lannister wore red, House Tyrell wore turquoise, House Martell wore ochre, etc. And when the center of power moved from Queen Regent Cersei Lannister to Queen Margaery Tyrell, the ladies of the court switched their dresses from crimson to teal. It’s so simple and yet so effective: we don’t even notice ourselves noticing it, but when we see the extras dressed in the colors of the upstart new queen, we immediately know to brace ourselves for Cersei’s response.

Thinking like a designer is especially useful when writing a novel with a historical setting, as costumes offer a unique opportunity to make the world of the novel feel real. We live our lives in the day-to-day—the taste of morning coffee, the sounds outside a window, the feel of keys in a front pocket—and clothing plays a huge part in how we feel in the world and in our bodies. So when it came time to bring readers into a Dodge City brothel in 1877, costumes were the perfect entry point.

In writing Lucky Red, I put everything I’d absorbed growing up to use, starting with color. Bridget, our plucky but down-on-her-luck protagonist, begins the novel in a faded pink dress; when she starts working in the Buffalo Queen brothel, she is always in her scarlet work dress; after much adventure and misadventure, she winds up in black with touches of purple. It’s a simple color story, but it tracks her journey from naïve to worldly, from passive to powerful. It also helps build the world of the Buffalo Queen: brothel madams Kate and Lila wear various deep reds—garnet, wine, burgundy—to place them on that same color arc, but they’re more experienced than Bridget, and therefore in deeper shades.

Other colors have roles to play as well. Blue and green are colors of and from the outside world and only worn outside of the Buffalo Queen. Brown is worn only by male customers so that they will fade into the background of the wood-paneled saloon: the men that the girls at the Buffalo Queen have sex with are of little interest compared to their own lives and relationships. Yellow signifies danger, but you’ll have to read the book to find out what I mean by that.

Texture is also of premium importance in Lucky Red’s costuming. How we feel in our clothes is one of the central questions of our day-to-day life: it affects how we feel in our bodies, how we hold ourselves, how we move, even how we behave toward other people (it’s pretty hard to be kind and patient in a hot, itchy sweater, right?).

We may take a lot of it for granted—it’s a foregone conclusion that you’ll hitch your jeans up now and then throughout the day—but it’s there, affecting our mannerisms and movements. This is where I started tapping into my mother’s encyclopedic knowledge of historical American clothing.

As I watched and re-watched westerns on my laptop, I took screenshots and dragged them into our text chain with questions like, “Would this shirt be soft or scratchy?” “What’s the knot in this tie called?” “When they wash their dresses, will the dye run?” Her answers always provided new bits and pieces of information: many people mail-ordered clothes from back east to wear them to rags in the west; a shirtwaist is another name for a blouse; yes, red dye would run like crazy.

Weaving together all of this information with the color story of the novel’s costume design allowed me to create a strong visual through-line while also bringing Bridget’s day-to-day world to life. It also let me weave in the threads of my home and family, the long afternoons sprawled in front of black-and-white movies when I learned another way to understand story through design, and all the precious, ordinary things that make up life.

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Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens is available now via The Dial Press. 

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew talks to Kate Strasdin, the author of The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes, about fashion, fabric and femininity in 19th-century England.

Find more Keen On episodes and additional videos on Lit Hub’s YouTube Channel!

Dr. Kate Strasdin is a fashion historian, museum curator and lecturer at Falmouth University, where she teaches the history of Fashion Design, Marketing and Photography.

I began to take feminizing hormones in January 2018, after many, many years of delay. The day that I took my first dose of spironolactone, to suppress my testosterone, and estradiol, which supplemented my endocrine system with estrogens, I did not believe that doing so would help me—indeed, I believed that I was ruling something out, and that I would shortly thereafter be able to put aside, if not the drive to transition, then at least the notion that anything might be accomplished in real life that might manifest that drive.

Instead, what I learned was that altering the levels of my estrogen and testosterone profoundly, overwhelmingly, and completely transformed my experience of the world and of myself. The central fact, which my experience has ratified over and again in the years since I began hormone replacement therapy, is that it has been possible for someone who merely wanted to have been a woman, to indeed become one—a metamorphosis from present perfect to present continuous, as utterly fantastical as an Ovidian fabliau.

That transformation has reshaped my intellectual and political commitments. How could it not? I began to question why, indeed, this transformation had seemed so impossible, despite the evidence of trans people writing about their experience for over a century—though, of course, the introduction of the hormone as the major vehicle of somatic change was a more recent phenomenon.

