Just pleachy
PLEACH, v. This verb means “to intertwine young branches to form a hedge.” These are pleached trees:
Pleached lime trees at Arley Hall in England, thx Wikipedia
Really I just wanted to brag that I read “pleach” in This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, made the Libby app define “pleach” for me, and thought “I bet that comes from Latin PLICARE, to fold,” and the OED confirmed my suspicion, which is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me all day.
I should clarify here that I don’t actually speak Latin. I’ve just taken a lot of Romance linguistics courses. I know about Latin the way that you know about a popular TV show that all your friends are posting about. You get an idea who the main characters are, but you can’t actually recount an episode.
But I do know the Latin word for “fold.”
Several years ago, I did some translation work on an academic text about Thierry de Chartres, a twelfth-century French philosopher and mathematician. Math and philosophy, for Thierry de Chartres, were meant to explain how God could be three but also one. You know, medieval Gentile stuff.
The answer was “complicated.” Or at least that’s what I thought. The italicized Latin word complicatio was printed over and over in the text. It wasn’t my job to translate the Latin, only the French. So I just left it there and was like “I guess God is complicated.”
But at some point in this translation, I needed to know even 5% of what the hell it was about, and not enough of my friends were posting about Thierry de Chartres on social media, so I had to take things into my own hands and actually do some research. It turns out that complicatio is Latin for both “multiplication” and also “folding” (or rolling something up), which is, like, philosophy and math.
So anyway God is complicated, like a burrito or a piece of origami, or maybe like a pleached tree.
This week in small-r romance, I read…
Heart of Obsidian + Shield of Winter (m/f, all cishet, sci-fi) by Nalini Singh. Damn, this series is a feat. These are books twelve and thirteen, respectively, and the world just keeps getting bigger and more complex. In this world, the Psy, a race of psychics, have spent the last century adhering to a protocol called Silence that forbids them from feeling emotion, supposedly to reduce the incidence of violent madness to which they’re prone. But Silence has been making everything worse, and now their society—the mental network they need to live—is literally falling apart, ravaged by a deadly virus that results from everybody refusing to Feel Their Feelings for a hundred years. There’s such a clever elision between network and community, between digital and biological viruses, and also such a good commentary on our society. Singh is from New Zealand, but I can’t help but think of gun violence in the United States when I read about the Psy cracking under the pressure of their brutally exploitative society and going on killing sprees. Because these are romance novels, the answer is love, but let’s not be glib about it: there is a very rich exploration of family and friendship and community in these books, made all the stronger by the fact that these are books twelve and thirteen in a series, so there are dozens and dozens of familiar supporting characters. The Psy literally need their network to live, just like us. We’re all pleached trees here. Content warnings: murder, violence, torture (of basically every possible kind), abuse, institutionalization, rape (in Heart of Obsidian, discussed), sex. Occasionally the main characters engage in possessiveness/jealousy in a way that is maybe normal among straight people (??) and is common enough in romance that some readers must find it appealing (????), but I don’t care for it because any hint of “I don’t want my woman around other men” or vice versa makes me think about Mike Pence refusing to be in a room with women who are not his wife, objectively one of the least sexy things a person can think about. Nalini Singh is an excellent writer and I don’t want to miss these books, so I grit my teeth and pretend it’s not there but YMMV. Also, reading about this sci-fi pandemic and societal collapse is bittersweet right now, because in the books, you know the people fighting to make a better world are the ones who are gonna win.
Hairpin Curves (f/f, both cis and bi, contemporary) by Elia Winters. Megan and Scarlett, former best friends, agree to drive from Florida to Québec for another friend’s wedding, even though things are tense between them. They’re opposites—Megan is methodical, Scarlett is impulsive—but they have a lot of overlap, since both of them are stuck in a rut, in that mid-twenties “I thought my life would be different by now” moment. This is a sweet, hot roadtrip romance about two young women falling in love and finding themselves, and it is gorgeously done. Full disclosure: Elia Winters is my friend and a lot of this novel was written in coffeeshops across from me—remember coffeeshops?—but my biased opinion is still correct. Oprah agrees with me, too. Content warnings: sex.
This Is How You Lose the Time War (f/f, both post-human ??, sci-fi, novella) by Amal El Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Okay, technically this is a work of science-fiction—in fact it just won the 2020 Hugo for Best Novella—but this is my newsletter and I’m filing it under romance. But you should know, before going in, that people will market this book to you as “an epistolary romance between two time-traveling enemy agents” and they won’t be wrong, but they also won’t really be preparing you for this pleached-tree reading experience, which feels more like reading a hundred and fifty pages of poetry than it does like reading a romance novel. You have to approach it wanting to pause over every sentence, which is appropriate, given that so much of it is about encrypted messages. Everything is interlaced. It is many layers of references, some silly and contemporary and some silly and Victorian, like this Henry Wallis painting The Death of Chatterton, which is, I think, what people had in 1856 instead of Precious Moments, so instead of a creepy-cute figurine of an angel or baby Jesus, it’s a twink poet sexily giving himself arsenic poisoning in a garret.
Chatterton’s even got the classic romance-novel cover “shirt tucked in, but open” look. This version is in the Tate, by the way. Wallis made two different versions of this painting because everybody loved it so much.
Anyway, Time War is a smart, slightly unreal good time. Content warnings: war, death, violence, torture, murder, mentions of suicide.
In things that are neither romance nor Romance, here’s what I loved reading on the internet this week:
SL Huang’s incredibly powerful, 2020-Hugo-Award-winning sci-fi short story “As the Last I May Know” (content warning for war)
Also on the subject of the Hugos, Best Novel went to Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, a book I wrote about in a previous newsletter, which I highly recommend
I love Nisha Chittal’s newsletter and she recently wrote about the word and the practice of “doomscrolling,” which I spent several days this week very sanctimoniously not doing, because I’m a better person than you. Just kidding! It’s because my phone was broken.
James Nestor in The Guardian on the lost art of breathing
Speaking of breathing, this 2015 piece in Elle about the daily routine of the founder of Moon Juice in Los Angeles is wonderfully batshit, never have I felt so sane and low maintenance, truly a beacon in these difficult times
Representative John Lewis’s beautiful piece in the NYT, written in his last days
Interlace yourself—digitally, emotionally, correspondence-wise—with people who care about you. See you next Sunday!
