Dead trees and live trees
RESPINGAR, v. I just wanted you all to know how far I got into Yuri Herrera’s Señales que precederán al fin del mundo before I ran into a word I needed to look up.
The answer is nine words. I got nine words in.
Anyway, respingar is a verb that can mean to shy away from (if you’re talking about a horse) or to ride up (if you’re talking about a piece of clothing) or to rise up (I think that’s the best translation in cuando todas las cosas respingaron). It can also apparently mean “to fuss, to complain.” Lotta possibilities!
It comes from Latin *repedinare, a colloquial (and unattested in writing) form of repedare, which means to back up, retreat, withdraw. You can kind of see its roots: ped, as in “foot,” is in there.
There’s some cool sound change happening between repedinare and respingar (epenthesis of [s], for one), but I am currently three thousand miles from my copy of From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts—can you believe I don’t carry it on my person like a prayer book? can you believe I have not memorized it? smdh starting 2020 on the wrong pede—so I will not speculate.
I am also three thousand miles from my copy of Señales, because I’m on vacation and it was too intimidating. (I shied away from it, you might say.) But I’ll be back in Massachusetts trying to read it in a couple of weeks.
Been thinking a lot about Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, Basho’s poetic travelogue of wandering around Japan looking at the moon and the trees, and kind of wishing I had carried that on my person, since I am currently wandering around the United States looking at some trees.
Unlike Basho, I am not going to write any poetry. I have nothing interesting to say about these sequoias, but please don’t mistake that for the trees themselves not being interesting. They are. Every time I see one, I burst out laughing or shout something meaningless and awed. I have seen at least twenty.
“A tree… but big” is a very simple concept. Sometimes the simple concepts are the best ones.
This week in small-r romance, thanks to a long flight, I read a lot.
Love Lettering (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kate Clayborn. The heroine of this book, Meg, is a calligrapher in New York City, and the book is rich in detail about both her work and her city, and I loved it. The slow-burn romance between Meg and Reid is swoon-worthy, and it packs the emotional punch I’ve come to expect from Clayborn’s work. Totally gorgeous all around—and now I kinda want to learn calligraphy. Content warnings: adultery/family secrets in backstory, sex.
Not Pounded By Romance Wranglers Of America Because Their New Leadership Is From The Depths Of The Endless Cosmic Void (fantasy, short story) by Chuck Tingle. Chuck Tingle’s role in the whole #RWAShitshow has been a bright spot. I guess technically this work isn’t romance or erotica—it says right there in the title that nobody gets pounded—but it feels so romance-adjacent that I’m putting it here. If you don’t know Chuck Tingle’s whole deal, it’s sort of hard to explain, but he’s a treasure and this book was way more than $2.99 worth of laughter. The list of titles in the back alone. Content warnings: N/A.
Grumpy Jake (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, novella) by Melissa Blue. This is delightful and very sexy. A kindergarten teacher and an emotionally closed off single dad get together. Content warnings: family members who have died in a car accident, grief, sex.
A Wedding One Christmas (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Therese Beharrie. This is so sweet and emotional and it obeys all three classical unities—there is a single action (Angie and Ezra falling in love) in a single place (Caledon, South Africa) over the course of twenty-four hours. But I’m happy to report that it’s the opposite of a tragedy. Content warnings: a parent who died from cancer, grief.
Pink Slip (? m/bi f/bi f, all cis, contemporary) by Katrina Jackson. This is like a James Bond movie if there was hot polyamorous romance and all the female characters were treated with respect and not murdered for kicks. So not like a James Bond movie at all. It was fine with me that the spy stuff is not the focus—there is nothing remotely enticing about the actual Central Intelligence Agency. But this book offers multiple global locations, a whiff of danger, a tough no-nonsense female secret agent, and a lot of sex, so I’m not asking any questions. Content warnings: a boss(es)/employee relationship, sex, kink, mild non-sexual violence, an assassination.
And in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. My main feeling about this book is summed up by something Dorian himself says: “I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.”
I picked this up because I wrote a draft with some magic paintings in it. I was mainly thinking about Pygmalion and Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” while writing (is the titular unknown masterpiece magic? I don’t know) but I figured I should do due diligence on famous magic paintings in literature, and also I’d never read anything by Oscar Wilde and wanted to change that.
Every moment of dialogue in this feels like an Oscar Wilde witticism, and it’s sort of wonderful but also sort of exhausting. Things and people (well, women mostly) are endlessly categorized, mostly ironically, but maybe not always. I’m too tired to tell. Also there’s some garbage antisemitism in this book and that made me mad. (You’d think years of running across it in Voltaire, etc., would have inured me to it, but it turns out it’s never any fun.)
But if you can get over that (and no judgment if you can’t), the descriptions make it worth it:
The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.
I feel about that passage like I feel about the big trees. I want to start laughing or yell “oh my god.” A thing I love about writing casually about books, instead of writing scholarly articles, is that I do not have to examine my feelings or this passage at all. Some passages are just “oh my god” passages. Some trees are just really, really big.
But speaking of my academic misadventures, the most hilarious part of Dorian Gray is that Dorian reads À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which I have also read, and which will haunt anyone who has read it to the point that this description suffices to identify it:
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian […]
That sentence goes on for quite a long time. Wilde makes the pursuits in the novel sound very spiritual and intellectual. Nowhere does he mention that Des Esseintes, the main character of À rebours (Against Nature), bedazzles a turtle to death.
You might think that is a joke or an exaggeration but it is not. Des Esseintes has a beautiful Persian carpet in his house, but he wishes it had more movement, so he buys a turtle, gilds and encrusts its shell with gems to match the carpet, and lets it walk around. It dies from the weight instead. The process takes an entire chapter and there is an extravagant, pages-long description of the gem selection.
(Des Esseintes was based on a real person, Robert de Montesquiou, who is also the inspiration for the Baron de Charlus character in Proust, because he was just that memorable, I guess. I don’t know if Wilde knew Montesquiou, but they were both artsy fin-de-siècle gays, so I’m not ruling it out. I also don’t know if Montesquiou bedazzled a turtle, but for the turtle’s sake, I hope not.)
One relatable thing about Dorian Gray is that once he has read this fucking bonkers book, he can’t forget it. Same. But Dorian is a fucked-up immortal aristocrat, so when he gets obsessed with it, he spends a long-ass chapter trying to be like Des Esseintes, acquiring all the most significant and cultured objects. And yeah sure Wilde’s descriptions are beautiful but also come on. Oscar, I picked up your book for magic paintings and murders. (Regular murders, not turtle murders.) If I wanted to read a plotless catalogue of expensive and unsettling art objects, I would read it in French like Joris-Karl Huysmans intended.
Anyway, I’m not sure if I liked either À rebours or Dorian Gray, but they are both fascinating. Kinda feel like both of these books are great advertisements for going the fuck outside. You know what else is a great advertisement for going outside? These trees.
Have a good week, y’all!
