let's swash that buckle.

I keep meaning to post and then I keep not posting; I have books to talk about and gardening and new fic, but: I watched It's a Sin last weekend, and I keep thinking about it, and so I wanted to get down some of my thoughts.

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Less, Andrew Sean Greer. I liked this a lot, perhaps more than I was expecting to. It was just very genuinely an enjoyable read, easy and compelling without sacrificing complexity or bittersweetness. And I loved and appreciated the incidental musings on gay fiction as a genre. I was not big on the ending--I thought it was overwrought and sort of boring--but to say that I didn't think it lived up to the rest of the book is more a comment on how much I liked the book rather than on how little I liked the ending.

Romance in Marseille, Claude McKay. I was very intrigued by the press for this--finally-published decades-old manuscript! LGBT rep in a book by a Harlem Renaissance luminary!--but I found the novel itself a bit of a slog, even at its very low pagecount. That said, the gay characters were interesting, especially in a novel originally written in the 1920s; they were very much side characters, but also nothing bad happens to them. It was interesting historically, but perhaps not, for me, literarily.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert. I've been meaning to read this for a while, and I liked it (though "enjoy" is maybe not a word that applies here). I liked her journalistic approach, as someone often bewildered by big-s Science; she explained things vividly and interestingly. I actually understand what ocean acidification means now! And as a former child obsessed with extinct and and endangered animals, this was right in my wheelhouse. I liked less the way she chose to end the book, with dire and typical warnings about humanity overtaking/killing the earth; while not untrue, it felt enormously unuseful and fatalistic after the book she had just written. I'm not necessarily saying she had a duty to be optimistic, but I do feel that in a popular science book that you are aiming at the general public you might feel some responsibility to point a way forward, even if that way forward seems unlikely or difficult. In addition, perhaps differentiating your generalized mass of humans into levels of responsibility wrt the environmental degradation you chronicle might be of some use. 

Our Riches, Kaouther Adimi (trans. Chris Andrews). I loved this. A novel about the bookstore Les Vraies Richesses in Algeria, chronicling its history from the mid-20th century to the present; not uplifting, exactly, but somehow still hopeful. Adimi uses several different formats and narrative voices to tell the story, including a use of the first-person plural which I thought was incredibly effective and well-done. Short but with a lot of depth; I would highly recommend it.

Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security, Masanobu Fukuoka (translated and edited by Larry Korn). Extremely interesting--and, now that I think of it, perhaps an antidote to the Kolbert. I ordered it from the library solely on the virtue of this quote from it that I saw on tumblr, and I'm glad that I did. Fukuoka's ideas are very simple--or at least he explains them very simply--but fascinating, and the examples he gives of areas where he's tried and succeeded in his reverse-desertification strategies ground the concepts he discusses. A short, easy little read, but full of big and interesting ideas.

Greetings all; it's been a very long time since I've posted here in earnest, but I have some hopes that that will change in the new year, so I'm attempting to start out right. I wrote two fics for Yuletide this year, after two years of just posting treats:

of grace
(Lord John series, Jamie Fraser & Lord John, 1388 words)
He did not know exactly the reason behind it, but he hoped with a  strength he could not have guessed at that John Grey would not die here  in this field, all that blood on him.

This was my assignment; I was excited to offer Lord John and then as soon as I got the assignment I panicked a bit. I had written fic before, but never any that had seen the light of day! I hadn't read the books in nearly three years! My recipient had requested Jamie and Lord John but didn't have a letter or any optional details, so I had a somewhat terrifying amount of free reign. I remember my strongest Jamie &/ Lord John feelings happening toward the end of The Scottish Prisoner, when Jamie carries him away after the duel, but I thought maybe a different idea would strike me during the reread. (It was also a wonderful excuse to complete the reread I'd begun lat spring and gotten only one book into before being entirely derailed.)

Of course, I ended up writing exactly what I thought I would at the beginning. It's still a wonderful scene, and as we get so much in the series about Grey's feelings for Jamie, I wanted to turn the tables a bit. It's short, but came relatively easily, and I wrote it mostly over the course of a week. I'm a bit worried it has more of my Generic Narrator Voice than is strictly warranted for Jamie, but overall I'm quite happy with it, and pleased as well that my initial panic about getting it written was unwarranted.

