... having been breathed out

After moving to Delhi, [my close friend] Siddhartha had lived in a series of rented apartments in the cheaper sections of Defence Colony, Lajpat Nagar, and Jangpura. Siddhartha's flawless Hindi and his angelic good looks always enchanted his landlords initially. But in just a few weeks they would inevitably turn hostile.

They disapproved of the unending stream of bohemians visiting Siddhartha—men of feminine appearance (some with tweezed eyebrows and a hint of kohl), rough and macho men, obviously single women (based on their arriving and leaving without male companions), and even one flagrant cross-dresser who sometimes arrived decked out int he shiny slips he favored. Singly or in a group, they all disappeared into Siddhartha's apartment.

The curtains were then pulled tight. Whatever the hour, there was music and loud laughter, sometimes broken by suspiciously long silences. Impromptu parties took place at odd times, occasionally even in the afternoon. The sound of ghungroos and male voices seductively singing "In ankhon ki masti ke, mastaane hazaron hain"—"Countless men are intoxicated by my bewitching eyes," a courtesan's siren song from a classic movie—would drift down. Siddhartha's voice, excited and giggling at a peculiarly high, feminine pitch, would float above the din.

Soon enough, the landlords would insist that Siddhartha move out, saying that his lifestyle was unacceptable in a respectable neighborhood. Though they strongly suspected he was gay, it was never brought up. They had no firm proof, and the large number of women visitors must also have confused them. But, Delhi being lawless in such matters, the landlords either refused to return Siddhartha's rental deposit, or, without giving him due notice, insisted that he leave immediately or be thrown out forcibly.

Because I had long taken on the role of being Siddhartha's responsible older brother, I inevitably got involved in the crises. Try as we might, matters would deteriorate. On one occasion, I came to blows with a landlord and his adult sons. Luckily, my years at [Eton-style boarding school] Doon had made me a tough opponent, and they backed off after we traded a few punches.

1. During WWI, tiny Elizabeth Bishop was living in Nova Scotia! Apparently she lived with her grandparents in Great Village, NS, from 1915-1917, aged four to six, and thereafter returned often for holidays. Great Village is west and slightly south of the Antigonish/Trenton/New Glasgow area where my characters Rebecca and Katherine grew up and where Emma lives; and situated on the Minas Basin north of Halifax, where Maisie and Rowland live. This has no practical applications for me as even Bishop at six years old was, you know, still a six-year-old; she wasn't running around falling in love with Canadian maidens and writing sonnets about loss. But I thought it was a cool connection.



2. The artist Mildred Valley Thornton, of whom I had never heard, sounds like a force to be reckoned with (from Shay Wilson's "Portrait of a Vanishing Artist)":
   

   At the age of seventy-seven, Mildred Valley Thornton looked back on her achievements. Her oeuvre was impressive-- hundreds of paintings, most of them striking portraits of First Nations people from the Plains and the West Coast, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s. She'd received honours and recognition. She was a fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts. She was a respected art critic. She had published a book (a second book was published posthumously). Her paintings had been internationally exhibited.
   
   Another person might have felt satisfied with these accomplishments, but Thornton was bitterly disappointed. Since the beginning of her career, she had refused to sell any of her portraits, even though they were in high demand. She wanted the Canadian government to one day purchase the entire collection on behalf of the public and to acknowledge the historical importance of her contribution. [Thornton intended to pass on the proceeds from this sale to the First Nations people who had been the subjects of her portraiture.] But when that day came, the Canadian government refused to buy it. Angry and hurt, Thornton made a drastic decision--she would have every last painting in the collection burned.

   
   This last did not actually happen because this codicil to Thornton's will wasn't properly witnessed; instead her works were sold into private collections and the money went to her estate rather than back to the First Nations people whom she wanted to benefit. Womp womp.

greywash

[Kipling's 1857 Mutiny] stories are [...] carefully screened for their unspeakable horror, a horror that only the narrators [and not the readers] can wholly see and decipher. [...]

In her work on narrative obsessions and their links to fetishism, Emily Apter connects such narrative structures to a particular kind of pleasurable preoccupation: "The literary psychodynamics of vision: the conceit of seeing... heightens erotic atmosphere by placing the reader-viewer at a distance (the suspense of image-suspension) or situating him or her at some transgressively hidden vantage point. The reader is a lonely voyeur, hunched over a keyhole, and the space that separates him or her from the spectacle correlates to the temporality of lingering on the way to a sexual aim... what Freud called perversion... and what Peter Brooks (glossing Freud) has described as the protracted forepleasure of narrative 'clock-teasing'." A footnote to the above passage further points us to the section "The Sexual Aberrations" in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in which Sigmund Freud places the burden of perversity on the rather elusive notion of "lingering": "Perversions are sexual activities... which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, of (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim." For Freud, these aberrant activities are problematic beginnings, preliminary stages that lose their "abnormalcy" when placed in a strongly teleological model of sexuality that must have as its endpoint the stabilizing space of heterosexual genitality. The founding split in all of Freud's revisions of these essays is his inability to account for the breakdown in such developmental models.

