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Reading Wednesday 3.27.19
Mar. 27th, 2019 06:33 amI actually finished multiple things this week! I'm on my way to reducing my number of in-progress projects! Go me! ... I will admit that I also started something new, which I will talk about for #accountability and also because I'm really enjoying it.
On the plus (or rather minus) side of the equation, I finished both Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. I mentioned the former back in early February, and having finished it, my opinion remains pretty much the same as it was then: I enjoyed it a lot, but the huge amount of hype surrounding it is kind of mystifying to me. It struck me as a well-written but fairly standard bildungsroman, told at a narrative distance that was a little removed to really enthrall me. I liked its focus on girls, women, and female friendship, but the majority of the things I read are about girls and women: friendships between girls and women, or love affairs between girls and women, or, ideally, complicated whatsits somewhere between or outside those two things between girls and women. So that's not exactly a novelty, though maybe that's because I very consciously seek those things out? Maybe if I were reading straight off the best-seller list (wording intentional) it would be more uncommon? I dunno, man. I remain kind of flummoxed by the mind=blown reaction that so many folks apparently had to this book. However! It's certainly a fine book, and one I'm glad I read.
For the Record, on the other hand, was super fascinating, which I'm sure is unsurprising to hear me say since I kept excerpting it while reading. Arondekar makes a nuanced argument about archival methodologies that strive for completeness and legibility: both the conservative stance which says, for example, no queerness existed in the past because it's not in the archive and the archive is complete; and also queer/feminist/subaltern studies (though, plainly, Arondekar belongs much more to the second of these groups than to the first) which attempt to recover in the archive what's been lost, or to read a complete story in what has gone unarchived, essentially letting the gaps dictate what they should be filled by. Her idea, greatly simplified here by me, is instead to dwell in the incompleteness of the archive: to find places where the incompleteness itself makes meaning, rather than always to look for places where it can be mitigated in favor of real or imagined completion. (You can see the connection to the passage on Kipling and Freud that I excerpted the other day.)
Almost more interesting, though, to the casual reader, is that in the process of exploring this idea Arondekar surveys all kinds of intriguing queer-historical moments, from Richard Burton's missing report on the male brothels of Karáchi, to an abortive sodomy conviction in Allahabad in 1884, to the fetishization of the rare-in-real-life india rubber dildo in Victorian porn, to an analysis of the scant few stories Rudyard Kipling wrote about the 1857 Mutiny. Arondekar closes her Kipling chapter by discussing a non-Mutiny Kipling story, "To Be Filed for Reference," in which the narrator is bequeathed a long-heralded yet (according to the narrator) ultimately nonsensical and inappropriate-for-revelation text by a semi-autobiographical character occupying a liminal space between Englishman and "native":
This was all very interesting to me because it so happens that I just started another story which also starts with the meeting of two men, also in a caravanserai in India; in which one man (as in the Kipling) offers the other tobacco and then, eventually, over drinks and in an interaction reminiscent of lovers (as in the Kipling), gives him a book which (as in the Kipling) offers the promise of enticing, previously-unsuspected yet near-unfathomable stories requiring much glossing and interpretation, at least one of which (as in the Kipling) involves a connection between a feral northern/white foreigner and an Indian woman: Indra Das's The Devourers. (One assumes that Kipling did not go on to chronicle the adventures of queer werewolves.) Not that the frame narrative of two strangers meeting in the night and exchanging stories or even texts is a unique one, but the many commonalities of those two setups do bring up the interesting possibility of reading Das as explicitly in dialogue with Kipling. I'm not far enough along in the Das to have much in the way of substantive comment on that front, but it does make a person wonder. Arondekar/Kipling connection aside, I'm finding Das's tone a little bit slow going: it sometimes feels self-consciously ponderous in a way historical fiction can be prone to before authors totally get in the swing of whatever voice they're adopting. A lot of the time my reading-brain can adapt, though, if I just keep on; and a lot of the time the author limbers up in their prose as the book goes on, as well.
