philosophy supernatural nude

This story came about as a response to a discussion I was having with thingswithwings a while back about Night Vale, queer theory, safe spaces, race, and many other things. It's about Night Vale as the small town in the desert that can be home to everyone, in its way, which isn't enough, but is something, I guess, and that in itself goes a lot of the way to why I love this stupid show so much.

(Also, it's about the federal government shutdown. I'm super-predictable.)

fic:: when you lay me down you'll bury only bones
by Raven
7000w, Welcome To Night Vale, Cecil/Carlos, Dana and Intern Vithya. Dana's back. Intern Vithya is new. Cecil and Carlos are just the same, but different. Today, Night Vale is the safest place on earth.

( this above all )

So ages ago I meant to rec the Damn, Fandom Is Good At What You Do fest, because I love that: one of my biggest narrative kinks is competence (and, now that I mention it, probably something that attracts me to people, as well). People just getting on with things that are difficult and vital because they love them and were born to do them - yes.

The thing is, I have tried to write my own version, and just cannot. What I do - and what, it becomes increasingly and embarrassingly obvious, I was meant to do - is too awful even for fanfic. It just is. I had a work experience kid following me around today (and I try not to be dismissive in that way, I try not to say "kid" and "girl" of grown women, but seriously) and I tried and tried to explain what I do - and just couldn't. It all turned into "my office is full of lollipops and I know a lot about sewers", in other words things that are true but not exactly helpful. I don't think I could have the Doctor and May or Charles and Erik or Hermione and Luna do what I do. (Wait, maybe Hermione and Luna. But not the others.)

So. Lollipops. Design infringement. Land registration. Life, as ever, goes on.

(My supervisor, today, sounding totally outraged: "I spoke to the woman on the other side of the lollipops thing, and she's YOUNGER THAN YOU!"

I said, "My work experience girl is ten years younger than I am."

We left each other disturbed.)

In other news there is no other news. The weather is godawful. Some of you may have noticed peripherally that I watched the second series of Sherlock and fell hard for it; the fandom is one of the massive ridiculous kink-memes-get-filled ones I haven't been in a while and I'm having a lovely time. I'm also, weirdly, enjoying having a teenage crush on Benedict Cumberbatch. Because the thing is I never did have harmless crushes on famous people when I was a teenager, except when I did and it was awful. If he'd been a famous person in a very popular show when I was, say, fourteen, I'd have had a crush on him secretly and guiltily and then worried and worried and worried: about his eyelashes and high cheekbones and longish hair and fabulously femme way of sweeping out of a room. About being, as we say, one of them.

(Hello, my name is raven and I'm queer, who knew. Strictly speaking I'm pansexual, a term I avoid on the grounds I am not exclusively sexually attracted to goat-tailed demigods playing the pipes. I don't think I articulated it until I was in my twenties, but my type is femme: femme women and men and genderqueer people. God, it's so hard, isn't it? You all know. I'll stop talking. I noticed the other day that I am absolutely incapable of understanding the world as though I were straight or gay; I mean, I can't even write a tight-third gay-or-straight POV, which is odd when you consider I can write white guys. Okay, now I'll stop talking.)

So now I have a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock on my desktop, and I quite like looking at it, and that's okay, self. tau_sigma and petra told me to listen to Cabin Pressure on Radio 4, and I'm doing that, and cackling. It's adorable and ridiculous and has that Radio 4 thing of not being funny in the slightest bit except it's TOTALLY HILARIOUS. It's a half-hour comedy show about a one-aircraft airline, and it has Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephanie Cole in it. It's lovely.

(Speaking of queerness, today is almost the last day to respond to the equal marriage consultation setting out the Home Office plans for for civil marriage and civil partnerships. It's very much worth doing. I speak as someone who finally got around to it today.)

In other other news the weather really is awful. I seem to spend all day at work with rainwater in my ears. I no longer have terrible migraines, thanks to the new meds, but have bizarre side-effect of being eerily calm about everything. Tomorrow I have a pub quiz in which the Caped Crusader and I have been split up by executive decree. The world spins madly on.