What happens, however, I want to ask, if this "lingering" or "fore-pleasure" supersedes the value of genitally defined pleasure, or more interestingly, what if "lingering" becomes, because of and not despite its defined incompleteness, the desired object of narrative focus?

Missing the enormous historical irony of his own words, Macaulay passionately claims that the primary reason for such a deplorable lack of legal models is that "all existing systems of law in India are foreign. All were introduced by conquerors differing in race, manners, language, and religion from the great mass of people."

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation: Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section.

The offence made punishable under this section requires that penetration, however little, should be proved strictly. Thus an attempt to commit this offence should be an attempt to thrust the male organ into the anus of the passive agent. Some activity on the part of the accused in that particular direction ought to be proved strictly. A mere preparation for the operation should not necessarily be construed as an attempt. Emission is not necessary.

"It is unnecessary to point out how desirable it is that our national character should stand high in the estimation of the inhabitants of India, and how much the character would be lowered by the frequent exhibitions of Englishmen of the worst description, placed in the most degrading situations, stigmatised by the courts of justice in India." Macaulay makes the point that Englishmen committing unnatural offences should not be tried in British India, for fear of the consequences of trial on public and civil life.

For antipornography laws to be instituted in colonial India, standards of obscenity had to be carried over from Britain to colonial India. The very presence of antipornograhy laws in Britain translated not only into the questionable morality of the supposedly civilizing colonizers but also undermined the rhetorical force of Britain's ability to govern India. Thus there apears a discourse of contradictory lament int he official archives with respect to the question of obscenity and pornography in the Indian context. On the one hand, we read of colonial officials repeatedly complaining about the rampant perversion of Indian culture and speaking of the need to regulate such outpourings in discursive materials. On the other hand, there is equal despair at the thought of brown subjects "viewing postcards of naked white women, or of English-educated Indians reading works like The Lustful Turk or Venus in India."

The element of terror—anxiety—is important. Perhaps overconsciousness of details—by which an individual tries to fix his place, from which he tries to gain security and confidence, but without success. It is the element of security, that is forever missing; the meaning and importance of life that is missing.

Pat once said that Ripley was a name she saw on a sign advertising men’s apparel on the Henry Hudson Parkway. And this is true: in the 1940s and 1950s, Ripley’s was a men’s clothing store in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. But it is also false: a convenient billboard wasn’t the only origin of Tom Ripley’s name.

“Comics,” Pat wrote to Kingsley in March of 1953, one year before she started imagining Tom Ripley, “I was determined when I started, were not going to influence my writing.” […] Unwilling to acknowledge influences from popular culture, but always ready to confess anything that ruffled the surface of her intentions, Pat hid the origin of Ripley’s name in one of her favorite places—her work. She put it into The Talented Mr. Ripley and allowed Ripley himself to give the secret away, casually, as a play on a phrase that every newspaper reader in America would know. […]

“He laughed, his own unmistakeable laugh that Marge knew well. ‘The thing is, I’m expecting somebody any minute. It’s a business interview. About a job. Believe it or not, old believe-it-or-not Ripley’s trying to put himself to work.”

Ripley’s Believe it or Not was (and still is) a renowned cartoon, a comics panel created by Robert Ripley […] in 1918. […] By 1936, Robert Ripley was voted the most popular figure in the United States, eighty million Americans a year were reading Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and the phrase “believe it or not” had embedded itself in the American household vernacular.

In December of 1944, writing hard for the comics and grumbling about it, working on the novel she'd been thinking about for two years, The Click of the Shutting, making notes for short stories at night, entertaining more love possibilities than she could possibly handle (a Virginia or two, the socialite Natica Waterbury, an Anne and an Ann, the model Chloe, et al.) and feeling abysmally poor, Pat still kept her eyes on the prize. She framed her desire for the "best" in life in metaphors saturated by the war and couched in the language of the enemy. (Her diary note is in bad German.)

When she was in Paris [in the 1940s, socialite painter] Buffie [Johnson], who knew everyone and went everywhere, was invited to both Natalie Barney’s literary salon and Gertrude Stein’s gatherings on the rue de Fleurus. When Buffie went to the rue de Fleurus, Gertrude, as was her custom, immediately relegated her to the “women’s corner” of the room with Alice B. Toklas, while she, Gertrude, spoke of important things with the men. Although Alice Toklas was very kind, Buffie was piqued at being ignored by Gertrude, and so, as she was leaving the atelier, she leaned over and surreptitiously pinched Gertrude Stein on her bottom. ‘It had,’ Buffie reported, 'the consistency of a block of mahogany.’