On the minus (or rather plus) side of things, this week I also started Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, which is a queer historical crime novel set in 1884 in Port Townsend, Washington—a little town I happen to have spent a lot of time in, since I have family there! So that's fun. The protagonist is the bisexual and gender-nonconforming Alma Rosales, rogue Pinkerton operative and disguise aficionada, who I love already after reading this passage, just a dozen pages in. Anyone who has—well, met me, but especially anyone who has read How the mouth changes its shape, will be not at all shocked that I am won over; right before this Alma even thinks to herself "be glad there's not a looking glass here":
I forgot how fast-moving crime fiction is; I'm only like 20 pages in and Alma has already knocked a guy out and been knocked out herself; and that's putting aside the two-page prologue in which she gears up to shoot someone after telling them not to use her name. But it's nice having a bit of a pot-boiler in my pocket when the majority of the other books I've got on the go are histories of racism, railways, and volunteer nursing in WWI. All super interesting, yes, but sometimes a person just wants a good old-fashioned in-costume queer fistfight.
Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I'm at five current reading projects, down from eight when I started trying to cut down. Maybe by next Wednesday I can be down to four?
On the plus (or rather minus) side of the equation, I finished both Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and Anjali Arondekar's For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. I mentioned the former back in early February, and having finished it, my opinion remains pretty much the same as it was then: I enjoyed it a lot, but the huge amount of hype surrounding it is kind of mystifying to me. It struck me as a well-written but fairly standard bildungsroman, told at a narrative distance that was a little removed to really enthrall me. I liked its focus on girls, women, and female friendship, but the majority of the things I read are about girls and women: friendships between girls and women, or love affairs between girls and women, or, ideally, complicated whatsits somewhere between or outside those two things between girls and women. So that's not exactly a novelty, though maybe that's because I very consciously seek those things out? Maybe if I were reading straight off the best-seller list (wording intentional) it would be more uncommon? I dunno, man. I remain kind of flummoxed by the mind=blown reaction that so many folks apparently had to this book. However! It's certainly a fine book, and one I'm glad I read.
For the Record, on the other hand, was super fascinating, which I'm sure is unsurprising to hear me say since I kept excerpting it while reading. Arondekar makes a nuanced argument about archival methodologies that strive for completeness and legibility: both the conservative stance which says, for example, no queerness existed in the past because it's not in the archive and the archive is complete; and also queer/feminist/subaltern studies (though, plainly, Arondekar belongs much more to the second of these groups than to the first) which attempt to recover in the archive what's been lost, or to read a complete story in what has gone unarchived, essentially letting the gaps dictate what they should be filled by. Her idea, greatly simplified here by me, is instead to dwell in the incompleteness of the archive: to find places where the incompleteness itself makes meaning, rather than always to look for places where it can be mitigated in favor of real or imagined completion. (You can see the connection to the passage on Kipling and Freud that I excerpted the other day.)
Almost more interesting, though, to the casual reader, is that in the process of exploring this idea Arondekar surveys all kinds of intriguing queer-historical moments, from Richard Burton's missing report on the male brothels of Karáchi, to an abortive sodomy conviction in Allahabad in 1884, to the fetishization of the rare-in-real-life india rubber dildo in Victorian porn, to an analysis of the scant few stories Rudyard Kipling wrote about the 1857 Mutiny. Arondekar closes her Kipling chapter by discussing a non-Mutiny Kipling story, "To Be Filed for Reference," in which the narrator is bequeathed a long-heralded yet (according to the narrator) ultimately nonsensical and inappropriate-for-revelation text by a semi-autobiographical character occupying a liminal space between Englishman and "native":
"To Be Filed for Reference" maps the genesis of a friendship between McIntosh Jellaludin (the only Kipling character to have successfully "gone fantee" and passed into the hybrid, sullied space of Eurasian identity) and the ubiquitous male narrator. The friendship, and the story, culminates in the form of a literary transaction, an exchange of a strange body of narratives, a "hopeless muddle" of jumbled tales that Jellaludin, on his deathbed, bequeaths the narrator.
