... having been breathed out

Holding strong at six books currently underway. One of these days I'm gonna get it down to five, y'all.

I finished Siddharth Dube's An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex. I'm sure no one who has seen me enthusing about it the past few weeks will be surprised to hear me say that it's excellent, but y'all: IT'S EXCELLENT. Highly, highly recommended, and I don't even read memoir as a general thing. Dube writes with incredible intelligence, experience, and empathy about the intertwined recent histories of the queer rights and sex worker rights struggles in India and the US, and how those things intersected both with global events (the AIDS crisis, the puritanical policies of the Bush administration, the rise of the BJP and Shiv Sena parties) and with his own life as a gay man bridging the gap between his Anglicized Hindu upbringing in Calcutta, and his social justice work and education in the US, India, and elsewhere. I was telling starshipfox in comments, that one of the things I found particularly moving about this book is that, although Dube never sugar-coats anything, he does pay attention to moments of success and hope; and overall manages to maintain hope in the face of what is often some very grim subject matter. That's an ability I admire so, so strongly; and a line that's very difficult to walk effectively.

The only quibble I have with this book is that Dube's terminology around transness feels dated. I think some of this is an awkwardness of cultural translation: when talking about sex workers, for example, he often uses the phrase "women, trans women, and men sex workers," which reads oddly to American eyes because it seems to imply that "trans women" is somehow a separate category from "women." However, when he uses this phrase in Indian contexts (which is most of the time he's using it), it's pretty clear that what he actually means is "women, hijras, and men sex workers," which is a distinction that makes a lot more sense since the Indian concept of "hijra" doesn't map neatly or exactly onto the Western concept of "trans woman," but is instead considered a distinct gender category from either "woman" or "man." Dube does use the phrase once in an American context, where it should probably have been replaced by something like "women, non-binary, and men sex workers." He also occasionally uses "transgender" as a noun, which feels awkward. But overall this is a pretty small complaint compared to the vast number of things that Dube does extraordinarily well and insightfully.

After finishing the Dube I started in on Jane Austen's Persuasion, which greywash and I are reading for our study group on adaptations. It's been SO long since I actually read any Austen, and I have to say that as I get older my impression of her barely-contained bitter fury only increases. It's pretty remarkable that her stuff is often remembered as gentle and frothy, because: I'm only three chapters in, but wow. Tear em up, Jane.

I also finally got around to reading Kate Lear's "It is No Gift I Tender", the last long story in her Endeavour Morse/Max DeBryn fic series. This whole sequence is lovely: bittersweet, understated, and erudite in extremely show-appropriate ways. Lear's Max voice is just really, really wonderful; and since Max is canonically really, really wonderful, stealing every scene he's in despite there being relatively few of them, it's a particular pleasure to get to spend so much time with him via these stories. I especially appreciated the ways in which Max's specific set of cognitive distortions are simultaneously very visible to the reader as cognitive distortions, and also often pretty inarguably reasonable reactions to the position he finds himself in vis-à-vis the law and society. There's also just a lot of awkwardly infatuated midcentury Englishmen lying around in gardens reading Catullus and attending open-air Mozart concerts and going on confusedly heartbroken fishing trips and so-on, which is a narrative space that's extremely soothing to me personally. (... However much of a contradiction that might be with also reading a lot about the history of 20th century British imperialism. I contain multitudes.)

Also read a bit more of Katrina Carrasco's The Best Bad Things (previously mentioned here and here) which continues to abound with fistfights and delightful genderfuckery. Carrasco really makes the most of her protagonist Alma spending most of the book in one disguise or another—usually as her male altar ego, Jack Camp—and taking her primary delights in (a) fighting/rivalry and (b) noticing other people noticing her and reacting to her. "Alma likes to know what people make of her," says the narrator at one point, which is partially a survival strategy, but she she also just gets off on it, and gets off on provoking as much of a reaction as she can. Which is great fun to read.

Purchase-wise, I picked up a Kindle edition of The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects, by Mari Ruti for the queer theory bookgroup meeting mid-May. Kindle editions are way down on my list of preferred formats, but as the linked post outlines, it was like $60 cheaper than a paper copy, for some reason beknownst only to the publishers. So. There we are. I'll probably start this in the next week or so.

I also, on a whim, while browsing in a local bookstore with a friend of mine, picked up a sale NYRB Classics copy of Louis Guilloux's Blood Dark, which is a sort of absurdist-sounding French novel written in 1935 but set in 1917, in which a philosophy professor in a provincial town gets into a petty squabble with a hawkish pro-WWI colleague and ends up fighting a duel. Those who know me will understand the SEVERAL reasons this setup appeals. I also just love the NYRB Classics imprint; I think they're doing great work getting obscure and out-of-print works, many of them in translation, out there into the world.

[My partner] Tandavan and I often went to my brother Pratap's home, where he and his family treated us warmly. I found even a greater warmth and naturalness at the home of my only other relative in Delhi, my aunt Nandini, the very youngest of my mother's five siblings and hence of my generation rather than my mother's. We had been close since our childhood. I had not discussed with her my being gay, so I was surprised and deeply touched to see that from the moment that Tandavan and I started living together she made it a point to specify that he was always invited with me to her in-laws' home, where she lived in a traditional joint family. From every one of her family, Tandavan and I only felt love and warmth. They may have privately discussed my being gay among them, but not once in their company did I ever feel that my choice of romantic partner was remarkable or made me different.

I was struck that my other favorite aunt, Usha, who lived in the small town of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, also treated my relationship with Tandavan with complete ease, insisting that we visit her often, giving us a bedroom with a double bed, and taking care to give us privacy. I thought of telling her and Nandini categorically about Tandavan and my being a couple, but decided against it on realizing that they were certainly already aware of it yet had not asked for any explanation on my part. All the evidence began to convince me that traditional Indians were immeasurably more accepting of same-sex desire than Anglicized Indians like my father. Siddhartha, with whom I had been debating the matter, insisted that was true, judging from his personal experience of being raised in a more Indian setting than I, a sprawling extended family that shared a large Calcutta house.

In contrast, my father—though unfailingly courteous to Tandavan—did not display the same kind of warmth. I didn't raise the matter with him, as all I wanted him to do was what he was doing already, treating Tandavan politely. But the unfortunate downside was that I stopped joining my parents and brothers on family holidays, to which my brothers' girlfriends were invited. It created something of a hiatus in my relationship with my father after a decade in which we had drawn closer and closer.

—Siddharth Dube, An Indefinite Sentence: A Personal History of Outlawed Love and Sex

I 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":

"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?