FALLOPIAN, adj. This word, which only exists in the term “Fallopian tube(s)” as far as I know, comes to us from the 16th-century Italian anatomist Gabriello Fallopio, who first described the tubes that carry eggs from the ovaries into the uterus. Not a particularly exciting word, except that it’s the name of the thing I had excised from my body by emergency surgery this week, before the embryo stuck inside it caused it to rupture and kill me.
I don’t know all of you who read this newsletter, or what you’ve been through or might currently be going through, and it feels wrong to invade your inbox with a description of my trauma that you did not ask for or consent to, so I won’t say more.
It’s been a shit week. Let’s talk about books.
I didn’t finish anything that qualifies as capital-R Romance or small-r romance.
In the in-between moments, I read a few things that are neither Romance nor romance, namely Aliette de Bodard’s fantasy novel The House of Shattered Wings and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I listened to through Anthony Oliveira’s podcast The Devil’s Party over the course of the last year and finally reached the end of this week. Paradise Lost was great and I’m so glad to have had someone guide me through it, since I would have missed a lot otherwise. The podcast also kept me accountable (I paid the small subscription fee of $3/month), so I felt like I had to finish. Now that I’ve read it, I see the impact of Paradise Lost in so many pop culture phenomena, from Buffy to Supernatural to Meljean Brook’s brilliant series of paranormal romance novels, The Guardians—and also Aliette de Bodard’s The House of Shattered Wings, which stars a cast of mortals and fallen angels in a Gothic, post-apocalyptic Paris.
There’s a lot to love about The House of Shattered Wings. The setting is gorgeous, as is De Bodard’s prose. I didn’t love the plot or the characters in this as much as I did in some of her other work, especially the beautiful novella In the Vanishers’ Palace, which is a queer (f/f) retelling of Beauty and the Beast set in a magic, post-colonial, post-apocalyptic version of Vietnam. I felt closer to those characters than the ones in The House of Shattered Wings. But I’m also primed to like anything with a romance plot in it, which Vanishers’ Palace has and Shattered Wings doesn’t. Still, I’m interested enough in the world of Shattered Wings to read the rest of the trilogy. (ETA: Also it feels relevant that I read a lot of Shattered Wings in the ER, which might have affected my judgment of it!)
On a totally different note, I also read Patricia Lockwood’s poetry collection Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, which is weird and hysterical and moving. Lockwood is sort of a poet laureate of twitter. If you’re a full-time internet, you might know her from her “you KICK Miette” viral tweet about her cat earlier this year
Patricia Lockwood @TriciaLockwood
me, lightly touching miette with the side of my foot: miette move out of the way please so I don’t trip on you miette, her eyes enormous: you KICK miette? you kick her body like the football? oh! oh! jail for mother! jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!
March 19th 2019 7,678 Retweets 25,690 Likes
Or perhaps you remember her from the powerful poem “Rape Joke,” which went viral in 2013. (Content warning for rape, obviously.)
Anyway, here is the most Paradise Lost of the poems in this collection of Lockwood’s work, according to me and the following method I just made up:
None of the poems in this collection are very much like Paradise Lost
but this one is about nature, of which there is a lot in Paradise Lost
and the naming of things, which also happens in Paradise Lost
and the sound of both human and non-human voices, which etc etc
There is a “fall” in it, and that fall affects language, though in Paradise Lost language is rendered less accurate and true by the fall, and here, well, natural dialogue grows in the woods.
(tiny note that this poem has some indented lines that don’t show up on Substack—apologies! if you really wanna know where they are, I guess you gotta buy the book!)
Natural Dialogue Grows in the Woods
Along with the poison berries,
and it’s your job in this life to spit both out,
and spit both out if you want to live. Listen
and learn to me and the woods: the Ummm
of the little crickets. The fresh and slangy
crows, who end every last word with the letter
A. Rats, say the mice in the woods, and What’s
the fuckin difference, Dad? My PawPaw
always says, says the voice inside the fruit tree.
Good ears and great ears and even uncanny
are trembling here in the woods, perked every-
where are ears for speech as it is spoke. Stiffies
of dialogue circle the trees and look for holes
in the conversation, and wait to get Red Riding
Hood as soon as she leaves the wild.
She says she never will, and stretches the word
giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl so long that we all become
women during it. The woodsman lives here too,
and he stretches the word maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan
so long that we all die out before he’s done.
Death is so random, deep here in the woods.
In the woods the eternal Daaaaaamn and Gonna,
and the small exact birds saying What it is. Like
like like from morning to night, till even the night
is like the day. Nothing dwindles down to nothin.
Maaaaaaaaaaan and giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirl flee to the woods
to forget their proper usage, and after what seems
like endless fuckin—well you know and you know
and you know what I’m saying. Know what
I’m saying and know what I mean. They fall hard
to the grass like the oldest trees and lie a while
listening, and then begin to speak, their mouths full
of the air of natural dialogue: Hopefully, hopefully,
totally, totally. Where are you from I have nowhere
to be. What are you called can I axe you a question.
Can we stay here forever. Probably, probably.
With the probly and the prolly and the loblolly pines.
