thoughts in a changing world
Jul. 4th, 2025 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I went back and checked, and it's been five years since I wrote here with anything approaching regularity. I guess the pandemic did more of a number on my creative voice than I realized.
So there's that. Anyway.
Today is July the 4th. The current administration in the U.S.A. is not something to celebrate. Yesterday the deadly budget bill passed the House (again), having somehow become worse than before in its little trip through the Senate.
(Oh, wait. I know how. We all do, really.)
These are dark times and I'm pretty sure they're going to get worse before they get better. That said, I'm not giving up. I may not be able to change the world as a whole, but I can make a difference for people around me, or at least I can try. Or keep trying, actually; there's that, too.
(My team's been hit hard by what's going on at the NIH. I'm doing the best I can to keep everyone employed. It's something.)
For today, I'm going to take a little time for myself to do personal things rather than work things, and then J. and I are going to grill burgers on the terrace and drag toys around for the cat and enjoy the evening.
For the occasion, I'm wearing a T-shirt from Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour, which we saw last Friday in Gelsenkirchen (and which was absolutely amazing in many ways).
It seems appropriate.
So there's that. Anyway.
Today is July the 4th. The current administration in the U.S.A. is not something to celebrate. Yesterday the deadly budget bill passed the House (again), having somehow become worse than before in its little trip through the Senate.
(Oh, wait. I know how. We all do, really.)
These are dark times and I'm pretty sure they're going to get worse before they get better. That said, I'm not giving up. I may not be able to change the world as a whole, but I can make a difference for people around me, or at least I can try. Or keep trying, actually; there's that, too.
(My team's been hit hard by what's going on at the NIH. I'm doing the best I can to keep everyone employed. It's something.)
For today, I'm going to take a little time for myself to do personal things rather than work things, and then J. and I are going to grill burgers on the terrace and drag toys around for the cat and enjoy the evening.
For the occasion, I'm wearing a T-shirt from Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour, which we saw last Friday in Gelsenkirchen (and which was absolutely amazing in many ways).
It seems appropriate.
Thursday DE
Jul. 3rd, 2025 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Taliesin the bard once said/sang, “I have been a word in a book.”
If the book is your character’s cannon, what word would your character be?
If the book is your character’s cannon, what word would your character be?
We are off through July ...
Jul. 2nd, 2025 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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... but we still have shows for you. We put the question up on FB, your favorite songs about books. We got quite a list! Five shows worth, with more to come later in the year or next January!
This week on FilkCast
Maureen O'Brien, Leslie Fish, Broceliande, Jordin Kare, Tom Smith, Anne McCaffrey-Tania Opland-Mike Freeman, Mikey Mason, Mike Whitaker, Larry Warner, Mike Whitaker, Mark Horning, Roberta Rogow, Echo's Children, Joey Shoji, Bob Asprin & Al Frank
Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.
filkcast.blogspot.com
This week on FilkCast
Maureen O'Brien, Leslie Fish, Broceliande, Jordin Kare, Tom Smith, Anne McCaffrey-Tania Opland-Mike Freeman, Mikey Mason, Mike Whitaker, Larry Warner, Mike Whitaker, Mark Horning, Roberta Rogow, Echo's Children, Joey Shoji, Bob Asprin & Al Frank
Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.
filkcast.blogspot.com
Wednesday DE: blended debate
Jul. 2nd, 2025 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Hello Milliways, it's hot, have a popsicle.
Today's DE:
Another versus question - smoothies, shakes or slushes?
Today's DE:
Another versus question - smoothies, shakes or slushes?
Rebuilding journal search again
Jun. 30th, 2025 03:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.
Monday DE: I'm lovin' it
Jun. 30th, 2025 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Afternoon all!
As I reheat Popeye's mac and cheese for a quick lunch... what fast food or takeaway food does your pup like best?
As I reheat Popeye's mac and cheese for a quick lunch... what fast food or takeaway food does your pup like best?
Thursday DE
Jun. 26th, 2025 06:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Hey all, sorry about Tuesday.
For today, who would your character do anything for? Who is their ride or die person?
For today, who would your character do anything for? Who is their ride or die person?
