The inevitable sparrowfart
SPARROWFART, n. I was gonna write about another word this week—and whatever I had to say was gonna be thematically coherent with all the books I read, and also really intelligent and poignant, you know, the kind of essay that illuminates the world in a way you’ve never seen, or reaches inside you, wraps a fist around your heart, and doesn’t let go—but I stumbled across this one by accident and felt the clinch of fate. It doesn’t matter what other words I looked up this week. As soon as I saw it, “sparrowfart” was inevitable.
I can’t even tell if anyone really says this word, which is UK English slang for “very early morning,” variously attested “sparrow-fart,” “sparrow’s fart,” and “sparrowfarts,” and which I swear I did not make up, but I want people to say it. So I’m doing my part to spread the sparrowfart word. Please make my dream come true.
I guess sparrows fart early in the morning? Or sparrows do everything early in the morning, farting included. And early in the morning, it’s quiet enough to hear it. I wouldn’t know. It’s more than the fact that I’m pretty sure birds just, you know, evacuate at will and thus don’t fart in the same way that people do.* It’s that very early morning, for me, is a mysterious and inaccessible time. Much like this word and also the concept of birds farting, sometimes I suspect it’s not real. No one is ever going to say “she woke up at sparrowfart” about me. I am not a sparrowfart person.
J has proposed that the opposite time of day be called “raccoonburp,” an appropriately gross and North American to describe my lifestyle, where I stay up late so I can rub my little paws together and nourish myself with garbage when no one’s looking.
*Okay I googled this and it turns out I was right that birds don’t really fart. They have really short intestinal tracts and fast digestion. Also, they do just shit wherever and whenever they want. Hard-hitting investigative reporting to uncover the truth about bird farts, that’s part of the Word Suitcase promise.
Just like I never write about the word I planned to write about, or go to bed at the raccoonburp time I intended to, I also never read what I thought I was going to read. I had a whole list of titles all worked out for this week, and next week, and the week after that. And then some library books came in and I completely ignored all my plans!
I do this every week: make a plan, then wreck it. At some point, you might think I’d skip making the plan, but I can’t. That ruins the thrill. Every week this newsletter is an adventure, but it’s my kind of adventure, where you never leave your house or do anything other than read and write. A word that isn’t from Romance roots, even though that’s what I know best? Bold. A different book than the book on my list? Almost too daring.
Anyway, in small-r romance, here’s what I read.
Teach Me (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Olivia Dade. This romance about two high school history teachers forced to share a classroom is so cute. They start off on the wrong foot and slowly warm up to each other, and there are a lot of satisfyingly nerdy jokes along the way. I loved both main characters, but especially Rose, the stylish ice queen (an archetype that always calls to me) who pretends to have a black and bitter heart but is actually a marshmallow. Rose is also a fat woman, and it’s written with sensitivity and respect, which is something that always makes me happy. This book has an inclusive cast of supporting characters, and both Rose and Martin really care about teaching and their students in a way that resonated with me, since I spent years working as a teacher (although not in a public high school). This book is totally adorable, and the kind of slow burn where you yell “JUST KISS ALREADY” and then it takes them another fifty pages—and you love every one. Content warnings: emotional abuse (in the past), mentions of sexual harassment, sex.
For Real (m/m, both cis and gay, contemporary, erotic) by Alexis Hall. 8,439 people told me to read this book, which won roughly that many awards and deserved all of them, and as such it took me that many years to secure a copy from the library, because everybody wants to read this, see above. This is such a beautiful, thoughtful exploration of relationship power dynamics—kink, on the one hand, and a large age gap on the other—and such a masterclass in character voice. One of the protagonists is nineteen and his internal monologue is perceptive and amazing and endearing (“The truth is, my granddad’s a pretty biased man. He thinks I’m this astonishing, talented, wonderful person, in spite of all available evidence to the contrary. But that’s sort of what love is, I guess. A perpetual state of semideranged partiality.”) but also occasionally cringeworthy, peppered as it is with early 2010s internet slang (“I can’t even,” “Nom. All of the nom.”), which is a perfect encapsulation of being nineteen years old. This book doesn’t shy away from anything, whether it’s acne or grief, and as a result it’s fierce and captivating. Worth getting in your library holds queue, however long it may be. Content warnings: a parental figure dies of cancer, grief, BDSM, sex, a main character has been cheated on in a past relationship, a main character is an emergency medicine doctor and there is some discussion of his work.
This week, in things that are neither Romance nor romance, I read Kate Heartfield’s sci-fi novella Alice Payne Arrives, which stars an 18th-century English highwaywoman and her automaton-inventing girlfriend who accidentally get caught up in some time-travel shenanigans, and is exactly as fun as it sounds. Content warnings: a supporting character commits suicide, war, PTSD from war.
I also read and loved this Tony Hoagland poem, “Reasons to Survive November” (CW for suicidal imagery), which I found through Helena Fitzgerald’s beautiful essay/newsletter “early dark”—the kind of essay I envisioned writing here, but instead I am a sparrowfart person, at least when it comes to words. At Fitzgerald’s suggestion, I also subscribed to the newsletter “Pome,” which delivers a poem to my inbox every day, and has so far been a complete surprise every time it happens (“what is this email???? ohhhh it’s that thing I subscribed to, sweet”). But a good surprise. Reasons to survive November indeed.
I don’t have any images related to this week’s newsletter, so here is a picture J took when we were in Mexico in January that I just found on our camera a couple days ago. These flamingos spend the winter in the Yucatán. It was the middle of the day and they were loud as hell, so as far as I know, none of them are farting.