Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with

countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an

engaging and accessible way. I'm very excited that the first episode of 2020 features one of my

favorite writers, Maggie Nelson. Maggie is the author of many very potent

and profound books, such as The Argonauts, probably her most famous one, which is about the body

and biopolitics and art and gender expression in our culture.

She is also the author of The Red Parts Autobiography of a Trial,

which is about the trial following the cold case

of the murder of her aunt decades before the book was written.

And her aunt is also the main figure in a book called Jane A Murder, which is a book of poetry

about her aunt.

Her aunt's murder, Maggie's encounter with that murder and her aunt's life.

She was awarded a MacArthur Genius Fellowship in 2016 and is also the author of this

great book called The Art of Cruelty, A Reckoning, which is about Maggie's encounters with and

struggles through longing to engage with violent and cruel art.

It's a longing that I certainly understand and that we talk about quite a bit in the episode.

Maggie and I like a lot of the same writers and a lot of the same thinkers.

When she came over finally, after we had emailed back and forth a few times over some months we talked about

Susan Sontag right away. Susan Sontag who held seriousness in very high regard and I think Maggie and I both

do and have both sort of taken that lesson and internalized it and thought about

how important it is to live a kind of serious life. And also in this episode, we laugh a lot and I think

express a lot of the pleasure and joy in engaging with ideas and concepts. And so it goes all over the place this episode because it's so engaged with the

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