How had I, who had read widely and enthusiastically in queer theory, failed to take seriously the fundamental ontology upon which my own life was being refounded?

What I came to realize was that a lot of the work I had read, while written by queer critics and activists unquestionably supportive of trans people as a verifiable social fact—indeed, as trans people’s only allies in a world implacably committed to our eradication—was nonetheless stridently hostile to the claims trans people tended to make about ourselves.

Eve Sedgwick, for example, the indispensable advocate of queer allyship and universality, argued in 1990 that “virtually all people are publicly and unalterably assigned to one or the other gender, and from birth,” and that therefore gender is not especially “apt” for critical deconstruction.

Sedgwick, as Jules Gill-Peterson has noted, would go on to see gender-affirming care of children as an attempt to eradicate gay children—an argument that is now being marshalled by Republican lawmakers across the United States and the United Kingdom as an argument for the abolition and criminalization of transgender care.

While I was editing Pleasure and Efficacy—i.e., since I first wrote the previous sentence—the following has happened: bills preventing trans athletes from participating in collegiate athletics have been introduced in Washington, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Tennessee, Louisiana, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North Carolina, and Georgia; trans kids were prevented by law from using school bathrooms in Alabama, while similar bills were introduced in Tennessee, South Dakota, and Arizona (the reason there aren’t more is that it was already banned in many places); bills criminalizing the provision of transgender care to minors were introduced in Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama (which act specifically criminalizes such procedures as are “intended to alter [the] appearance of gender”), and New Hampshire (which treats transition-related care under an existing child abuse provision); similar bills were repeatedly introduced and vetoed in Kansas; a bill characterizing and criminalizing transition as “genital mutilation” was passed in Idaho; and attempts were made to outlaw transition itself in Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, and Tennessee by the removal of existing provisions for legal sex changes.

I began to understand my work as contesting what I saw as the impossibilization of transition, which I took to be a governing structure of much contemporary thought, both queer and str8. And in order to track the social reproduction of that procedure, I used my training as a literary and cultural critic to investigate the historical origins of skepticism about the efficacy of a sex change and to interpret the literary and cultural genres that that skepticism produced, which I tend to think of as romances of intractability.

A romance of intractability is a narrative or argumentative procedure—perhaps, following Wayne Booth, a “rhetoric”—that endows a given historical problematic with value in proportion to how difficult it is presumed to be to solve it: if, for example, one finds the notion of using hormonal transition to solve one’s problems “too easy,” one is engaged in a romance of intractability.

The idea that insolvable problems are much more appealing than solvable ones, to such an extent that we change some of the latter into the former—the better to ruminate on their splendid insuperability—has yielded literary themes for many authors. Franz Kafka is one of the mode’s maestros. Consider this piece of microfiction, “The Next Village,” written sometime between 1917 and 1923:

My Grandfather used to say: “Life is amazingly short. Now, looking back, it is so jumbled up that I can hardly understand how a young man can make up his mind to ride to the next village without fearing that–even without any unfortunate accidents—the span of a normal, happy life won’t prove long enough for such a ride.”

The story is, to be sure, hard to summarize, its meaning hard to glean. The story begins with the disappearance of an utterance, or even of a grandfather, since we cannot be sure whether the “used to” indicates the grandfather’s death (or muteness from some other cause) or a change of heart on the specific question of the brevity of life.

This question, indeed, has bearing on the grandfather’s adage itself, since perhaps his own life has been long enough (like Marianne Dashwood’s in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility) that he has lived to see his own commitments reversed. Or perhaps short enough that he simply died. But this comical impossibilization of the eminently possible will be familiar to readers of Kafka’s work: it appears in “The Great Wall of China” as part of the famous “Imperial Message” section, in which the Emperor’s messenger is unable to escape the palace grounds during a lifetime’s journey, or “Before the Law,” from The Trial, in which a “man from the country” waits a lifetime to gain access to an infinitely deferred judicial authority.

Each of these stories produces a wildly dilated temporal disorientation, in which the achievement of basic tasks takes on the quality of Zeno’s Arrow Paradox: impossible because requiring the traversal of a space whose interior is, by the nature of interior space, infinite.

Yet the short story also offers us something other than this kind of goofily mind-blowing speculation: it suggests that the problem derives from the subject who “can hardly understand,” rather than from the world itself.