Bring me my Bow of burning gold
(Society of Gentlemen, Silas, 8224 words)
It was the nicest place he’d ever lived in his life, and all he’d had to  do to get it was sell out his principles for a guinea a week, for a man  who’d probably never want to see him again. 

I planned from the beginning to write a Society of Gentlemen treat if that wasn't my assigned fandom, but this was...rough, to say the least. There were a number of interesting prompts, and I toyed around with several of them before various things put me off. (My sudden inability to write Dominic/Silas in any sort of believable way! My complete misremembering of someone's prompt! Though some day fic about Silas mending things will hopefully see the light of day, as 'historical men sewing' is a narrative kink of mine I've never put to good use.) I ended up drawing inspiration from various bits and bobs I'd written as early as a year ago, and especially over last summer, about Silas when he first joins Richard's household; it's a period of canon that really interests me, and it was also a useful vehicle to talk about some Silas backstory stuff that I'd been noodling around with. Despite all of that, it very nearly didn't get finished, and I'm slightly afraid to read it over again, as I know there are things I'll want to edit.

Ultimately, to me it's a fic about feeling anger and grief and helplessness, and about trying to embrace opportunities to do good even in the teeth those feelings, and how small and inconsequential the opportunities might seem. Gosh; I have no idea why I might've written this at the end of 2020.

I haven't posted here in a while, though luckily for only the best of reasons: namely that I am free of academia for the summer and wolfing down as many books as I can get my hands on, in between eating a lot of Twin Cities-specific food and doing a lot of Twin Cities-specific things that I cannot get and do in the Southern hellhole to which I've consigned myself. (It's really not that bad, but sometimes it is, actually, that bad.) Nonetheless, I do miss posting about what I've been reading, so I'm hoping to use this as a kind of reset and then start in on Reading Wednesdays again next week. We will, however, see how long that resolution lasts. 

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My protracted absence from DW is now, I believe, finished: I blame school stress and then a wonderful trip to New York (which I will hopefully write more on) and then my sister visiting on her spring break (which meant eating our respective weights in excellent food--she cooks for me, I buy her good food in town--and watching a dizzying number of Buffy episodes); none of which leaves much time for things that are neither productive nor an immediate stress-alieviator.

I have at least a month of Reading Wednesdays to compress and catch up on, but in the meantime, some miscellaneous things on the internet that have caught my eye as of late:

10 Great Irish Novels Not Set in Ireland

Worth reading if only for the quoted review of Dorian Grey (which perhaps obviously dates from 1890, rather than 1980): "Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he contributes to Lippincott’s, is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters. . .it is false to morality—for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity. . .Mr. Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys, the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.”

It's also intrigued me about Let the Great World Spin and The Lesser Bohemians, both of which are going on my already greatly burdened TBR.

A Counterculture Portraitist’s Chronicle of New York’s Youth

Some great photographs; I'll definitely be checking out the forthcoming book of Green's work.

The house that inspired Wuthering Heights could be yours

...if you've got $1.62 million lying around.

(And speaking of the Brontës, I found the review/recommendation of Villette in the most recent Slightly Foxed to be horribly disappointing: as someone who loves the book well past the point of rationality, that review would never have made me think twice about picking it up.)

Letter of Recommendation: Sleep, ‘Dopesmoker’

The origin story of ‘‘Dopesmoker’’ sounds like a light-bulb joke co-written by Nancy Reagan and Sisyphus: Three California stoners decide to write a song about how much they love marijuana, but they’re so high that it takes them four years.

I just remembered that this existed, and the immediate reread was well worth it. Reads like an Inherent Vice tie-in picked up off the cutting-room floor.

(Incidentally, I feel as though a drinking game of some kind should be started for historical fiction whose time period is woefully mis-described in reviews; this brought to you by my having to read with my own two eyes the setting of A Gentleman's Guide. . . confidently asserted to be "Victorian." Though Lee certainly brings it on herself--historical, well, anything, was not that book's strong suit--it does say right up front that it's set in the 1700s, so this one's on the blogger (and an appallingly non-satirical iteration of the "Victorian women in the 1700s" joke that's been circulating around tumblr of late.))

