Not True

In which I ask you about poise and a horny dead poet talks about milk. April 2026.

Dominique: The Case of an Adolescent feels impossible. The book records an entire course of psychoanalysis—possible only because the therapy was ended after about a dozen sessions—with a fourteen-year-old French kid. He’s been referred to Dolto by another therapist for a host of behaviors we, the readers, are tempted to flatten into autism. The book is unembarrassed of its psychoanalytic extremity—no throat-clearing before it ascribes things to object relations, a ruptured castration complex, erotic transference, the outlets of childhood sexuality etc. The book addresses gender fluidity without stigma, even if using dated language and being direct about Dolto’s own distaste for ie certain vocal affects.

It’s an entertaining read. Unfortunately I’m a real dum-dum, and for me the value of the rest of the book is eclipsed by one specific formulation, spoken into being by Dolto at the opening of her very first session with Dominique.

Dominique: Well me, I’m not like everybody else. Sometimes when I wake up, I think I’ve lived a true story.

Me: Which made you untrue.

…

I also tell him: What’s important in life isn’t what you do with your lessons, your notebooks and schoolbooks, it’s your way of being, your way of being not true.

I find everything about this construction so thrilling, so liberating. We’re not dealing with authenticity, with identity, with the real. Importantly, this ‘untruth’ isn’t something to work through or cure, it’s not juxtaposed with a real self. Granted I’ve been in a weird place for months upon months now but it made me cry to read it.¹

(One takeaway for Dominique’s family that could apply to us all: maybe don’t make your son sleep in your marital bed to ‘keep you warm’ while your closeted husband is off on one of his many work trips with his partner.)

Dominique is out in a new-ish edition from Divided Publishing. I saw their books first by way of their Ariana Reines collection, but my god the Fanny Howe they have. I’ve become a bit obsessed with them. This one, Dominique, I heard about from an interview Jamieson Webster gave on it. Webster also has a fantastic collection of essays with Divided, about which more later.

Sorry Gennady

I used to revere the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi. I don’t think that’s true right now. I’m not clear about why. I’m experiencing a lull in reverence.

Here’s part of an early work, “Consolation: Roses” translated by Peter France for WWB

in your presence even the toes

are as if they remembered!

 

and the mind more strongly

pierces our head

in your presence!

 

and together perhaps you are that

whence

separating

they drew out:

 

of one kind – in one mystery:

 

deposit of genius in flowers

In reveries about walking into the ocean, do you stagger?

How important, in this fantasy, is your poise?² If a wave hits you and you get knocked back a bit, if you make a noise when the cold water hits your balls, do you call it a day? Is humiliation, in this scene, a strong enough deterrent? Here’s a story by my buddy Derrick I think about now and then. There’s a beach.

Poem titles from A Demon Spirit, hunting poems by Abū Nuwās, edited and translated by James E. Montgomery

14: Her Brutal War

20: A Pleuritic Cough

26: Pellets Like Nostrils

27: Unharmed by the Needle

36: His Malignity

54: A Saker Stoop

67: An Infant’s Angry Howl

95: Gentle in the Draw

114: Raised on Milk

I recommend Montgomery’s introduction as well. The book is here.

If you don’t know Abū Nuwās for his outre poetic persona, here’s a ‘96 paper from Montgomery on a fun and profane example, including a line wishing the speaker were the blood of christ so a christian boy would drink him up.

Other things

• “Fucking a lot of people doesn’t make you good at love, just like fucking only one doesn’t. But I guess these conversations frequently aren’t actually about love, and it’s my error to respond as if they are. They’re about (what’s described as, propagandistically,) a timeless misalignment of the sexes, about women’s unreasonableness, our erotic satisfaction and lack thereof, the presumed insatiable sexual appetite of every man, social breakdown, marriage as institution, and so on.”

• I’d like us all to be a bit more honest how little we, personally, know about beaked whales³

• Here’s a haunting pared-down cover of some Springsteen tracks just out from Orindal Records. It’s very Ashworth-ey but the artist is Nicholas Krgovich.

• I learned—possibly for the second or third time—that Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland. Here’s a poem I like very much. It’s the opening poem in her collection Lovability [Fonograf, 2021] which you should buy and read.

• I should be rewarded for not talking here about Helen deWitt and neurodivergence and whether evil adheres to money taken from the Koch fortune. I accept cash or sustained eye contact.

Thanks for reading. See you in three weeks or so.

1. What doesn’t make you cry, man, goddamn.

2. [Por]

3. not a porpoise