CONTRITION, n. Did you know that this word used to mean “[t]he action of rubbing things together, or against each other; grinding, pounding or bruising (so as to comminute or pulverize)” (OED)? I did not. I was only familiar with the figurative meaning: “being bruised in heart; sorrow or affliction of mind for some fault or injury done; spec. penitence for sin.”
Same goes for “contrite,” which has undergone this same evolution of the literal meaning (bruised, crushed) becoming obsolete so that only the figurative remains (crushed in spirit).
This does explain, in a roundabout way, why “contrite” sounds like “detritus,” both of which have come up in my novel draft recently. They’re both from a Latin word that means rubbed, ground down, or pulverized. Or “triturated,” which is an English word I just learned that also means pulverized, in case you need a fancy synonym.
“Contrite” has permanently relocated to the realm of the figurative, whereas “detritus” maintains a connection to its original, literal meaning of stuff that has been rubbed away: rock fragments eroded by glaciers or other disintegrated and decayed materials. Debris.
And “trite,” naturally, describes anything used so often that it has been ground down and worn out—become commonplace, expected, uninteresting. So if you perform a trite act of contrition, your heart might be bruised, but your repentance is so routine that nobody believes you. This is a problem that recurs for romance characters, in addition to whatever trite comments we might make about getting pounded.
Here’s what I’ve read recently in small-r romance:
Regarding the Duke (m/f, both cis and het, historical) by Grace Callaway. I checked this out of the library because it has amnesia in it, and that usually means the plot is bananas in the best way. I do have some caveats: this book is very straight. It’s gender essentialist in a way I find unfortunately common in straight historicals (women are like this, men are like that, “male scent,” “male confidence,” and so on). There’s also some Scheherazade roleplay that feels of a piece with nineteenth-century Orientalism to me—plausible that these white characters would act this way, but contemporary readers might find it alienating. And you know, dukes and obscene wealth and all that. But it is sexy and the prose has that over-the-top old-school-romance feel. There’s a nasty heartless villain and a tragic childhood and a ruthless vengeance scheme. The story scratched my “bonkers romance novel with amnesia in it” itch. And it has Titian’s Venus of Urbino in it, which has featured in this newsletter before.
Wild Life (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Opal Wei. This is inspired by the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, but set in and around contemporary Vancouver. It stars Zoey Fong, a prickly, starchy, ultra-organized MD/PhD student researching cancer, and Davy Hsieh, a freewheeling ex-boy-band member who now lives on a private island in the Georgia Strait with an elderly cougar (big cat, not human woman) that he rescued. It’s zany and delightful and still has the precise, stylish prose I associate with Wei (this is technically Wei’s debut, but she has previously published romances as Ruby Lang). There’s a particularly wonderful scene where Zoey and Davy flirt by playing piano together and some really good, silly wordplay throughout. I had a great time.
Comfort (trans f/nonbinary, contemporary, erotic) by Chace Verity. This short story does such memorable character work. It’s wonderfully specific: Eileen edits an alternative paper; Sorrel works at an auction house for used farm equipment. She’s forty-five and they’re twenty-five. The two of them hooked up six years ago. Eileen was the first person who ever made Sorrel feel comfortable with their gender presentation, but it never became a relationship. Eileen told Sorrel they were too young for her. They find each other on an app and decide to try dating—by going shopping for a new couch for Eileen. Things heat up fast. I love that this remains sweet and silly even when it’s very sexy.
And in things that are romance-adjacent, here’s an article on romance novels with infertility (and without miracle pregnancies).
In things that are neither Romance nor romance, I loved this wonderful essay in the LA Review of Books about a passage of “gibberish” in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well and Euskara (Basque).
I also read this beautiful and devastating 2023 photo essay about the 75th anniversary of the Nakba from Jewish Currents.
I’ve been working my way slowly through a collection of three volumes of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, translated by Fady Joudah (whose poetry I also love), called The Butterfly’s Burden. The first volume is called The Stranger’s Bed and it’s all love poetry. It was late-career work for Darwish, and I think by then there was the expectation that he would always write political poems, poems about Palestine, about exile and occupation, that it was his duty. So it’s a rebellious choice to publish love poetry, to exert his right to make art about anything. And the choice is itself—inevitably, inescapably—political. But art about love is no less essential or intellectual or worthy than art about anything else, and The Stranger’s Bed is gorgeous art.
Darwish’s work is erudite, informed by a literary tradition that I’m unfamiliar with, so I really appreciate Joudah’s endnotes for the poems. I like to think, even when I don’t personally know the literary tradition, that I can sense its presence. I like a poem with a little (or a lot) of friction in it, challenge, something that makes me go back to the beginning and read it over a few times. I like to work hard and I like to fail when I read poetry. I like a poem to be a little bit mysterious, a little bit elusive. I want it to haunt me. This delivers exactly that.
I took a tiny unplanned hiatus from this newsletter, which was supposed to come out on May 12, and I might be sporadic in the next month as I finish (?) writing my current novel. I am hoping to be back in your inbox in the next couple weeks (June 9, let’s say) with a newsletter about spies or vampires, depending on which books I finish reading first.