A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions

A bizarre account of an editor and author who spent years spinning lies about himself in order to gain and maintain success. You begin reading with a sort of car crash-watching voyeuristic pleasure, though at some point that was replaced for me with only a vague ill feeling. I found it very much worth reading, however: I had the thought at one point that I wouldn't be at all surprised that the story itself was a sort of tromp l'oeil piece that was itself a fiction, which is to say it's both very well-told and high in mindfuckery.

If it sounds like a place made up in a lazy, trashy novel set in the English countryside, it’s almost definitely a real English village.

I found this Twitter thread again, and can only beg you to read it; I have to stop after every third or forth one and just wheeze for a while.

Pavlova’s Shoes, Nijinsky’s Diary, and Other Dance Treasures From the Public Library

Much here is great, but it's really the titular shoes that I'm linking this for: they're both lovely and fascinating (the stitching!).

Virginia Woolf? Snob! Richard Wright? Sexist! Dostoyevsky? Anti-Semite!

Though I'm always a bit leery of the "man of his time" argument--there were a non-zero number of unprejudiced people people at any given time in the past, not least of all the people the prejudice was against--the author of this article makes several prescient points that I had already been thinking about a lot recently. The most significant is, I think, the phone parable, which is something I grapple with a lot when looking at the past. There are so many things I find abhorrent about people's behavior and what there were willing to turn a blind eye to in order to live their own lives in comfort, but I'm also painfully aware that if a historian in the future happens to turn their gaze to my life and my choices, they certainly wouldn't find me blameless of comparable avoidances (at the very least, though likely active behaviors as well, much as I try to avoid them). I think realizing this, at least for me, has both increased my historical empathy--though certainly not erased my ability to hold historical figures accountable for their actions, or inactions--and forced me to re-evaluate and begin to try and change the way I live my life in the present.

And on that heavy note, let me present to you all a Very Fine Dress:

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It's not so much a dress as a confection, really, which is how I prefer my French gowns.

Only a few scattered links today, I'm afraid, but all to things I'm very excited about.

The Confessions of Frannie Langton, by Sara Collins, sounds potentially really interesting--1820s, a Jamaican woman in is put on trial in London for the murder of her master and mistress (I think--the official summary calls her their maid with no further qualification, but if it's in Jamaica I'm thinking she's enslaved, or was?). The official summary is somewhat muddled and potentially leads in not-great directions, but I'm thinking (hoping) that's the publisher's fault, and it sounds like it has great potential. I've linked to the UK version, as it has a nicer cover--the US version will be released May 21.

Also, have y'all heard about the Peterloo movie? I didn't even realize it was already out in the UK, but us Americans have to wait until April 5. The trailer isn't stunning, but obviously I'm very into the history around it.

And lastly, Sotheby's had a huge auction of quote-unquote "Important Americana" recently, and the online catalog (actually catalogs--one part is here and the other part is here) is amazing. I've only really looked through the paintings so far, but there's some really wonderful and fascinating stuff, like this 1694 portrait of a little girl from Boston (which is in some ways intriguingly reminiscent of this portrait of a little girl from New York, over 30 years later--love the whole striped-dress theme). Or this c. 1820 painting, entitled "Portrait of a Black Gentleman Lifting a Glass of Wine."

stultiloquentia posted: Writers of historical wedding nights, I have a gift for you.

It is hilarious and horrifying and medically unsound, but also encouraging and kind of sweet in places, such as when the author explains what a clitoris is and why bridegrooms should care, and when the chapter on hymens takes pains to stress that virgins come in all shapes and sizes, and just because the bedsheets aren't a bloodbath doesn't mean the bride wasn't chaste (encouraging, I admit, for certain values of...), and, my favourite, when it is recommended that the gentleman include, in his foreplay, the recitation of a sonnet.

This is truly amazing, and I highly recommend clicking through to read the sonnet. But then in the comments rydra_wong added:

... this needs to be a challenge for assorted historical fandoms.

WHO IN YOUR CANON HAS READ THIS? WHO WOULD TAKE IT VERY SERIOUSLY? WHO WOULD ACTUALLY WRITE A SONNET? WHO WOULD FALL OUT OF BED LAUGHING AT THE SONNET?