I suspect real happiness is getting up far too late on a sunny Friday morning, stumbling into the kitchen and finding a split croissant, with cheese inside, on the table, and just in case I didn't get it, a note propped on it saying "breakfast!".

So, three things make a post, right?

( lashings of ginger beer time! )

*

Here is the second thing in this post. X-Men. Hi. A few days ago gavagai discovered I'd never seen it and showed me the first movie having just poured me a glass of lemonade plus two and a half measures of gin. Possibly as a consequence, I enjoyed the film thoroughly. Yay, Patrick Stewart. Yay, Ian McKellen. Yay, my continued crush on Anna Paquin. Anyway, I enjoyed it enough to watch X2, and then again on gavagai's advice I skipped the other two and watched First Class instead.

( loooots more about that )

*

And here is the third thing I want to write about! thingswithwings gave me some of my icons to talk about. ( icons! )

*

Now I am going to write fanfic! Maybe. Three more days of freedom. Not that I wanted to be unemployed for the rest of my life, far from it, but I will miss writing fanfic at 3pm.

I am sleeping very badly and suffering unexpectedly from jet-lag. I hate my brain. Hence my sleeping until three today, and doing nothing of any productivity. Graargh.

But, actually, I want to talk about something else. A while ago, yiskah recommended A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth's 1400-page novel about post-independence India, and reminded me I'd always meant to read it, and never got around to it. (Well, I got it out of the library once. 1400 pages, a one-week loan. You understand.) Then Shim found it in Oxfam for a couple of pounds (in terms of sheer verbiage, the best-value book purchase he's ever made) and I had a couple of translatlantic flights this week. The time had come.

I just finished it. I am a teeny bit disappointed with it for a stupid reason I am going to put under a cut. ( spoilers )

That aside, I am incredibly impressed with the novel, its depth, and scope, and a little drawn out of my skin by it - which is understandable, I've been reading it for a week, occasionally for several hours at a time - but it's also because it creates an entire world and then pulls you into it so, so well. The writing style is so deceptively simple, sometimes even archaic - when was the last time you read a contemporary novel with an omniscient third-person narrator? - that you don't realise you care for the characters until you've been doing so fervently for 700 pages. It's wonderfully done.

The book jacket says that the novel is: "at its core, a love story; the tale of Lata's - and her mother's attempts to find a suitable boy, through love or exacting maternal appraisal. At the same time, it is the story of India, newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis as a sixth of the world's population faces its first general election and the chance to map its own destiny."

That sounds pompous. But oh, it's right, too - it really is that. It really is an attempt to show us that world, that post-1947 world where everything was new and just the same, how India started out, by means of showing us some Indians - of different families, castes, and religions, all tied together by Mrs. Rupa Mehra's quest to find a suitable boy for her daughter - and how they come to be what they are.

And I know us brown people are always making such a fuss about people who aren't us writing about us, but here, right here, is the reason why: Seth writes about Indians with a mixture of knowing acerbity and warm, warm affection, because he is those people. His characters are sweet, funny, unspeakably corrupt, occasionally horrible, warm and loving, hideous, and they are Indian. In 1400 pages there are about sixty named characters, and they all know each other and they are connected and interconnected and everyone knows everyone else's business except when to do so would make life more efficient, and that rings marvellously true to me. They're wonderful characters. Lata, who is the closest of any of them to being a main protagonist, is marvellous: she's a university student, intelligent - more so than her mother - and trying very hard to navigate a world in which everyone suddenly wants to get her married. Her mother's endless emotional manipulation is just right. So is her brother Arun, a wonderfully done brown-sahib of just the most irritating type. And the languages they speak - the casual mix of Hindi, Urdu and English, the religious and post-colonial battles that are fought on linguistic territory, I just wanted to climb into the book and roll around in the rightness of it. (When the outraged citizenry start protesting their Home Minister, Lakshmi Agarwal, and chant: saanp ki zafar, insaan ki khaal / yeh hai L. N. Agarwal!, I kind of had to clutch at my heart and gasp.)

