We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

So the problem with using New Year’s as a time to take stock and make plans or to set a pattern for the year to come is that generally I spend New Year’s celebrating Christmas with whichever part of my family I didn’t see earlier in the month. So I’m not in a familiar space and often I don’t even have my laptop with me, which has, for example, the .txt file where I keep track of my reading.

Luckily this month that wasn’t complicated.

Recent: I listened to the audiobooks of Allie Therin’s Roaring Twenties Magic series again, while sewing. This was exactly what I needed and I enjoyed it very much.

That’s it, that’s all I finished this month.

I did reread “Christabel” on the subway one day, and I bought waayyy too many books and read some scholarly introductions to 18th century literature.

Current: I’m almost done rereading The Ironmaster’s Tale.

I am about halfway through Isabel Cooper’s Blood and Ember, which is the conclusion to a fantasy trilogy. I’m enjoying it, but I won’t finish it before I need to renew it.

But at least I can renew it, while The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper and Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed (both of which I’ve just started) have holds on them and I also probably won’t finish them before they have to go back. Oh well, I can put more holds on.

Future: I might just reread Daniel Cabot Puts Down Roots. That sounds like it’d be great right now. Also there was an excellent Yuletide fic for it.

Beyond that I might try to space things out a bit more. I may be hitting a point where I can only focus on one or two books at once, which would be weird.

Posted later here because like hell was I dealing with html tags on a touchscreen keyboard. But also I have now given my sister her Christmas present so I have posted quilt pictures on tumblr!

A continuing series that I might as well collect in one place.

It Is Always 1984: The BBC’s Sherlock and the Normalization of the Surveillance State

Vehement or Excited Mental State: Divinity, Disturbance, and Disapproval in Euripides’ Bacchae and The Rocky Horror Picture Show

That’s Not Awesome, That’s Child Labour: Problems with Pop-Feminist Understandings of History

Beautified With Our Feathers: An Optimistic View of the Future of Fanfiction

“I’m Here to Talk to You About the Avengers Initiative”: The Fantasy of the Perfect Job Offer in Modern Media
Alternatively, “Yer a Wizard, Harry”: Same Subtitle

So one of my tumblr posts has been cited in someone's doctoral thesis! Again?! And I can't believe this every time it happens, but this is the third time and I should maybe get a tag for it.

(If you know me and that's your thesis, do feel free to private message me if you want; I will not out you.)

I just. I have so many feelings about this. I did not go to graduate school, and I still think that was the right decision even if I'm sad about it, but ... this is so fucking cool you guys.

1. The Antique Pattern Library is a thing that exists! OMG!

2. My twitter rule still applies ... except in the case of theJagmeetSingh, which may be the only twitter that makes me feel better about humanity.

3. Most accurate AO3 tag yet: #idiots to lovers.

4. Titles and summaries are the most annoying parts of fic writing, so it's very weird to get that but literally nothing else about the fic - no prose, no plot, not even theme or mood. But:

It's Not That I'm Sentimental
Natasha Romanov is not a matchmaker. Maybe if she says that often enough eventually someone will believe it.

5. The latest in the continuing series of essays I won't write: Beautified With Our Feathers: An Optimistic View of the Future of Fanfiction.

I have updated my header post. That was actually all I was going to say, but in the process I discovered that a Tumblr post of mine (regarding the Watson & Holmes comic) has been quoted in someone's MA thesis! This is not my first time being mentioned in an academic paper, but omg it makes me so happy when it happens.

(If you know me and that's your MA thesis, do feel free to private message me if you want; I will not out you.)

And then consultingpiskies came in to show me Billy Porter's Oscars outfit, and man, some things need to be reblogged regardless of my general avoidance of Tumblr.

(At some point I will also try to sort out how to fit the widest number of potential applications into 15 icons, but now is not that time.)

Putting this on Dreamwidth as well as Tumblr:

So I’ve been thinking about soulmate AUs. The kind where your soulmate’s name is written on your skin. How would that start? When would that start?

Not with the beginning of writing. For centuries, in China, in Sumer, in Egypt, in Mesoamerica, writing was used for accounting or religion, and nothing else. Most people would never be able write their names or recognize them if they were written. Only royalty, gods, and perhaps some property owners would.

Individual scribes might have had signatures. For that matter, for all we know individual Paleolithic artists might have had signatures. But most people wouldn’t. What would happen the first time someone was born with an unknown symbol on their hand?

Probably it would be an isolated mystery. Remember, in most of these scenarios there’s no actual guarantee that you’ll ever meet your soulmate (although most people seem to end up with one from the same general area. Which is statistically unlikely). No one would know what it meant. Maybe people with symbols would be seen as special, or divine, or demonic.

And then it might start happening more often - or stop happening, if writing stopped being used (like in Greece after 1200 BCE). But most of the time still no one would know what the symbol meant. And most people wouldn’t have symbols, because most people’s soulmates wouldn’t know how to write.

