Poured Over: Margo Jefferson on Constructing a Nervous System
“I didn’t want that more traditional kind of arc of childhood to a certain stance of wisdom or resignation or triumph. I wanted—partly because I felt with Negroland, and very much with this book—that ability to change persona, change my position, to acknowledge that one was performing at times, and that one played many, many roles…I wanted to be able to take in all of that, and a traditional memoir structure wasn’t going to allow it.” Margo Jefferson is one of our most astute and elegant cultural critics, full stop. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, she’s also the acclaimed author of several books, including her latest, Constructing a Nervous System. Margo joins us on the show to talk about finding a new language for criticism, engaging with art on her own terms, Bing Crosby and Ella Fitzgerald, investigating herself as a critic and a teacher, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with another set of TBR Topoff book recommendations from Margie and Marc.
Featured Books:
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson
Negroland by Margo Jefferson
Song of the Lark by Willa Cather
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here, and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:
Barnes & Noble: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the host and producer of Poured Over and I am so excited. I’m actually giddy as we tape this show because Margo Jefferson has been a writer that I have been reading for a very long time. And I never, ever walk away from a Jefferson piece without learning something new. And I have to say, I’ve been listening to so much Bud Powell and Nina Simone and Marvin Gaye, while I was prepping for this show. Margo’s new book is Constructing a Nervous System. And I’m so excited to see you this morning. Thank you so much.
Margo Jefferson: Mutual excitement. Thank you.
B&N: I love this metaphor. And I love this title Constructing a Nervous System. Can we start with that?
MJ: We can. And I first have to since this book is filled with other people’s words, note that this title came out of the conversation I had with a writer friend, Wendy Walters, we were talking about. I was like, This is so hard. This was years ago I don’t know what I’m gonna do and I don’t know what I’m doing. And she said, You know, I understand that. I totally feel how hard it is. I said, Okay, tell me why. And she said, Well, it’s like constructing a nervous system. And I thought, oh, I can live with that. You know, that was the frame that was the soft pillow in a way I needed to rest on. So I kind of went back and looked at my Greys, not my Grey’s Anatomy, my old anatomy books and went online. Okay, yes, this really does work. It works both in terms of being openly, I’m involved with the arts, I love it. I don’t I’m reliving parts of the book and with the parts that are being forced to engage with my own, you know, temperamental complexities, let’s just say,as we all have. Here we are, we struggle through life with our, and we move through sometimes happily, our nervous systems, we can tweak them, but you know, their these fixed things that were given at birth. There is also though there is this private culture that we are making for ourselves that we’re taking in every moment and you know, yes, there’s our family. There’s the town we live in, you know, they’re all these psychologically, entwined narratives, psychoanalysis, sociology, and all. But there are these particular stories, they might be narratives, they might be free associative, it might be collage of parts of us that are awakened, aroused, repelled in some way that is fascinating, by anything from a little piece of ephemera, from some gesture, you know, you see and enact or to some great work of art, but it’s all reconfiguring or can be reconfigured inside us. Sometimes, simply by the fact that you age, or you go through some vast extreme experience. We all as writers know those books that we can barely manage, and a certain point of our life that suddenly become or they eventually become critical. Well, in tiny, you know, microscopic, it might be a word, it might be, you know, a drawing in tiny, microscopic waves, those ways, those changes are always taking place inside. And that’s really what I wanted to track. It also had to do with the sense of conviction I’ve had more and more, probably since I stopped doing reviewing regularly that one just has to stay open to these difficult, for a critic, responses and emotions like vulnerability, like uncertainty like ambiguity. How do you write interestingly about feeling? I don’t know that I’m up to this piece of work that I just saw on stage last night, it’s asking things of me that I wasn’t ready to give or that are new to me. How do you turn that into prose that doesn’t simplify, make sure that you somehow are still in a position of traditional power, I’ve mastered this? So you know, all of those responses and feelings that are so much a part of every fiction writer, every playwright every poet, uses that, we critics use it in directly but I want it sometimes that I wanted to use all of that directly, which would also help keep a sense of momentum going in the book.