And then there are surprises. The couple who have an arranged marriage in the very first pages, Savita and Pran, are supposed to be orthodox and boring - and turn out to have a wonderful love story of their own. Another family, the Chatterjis of Calcutta, have a brilliantly sparkling habit of talking in rhyming couplets. Their eldest member, Amit, is a published poet, and Seth takes great pleasure in writing poetry to put in his mouth. The Congress politicians fight it out in the background and foreground, and their stories ought to be boring, too, but aren't. Surprisingly, the wife of the Revenue Minister, Mrs Mahesh Kapoor, and her garden, are the epicentre around which the political stories revolve, and it's a strange narrative choice that works beautifully. There are subplots within subplots, there is intelligent treatment of such varied things as mental illness, shoemaking, tree surgery and sectarian conflict.

Sectarian conflict - yes. The thing that I find most amazing, about many things that I do find amazing about this book, is that the Hindu and Muslim battles are fought in the background of one particular love story between Maan, the Hindu son of the Revenue Minister, and Firoz, the Muslim son of the local Nawab. Their relationship is, well, interestingly handled - I want to say ambiguously, but for all that we never see them sleep together, or even kiss, it's not ambigous, and the part of me that just thirsts for literary queer Indians of any kind wishes there were more about this aspect in the novel. But at the same time, it doesn't flinch from depicting that they love each other dearly, and that it drives them to do extraordinary - and extraordinarily awful - things. Given what they then begin to symbolise to their respective religious communities, I think I have to acknowledge that it is satisfying, thematically. I just wish there were more.

And the thing I got out of it all - other than all these scattershot ramblings - is, well, a sense of self and history. The India in my head is a curious place. Having never lived there as an adult, I have a strange mixture of my childhood memories, my adult observations, my own hang-ups about it all and the post-independence India of my parents, that they told me about when I was small, that they still look for vainly when they go back. I have heard so much about this time: Nehru's India, the one my parents were born into, a mixed-economy world dominated by government bureaucracy and people's first stumblings towards becoming themselves. It's in the details: the Chatterji family, in the novel, discuss how they changed their name to the anglicised Chatterji from the original Chattopadhyay. In the same way, my surname is not the same as my grandfather's. A character reads for his IAS exams - my grandfather did the same. In 1951, the year the novel is set, my grandfather was working for the IAS in the department of natural resources. (And, as he often told people in the decades to follow, as part of his job, he worked on the first computer in India.) Another character has been sent to boarding school in Shimla, a fate my parents assure me would have been mine, too, had things been slightly different. Even the fictional setting, a university town called Bramhpur, bears a distinct similarity to Roorki, the university town near Delhi where my father grew up. It's rather wonderful to have this whole, solid book full of people and places and things, that I can read, reach out and touch.

Seth claims to be writing a sequel, called A Suitable Girl (what else?) to be published in 2013 and set at the time of writing. I really, really hope this does get written. I want to see what he does with India, now. Come to think of it, I rather want to see what we do with it.

So, when lgbtfest prompts were open for submission, I submitted this:

2871. Sports Night, Natalie Hurley, Natalie is not guilty, conflicted or unhappy about her queerness - no matter how much her boyfriend, her faith and her parents get in the way.

I didn't claim it myself, but I kept on thinking about it, and in the end this story happened. This isn't an lgbtfest story really - because I suspect it might have gone differently if I'd worried about sticking exactly to the prompt - but a hat-tip is in order. Writing about queer issues, guys! It's really great.

Anyway. With thanks to gamesiplay and foreverdirt for their kindness in betaing. (And so quickly, too! Thank you both very much.)

Fic:: Hear The City Breathe
by Raven
G, Sports Night, gen and slash, 4000 words. Natalie, who she is.

( Natalie's had a lot of boyfriends )

Here are my opinions about the new episode of Doctor Who:

( this isn't actually all that spoilery )

That is all. I am too sleepy to sit up straight.

Last night I drank a lot of Pimms and wine, and luminometrice and triptogenetica were wonderful hosts, and when we turned up with a duck the size of Jupiter they cooked it, and it was eaten with pancakes and hoi-sin sauce, and it was a lovely lovely evening, and Shim and I stumbled drunkenly home at one in the morning singing "Barrett's Privateers". ("We were let down", he noted, "by the fact I only know half the verses and you don't know any of them at all.")

