COCK A SNOOK, expr. I ran across this phrase while revisiting Montaigne’s essay “To philosophize is to learn to die” (Essais, I, 19). Here’s the original French, with the expression of interest in bold:
Gagnons cet avantage qui pourra : C’est ici la vraie et souveraine liberté, qui nous donne de quoi faire la figue à la force, et à l’injustice, et nous moquer des prisons et des fers.
Here, because this newsletter is in English, is my rough translation, same expression in bold, a little context added:
Gain this advantage [not fearing death] if you can: for here is the true and sovereign liberty that lets us make the fig at force and injustice, and laugh at prisons and irons.
So “faire la figue” is “to make the fig,” a rude hand gesture where you make a fist, but put your thumb in between your index and middle fingers to imitate a vulva. It has come up previously in this newsletter. The anglophone world doesn’t generally make the fig, so I wanted to know what other translators had said instead. Here’s M. A. Screech’s version (published in 1993), for the sole reason that he’s the translator I had on my shelf, with bold text added:
let any of us who can gain such a superiority do so: for here is that true and sovereign freedom which enables us to cock a snook at force and injustice and to laugh at manacles and prisons
You will be unsurprised, given the subject of this newsletter, to learn that I thought, “What the hell is that?” I know what making the fig is, but… snook? Cocking a snook, no less? Most likely my incomprehension comes from speaking US English (Screech was British), but there’s a chance it stems from my age (I’m a Millennial, Screech worked as a codebreaker in WWII), or maybe I’m just one of today’s lucky ten thousand. It’s fine not to know stuff; you can look it up. (That’s this newsletter’s motto: You Can Look It Up.)
Anyway, obviously “cock a snook” sounds rude, and it must be a derisive hand gesture, but what does it look like?
You put your thumb to your nose, keeping your palm open and perpendicular to your face, and then you wiggle your fingers. If you need a visual, here’s one, courtesy Wikipedia:
As soon as I read the description, I thought of little kids making this gesture, but I had no idea it had this name (snook). If pressed, I might have been able to come up with the phrase “thumbing one’s nose” for this action, but I’m not sure of that.
Snook, by the way, is a mystery word. The gesture is unrelated to the fish of the same name or the game “snooker” (also a word “of unknown origin”). “Cock” in this expression means to turn or tilt toward, as in “he cocked his head.” Some day this newsletter will arrive at that term’s other meanings, but today is not that day.
One hopes there will be more days, but as Montaigne says in “To philosophize is to learn to die,” the same essay where he advocates for not fearing death, so we might make a fig/cock a snook at force and injustice:
Je veux qu’on agisse, et qu’on allonge les offices de la vie, tant qu’on peut : et que la mort me trouve plantant mes choux, mais nonchalant d’elle, et encore plus de mon jardin imparfait.
I want us to act, and to live as long as we can; and let death find me planting my cabbages without concern for it, and with even less concern for my imperfect garden. (my translation)
Or, you know, let death find me looking up “cock” in the OED, not worried about my unwritten newsletters.
(I was revisiting this particular Montaigne essay because I couldn’t resist using a passage as an epigraph for my upcoming novel.)
Because I’m not dead yet, naturally I’ve been spending my precious, limited time reading small-r romance. Here are a few:
Overture (gay trans m/bi cis m, contemporary) by London Price. (EDIT: I have an older copy of this book, which has since been retitled Face the Music.) This is a second-chance romance narrated by Evan, a cis guy who screwed up when his partner came out as a trans guy. Evan took too long to process Andrew’s coming out and is now brokenhearted and desperate to get Andrew back. Andrew, meanwhile, is going through it: he quit school, fought with his roommates, ran out when his sister asked him to be her bridesmaid, and could really use a place to stay and a friend. Evan tries hard to be that friend, but, this being a romance novel, naturally “friend” is not what either of them really wants. They end up living together and screwing up a few more times before they finally get it together and have some hot, sweet, gender-affirming sex. I really enjoyed all the details about Evan’s job as a percussionist in the Portland Symphony.
Solomon’s Crown (bi m/gay m, both cis, historical) by Natasha Siegel. I’ve never been so grateful for a novel not being historically accurate, as in real life Richard I of England and Philip II of France both have subheadings on their Wikipedia pages like “Expulsion of Jews,” plus, y’know, all those Crusades. Not sexy! Regular wars in France/Aquitaine are also bad, of course, but this novel does acknowledge those, though they are altered for purposes of romance. I’ve read lots of enemies-to-lovers, but I think maybe this is the first time I’ve read lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers? The circumstances really feel impossible to overcome, and I’m a sucker for characters who tell themselves “if tonight is all we get, let’s take it.” The prose is beautiful, the yearning is palpable, I only flinched a little when Queen Isabella’s childbirth threatened her life.