Which I move that we all immediately turn into a meme, or something, because oh my god.

(Miranda's definitely read it. Thomas has definitely read it. They would take turns at the sonnet-writing and falling-out-of-bed laughing. James has never so much as heard of it, and turns an appealing shade of scarlet when they read carefully selected portions to him, though he does enjoy watching them compete to see who can compose the dirtiest couplet.)

tautline-hitch posted: a discussion of homosexuality and the navy, ca. 1789–1815
A fully-footnoted tumblr post (be still my heart) about homosexuality in the British Navy (be stiller my heart), replete with great commentary, as seen above. (I laughed hardest at Read the room, William.) There is also an addendum with further interesting info.

Other interesting things happening on tumblr include depictions of the Leonid meteor storm of 1833, and the best dress, feat. TREES:

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It's so quirky and delightful; the only thing I can think of even slightly like it is this absolutely adorable little Anna Maria Garthwaite pattern, though I don't know of any surviving pieces (or even fabric) made from it. Historical costumers, get on THIS.

Huge historical archive of mail from captured ships to go online

I'm way behind the times on this, but oh my god. 160,000 letters seized by the British Navy between 1652 and 1815 will be opened for the first time and digitized.

Kate Winslet, Saoirse Ronan to Star in Fossil Hunter Movie ‘Ammonite’

More of me being behind the times, but I'm so excited; it's set to be directed by Francis Lee, as well, who did God's Own Country. Historic lesbian fossil hunters, my DREAM MOVIE.

(Let me also take this as an opportunity to revisit one of my all-time favorite Kate Beaton drawings.)

Has anyone heard of the upcoming ITV drama Beecham House? 1795 India, including Indian, British, and mixed-race characters. What I can find about it would lead me to be leery ("Downton Abbey in India"), except it's written by Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice), so I have hope. The linked article is the most recent info I've found about it, so while Wikipedia says it'll air this month, it sounds like it'll actually be later in the year.

And a few, more recent, Hamilton-related things:

The Mixed Reception of the Hamilton Premiere in Puerto Rico

This is an interesting article dipping in to complexities of a subject I know little about, but the difficulties of what Hamilton presents and the message behind that is a subject I'm always fascinated by, and these are controversies that I haven't seen talked about as much.

Did ‘Hamilton’ Get the Story Wrong? One Playwright Thinks So

This sounds interesting, if distinctly unsubtle. Certainly no one can fault the intent, however: Chernow vastly overstates Hamilton's anti-slavery sentiment (to the extent of calling him an abolitionist, which he certainly wasn't; the movement itself hardly existed at the time in the sense we think of it now), and LMM restates it with equally nonexistent foundation. I'm only surprised that the historian they interview didn't mention, or if he did the NYT didn't quote him mentioning, the fact that we have hard evidence that Hamilton bought and sold enslaved people: while you can argue that he did so for other people, which at least in some cases is certainly true, it's a pretty solid blow to the idea he had any particularly strong personal convictions on the matter.

(Also, a reminder to myself that there's a copy of Historians on Hamilton on my shelf that's just waiting to be read.)

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Plus, miscellaneous historical object I'm obsessed with this week: map samplers.

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The one above was done by Ann Rhodes in 1780; while maps of England were very common among English girls, Irish girls embroidered Ireland, Scottish girls embroidered Scotland, American girls embroidered America (such as it was at the time), and so forth; some did maps of Europe, and some did the whole world. All the examples I've seen are from the late 1700s into the early 1800s, and they're usual simple to date, as the girls would embroider the year they finished them on the samplers themselves. (Along with their names, which I love; there are so few stitched pieces that are attributable to specific people.)

Some girls followed hand-drawn patterns (and some didn't seem to be following much of a pattern at all), but some followed either paper patterns or patterns printed directly onto linen or silk. (I also discovered that you can buy a cross-stitch kit to reproduce one of the English maps, which is both delightful and more or less historically accurate, in terms of how girls would've stitched them.)

I love them! I think they're delightful (look at the little ships embroidered in the English Channel!), and they seem to bridge the public/private, political/domestic divides that always seems so stark in this period. I've just linked to a smattering I've run into; they seem to be not uncommon in museum collections.