B&N: One of the things that I love about this new book, too, is you talk about how you’re pursuing that dissonance. And you want to sit with the dissonance. And I always think of that honestly as the writer’s job because you’re sitting either with characters that you’ve created or characters you’ve witnessed, whether that’s in visual art or on the page or on the screen or listening. So you’re balancing this idea of witnessing in a way as a critic you’re translating and not just a critic, I should say, as a writer, because that is ultimately your job. And you’re sitting in this dissonance, and you’re thinking about how you’re going to translate experience. And you need to still capture the movement of the experience, you need to capture the moment it changes you, which means you actually have to give something up to your audience that you might not be prepared for. And you’ve talked about memoir and the difficulty of writing memoir, Constructing a Nervous System is not a traditional memoir, it’s it to me, it’s a work of literary criticism, it’s a work of, it’s so much bigger than memoir, but you can’t separate who you are, as a writer and a person from the work that you choose to do.
MJ: You know, I almost titled will subtitle it a cultural memoir instead of a memoir. And that’s really the form I found I could work in, I actually didn’t want with Negroland, and certainly not with this, particularly when people would say, Well, this is going to be a continuation of Negroland. I didn’t want that. And I didn’t want that more traditional kind of arc of childhood to a certain stance of wisdom or resignation or triumph. I wanted partly because I felt with Negroland, and very much with this book, that ability to change persona, change my position to acknowledge that our one was performing off times, and that one played many, many roles, none of which were hypocritical, all of which the complexities of the life around one now I’m back to Negroland, and this multi layered world that I was in in terms of class, race, you know, identities, the history of the time, I wanted to be able to take in all of that, and a traditional memoir structure wasn’t going to allow it. And partly because I also needed to change my relationship and my tone as I went along. And that was really what drove Constructing a Nervous System.
B&N: You keep a great device to that you use to great to terrific effect in the Roland which is you break the fourth wall a lot, and I really appreciate it. And there a couple of points where you do it specifically in Constructing one is talking about memoir, and you say remember, memoir is your present negotiating with versions of your past for a future you’re willing to show up for. Which is exactly what this book is. Because, again, as you just said, you don’t need to do, here’s Margo, at age five. Here’s Margo. I mean, those moments pop, but they’re in the context of the music, your experience.
MJ: Here’s what it is happening to this creature, who is Margo at age five. Yes, exactly. Well, you know, I realized I couldn’t progress in Negroland until I simply said, acknowledge that a I was fighting, I’ve been raised to oppose well, and avoid, the confessional centrality of this very theatrical self. I’ve been raised not to do those. And if you’re a critic, that’s also not what you’re practicing. And that’s not what you’re expected to practice. I do honor that in terms of ways that criticism can train you to be deeply engaged with and to insist on being informed deeply about things that are not directly. your passion, your concern, you’re always in that way. Criticism is very even the most traditional, which I’ve also done tied to this book. So you are constantly finding almost new languages and new connections, forging new connections, you might forget it the next week. But you did it. You found it and something of it stays with you.
B&N: And it’s interesting to me, because Bing Crosby comes up in a way that having read a lot of your work, I wouldn’t have necessarily expected but it makes sense for who he was at the time.
MJ: Yes. In that cultural period. Yes. Yes. Which is really the first half, a little past, I forget when he died of the whole damn 20th century.
B&N: Really, can we talk about Bing Crosby for a second because I have two experiences of Bing Crosby one is him singing Little Drummer Boy with David Bowie. I don’t even understand what this is. Because I was so tiny.
MJ: And David Bowie says that he did it because his mother had loved Bing Crosby. But there were the two of them as performers utterly committed to a strange kind of inauthentic authenticity.
B&N: And then there were the road pictures with Bob Hope, which when we were small, there were not a lot of television options. You would occasionally get plunked at the babysitter’s and I’m like what am I doing? But so I know historically, Bing Crosby is this huge figure in American pop culture, right? He’s a musician. He’s a movie star. He’s Bing Crosby. He apparently was not a nice man.
