Excerpt from Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivan) // Hazel Jane Plante
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante will be published on October 7, 2019 from Metonymy Press. The following excerpt is presented in partnership with moore hype.
I never understood why Vivian gravitated towards me. We only had a few things in common, but from the moment we met, we started spending a lot of time together. The guys she dated would get jealous, send text messages with emojis of eggplants and cats with heart eyes.Mostly, Viv and I would wander around town, talking. When we got tired of walking and talking, we’d find a bench. If it was rainy, we’d carry umbrellas. She thought best when she walked; I thought best when I was around her. I always felt more articulate talking to Viv. I was fuelled by coffee; she worked in a coffee shop, but didn’t get caffeine, claimed it had no effect on her. She’d bring a travel cup filled with one uncaffeinated beverage or another. We talked about everything under the sky. After a while, I realized she didn’t want to talk about her past. I talked quite a bit about my younger self, but I always sensed that she wanted me to follow her lead and let it all fall away. She’d crossed a border and the past was now a country that she no longer wanted to visit... I took her to the art gallery once for a sprawling exhibition called European Paint, North American Paint. In the European painters section, she drifted past still lifes by Cézanne and Monet, gravitating instead towards more playful and abstract works by Klee and Miró. In the North American painters area, she lingered in front of a vast canvas covered in swirls and streaks of red paint. It was bright and messy and the paint was thickly layered. After a while, she sat on a bench across from the painting. I sat down beside her. We sat silently for a few minutes and I tried to appreciate the painting, but it didn’t do much for me. I asked her what she saw in it. She bit her lip and scrunched her eyes. After a longish pause, she said, “I don’t know. It’s got an energy. If it were a different colour or a different size, I don’t know how I’d feel about it. But the way it towers over me and fills my eyes with red … I don’t know. The other stuff here is okay, I guess. But this one does something. It’s like a giant red door. Or a giant wound. Or a giant angry cunt.” I’m sure that I blushed at this point because, well, she’d said the word “cunt” and we were in an art gallery. We were already a conspicuous pair wherever we went. She was on a swearing roll, though, and said the painting was “just so fucking brilliant.” When I asked who the artist was, she shrugged. I was used to people largely gauging how much they liked art based on the prestige of the artist, rather than just looking at the work. Even the crappiest Picasso always had a gaggle of people leaning in to inspect the brushstrokes, whereas an amazing work by a lesser-known painter would generally get a cursory glance. I walked over to the looming painting and read its label:
Beulah Holmstrom
American, 1914–1987
Red No. 42, 1966
Oil and blood on canvas
On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago
Beulah Holmstrom is associated with the abstract expressionists and color field painters. She gradually narrowed her palette to include only shades of red, a development one prominent art critic declared “signals she has lost her artistic bearings and is sending flares of emergency red in the darkness, casting a pall on gallery walls.”
Red No. 42 is significant in Holmstrom’s development as an artist because the canvas includes the first use of her menstrual blood. At the time, she didn’t divulge the inclusion of blood as one of the materials in her work. This information was discovered in her notebooks several years after her death and the presence of blood was confirmed by analyzing her paintings. She has been cited as an influence by many contemporary artists.
When I told Viv, her eyes lit up. “She used her own menstrual blood?! That’s genius!” While I appreciated the idea, I still wasn’t sure about her work. That’s when Viv first mentioned Little Blue. I remember because I was confused by the name and thought she was talking about colours. After a few sentences, I had lost the conversational map. I interrupted her and she realized that I’d never seen her favourite television series Little Blue, which disappointed and thrilled her. A day or two later, we started watching the series together.…One aspect of Little Blue that Vivian related to was its abundance of absent characters. Viv lost so many people when she told them she was trans: all of her relatives (except her sister), most of her close friends, and her boyfriend. She didn’t like to talk about her life before she transitioned, but her sister Dot told me later that their parents did everything they could to “fix” Viv. When she left for university and transitioned, her parents refused to call her by her name and use female pronouns. Eventually, she couldn’t endure being unseen and unaccepted, so she cut off contact with them. (A sad coda to their relationship: When Vivian died, Dot ran an obituary in two newspapers, including the paper in their hometown. Her parents immediately contacted the newspaper to demand that it run a retraction and publish a new obituary with her dead name and male pronouns, which the paper refused to do.)[1]
[1] A note to journalists: There is rarely a good reason to print a trans person’s dead name. If it’s to tell your readers what their previous name was -- or to tell them what their “real name” is -- that is not a good reason. If you dead name me in my obituary, I will fuck you up. Seriously. I have a contingency plan in place if this happens. It will be armageddon, trans-style. ;)