As in Zeno’s paradox, the arrow does reach its destination; the young man does ride to the next village, and however difficult the divisibility of space may be to contemplate, there is also something irreducibly silly about the contemplation. Key to Kafka’s romances of intractability, then, is the suspicion that the pseudoproblems which detain us in literature have, elsewhere, rather straightforward solutions.

Since an important purpose of Pleasure and Efficacy is to encourage readers to relinquish the undoubted appeal of such ruminations, I will generally prefer to examine such conundrums as I do encounter from the perspective of what I have tended to call “pragmatism”—a term, of course, with many meanings. I tend to follow the classical formulation of Charles Sanders Peirce: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”

The truth-value of a proposition is equal to its necessary effects. While I do not, in the book, get into debates with “gender critical” thinkers, whose ideas fall outside the scope of a feminist, liberationist work of theory, I would suggest that Peirce’s maxim might clear up much of the fogginess around the metaphysical definitions of “woman” that have become contentious: a trans woman is a woman if and only if she is referred to as a woman; likewise an absolutist definition of women deriving from gamete size (or chromosome, etc.) is useful only if it accurately encapsulates the word “woman” as it appears in use. Since plenty of people do use the word “woman” to refer to trans women, for whom many of those reductive characteristics do not apply, the latter definition is of limited use.

I am aware, too, that by marking my commitment to a Peircean stripe of pragmatism here, I may be at risk of blurring a distinction between method and object that, in general, I aim to keep quite separate. Broadly speaking, I adhere to pragmatism, but I don’t study it; I study Freudian psychoanalysis, but I don’t adhere to it. Certainly I hope to recover aspects of Freudian thought and other methods of analysis insofar as I believe they can be put to political use.

However, I am not in this book offering a normative account of any individual method, but rather pointing to some of the conceptual difficulties that have arisen from the collisions of psychoanalysis, feminism, and trans embodiment. My only normative method is the nonmethod of trans liberation—for which, as it happens, I believe psychoanalysis may indeed be more useful than its reputation would suggest.

I don’t consider most of the theoretical questions raised by the claim that one has changed sex to be solvable in the terms in which they are posed; certainly, and I hope obviously, I don’t believe that I have dispelled them. Yet as I investigated the history of the romance of intractability, I also discovered a feminist counterhistory of technique, of tricks and techniques passed on by women to women that comprises a body of knowledge written in the margins of history.

These devices emerge to spite the notion that the most dignified response to the psychic suffering of women and queers is pious acceptance, yet they do so without congealing into a generalizable system of rationality, and indeed are as hostile to technorationality as they are to the counsel of despair.

The archive of technique appears as a nonorganic, nontotalizable, inductively organized sequence of attempts to improve the lives of women and queers, accredited on the basis of their efficacy, not their elegance, and certainly not on their conformity to macro-epistemic schemes of knowledge. These auxiliary knowledges, the One Weird Tricks of modernity, are the focal point of this study, and while they are not all defensible—the two I am going to discuss in this introductory essay were written by an imperialist eugenicist and a manipulative charlatan—they offer us ways to think of collective modes of redress and, most importantly, the real difficulties that emerge to impede transition and mobility once one relinquishes the certainties of depressive pessimism.

That nonsynthesized compendium of techniques, upon which the attention of my book has been trained, I call “realism.” Though this is certainly a usage at odds with other contemporary uses of that overburdened word, I derive my sense of realism from George Eliot, a Victorian novelist who typifies the term, and whose work—as we shall see—strives to learn, of a given situation, what works in amelioration.

Temperamentally resistant to Romantic claims of either revolutionary or conservative types, but no less skeptical, finally, of the mid-Victorian celebration of “reform” as a historical metanarrative, Eliot’s novels, as well as essays, are replete with pragmatic devices to be assessed on the basis of their efficacy.

Eliot intended the novels themselves, indeed, are not to be read exactly as descriptions, but rather as protocols for social improvement: the purpose of each sentence of Eliot’s novels is to cultivate empathy and thereby, little by little, to effectuate a more empathic world.

In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Booth dwells on this as one of the typical features of realist fiction; more narrowly, in The Antinomies of Realism, Fredric Jameson sees it as an individuating feature of Eliot’s bad faith, ultimately amounting to a refusal to take a position.

Yet I plan—following Sedgwick, as it goes—to read realism as far as possible without paranoia and without fear that the knowledge schemes into which it attempts to induct me are either totalizing (they do not explain everything) or hostile (they will not make my life worse).