MJ: Which is one of the things that’s kind of horrifyingly fascinating because the benevolence of the persona, that laid back hello, but also you know the boy next door who can play you know, that was so intense and so a cute. But I first got really interested in him because I didn’t give a damn about the road movies particularly. Via is Paul Whiteman, jazz, loving and getting credibility in those early years from loving and kind of listening to and in the case of Bix Beiderbecke, jamming with Bix Beiderbecke early on, recognizing Armstrong’s genius, recognizing everyone is genius, but at the same time, he is always you hear it in his earliest recordings, the almost minstrel adaptation, less of black phrasing, which he does with a kind of musical truth telling, but the voice is definitely a legacy of Oh, I’m this white person rolling around these wild, you know, kind of guttural syllables and sounds in my mouth, and it makes me feel very good. And it’s a lot of fun. Oh, those people. So that fascinated me too, this combination of something that was part of the history that yes, complicated is nevertheless in certain fixed ways revolting. And this creature who was part of this hybrid and mulatto and race clashing and collaborating suddenly modernism, American modernism. The most interesting white performers were all in some way engaged in that like his ability the power he had as a straight white man, to just keep Okay, I’m a naughty boy doing minstrel. Oh, no, now I’m a kind of paterfamilias crooner, you know, one reassuring symbol of American culture that will show up in sitcoms in the 50s. He’s ahead of the curve and all those ways, and the voice that was playful and able to move around quickly, rhythmically becomes more oleaginous. All of that just fascinated me as did and not just in being but then other performers. But I couldn’t let go of him. You know, my repulsion. My distancing, my Oh, this is so cornball, you know. Nevertheless, kept corralling him back into my little cultural wheelhouse. So that’s when I began to think about, okay, what do I need from him, racially? You know, what does he give me? And some of it is just a fascination of otherness, you know, even when it’s nasty, or unsettling. But the other thing that I realized is that, for me, he does embody the performance of a kind of almost caricatured whiteness, and that’s white minstrelsy. And I thought, well, let me find, let me assume a rather powerful position in relationship to that. He’s my toy. Let me kind of make him a toy, as well as a kind of revelation of one sense of what in terms of race and gender you are allowed and what you’re not allowed. So I was able to be a bad girl in something.
B&N: But also his performance of masculinity, too. I mean, it was very specific to the era. It was very specific to his audience. He was aspirational for so many people.
MJ: Exactly. Which, in terms of the American masks of amiability, you could take that line DH Lawrence is about the basic American soul and he is talking about the male American soul. He says, you know, all the other stuff, please. It’s window dressing all this sweetness and light, it’s hard, isolate, stoic and killer. That, in its own way, if one thinks of Bing’s life and the contrast between the public persona and the you know, the, yeah, hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. American male amiability, class, amiability.
B&N: And the flip side of being in many ways is Ella Fitzgerald, here she is her background is really tough, really, really tough. And she’s also a model for Black womanhood in a way that we hadn’t experienced. I mean, the fact that she would sweat on stage apparently was very disturbing to some people. And I’m like, she’s a performing and she’s in her zone as it were.
MJ: Yes. And she is admired and respected even by those who, and adored, even by those who were disturbed, as I was as a girl by the sweat. But that has so much to do, of course, with race mixed with class and gender, you know, Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, the actual tambor and tone, and the songs that she drew on were, in certain ways as jazz was, they were a kind of bourgeois world. So we were not supposed to see, you know, the funky blues singers, they were, even though Ella actually can musically do blues very well. But we weren’t supposed to see all that funky low down. I’m a woman and I’m sweating the same way that Muddy Waters might. So then we moved into the codes of feminine behavior, which my Black bourgeoisie was deeply involved in this had been mastering these codes and performing them beautifully had been considered, in certain ways, as important as having a social conscience, you know, in is helping the race progress that was seen in a way not only as pleasurable and a sign of privilege, but as an achievement because of the kind of slimed hit of stereotypes and degrading behavior towards black women, all of which had been historically kind of put onto us. It’s, this is who you are, we can’t do any better. So there is this fabulously talented Ella Fitzgerald, but I’m looking even though I know perfectly well, she’s very good, but she’s not a genius in that way. You know, I’m looking at Lena Horne, because that’s a presentational female glamour mock, and Ella is you know, she’s, she’s stout, she dresses well, and she shy, you know, so she doesn’t step right into all that pattern on the TV shows. She’s simply visible, you know, that’s what she is. All of America recognizes her. But when she died, that’s when I really started thinking about her, I suddenly saw in myself a certain kind of condescension, Billie Holiday was so much more emotionally profound and look at the life she lived, as if what we knew about this hard in certain ways tragic but help, you know, those were her bonfide few days and back, you know, the the narrative of the incandescent, destroyed and itself destroying woman and Ella had none of that. In this way. You weren’t very typical girl of a certain era, particularly as typical Black girl, at a certain era track this. And that allowed me to track your uncertainty, your distress that here was a Black woman very nicely dressed, who nevertheless was sweating the way working class, Black women sweat and the way one feared, one was always going to be seen as just about to do or is really finally best suited to doing. It was really the Bud Powell record that set me off because there he was sweating on the cover. And that was glorious, you know. So then I moved to Ella. And that was it was an entry into trying to find a real intimacy with her life, as well as her art, the life that she did not confined to the world intimacy that was not omniscient, that got her talent that got the ways in which she was difficult to read, almost decorous. And then also, but could find, finally, the wildness of her art, hidden in certain ways in plain sight, always displayed musically, but performatively hidden in plain sight.