(no subject)
Jun. 25th, 2025 08:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I was traveling again for much of last week which meant, again, it was time to work through an emergency paperback to see if it was discardable. And, indeed, it was! And you would think that reading and discarding one bad book on my travels, dayenu, would have been enough -- but then my friend brought me to books4free, where I could not resist the temptation to pick up another emergency gothic. And, lo and behold, this book turned out to be even worse, and was discarded before the trip was out!
The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. ( spoilers )
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
The two books were not even much alike, but I'm going to write them up together anyway because a.) I read them in such proximity and b.) though I did not like either of them, neither quite reached the over-the-top delights of joyous badness that would demand a solo post.
The first -- and this one I'd been hanging onto for some years after finding it in a used bookstore in San Francisco -- was Esbae: A Winter's Tale (published 1981), a college-campus urban fantasy in which (as the Wikipedia summary succinctly says) a college student named Chuck summons Asmodeus to help him pass his exams. However, Chuck is an Asshole Popular Boy who Hates Books and is Afraid of the Library, so he enlists a Clumsy, Intellectual, Unconventional Classmate with Unfashionable Long Red Locks named Sophie to help him with his project. Sophie is, of course, the heroine of the book, and Moreover!! she is chosen by the titular Esbae, a shapechanging magical creature who's been kicked out into the human realm to act as a magical servant until and unless he helps with the performance of a Great and Heroic Deed, to be his potentially heroic master.
Unfortunately after this happens Sophie doesn't actually do very much. The rest of the plot involves Chuck incompetently stalking Sophie to attempt to sacrifice her to Asmodeus, which Sophie barely notices because she's busy cheerfully entering into an affair with the history professor who taught them about Asmodeus to begin with.
In fact only thing of note that nerdy, clumsy Sophie really accomplishes during this section is to fly into a rage with Esbae when she finds out that Esbae has been secretly following her to protect her from Chuck and beat her unprotesting magical creature of pure goodness up?? to which is layered on the extra unfortunate layer that Esbae often takes the form of a small brown-skinned child that Sophie saw playing the Heroine's Clever Moorish Servant in an opera one time??? Sophie, who is justifiably horrified with herself about this, talks it over with her history professor and they decide that with great mastery comes great responsibility and that Sophie has to be a Good Master. Obviously this does not mean not having a magical servant who is completely within your power and obeys your every command, but probably does mean not taking advantage of the situation to beat the servant up even if you're really mad. And we all move on! Much to unpack there, none of which ever will be.
Anyway. Occult shenanigans happen at a big campus party, Esbae Accomplishes A Heroic Deed, Sophie and her history professor live happily ever after. It's 1981. This book was nominated for a Locus Award, which certainly does put things in perspective.
The second book, the free bookstore pickup, was Ronald Scott Thorn's The Twin Serpents (1965) which begins with a brilliant plastic surgeon! tragically dead! with a tragically dead wife!! FOLLOWED BY: the discovery of a mysterious stranger on a Greek island who claims to know nothing about the brilliant plastic surgeon ....
stop! rewind! You might be wondering how we got here! Well, the brilliant plastic surgeon (mid-forties) had a Cold and Shallow but Terribly Beautiful twenty-three-year-old aristocratic wife, and she had a twin brother who was not only a corrupt and debauched and spendthrift aristocrat AND not only psychologically twisted as a result of his physical disability (leg problems) BUT of course mildly incestuous with his twin sister as well and PROBABLY the cause of her inexplicable, unnatural distaste for the idea of having children. I trust this gives you a sense of the vibe.
However, honestly the biggest disappointment is that for a book that contains incestuous twins, face-changing surgery [self-performed!!], secret identities, secret abortions, a secret disease of the hands, last-minute live-saving operations and semi-accidental murder, it's ... kind of boring ..... a solid 60% of the book is the brilliant plastic surgeon and his wife having the same unpleasant marital disputes in which the book clearly wants me to be on his side and I am really emphatically absolutely not. ( spoilers )
Both these books have now been released back into the wild; I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them. I did also read a couple of good books on my trip but those will, eventually, get their own post.
Wednesday DE: like a house on fire
Jun. 25th, 2025 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Heyo everybody, I hope y'all are doing alright out there in the world.
Today's DE:
Sort of inspired by yesterday's, who would your pup get along great with from another canon?
Feel free to mention any Milliways friendships that have actually happened, or pick someone who either your pup has never met, or who has never been in the bar that you think would be a great BFF match.
