SAKE, n. This noun no longer exists on its own in English. We gotta say “for God’s sake” or “for fuck’s sake” or “for the sake of [whatever].”
I was gonna try to come up with a counter example, “sake” on its own, to explain what we can’t say anymore, but I couldn’t do it. “Sake” hasn’t been independent in English for hundreds of years—unless you’re the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who got his own special section in the OED entry. Here’s what he wrote about it in an 1879 letter to his friend and fellow poet Robert Bridges:
Sake is a word I find it convenient to use:..it is common in German, in the form sach. It is the sake of ‘for the sake of’... I mean by it the being a thing has outside itself, as a voice by its echo, a face by its reflection,..a man by his name, fame, or memory, and also that in the thing by virtue of which especially it has this being abroad,..as for a voice and echo clearness; for a reflected image light, brightness;..for a man genius, great achievements... In this case it is, as the sonnet says, distinctive quality in genius.
I’m not sure I get what Hopkins is talking about, but I respect that he used a word so wildly idiosyncratically and so insistently in his writing that the closest thing English has to an official dictionary was like “fine, have it your way.” Bravo, Gerard.
Also bravo for “Pied Beauty,” which isn’t related to this topic of this newsletter at all, but which is one of the best poems.
Anyway, for those of us who are not Gerard Manley Hopkins, “sake” in its usual dependent form—for the sake of X, for X’s sake—means something like “out of consideration for.” This is very funny when you consider “for fuck’s sake,” a phrase common enough it can be shortened to “ffs” on the internet. Out of consideration for fuck.
I’m speculating here, but I think “for fuck’s sake” probably came from people swearing with the slightly more comprehensible “for God’s sake” (out of consideration for God). Certainly the (primarily US English, somewhat antiquated) phrases “for sake’s sake,” “Sakes alive!” and simply “Sakes!” spring from a desire to replace the word “God” (or “Christ”) and to swear without swearing.
Back when “sake” could be used on its own, it meant, variously, contention, accusation, sin, or guilt, but these were often used in the negative, as in “without sake,” without sin. If you squint, you might be able to make out the connection with the verb “forsake,” which originally meant “to deny (an accusation).” Later, “sake” wandered from its connotations of strife, whether legal or spiritual, and came to mean “regard,” which how we get the “for X’s sake” contemporary usage.
“Sake” has been on my mind because of Théophile Gautier’s 1835 novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, which I am reading very slowly and which I mentioned in my last newsletter. It has a very famous preface where Gautier advocates “art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art, though this exact phrase doesn’t appear in the preface). I started thinking about why we English speakers need an extra word when we could just say “art for art,” and I still don’t know the answer, but I reread “Pied Beauty,” so it was all worth it.
Anyway, let’s talk about art—for our sake, for its sake. Mademoiselle de Maupin is what I’ve been reading in Capital-R Romance. Gautier, railing against actual government-imposed censorship and the quieter kind of social censorship that insists art must be useful or morally instructive to exist, had this to say in his preface:
Il n’y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien ; tout ce qui est utile est laid […] L’endroit le plus utile d’une maison, ce sont les latrines.
Nothing is truly beautiful except that which is useless; everything useful is ugly […] The most useful place in a house is the toilet.
(Did Marcel Duchamp have this line in mind?)
Doesn’t that concept—that art doesn’t need to be moral or useful, it just needs to be art—take on a different aspect when you learn that it was originally written in defense of an undeniably queer love story? I think it does.
The beginning of the novel is this character named D’Albert writing long letters to an unnamed friend about his terrible ennui. He’s sort of crafting a dating profile, talking about himself and how much he longs for a mistress, but he hates pretty much every kind of woman and itemizes their various flaws. The only women D’Albert likes are imaginary. Wandering Paris, he finds perhaps “one out of a hundred” acceptable. Listen, friend, “high standards” this and “particular tastes” that, but at a certain point, you gotta consider that maybe you are just not attracted to women.
D’Albert does not consider this. Instead he gets himself a mistress. He names her Rosette. D’Albert doesn’t think she’s The One, but she’s hot and adorable and DTF, so maybe she’ll do. They start fucking elaborately. I read the phrase “habillé en ours” (dressed as a bear) and briefly wondered if it was some kind of 19th-century euphemism for nudity, but no, a few sentences later D’Albert explains the literal bear mask and costume he is wearing while he and Rosette have sex. Habillé en ours = 100% literal. Who knew you could be a furry in 1835?
But no matter how frequently or fantastically they fuck, D’Albert just can’t make himself fall in love with Rosette. Something is missing. D’Albert’s still fighting vainly the old ennui. Hmmm. Cue me painstakingly highlighting every phrase hinting at anything even the slightest bit queer or trans (the aforementioned difficulty feeling love for women; “I am like a drop of oil in a glass of water”; “no one has ever longed to live other lives or assimilate another nature as much as I have, and no one has ever succeeded less than I have”; “my body and my soul are perpetually at war”) until I arrived at
j’aurais préféré d’être femme
I would have preferred to be a woman
I shouted and threw my notes into the air in an explosion of pages. (I am reading and annotating an ebook.) Equal parts elated and “I… worked on this story for a year…and…he just…he tweeted it out.” Anyway, thank you, Théophile Gautier, for making it easy for me and letting me know, a few chapters too late, that I can focus my annotation efforts on subtler things.