B&N: I think, too, one of the things that’s so interesting, as you read through Constructing a Nervous System, are the pieces that you have to break through for your own sense of self. And the idea that you had to deconstruct all of these different iterations of Margo at different stages.
MJ: Yes, that’s right.
B&N: Via the art, which, yeah, I could argue that that’s the growing up process. Certainly.
MJ: Yeah. Yeah.
B&N: But here on the page, everything is very deliberate. There’s one chapter where your literary references, you go from Charlotte Bronte to Willa Cather to Sylvia Plath, Katherine Mansfield, Gertrude Ma Rainey, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone. And that’s just one chapter. That’s early in the book. And I can see, knowing what I know about each of those, that progression makes perfect sense to me.
MJ: Thank God, you know, because the task and the terror for a writer is making those strange progressions. that space inhabited by all of this disparate stuff, making them make sense not just for you, but placing them in such a way that the reader can either decide to go with in like a critic does, okay, I’m decoding and I’m going with this arc or can be stimulated to invent their own chain of associations as they enter each one. This was also very much my way of, I’m so tired of the word reckoning, but coming, recognizing, let us say, and making use of this very heterodox, you know, start with race, gender, you know, I grew up in the era where the cannon was basically white males and the Americans, even American white males were relatively new in that, in the course of my life, because history happened to put me there, you know, I got to college in the mid and late 60s. So all of these other political, social aesthetic movements, racial, genders, sexual identity, feminist, they all came. And so I wanted to, but I also had to keep taking this stuff in, it’s easy when you’re young to take it in. And by excluding the things that rightfully are being critiqued because they were pretending to be ubiquitous, and you were universal. But the older I got, particularly when I started writing criticism, I didn’t want to dump that stuff, I had my my rights to engage with it as fully as any white, you know, male, heterosexual, who shared those qualities with the writers. And I had to keep thinking so or feeling my way through how, at least in terms of my sensibility, my temperament, they could be in conversation with each other, and they could cohabit without being opposed to each other at all points. That’s part of that track that you’re finding. And then suddenly, it’s a lot of fun, it turns out, you can find a way to put a Sylvia Plath line with a Ma Rainey line, and it works.
B&N: It absolutely works, because these are all disparate pieces of American culture. And I think that’s the piece that gets lost because we’re so this might be a human thing, where we just want to keep categorizing things.
MJ: Every time we discover and acknowledge new parts of American culture, political aesthetic, whatever. One impulse is to categorize it in a very fixed way and to make sure that what we’re now calling the debris of earlier periods of the culture I cleared away well, some of that debris needs to be cleared away, but but not erased, it still needs to stay in our consciousness. And yeah.
B&N: And this brings me to Willa Cather in Song of the Lark, you talk about struggling to teach this book in the 70s. Obviously, we’d had this moment where suddenly women writers were everywhere.
MJ: There were so many, there were women’s bookstores.
B&N: It was, it was a different moment. It was a very different moment. But Willa Cather’s Willa Cather your teaching song of the lark, and I’m just going to own it, I have not read as much Willa Cather as some.
MJ: Where did you grow up?
B&N: Outside of Boston.
MJ: Hey, um, yeah, that a little Midwestern thing, driving a bit towards.
B&N: And again, this is a part in the book where you break the fourth wall and you say, reader, this is a procedural, and I really want to talk about this for a second because the way you interrogate yourself and the way you interact with the art itself, the Willa Cather novel song of the lark, but also the painting that kicks it off, right, which some folks have used on different editions of the book, and then you’re thinking about your students and how your students will respond to you as a Black woman teaching an American Classic by a white woman.
MJ: Exactly. And the ways in which I refused to fully take in I think, you know, it was there, but it wasn’t activated. I refused to activate for several years of teaching this, the problematics of her race, simplifications, stereotyping, dismissals. So if I was investigating myself, as a critic, I had to investigate myself as a teacher. what
B&N: Well. I mean, is canon? At this point? I have a very nice life. I just had a similar version of this conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winner. It is something I’m a little obsessive about because canon is such a powerful notion, and yet, it’s very easy to become part of canon, it’s very difficult to fall out of canon.