Today's DE:
Sort of inspired by yesterday's, who would your pup get along great with from another canon?
Feel free to mention any Milliways friendships that have actually happened, or pick someone who either your pup has never met, or who has never been in the bar that you think would be a great BFF match.
This week on FilkCast
Jun. 24th, 2025 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Anthony Gilbert, Kristoph Klover, Kathy Mar & Taunya Gren, Draketo, Frank Hayes, Mike Whitaker, Alexa Klettner, The Blibbering Humdingers, Ju Honisch, Norm Sherman & Dusty Mangum, Jordin Kare, Jellicle Timewarp, Philip Allcock, Twotonic, Barry & Sally Childs Helton, Mary Crowell w-Betsey & Kade Tinney
Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.
filkcast.blogspot.com
Available on iTunes, Google Play and most other places you can get podcasts. We can be heard Wednesday at 6am and 9pm Central on scifi.radio.
filkcast.blogspot.com
Monday DE: Pop (Culture) Quiz!
Jun. 23rd, 2025 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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...Ooh! Ooh! I know!
Pick a quote or reference from a different canon entirely which sums up your pup.
Don't tell us which reference = which pup. Let everyone else guess who you're talking about!
(For example, one I've used before: Stitch's "ALSO CUTE AND FLUFFY!" line, yelled as he beats up a giant alien, is my girl Molly.)
Pick a quote or reference from a different canon entirely which sums up your pup.
Don't tell us which reference = which pup. Let everyone else guess who you're talking about!
(For example, one I've used before: Stitch's "ALSO CUTE AND FLUFFY!" line, yelled as he beats up a giant alien, is my girl Molly.)
FIC: Caring For Your Dragon
Jun. 22nd, 2025 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Title: Caring For Your Dragon
Author: blueraccoon/rebecca
Rating: NC-17
Summary: They went home. Now they have to go back to real life. In which Will and Jean-Rene figure out how this mate thing works.
Notes: I said on AO3 it's been fascinating to watch this story come together because it involves people I've literally written millions of words about, but which have only been read by one person other than me. I found I kept having to pull out things where I'd added unnecessary filler exposition just to drop in details about people because I thought they were cool and wanted people to know the cool details. There were two entire passages that got yanked because they were tours of a house and another building and I was like "becc, come on, nobody wants to read that shit" so now they're in my side bits file and if you want to read those side bits let me know.
There will be more stories. I have the next two mostly written, and then some stuff after that, and things planned for future. It seems to have found a small but existing audience on AO3 so I'm happy about that, at least.
Author: blueraccoon/rebecca
Rating: NC-17
Summary: They went home. Now they have to go back to real life. In which Will and Jean-Rene figure out how this mate thing works.
Notes: I said on AO3 it's been fascinating to watch this story come together because it involves people I've literally written millions of words about, but which have only been read by one person other than me. I found I kept having to pull out things where I'd added unnecessary filler exposition just to drop in details about people because I thought they were cool and wanted people to know the cool details. There were two entire passages that got yanked because they were tours of a house and another building and I was like "becc, come on, nobody wants to read that shit" so now they're in my side bits file and if you want to read those side bits let me know.
There will be more stories. I have the next two mostly written, and then some stuff after that, and things planned for future. It seems to have found a small but existing audience on AO3 so I'm happy about that, at least.
That art show thing I mentioned last post
Jun. 22nd, 2025 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I posted a while ago about how I'd been really getting into pottery this year. That remains true, and shows no signs of stopping. It's just so fun! I still take a 3-hour class once a week at a member-owned studio near me; I think wistfully about spending more time on it too, but for various reasons including but not limited to the busyness of my life in general, that dedicated weekly slot is what works right now.
Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.
I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.
And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.
So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.
( About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )
Back in late February, I spotted a flyer that someone had hung up on the studio bulletin board. It was a call for Boston-area artists to submit art inspired by Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, as part of an art show and book circle event co-organized by two local stores, The Local Hand and JustBook-ish.
I'd been meaning to read Parable of the Sower for ages, and the idea of doing a pottery piece inspired by a book seemed really fun -- like a Yuletide prompt, but for physical objects. Also, if your piece was accepted, you got a $500 stipend and 75% of the sale price if your piece sold, and let's be real, that was also extremely motivating.
