A rose is
ROSE, n. This week I was reading Tiffany Reisz’s novel The Rose and a character suggested that an artifact with “rose” in its title was named “after Eros,” and I will happily suspend my disbelief for magic, but not for linguistics.
“Rose” is attested, beautifully, all the way back through various ages of English and then French to Latin and then to Greek, and we have corresponding examples in all kinds of other Indo-European and even some Semitic languages (the Wiktionary entry is very exciting). We know a lot of names for this flower, but none of them are Eros. As Gertrude Stein said, rose is a rose is a rose. (Aretha also said it.)
“Eros” is a little more mysterious. It’s connected to a Greek verb meaning “to love, to desire,” but where did that come from? Not easy to say, but here’s a persuasive post that comes paired with a fabulous Anne Carson excerpt that argues that perhaps “Eros” is connected to the idea of borders and separations. God, Anne Carson is incredible:
Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive.
Anyway, roses might not be etymologically connected to Eros, but there’s a long history of making them into an erotic symbol, and Tiffany Reisz is a hell of a writer and I support her right to have characters make up etymologies whenever it suits, especially since it resulted in such a fun little internet adventure for me.
This photo shows a rose from my garden last summer, because this summer has been a bunny reign of terror.
In Capital-R Romance, these days I only ever read French textbooks and old vocabulary quizzes I wrote, so I can try to write new online quizzes with my college’s learning management software and its 47 clunky question-design options, and Zoom French 101 is gonna be an “A for effort” experience for all of us, instructor included.
In small-r romance, I only finished one thing this week but it was so fucking good.
Deal with the Devil (bi f/het m, both cis, sci-fi) by Kit Rocha. This perfect book lives up to the hype. It’s fun and action-packed, but totally character-driven and utterly in love with all the (varied! complex!) women characters. If a Marvel movie cared about doing romance right, instead of just shoving a cis man and a cis woman next to each other and checking “heterosexuality” off its to-do list, then that hypothetical Marvel movie might someday aspire to be almost as good as Deal with the Devil. This book is twisty and sexy and it has heroes you can root for, plus villains you can love and villains you can hate, and it’s about how hard and how necessary it is to believe that people can still be good—and that goodness still has power—even when you live in a dystopian hellscape ruled by tech corporations who deliberately create scarcity in order to profit from your misery. Sometimes fighting back is about singlehandedly taking out four armed assailants, but sometimes it’s about building a library and growing an illegal community garden on your roof. Content warnings: violence, death, torture, sex.
In things that are neither romance nor Romance…
Speaking of believing that people can still be good in capitalist nightmare societies, and that we can work for restoration even in post-apocalyptic scenarios, I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s marvelous Braiding Sweetgrass, a book about nature, indigenous ways of knowing, science, and gratitude and reciprocity between the human and what she calls the more-than-human world. (I mentioned this book in a previous newsletter.) I learned so much about how indigenous people used to manage the land so resources weren’t scarce, something we should talk about—and aim to return to—more. This is a gorgeous, hopeful essay collection about how much the Earth loves us, and how we can love it back.
And on the internet:
A twitter thread about inclusive design brought this 2018 history of the OXO Good Grips vegetable peeler to my attention—the original inspiration for it was that the inventor’s wife had arthritis and peeling vegetables was hurting her. In making a better tool for her, he made a better tool for everyone.
Also this week, this New Yorker piece “How a Cheese Goes Extinct” taught me that “cheese anthropologist” is a career that exists, and now I’m sad that’s not the job of anyone I know in real life and sad about cheeses going extinct. (Naturally whenever I read about an interesting job, I think “what if this was the job of a romance-novel protagonist?”, so, you know, Free Idea to Good Home. Write me a cheese anthropologist romance and send me your preorder link.)
Heather Hogan, in Autostraddle, on developing a disability after having the virus: The Soft Butch That Couldn’t (Or: How I Got COVID-19 in March and Never Got Better). It’s frightening to read about Hogan’s struggle—especially her struggle to get doctors to take her seriously and diagnose her—but it’s important, and she writes about it so well.
An article about the hashtag #BestMuseumBum, which was active earlier this summer but is still a treasure trove.
One last note: fifteen-ish years ago, I heard a Pakistani truck artist speak, and at the end of his talk, he said (through his translator) to the audience, “Your welcome has made my heart bloom like a rose.” I have the impression this kind of poetic flourish is more common in Urdu conversation, but that doesn’t make it any less wonderful. Don’t you wish exchanges in English ended that beautifully?
Your welcome has made my heart bloom like a rose. See you next week!