MJ: It’s true. It’s difficult to completely fall out. It’s not as difficult as It used to be to slip down. You know we were talking about canon books, the way we might talk about, you know, sports teams whose rating is really, really plummeting, even though they’re still going to be able to participate in the championships. Hemingway’s an example of that, Norman Mailer is an example of that. But it is, and traditionally, always has been much harder to get in. And the only way really go up against that has been for each group to devise present, recognize, lobby for and declare its own canon and to produce to keep producing that work that we then call the tradition. That’s what’s happened over and over and over. And again, if you go back to early modernism, early, well, late 90s, even early 20th century you see white Americans doing that for the American basically white tradition compared to Europe, which is basically saying, Oh, come on, you can be cute, you can be funny, but your primitives and then they get that tradition going and a lot of them are saying Well okay, let me have some primitives of my own these these women of any race, these Black people, these people of color, these immigrants arriving, you know, we see all of them is really not having legacies that we need to attend to.
B&N: Do you still teach Cather?
MJ: I have taught a couple of critical essays of hers in my arts writing courses, one in particular, where she’s kind of impersonating. She’s writing about an opera singer, she loves a woman and she’s all been impersonating a male critic, and that’s a lot of fun. There are other novels of hers that I would teach much more. Would I teach Song of the Lark again? I might depending on the course. This was I was teaching her usually in a in a course I think I said it had to do with American women, traditions of innovation of modernism in music, movies, and literature and even dance. So you know, Cather was also living on the syllabus with Ethel Waters, Billie Holiday, Barrett, Martha Graham, various other people. But first of all, I’d have to have the right context. And I would only teach it really bringing in with a full concentration on not exclusively concentration, but with a full concentration on these racial mythmaking. And you feel excluding part portions of it. And that would be very much a part of, you know, how I examined her sensibility, her intelligence, her tactics, her strategies as a writer and as a creator with a certain vision, because that’s one reason we taught the book of American culture and of an American woman artist.
B&N: A large part of criticism has always been to give context to a piece of art, regardless of discipline, right? We’re trying to fit it into the context of not just the art form, but the moment in time and the moment in our culture, or there are a million different pieces that we’re trying to sort of harvest. And I go back and forth on this too. But there are times where I feel like criticism has become less about the context, which was always the fun part to read really, like in a great review of whatever it is like the context was always a little … it was a reward.
MJ: Yes, the artistic the social, the political, the assumptions of this time, were I mean, that’s that’s ponderous, but it was always very interesting. Readers assumed when they first saw it. Yeah.
B&N: And now I kind of feel like I’m getting a lot of synopsys. And I feel like, I don’t know if it’s an assumption that we all share. And we have a lot of the context already, which feels very strange to me, because given how we’re sort of shot into a tiny million different little pieces because of social media.
MJ: Interest and identity, yes.
B&N: Right. So there isn’t the sort of, if you look at the 50s, or the 60s or even into the 70s 80s 90s, you can argue there’s a mono culture, there are certain television shows, there are certain pieces of music, there are certain movies that become moments that you can shorthand and everyone knows the one line from the Godfather, right?
MJ: Yes, that’s absolutely right. Now I’m not sure it’s ever been is common when you’re talking about what’s called high culture or experimental culture in terms of mass culture, which includes parts of the book world, yeah.
B&N: You’re teaching students how to write criticism and how to interpret criticism. Have we hit a turning point, though? Is there any going back? Is there any I read just on a set of tracks that are taking us?
MJ: You know, I think very much depends on the medium that you’re talking about where I would ask, though I wouldn’t put you on the spot now, where are you seeing these synopsys dominate? The more complicated critical expeditions into a text, it really does depend on the newspaper, magazine, you know, online or in print is trying to reach, how they’re trying to hold on to, or expand their audience. It certainly feels a synopsis without a lot of context. It’s just kind of safe bid for a writer. Even in my own career, I can certainly remember those times, especially maybe with doing weekly books, but know also with theater. When OK, I’m not deeply engaged with this. I’m doing my best when I’m not working. I just got assigned to see something that I can cram. But I don’t know much about the context. And so the safe way to un-embarrassing literacy is a synopsis. And maybe some not so difficult opinions on the writers voice, the actors, the playwrights way of using dialogue, that kind of thing. I think it’s a safe haven. Maybe at a time that one feels many, many writers feel I can I quit. This stuff is overwhelming me. These are just my number. And I have to be in some way. I always always terrified of being a dilettante as a reviewer, in a way that’s what a synopsis enforces a kind of dilettantism don’t you think?