And motivation was useful! Because the deadline was just over a month away. Pottery has a lot of built-in wait time while things dry, get fired, etc, so on a once-a-week schedule that was going to be pretty tight.
So I read the book, and loved it -- I'd been told that it was brilliant, which it is, and that it's brutal, which it is, but all of the (accurate!) discussions of its brutality hadn't conveyed the fierce pragmatism and focus of how Butler writes hope and community, and that's what I loved most -- and by the next week, I had a plan.
( About my piece, and the process, and also noodling about pottery and art -- this got very long )
(no subject)
Jun. 22nd, 2025 08:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
When I'm reading nonfiction, there's often a fine line for me between 'you, the author, are getting yourself all up in this narrative and I wish you'd get out of the way' and 'you, the author, have a clearly presented point of view and it makes it easy and fun to fight with you about your topic; pray continue.' Happily, Phyllis Rose's Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages falls squarely in the latter category for me. She's telling me a bunch of fascinating gossip and I do often disagree with her about what it all means but we're having such a good time arguing about it!
Rose starts out her book by explaining that she's interested in the idea of 'marriage' both as a narrative construct developed by the partners within it -- "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent" -- and a negotiation of power, vulnerable to exploitation. She also says that she wanted to find a good balance of happy and unhappy Victorian marriages as case studies to explore, but then she got so fascinated by several of the unhappy ones that things got a little out of balance .... and she is right! Her case studies are fascinating, and at least one of them (the one she clearly sees as the happiest) is not technically a marriage at all (which, of course, is part of her point.)
The couples in question are:
Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Carlyle -- the framing device for the whole book, because even though this marriage is not her favorite marriage Jane Carlyle is her favorite character. Notable for the fact that Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty, and then published after his death, making everyone else feel like he ought to have been feeling incredibly guilty. Rose considers the secret postmortem diary gift a brilliant stroke of Jane's in Triumphantly Taking Control Of The Narrative Of Their Marriage.
John Ruskin and Effie Gray -- like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage. non-consummation! parent drama! art drama! accusations that Ruskin was trying to manipulate Effie Gray into a ruinous affair so that he could divorce her! Effie Gray's family coming down secretly to sneak her away so she could launch a big divorce case instead! my favorite element of this whole story is that the third man in the Art Love Triangle, John Millais, was painting Ruskin's portrait when he and Gray fell in love instead, and Ruskin insisted on making Millais keep painting his portrait for numerous awkward sittings while the divorce proceedings played themselves out and [according to Rose] was genuinely startled that Millais was not interested in subsequently continuing their pleasant correspondence.
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy. Harriet Taylor was married to John Taylor but was not enjoying the experience, began a passionate intellectual correspondence with John Stuart Mill who believed as strongly as she did in women's rights etc., they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours", nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was. (Meanwhile the Carlyles, who were friends of John Mill, nicknamed Harriet 'Platonica,' which I have to admit is a very funny move if you are a bitchy 19th century intellectual and you hate the married woman your friend is having a passionate but celibate philosophical romance of the soul with.) Eventually John Taylor did die and Harriet Taylor and John Mill did get married -- platonically or otherwise is unknown but regardless they seem to have been blissfully happy. Rose thinks that Harriet Taylor was probably not as brilliant as John Mill thought and John Mill was henpecked, but happily so, because letting his wife tell him what to do soothed his patriarchal guilt. I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!
Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens -- oh this was a Bad Marriage and everyone knows it. Unlike all the other women in this book, Catherine Dickens did not really command a narrative space of her own except Cast Aside Wife which -- although that's probably part of Rose's point -- makes this section IMO weaker and a bit less fun than the others.
George Eliot and George Henry Lewes -- Rose's favorite! She thinks these guys are very romantic and who can blame her, though she does want to take time to argue with people who think that George Eliot's genius relied more on George Henry Lewes kindling the flame than it did on George Eliot herself. It not being 1983 anymore, it did not occur to me that 'George Eliot was not primarily responsible for George Eliot' was an argument that needed to be made. "Maybe marriage is better when it doesn't have to actually be marriage" is clearly a point she's excited to make, given which one does wonder why she doesn't pull any Victorian long-term same-sex partnerships into her thematic examination. And the answer, probably, is 'I'm interested in specifically in the narrative of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual power dynamics and the ways they still leave an imprint on our contemporary moment,' which is fair, but if you're already exploring a thing by looking outside it .... well, anyway. I just looked up her bibliography out of curiosity to see if she ever did write about gay people and the answer is "well, she's got a book about Josephine Baker" so I may well be looking that up in future so I can have fun arguing with Rose some more!
