REFLECTIONS: “Off-Track Reader Responses” by Maud Lavin

Illustration by Maura Walsh after “Modenschau” (Fashion Show), by Hannah Höch, 1925-35 (detail).

REFLECTIONS
Off-Track Reader Responses
By Maud Lavin

I’m skipping the hate responses here — although I get them. I’ve been screamed at twice at in-person readings. What can I say, I’m a Scorpio and I sting when I have to, so both times it ended fine. Often, though, when I receive responses to my writing, I get positive ones, but sung to an unexpected tune. Sometimes they make me laugh, like, ha, joke’s on me — I worked so hard to create x, and it’s really the y part they like. I’m not sure why I enjoy this so much, and I’m not sure how to convey to you that surprised delight. Which is, well, the point. Intention is not reception. Not exactly.

Connecting involves some miscommunication. And some learning. I could puff my chest here and preach that writing is a process of learning, of digging in, of figuring out what I think in order to communicate it, reading is a process of learning, and being in dialogue with readers is learning. I find learning in the off-track jogs of misunderstandings mixed with understandings. But the word “learning” is too flat and dutiful to connote how weird and generative the process of give and take can be, especially with creative nonfiction.

The surprises when hearing from readers are fresh reminders that other people are not — God forbid — mirrors of the self. The veering off the linear of intended meaning in an unforeseen direction — a flagging of quirk. The listening and mental rewriting back and forth — the fun of a volley. At times it’s a volley that happens years later, after, say, someone reads a book that’s been out for a while and then they reach out on social media.

This happens to me fairly often. My first book, CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE, on the Berlin Dada photomontages of Hannah Höch, published by Yale UP in the early 1990s, has, against odds, become a cult classic. Four printings, named a New York Times Notable Book, reviewed in the Times, Newsweek, and many other places. Still read and given as gifts now, 30 years later. In addition to writing a book about a cool woman artist not at the time much known outside of Germany, I intended to create a book that was written in a lively, engaging way, to involve readers in how one artist responded to Weimar mass media images and her times.

Between writing the book and now, I’ve given a ton of talks, lectures, and readings with the material, so I’ve heard a lot of responses in the early years of the book and continue to, at a lesser flow, in these later years of the book’s mysterious staying power. In sum, those reader responses have been partly what I was aiming for and partly not: yes to a cool woman artist doing great photomontages, yes to lively writing (thank you!), and no, not caring a lot about an artist looking at mass culture, why wouldn’t she (good point, although art history still fusses about a high art/mass culture permeable boundary years later).

Surprise twist: readers had and have big interest in Hannah Höch as bisexual. The book was published at a time when bisexuals were not widely accepted, the mainstream attitude being that “they” hadn’t really acknowledged their homosexuality and were somehow just pretending (to themselves, to everyone else) to be bi. Bisexuals were hungry to be seen, and there I was writing about Hannah’s three big long-term relationships, one with a man who was a fellow artist, later one with a woman who was a writer, and then another with a man, this time a much younger one, a pianist. My book wasn’t even a biography, but it included research on her life as well as her art. Hannah loved hard. As Hannah wrote her sister Grete when she fell in love with the writer Til Brugman, “I am and will be very happy with Til. We will be a model of how two women can form a single rich and balanced life . . . My dear Gretelein, you are probably the only one who realized how thoroughly the chapter “man” is finished for me . . . Now, all the gates have been thrown open again, and I stroll from myself and ‘it’ marches back into me” (188-89). Hannah Höch died in 1978, but I’m here, as well as others, to answer questions about her, and am glad to do so. Thanks to being interviewed for Barbara Hammer’s film “The Female Closet,” I even have an IMDb page now.

Up to the 2010s and my own reading. By then, I was writing more about mass culture and had gotten fascinated with media flows and fans between East and West. I was watching videos and reading about Chinese pop star Li Yuchun whose sexuality seemed to be a mystery. She’s huge in China, bigger, if possible, than Beyonce is in the West. Her androgyny and dead secrecy about her sexuality has opened the door for a lot of fan projection. I found a great essay by Ling Yang and Hongwei Bao about the online wars between fans who considered her hetero and fans who considered her lesbian. I loved the way the Yang and Bao piece was written — beautiful, beguiling, cranky writing in English about this stew. Look, I’m shy, so I rarely do this: I wrote Ling Yang a fan email at her university email address about the article. We hello’ed back and forth, we argued back and forth, we became pen pals. Moving forward a few years, we ended up co-editing, also with Jing Jamie Zhao and co-authoring, along with others, a book, BOYS’ LOVE, COSPLAY, AND ANDROGYNOUS IDOLS, on queer fan cultures in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, published by Hong Kong UP. We became friends. We spoke at conferences together. We went on a vacation in Michigan together with our husbands. Mine wasn’t so much a misreading of Ling’s original article as seeing a spark of her in the Li Yuchun piece and the way it was written, reaching out because I wanted to connect with her. After a time, I sent her my writing too, we liked (maybe more important than exactitude in communication) each other’s writing, and got to know each other across half the globe and in real life.

It’s not all harmonious Lake Michigan vacations. It’s another friend telling me he found a poem about my disability struggles really funny. (I left that one alone, with a thanks-for-reading deflection.) It’s a different friend asking me if I made up a creative nonfiction piece about an incident from my Ohio childhood. No. But that was ok, sometimes I, too, wonder if I imagine some Ohio memories. I don’t, Ohio is a strange place.

Then there are the odd times when I re-read work I published years earlier. I like that writing. It’s angry, passionate, excited, argumentative, not subtle. I’d see and write those subjects with some more gray areas now, I expect, but when reading I want to be friends with that younger writer. Still am.

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