(Sometimes I think the theory is that people would have a thumbprint instead of a soulmate mark? But this would be basically useless for matching purposes - you would have no idea where to start. So from that point of view the first people with actual names would just have them instead of the thumbprints that everyone else had and didn’t know the meaning of.

Incidentally, using thumbprints for recognition isn’t universal in non-literate societies either. European society didn’t realize that fingerprints were unique until the late 19th century. In a lot of places, they weren’t used until people were already using signatures, and needed an option for illiterate people. Also, while they are an identifying mark, they really have no relation at all to your name. For most of human existence, having a physical marker of your identity really wasn’t that important.)

Only somewhere with at least moderately widespread literacy would someone be able to look at a mark and go “Oh, that’s my friend Imhotep’s name. What a coincidence!” And only somewhere with widespread literacy would Imhotep’s soulmate also be able to write their name. Most early languages were logographic, and in cuneiform names specifically were almost always logographic, so you wouldn’t even be able to sound it out.

Phoenician (starting 1050 BCE) was the first widespread writing system, and was simple enough and common enough that sailors could write in it. It was also the first phoenetic script which would allow you to easily approximate the pronounciation of the writing on your skin.

But still, most people wouldn’t have symbols. Most people would never meet anyone with their name on their skin.

This would be a problem in AUs where you never feel sexual attraction to anyone who isn’t your soulmate. Imagine religion and culture in a world where almost everyone is functionally asexual.

How long would it take, until someone realized that if people’s names matched up, they had some kind of bond? How long would it take before this was a generally accepted theory?

Also, how long before this was seen as at all important, given that most people with the status to know how to read would also have arranged marriages?

But once it was generally accepted, suddenly literacy would become a lot more important. People would demand to learn how to write. (Some people would learn that their soulmate’s name wasn’t in the local writing system. What happens then?) People would want to give their children more unique names (ancient Rome had about thirty given names for men total, and they named their daughters “first Julia” and “second Julia.”)

Anyway, around ancient Rome or so, when there would not only be a lot of literate people but also a lot of people able to recognize foreign alphabets, suddenly there would be a huge drive for 1) more literacy and 2) better long distance communication, so you could find the Caius or Ξανθίππη or שָׂרָה who had your name on their skin. And as this idea became more and more widespread, so would this desire. The same thing would be happening in China and Ethiopia and India.

This would revolutionize world history. There would be strong motivations both for exploration and for making peace with foreign cultures. Everyone in Rome with a Jewish soulmate would want to make sure they wouldn’t be killed before they could meet them. Everyone with a soulmate in a strange language would want to know at least what language it was.

Come to think of it, these are also all good reasons for why people wouldn’t believe in soulmates. Your soulmate can’t be one of the hated barbarians, so that symbol doesn’t mean anything!

And that’s leaving out the fact that lots of people still wouldn’t have a soulmate who could write, and completely ignoring the existence of polyamory.

So getting to a modern society with everyone just knowing that that was your soulmate’s name would involve a really complicated history, probably nothing at all like ours. And there would be huge pressure to ignore the existence of soulmates at all.

No conclusions here, just taking an illogical premise way too logically.

And this, which I could queue on tumblr when I wasn't feeling fragile and then went ack when I was about to repost it but look, people, I know Greek.

Sappho; translated by, um, me

That man seems equal to the gods
to me, who sits across from you
and from so close can hear your sweet
speaking

and lovely laughter, as they force
my heart to shudder in my chest.
For when I briefly look at you,
speaking is lost,

instead my tongue sticks, subtly
a fire runs under my skin,
my eyes see nothing, roaring fills
my ears,

cold sweat pours over me, trembling
grips all of me, and pale as grass
I am; I seem to be so close
to dying.

But all must be endured, since
a poor and [

William Wordsworth

Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ‘twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.


Also, the tag "shakespeare monologue meme" on Tumblr has some lovely things.

Title: But By Degrees
Author: Violsva
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes
Rating: M
Warnings/Enticements: Sex, Angst, Victorian Attitudes
Word Count: 4277
Summary: Mary Watson builds herself a life and home with her new husband, as secrets tangle around her.

At AO3.


Two years after graduation, and I still get random article titles in my head. The latest one is It Is Always 1984: The BBC's Sherlock and the Normalization of the Surveillance State.

I'm not writing it, but it's fun to think of.

...like reading an introduction to a famous literary work. Even a very good introduction.

"The idea of that payment to Dupin echoing a real-life bribe to Poe seems on its face far-fetched (though less so than one writer's later suggestion that Poe himself was the "swarthy" gentleman who murdered Mary Rogers)." --Matthew Pearl

...That sounds surprisingly biographical for academic literary criticism. But it's not more absurd than a lot of critical theory.

(It spoiled the plots, like all introductions [the authors of introductions appear to believe either that they are actually writing afterwords or that everyone, or everyone important, already knows this anyway], but I read it after the stories, so that was okay.)