B&N: It does, but that is just not a word I would ever use to describe you or your work.
MJ: Well, you know, when I was growing up, I was always jumping from Oh, I mean, I’m a good pianist. I’m gonna be Oh, no, I want to be an actress. Oh, you know, I felt a little, particularly as part of this female tradition of amateurism. Oh, my god, how am I going to show I’m going to prove to myself as well, as I’ve just said, I am a deeply serious person who will take hold of something. And maybe that’s also partly in this book. I’m showing you how this heterodox mix is not dilettanteism, okay.
B&N: Oh, it’s really not. It’s really not. What brings you joy.
MJ: That’s a big question. I can count always on a piece of art in any field in any area. Some of them I know can bring me joy, right? You know, because they’ve been with me, you know, press the button, you’ll get joy. I know that if I’m venturing forth to some new form of art or entertainment, something will excite me, I can count on that. But the joy of finding encountering something new, and it is far beyond that, of course, the people one loves hanging out with them. I like sort of veering from something that’s very serious to being really shallow and obsessive say about makeup. You know, that’s a lot of fun. I used to love window shopping. It’s hard now. Yeah, the counter to joy. I mean, the absolute opposite of it is the harsh, ugly predictability of what we’re seeing in our political, global as well as national, this lockdown what always brings one joy, at least anticipatory is in the sense that something surprising, something new can take place.
B&N: Right? Yeah, like Constructing a Nervous System
MJ: Ah, you’re slick. Definitely into that compliment.
B&N: But it’s true. And I get to say that you’re part of my nervous system and who I am as a reader and who I am as a bookseller, which is pretty cool. So what’s next for you?
MJ: A friend and I, I’m not going to get really specific, but there are critical identity differences between us, we are of the same generation which we were born like 47/48. So we have lived through a number of crucial historical movements, periods, experiences. And so we are going to, not using a joint voice, we are going to write a kind of cultural memoir that would start basically in the 50s and move up and through but definitely, again, not to people writing and creating an arc will be very much also about friendship, because I’m also a third generation of women, they created families out of friends and about aging, which one never thought about for many years and now must. And how that affects your sensibility, your receptivity, as well as your vanity.
B&N: This is really good. It’s a cultural history of being human. Oh, I like that. Trying it is a cultural history of being human. I think this is kind of great. I’m very excited. I can be patient.
MJ: You’re always patient. No, you’re not always patient. Okay. I’ll take that.
B&N: Oh, wait, I need to ask what have you been teaching recently? If you’re fiction isn’t really quite the thing.
MJ: I don’t do that anymore. I really, when I began teaching full time around 2006-07, I really plumbed on two essays, you know, because the essay form was taking off. And all the avid boldness that nonfiction writers were claiming, yes, the memoir was also becoming popular, but took me a long time, as you know, to get to the memo. It was all this daring it was and it was nonfiction saying, you know, we have license to do anything. So I took that into what people now call personal and lyric and cultural essays, I took that into arts writing, and ways of pushing at the form. I wish I had a term other than criticism, which is a perfectly useful term, kind of like literary nonfiction, but a little a little drab and passive. But I haven’t found that yet. That’s what I’ve been focused on, the creative license in that way that a nonfiction writer can claim.
B&N: I think there’s so much to be said for that. But again, it brings me back to the idea that criticism and autobiography are entwined.
MJ: Absolutely. One of the courses I’ve taught is slightly clunky title, Arts Writing, Life Writing, sometimes I go to slack, but it’s because I want and the writers that I teach, and the students to pay the pieces I want them to really foreground and focus on and then shape and discipline, those all the lines that link all the nerve endings, and chains of memory and fun and invention that link the so called personal life to your life, the personal life of the critic, and the personal life of the of the person, the off the page person. How do they combine? How do they converse? How do they collaborate?
B&N: I think anyone who picks up Constructing a Nervous System can at least see some of those lines.
MJ: Thank you.
B&N: Margo Jefferson, this has been such a pleasure. I mean.
MJ: We had a good time. Yeah.
B&N: Could we do this again? I would just like to keep doing this all the time.
MJ: Keep the brain on its toes. That’s what you do. Yes, we can do that. Keep the brain on point.
B&N: Yeah, I think yeah, that would because there’s so much to talk about, I mean, Constructing a Nervous System, it is a relatively short book, but there’s a lot and it’s all great. It is all so, so great. It’s out now Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson. Thank you again, Margo, for joining us.
MJ: Thank you.