Today I have mostly been too depressed to do anything. C'est la vie. However. There is a point to this post, before I GO FOR A WALK OMG, because IT IS HEALTHY OMG. I have five Dreamwidth invite codes. If you would like one, please comment and thou shalt receive.

Oh, also, have two more lgbtfest recs:

Something Old, Something New, by such_heights, Merlin.
Arthur, Merlin and Gwen figure things out. There is politicking and hangover cures. It's sweet and kind of awesome.

That Sort of Thing, by hathy_col, Discworld.
This is FABULOUS. Vimes attempts to Explain Things to Carrot. Carrot stays resolutely unexplained. I love this a lot.

Dreamwidth invites. Speak now.

So, my day was going pretty badly, and then there were death threats!

Remember the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women? The Pink Chaddi Campaign was a wonderful, wry, smart and pointed form of protest - because, let's face it, Hindutva activists are usually quite stupid, and witty humiliation as an argumentative technique is the best way to deal with them other than hitting them with iron bars and setting them on fire.

The Facebook group of the Consortium - I'm not linking to it, for reasons that will be clear in a moment - has been hacked and renamed "the only good bong is a dead one".

I hate everybody. And the Indian men of the world can go fuck themselves, with ginger.

edited to add: the Hindu discusses it.

I do wish Feministing wouldn't talk the way it does about, well, stuff. Skin-whitening products are Bad and Wrong, I quite agree, yes indeed. But... you know. There's a reason for them. Colourism, I've seen it called, but it's a kind of internalised racism or just plain old self-hatred that makes people like me think our skin ought to be whiter, and, you know what? It's my business, mine and my people's business, what we do about that, and I can't help but think it's terribly presumptuous for someone who's never been a part of a culture where this is an endemic feature to jump in and start spouting about the Bad and Wrong.

(And, just for the record? If there was some magic cream that would let me pass for white? I'd take it in an instant, and I'd pay more than $70 for it, too.)

In other news, lgbtfest is open for prompt-claiming, and I am having to resist very hard and not claiming... well, lots. I especially love the Harry Potter ones, becuse they twist off two identifiable nexuses (not a word I have used in the plural before): the thought that the magical world is much more socially conservative than ours, and the equally convincing thought that, well, they have magic. Rather than come out as trans, you might go to a back street for a potion as soon as you were sure it's what you wanted. I want someone to write that, actually. I'd also love someone to write about Voldemort's persecution of queer people and how that intersected with issues of birth, and oh, queer issues in the Potterverse generally.

In other other news, a brief vid rec (unlike me, I know): How Much Is That Geisha In The Window, a really gorgeous, savage indictment of the invisible Asians in Firefly. I don't entirely agree with the thesis, but the vid is stunning and very smart.

In other other other news, Small Cat just woke up and looked at me in a disapproving fashion. Back to equity and trusts. One day I will understand the law. Today is not that day.

I have my window open a crack. I can hear the sea.

.....aaaah. Okay. Sane now. Really.

Maybe not quite. But I am back in the frozen north (er - actually, it's a couple of degrees warmer than Oxford), and feeling rather better about life. The Aeneid was wonderful - more thoughts on it when said thoughts are something beyond "omgyay!" - and the week ended very very well indeed. And now, amazingly, I am home. I didn't particularly think about what I was doing this vac, mostly because my life ended with the Aeneid, and now I'm here and really rather quite surprised about it.

But. Pleasantly surprised. At nine o'clock this morning I got a text from my mother, to the effect of, am in Dubai, see you later. I am an awful person and had entirely forgotten she was there, mostly due to the pernicious effect of the Aeneid cast party the night before. It was drunken. That is a big surprise to everyone, I know. But it was also joyous and filled with happy people, and I had not eaten in days, and drinking was clearly the best idea ever. (I tried. I really, really did. I ate a sandwich and everything. In the afternoon, I was packing up my room with the windows open with chiasmata knitting and making soothing noises in the windowseat, and was being gradually consumed by maudlin. Because Balliol are not made of win, they want me to clear out all my crap. I, therefore, was putting away books, thinking, oh, won't have time to read much next term, I may as well take it home for good. Oh, god. Leaving Oxford. Please to not be getting me started on this always-cheerful topic.)