The narrator first stumbles on the drunken Jellaludin on a dark night and befriends him with the enticement of tobacco and books in exchange for what he ironically calls "the materials of a new Inferno that should make me greater than Dante" (Indian Tales, 377). ( Born out of this drunken erudition... )
This was all very interesting to me because it so happens that I just started another story which also starts with the meeting of two men, also in a caravanserai in India; in which one man (as in the Kipling) offers the other tobacco and then, eventually, over drinks and in an interaction reminiscent of lovers (as in the Kipling), gives him a book which (as in the Kipling) offers the promise of enticing, previously-unsuspected yet near-unfathomable stories requiring much glossing and interpretation, at least one of which (as in the Kipling) involves a connection between a feral northern/white foreigner and an Indian woman: Indra Das's The Devourers. (One assumes that Kipling did not go on to chronicle the adventures of queer werewolves.) Not that the frame narrative of two strangers meeting in the night and exchanging stories or even texts is a unique one, but the many commonalities of those two setups do bring up the interesting possibility of reading Das as explicitly in dialogue with Kipling. I'm not far enough along in the Das to have much in the way of substantive comment on that front, but it does make a person wonder. Arondekar/Kipling connection aside, I'm finding Das's tone a little bit slow going: it sometimes feels self-consciously ponderous in a way historical fiction can be prone to before authors totally get in the swing of whatever voice they're adopting. A lot of the time my reading-brain can adapt, though, if I just keep on; and a lot of the time the author limbers up in their prose as the book goes on, as well.
On the minus (or rather plus) side of things, this week I also started Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things, which is a queer historical crime novel set in 1884 in Port Townsend, Washington—a little town I happen to have spent a lot of time in, since I have family there! So that's fun. The protagonist is the bisexual and gender-nonconforming Alma Rosales, rogue Pinkerton operative and disguise aficionada, who I love already after reading this passage, just a dozen pages in. Anyone who has—well, met me, but especially anyone who has read How the mouth changes its shape, will be not at all shocked that I am won over; right before this Alma even thinks to herself "be glad there's not a looking glass here":
To lacquer on manhood, Alma starts with the hands. Gentlemen wear rings. A workingman wears calluses. He leaves dirty fingerprints on newspapers, drops peanut shells in his path. His nails may or may not be bitten. In winter his knuckles crack with cold.
She shakes open a sackcloth bundle. Inside is a warped metal pipe, slick with grease, caked with ash. A sailor sold it to her from a dockside box of scraps. He said its explosion unmade a boiler room and nearly sent its ship to the bad place.
Only faint smears of French chalk remain between her fingers. Gripping the pipe, she twists her hands in opposite directions. Twists, so the pipe's grease grits into her skin and its metal ridges rouse the nerves of her palms.
Remember how to talk like Jack Camp. Rough voice. Tobacco-muddled tongue.
Grip, twist.
Remember how to move like Jack Camp. Hips first, cocksure.
Twist.
Remember how to fight like Jack Camp—and at this, Alma smiles. This is her favorite thing. The red and sweat and swearing, the fire in her rib cage, the bend and crush of bodies. Muscles contracting. Sunbursts of pain. Nothing but the pummeling, the wild onrushing of life.
As Camp, she could be a thief, saying, I was on a crew in the city. We ran small-time jobs—liquor, queered cash. Your place looked like easy pickings, and your boys sure as shit didn't put up much of a fight.
I forgot how fast-moving crime fiction is; I'm only like 20 pages in and Alma has already knocked a guy out and been knocked out herself; and that's putting aside the two-page prologue in which she gears up to shoot someone after telling them not to use her name. But it's nice having a bit of a pot-boiler in my pocket when the majority of the other books I've got on the go are histories of racism, railways, and volunteer nursing in WWI. All super interesting, yes, but sometimes a person just wants a good old-fashioned in-costume queer fistfight.
Anyway, the upshot of all that is that I'm at five current reading projects, down from eight when I started trying to cut down. Maybe by next Wednesday I can be down to four?
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