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary, historical, fantasy) by Tia Williams. This novel has a cover with a photo of two very beautiful people’s faces, which is getting to be a rarity in romance, and even among photo covers I think it’s a stand-out—sensual and moody, just like the book. Having read Seven Days in June, I expected this book to deal with serious issues in addition to its big fairytale romance, which it does. The hero, a jazz pianist, migrates from the Jim Crow South to Harlem in the 1920s after his entire family is lynched in a church fire, so he is grieving and traumatized, as are many of his fellow Harlemites. In contrast, the heroine is a contemporary twenty-something, the youngest daughter of an elite Black family who run a chain of funeral homes, and while her life is not without difficulty, she hasn’t experienced the same regime of terror as the hero. So she, her inability to keep interesting trivia to herself, her adoptive grandma, and her former-child-star best friend are wonderful for levity. I was surprised and delighted by how funny this book is. The former child star, Tuesday, is trying to write a memoir:
“My mom’s Polish! She moved here at eighteen and became a coat check girl at the Roxy, where she met my dad, an aspiring backpack rapper from Houston. They fell in ‘90s hip-hop love, had me, and then he got deported for running a fraudulent phone sex service where he’d pretend to be several lusty women. Turns out, he wasn't Texan; he was a Rwandan refugee and a master at accents.” Sullenly, she chomped at her cupcake. “I hate memoir writing. It’s impossible to tell what’s interesting about my life.”
Do you think “Sullenly, she chomped at her cupcake” has ever appeared in print before? What a sentence. I love it so much—and the rollercoaster of a paragraph it appears in. This book really does have it all: history, modernity, heartbreak, mortality, grief, magic, fated romance, and jokes. It’s a gorgeous portrait of Harlem, too.
Lady Eve’s Last Con (f/f, both cis and lesbian, sci-fi) by Rebecca Fraimow. This book is a frothy, sparkling cocktail served with a straw in zero g. It is about a lesbian con artist in space, but retrofuturistic 1930s-screwball-comedy space, full of mean debutantes and shady mobsters, and everybody’s taking luxury space cruises and going to the anti-grav opera, and it is so fucking fun. Ruthi Johnson is posing as naive provincial debutante Evelyn Ojukwu, just arrived in the glittering New Monte social scene, and she is out to scam the man who broke her little sister’s heart. That man’s suave, suit-wearing sister Sol Mendez-Yuki does not figure into her plans, but somehow the two of them just keep ending up alone together. Sol is a daring flirt, but she’s also very suspicious of this “Evelyn Ojukwu” character, and she’s not about to let her get too close to her brother. I loved their tense, antagonistic banter and their eventual alliance. The revelation of Sol’s secret business dealings was a genuine surprise—and funny, but played just right. This book is also delightfully Jewish, with Ruthi speaking Yiddish with her sister and describing someone as having a “face like an etrog.” Amazing. (And because this is my particular deal: there’s a pregnant supporting character and some sci-fi pregnancy stuff. Just in case you’re me in the past, now you know.)
In things that are romance-adjacent, I inhaled swoony, funny, suspenseful, tragic sci-fi novel The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley and am now wishing I could chainsmoke it. That prose, my God. It’s the kind of book you close and then need to reorient yourself to your surroundings. Transcendent. Afterward I kept thinking to myself: this is what fiction is for.
These characters felt real to me while I was reading, which I almost stayed up all night to do. This book both broke my heart and elicited one genuine laugh so loud it startled my beloved in the other room. It’s about power and complicity in terrible systems, but also about what if you had an overpowering crush on a minor historical figure and it turned out he liked you back. And yeah he’s a white British nineteenth-century imperialist displaced in time, and you’re a Cambodian-British twenty-first century civil servant, and it’s an irredeemably fucked-up situation, but maybe you should kiss about it anyway. Also: even the ostensibly straight characters are pretty gay. What could be better?
I should say here that if anyone presents me with a sci-fi novel and says it is about time travel, I understand this to mean I will be forced to think about some squiggly shit, to which I immediately say “no thank you.” Whereas if you present me with a romance novel that has time travel, I understand that no one will give one single fuck how time travel “works” and that there will be a character displaced from their own era, relying on the guidance of another character with whom they have intoxicating chemistry, and it will be a great time. This novel is like 90% in the latter category, and that’s one of many reasons I loved it. There is a little bit of squiggly shit, but by then I cared so much about these people that I was digging my claws into the hardcover, trying in vain to make everything turn out right.
I also read this excerpt of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun (translated by Humphrey Davies), which I found linked in a recent obituary for Khoury. He was a Lebanese novelist who fought for Palestinian liberation, and Gate of the Sun (originally published in Arabic in 1998) is about Palestinian refugees. Even that brief excerpt was so moving and nuanced and humane that I submitted a purchase request to my library. My eyes are always bigger than my stomach when it comes to books, but it’s never a bad idea to ask the library for something.
That’s all for this time. I’ll be back in your inbox on October 6.