So that’s where I am in Mademoiselle de Maupin right now. I haven’t met the titular character yet even though I’m about a third of the way through it, but the prose is lovely. Overall I would say that this novel is indeed both less useful and more beautiful than a toilet.
I’ve been led to believe there will be sword fighting at some point. I’ll let you know if I get there.
In small-r romance, here are some recent reads I have loved. (I’m not providing content warnings in this newsletter because my memory is unreliable at the moment, but if you ever want to ask me anything about one of these books, please do reply and I will do my best to figure it out for you.)
Satisfaction (bi m/het f, both cis, contemporary) by Sionna Fox. Fox is emailing this novel in installments, a thing I am also doing, so I had to check it out. By the time I started reading, there was a big backlog of chapters available, and by the time I finished that, I was invested and wanted the next one, so I went ahead and bought the book (an option I have cruelly denied readers of my own email serial, lol). This contemporary has a pretty serious plot about the heroine’s pelvic pain and her struggles with getting the medical establishment to diagnose and treat her instead of telling her she’s “just anxious.” (Raise your hand if a doctor has ever said this to you about a problem that turned out to be physiological rather than psychological.) The serious stuff is balanced by an achingly slow burn friends-to-lovers romance with the kind of patient, understanding hero I just love. When the heroine asks him what they’ll do if her pain prevents them from ever having PIV sex, he shrugs and goes “we’ll find other stuff to do, you can top me if you want.” Incredible. Also a great best friendship in this.
Ship Wrecked (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Olivia Dade. This is so joyful and horny—two of the best things a book can be—while also delving deep into hurts and fears and all the big feelings that make people afraid to fall in love. I love a good “we had a one-night stand and then discovered that we’re coworkers” romance plot, and this amps up the tension by adding “on a remote island where we’ll be filming a prestige television show in which we pretend to be in love for six years.” Talk about a slow burn. I loved the supporting cast in this, including previous main characters from other books in the series and new characters in the island film crew and Maria’s big, loving family, and I love how diverse it is. Both main characters are fat and their differing responses to the TV/film industry’s prejudices are a big part of the story. Maria is willing to walk away from any project that doesn’t treat her right—it’s just a job—and Peter feels the need to do anything and everything to keep the roles he gets, because his work is everything to him. Maria is Swedish, so her more balanced approach to work comes from living in a more socialist country, versus Peter’s American work-is-life attitude. I loved seeing this explored in a workplace romance. Plus, Peter is from Madison, Wisconsin, and there are scenes set at Memorial Union and in Vilas Hall, two places I’m very fond of.
Even Though I Knew the End (f/f, both cis and lesbian, historical, fantasy, novella) by CL Polk. This is masterfully constructed—a noir fantasy set in 1941 Chicago, starring Helen Brandt, a lesbian private investigator/magic wielder who sold her soul to a demon ten years ago and who has three days to live—and beautifully written. The combination of the noir setting, the devil’s bargain, and a kind of auguring magic that forces Helen to be aware of the ticking clock every minute, but is also about interpreting sigils (crime scene clues) is just brilliant, and CL Polk writes such amazing sensory detail into every scene—the piercing Chicago winter wind, the din of the bourbon-scented underground lesbian bar, the satin of a handkerchief. All of it is just perfect. And watching Helen spend her last days with Edith, the love of her life, as they try to eke out a few more minutes, hours, days, any time at all together, is heartwrenching and wildly romantic. We all know the end, but we fall in love anyway.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Micaiah Johnson’s sci-fi novel The Space Between Worlds. There is a little sapphic romance in this gripping story about life and death in the multiverse, with a hint of a hopeful ending, but it’s mostly about survival and vengeance and intrigue. It’s climate fiction, set in a future where cities are walled fortresses that block out harsh conditions and poor people live in the polluted environments outside. But it’s only possible to cross between worlds if your doppelganger is dead on the other side, so people born into violence and scarcity suddenly gain value for the corporation that controls “traversing.” The protagonist of this story, Cara, has survived poverty, an abusive relationship, and a mother with an addiction. Cara is dead on hundreds of worlds, so she suddenly becomes a prized corporate asset, allowing her to traverse not only the multiverse but also the space between her home in the wastes and the wealthy city. As you can imagine, the setting of this story is grim. I almost didn’t make it past all the details about intimate partner violence in the beginning. But I’m glad I persevered, and I’m glad Cara persevered, too. The writing is so starkly memorable (“Reasons I have lived: I don’t know, but there are eight”).
That’s all for now. I’ll be back in your inbox in mid-April!