"So gender is a kind of playacting?" he has asked her once. "We're all in drag?"

"No, no, no!" Vita has cried, "You don't understand at all! That's a gross oversimplification!" This outburst had culminated in a rather huffy exhortation to review, if he hadn't already, all the sources cited in her bibliography, and then to read her article again more carefully. Nelson, trying to be clever, dredged his memory of Professor Evangeline's literary theory class at Sooey and quoted Adorno's critique of Heidegger to Vita, that "he lays around himself the taboo that any understanding would simultaneously be falsification." But Vita only flattened him with another Adorno quote, that "retention of strangeness is the only antidote to estrangement."

"So I can only understand your argument if I don't understand it?" Nelson had said, trying to understand.

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¶ 9:25 PM