But, yes, yes, cast party. I participated in some glorious cocktailing, and now have adopted two more OULES children as well as Maria. And spent the rest of the evening curled up on the Couch of Lesbian Doom, so called because through a bit of syllogistic trickery, everyone on it was - here's the clever part - by definition a lesbian (osymandias and shimgray objected to this slightly, on grounds of being male, but they were both quite clearly wrong) and I was rather extravagantly rude to a gatecrashing sleazy boy drifting through the party (although not quite as rude as chiasmata, who was heard to wish quite cheerfully that his penis would fall off), and after that, sinking slowly into sleepy contentment. Ahhhh.

Yes, nine o'clock this morning, my mother was in Dubai, and by six, we were both in Manchester Airport, she sleepy and endearingly irrational and me sleepy and wearing the Cat Ears of Troy. (Because, er, everything that was involved in the Aeneid in any capacity has become the "X! Of! Troy!", said just like that, with pauses for dramatic piano music. My life has become constituted and defined by the norms and mores of a student bastardisation of Virgil, why do you ask?) She's been gone a month, and I've been away for three, and it was nice to wander back tonight and dazedly talk about nothing much. She informs me that I've lost weight. To which my answer is, um, I haven't eaten in days, this is hardly surprising. (Is it some sort of grand only-daughter cliche that this should be our very first topic of conversation? Sigh.)

And now I'm home, and feeling sane enough to sit still and write for the first time in a while, and it's funny, but I'd forgotten what absolute silence sounds like. Above the aforementioned sound of the waves - which are particularly clear tonight; it's rough, and the trees are mostly still - there's no sound at all. It's immensely soothing. (I mean, no wonder I get crazy living in central Oxford. I lived here for eight years before that.) And now I can write again, and am eating a little more, and I might even be able to do some work for, er, Finals. These are all good things. (Which is not to say I am not missing Oxford ridiculously. I am, and with almost comical immediacy.) Things I have wanted to post for a while, and not done so through being crazy busy:

-remixredux08! Hurrah, hurrah! I love Remix, and this is, frighteningly enough, my fifth year doing it. (And almost not; I signed up literally minutes before sign-ups closed.) I'm pretty excited about this year's - my author is intimidatingly awesome, in the good way, and writes about places and people and I really want to revisit. One thing I like is that I tend to have more fun with the writing each successive year - last year's effort was "Ways of Not Speaking (the Poetry in Motion Remix)",which I don't think I ever reposted - and that bodes well for this time around. We shall see.

-lgbtfest, run by penknife and my dear mireille719. I love this idea; it addresses something that's always bugged me, namely, the relatively small amount of fic out there that addresses, alongside slash, notions of queerness and gender and sexuality in fandom's fandoms. For once, my timing is fabulous - prompts have just now opened for claiming - and they really are pretty cool. (I came up with exactly one. I fail. Other people emphatically do not, the list makes very intriuging reading.) I'm not sure if I'm going to sign up yet; I really ought not to do more than one ficathon at one time, but I do want to take the opportunity to finish my Teddy-Lupin-is-amazingly-genderqueer story, which is currently festering at 2000 mostly disconnected words.

-(Also, a 9000-word-story, Star Trek, supposed to be for likethesun2's birthday, except not, because see above re: me failing, is festering as well, and that's annoying me because it was going so well. Again, we shall see, now I can sit still and, you know, construct sentences again.)

-My darling wife jacinthsong has divorced me on Facebook. This is a tragedy of epic proportions. It is epic and tragic. (More than the Aeneid. Yes.)

She does, however, have her reasons. Er. Um. In brief: I have a boy; I am as surprised as everyone else, believe me; it's shimgray; I am happy.

Right. To bed, to bed! In the morning I am going to the beach.