But if I confess to attempting to animate, within realism, the erotic frisson that might derive from the fantasy of being brainwashed, I will feel myself safe because George Eliot was, unquestionably, a trans author, and transition, whatever else it may be, can hardly escape the condition of brainwashing, and those upon whom it does its work would hardly wish it to.

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Excerpted from PLEASURE AND EFFICACY: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques by Grace Elisabeth Lavery. Copyright © 2023 by Grace Lavery. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Translated by Stephanie Smee.

“I entered the forest, drawn in by the trees almost in spite of myself, it was irresistible. They were emitting such a powerful energy that I felt humbled, happy to receive their generosity. It was immediate, the pleasure I felt from stroking the grey bark; I saw a brown liquid oozing out of the tree, and the smell of balsam stopped me in my tracks. I stayed among the trees for almost an hour, alone, I had lost all notion of time. I know of few ingredients as addictive as Peru balsam. I love its facets, at once gourmand and woody. At first, it is vanillic and ‘balsamic,’ its woody notes are blond, there is nothing dark about it, on the contrary, it has a noble suppleness.”

A formidable perfumer and my sometime traveling partner, Marie has just returned from El Salvador, where she came across Peru balsam hidden away in the cordillera when she was accompanying an important client. She has composed some magnificent fragrances for Guerlain, Armani and Nina Ricci, and she is one of the creators behind Yves Saint Laurent’s Black Opium. She adores the woody, balsamic notes of patchouli. I like her particular sensitivity to natural ingredients, her calm, intense expression, her perceptive commentary.

Sitting opposite her in Paris, I listen to her paint a picture of her balsam experiences. Sharing these intimate emotions, she leads me with her along the paths of the cordillera, evoking my own very vivid memories. I am taken by her image of blond wood. “For me, Peru balsam is gourmand, like a patisserie, intimate and warm. It is used far too sparingly in compositions; in order to do it justice, it should be used with liberal abandon!”

Marie regrets the fact that allergen regulations governing fragrance components have led to significant restrictions on the permitted balsam dosage in perfumery. “But it has led me to a new project, trying to reconstitute it using other naturals, emphasizing all of its characteristics, like a picture that I would make my own by highlighting certain features in pencil.” What raw materials does she intend to use? “Cinnamon, sandalwood, cedar, cacao, benzoin resin,” she tells me, with a smile. “I would never have even thought of it before going into the forest.”

Producers of Peru balsam are difficult to come by. They keep a low profile, deep in the mountains of El Salvador, and their facilities seem even more ancient than the great trees surrounding them. It was ten years ago, on my first visit, that I saw a balsam press for the first time, the beating heart of a production facility’s equipment. The sight of machinery beneath a temporary awning, the ropes, pieces of wood, screws, beams and hoists, brought me back all of a sudden to the era of the conquering Spaniards, as if the men of Christopher Columbus or Cortés had set it up on their way through, and it had remained unaltered ever since. It lent Peru balsam a seductive air of mystery.

The modern history of this ingredient, like that of vanilla, is a tale of conquest that involves the Europeans. They discovered that the native Central Americans were using a balsam that they would collect as exudate from a tree to use as a healing remedy. The substance was effective, it smelled very good, they started using it themselves and soon it was added to the lengthy inventory of American products being brought back to Europe from the sixteenth century onward. Balsam has always been part of the local natural pharmacopoeia.

It is collected from the Myroxylon pereirae tree, which is now found only in the mountains of El Salvador and Nicaragua. The tree has never been known to grow in Peru. It was so named by the Spaniards because it was exported from the port of Lima, capital of what was then the Kingdom of Peru. Raw materials originating in distant and mysterious places only seemed to become real in the eyes of the Europeans at their port of departure, Siamese benzoin being a case in point. Curiously, the world of perfumery has long had a tradition of adopting fanciful or approximate names.

Beyond the notion of protecting confidential sources, the continuing use of these labels suggests a lack of curiosity. From the eighteenth century onward, the world of fragrances, of refinement and creativity, seemed increasingly to maintain its distance from the distant, rural worlds of its raw materials. This distance was to make the fortune of merchants and large fragrance companies, particularly those in Grasse, when they decided to establish trading posts at the source of these natural ingredients.

*

I returned to El Salvador in 2016 to meet up with Elisa, a young Guatemalan who had set up a company producing aromatic essential oils in her own country. Determined and talented, she had studied chemistry and perfumery in France, married a French engineer and had managed to overcome every obstacle that had been thrown at her when establishing a new business in a challenging country.

With no experience, she had put in patchouli crops and a distillation facility. I was involved with setting up the business and have been following her progress ever since. These days she is successfully producing cardamom and patchouli essential oil, and over a number of years now has developed a keen interest in developing the balsams that grow in the region, namely Honduran styrax and Peru balsam from El Salvador.

Elisa wants to involve the local farmers and carry their communities along with her success; she is appalled by the poverty, illiteracy and isolation to which it seems they are deliberately confined by these Central American nations. She sources her supplies directly from producers at prices that offer a sustainable living. The daughter of a doctor, she pays health insurance premiums for workers in the fragrance industry and guarantees purchase of their entire production. As obvious as this all may seem, it remains a novel approach, and a challenging task. Elisa is determined and unstinting in her refusal to compromise when it comes to the ethics of her business practices.

I have returned to the “balsam cordillera” region, as it is known in El Salvador, to take part in the filming of a documentary for French television. It involves following an essential oil sourcing agent into a remote area and witnessing the “discovery” of a new ingredient. I was initially reluctant, doubting television’s ability to recreate these stories without distorting them or misrepresenting them in order to paint an attractive picture at any price. In the end, I let myself be convinced that it would be a good opportunity to tell the story of the tappers and their extraordinary work, and I agreed.

We have been driving for six hours from the head office of Elisa’s company in Antigua, the former capital of Guatemala and a colonial architectural jewel. Her cooperative is hidden away in the highlands above San Julián, reached by following a narrow track all the way up through the tropical vegetation to the producers’ rudimentary buildings. The director of the cooperative is waiting for us, along with a group of tappers, respectfully lined up with hats in hand.

On the horizon, through enormous clumps of bamboo, a ridge of forested mountains can just be made out: we are in the heart of the balsam cordillera. The production workshop looks out over a jungle-filled valley, out of which appear one or two Myroxylon at twenty-meter intervals. These imposing, balsam-producing trees are twenty to thirty meters tall, and at least eighty years old. Over time, they have grown into astounding forms with grey, striated trunks, the result of decades of balsam production.

The tappers are independent contractors engaged by the owner of the trees, with whom they share the results of the collection process. Fifty-year-old Franklin is an experienced collector whom I got to know on my first visit. With dark eyes in an emaciated face, he is as thin as a rake and never without his white hat, which accompanies him wherever he goes. He started climbing trees at the age of fifteen, continuing the work he learned from his father. In his musical Spanish, he tells of the risks and hardships of his job.

Tapping for Peru balsam is perhaps the most impressive of all the different jobs I have come across in my travels. Franklin readies his equipment on the ground: ropes, a swinging seat, a cardboard fan, a knife, a packet of rag cloths and a bundle of sticks that he will use as a flaming torch. The sticks are taken from the Myroxylon tree, a slow-burning wood that produces excellent embers. He lights the bundle, waits until it is glowing, loads it onto his shoulder along with the rest of the equipment and heads over to the foot of a tree, a plume of smoke fanning out from his neck. A single throw of a rope into a high fork allows him to start his barefoot climb. Fifteen or so meters up, he sits down on his little seat, suspended over the void. The torch is still smoking behind his shoulder. Now he can set to work.

In order to obtain the balsam, he has to stimulate the tree. Franklin slices out a piece of bark and peels it back from the trunk, then takes the torch and uses the fan to kindle some flames. Still seated, feet pushed up against the trunk, he holds the flaming torch to the exposed wood and the surrounding bark, moving it backward and forward, singeing it to encourage the balsam to flow. These rituals must be witnessed first-hand in order to appreciate the true nature of the task of these fragrance “hunters” and their life in the forest. Now Franklin applies rags to the burnt area, affixing them to the edges of the peeled bark. In two or three weeks’ time, they will be saturated with balsam and he will climb back up to collect his harvest, some of which will have gathered in the rags, the rest in the pieces of bark. He goes through the same process again in a dozen or so places judiciously spaced out along the trunk.

The Salvadoran tapper, much like his Lao counterpart, knows exactly how much he can ask of the tree without endangering it. Any tree that is tapped in one twelve-month period will not be tapped the following year, received wisdom that allows hundred-year-old trees to continue to be exploited. The collectors know how to manage their resources. Their lives depend on it.

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Excerpted from In Search of Perfumes: A Lifetime Journey to the Source of Nature’s Scents by Dominique Roques. Copyright © 2023. Translated by Stephanie Smee. Available from HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.