Rose starts out her book by explaining that she's interested in the idea of 'marriage' both as a narrative construct developed by the partners within it -- "a subjectivist fiction with two points of view often deeply in conflict, sometimes fortuitously congruent" -- and a negotiation of power, vulnerable to exploitation. She also says that she wanted to find a good balance of happy and unhappy Victorian marriages as case studies to explore, but then she got so fascinated by several of the unhappy ones that things got a little out of balance .... and she is right! Her case studies are fascinating, and at least one of them (the one she clearly sees as the happiest) is not technically a marriage at all (which, of course, is part of her point.)
The couples in question are:
Thomas Carlyle and Jane Baillie Carlyle -- the framing device for the whole book, because even though this marriage is not her favorite marriage Jane Carlyle is her favorite character. Notable for the fact that Jane Carlyle wrote a secret diary through her years of marriage detailing how unhappy she was, which was given to Carlyle after her death, making him feel incredibly guilty, and then published after his death, making everyone else feel like he ought to have been feeling incredibly guilty. Rose considers the secret postmortem diary gift a brilliant stroke of Jane's in Triumphantly Taking Control Of The Narrative Of Their Marriage.
John Ruskin and Effie Gray -- like every possible Victorian drama happened to this marriage. non-consummation! parent drama! art drama! accusations that Ruskin was trying to manipulate Effie Gray into a ruinous affair so that he could divorce her! Effie Gray's family coming down secretly to sneak her away so she could launch a big divorce case instead! my favorite element of this whole story is that the third man in the Art Love Triangle, John Millais, was painting Ruskin's portrait when he and Gray fell in love instead, and Ruskin insisted on making Millais keep painting his portrait for numerous awkward sittings while the divorce proceedings played themselves out and [according to Rose] was genuinely startled that Millais was not interested in subsequently continuing their pleasant correspondence.
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor -- this was my favorite section; I had never heard of these guys but I loved their energy. Harriet Taylor was married to John Taylor but was not enjoying the experience, began a passionate intellectual correspondence with John Stuart Mill who believed as strongly as she did in women's rights etc., they seriously considered the ethics around running off together but decided that while all three of them (Harriet Taylor, John Taylor, and John Mill) were made moderately unhappy by the current situation of "John Mill comes over three nights a week for passionate intellectual discussions with Harriet Taylor while John Taylor considerately goes Out for Several Hours", nobody was made as miserable by it as John Taylor would be if Harriet left John Taylor and therefore ethics demanded that the situation remain as it was. (Meanwhile the Carlyles, who were friends of John Mill, nicknamed Harriet 'Platonica,' which I have to admit is a very funny move if you are a bitchy 19th century intellectual and you hate the married woman your friend is having a passionate but celibate philosophical romance of the soul with.) Eventually John Taylor did die and Harriet Taylor and John Mill did get married -- platonically or otherwise is unknown but regardless they seem to have been blissfully happy. Rose thinks that Harriet Taylor was probably not as brilliant as John Mill thought and John Mill was henpecked, but happily so, because letting his wife tell him what to do soothed his patriarchal guilt. I think that Rose is a killjoy. Let a genius think his partner of the soul is also a genius if he wants to! I'm not going to tell him that he's wrong!
Charles Dickens and Catherine Dickens -- oh this was a Bad Marriage and everyone knows it. Unlike all the other women in this book, Catherine Dickens did not really command a narrative space of her own except Cast Aside Wife which -- although that's probably part of Rose's point -- makes this section IMO weaker and a bit less fun than the others.
George Eliot and George Henry Lewes -- Rose's favorite! She thinks these guys are very romantic and who can blame her, though she does want to take time to argue with people who think that George Eliot's genius relied more on George Henry Lewes kindling the flame than it did on George Eliot herself. It not being 1983 anymore, it did not occur to me that 'George Eliot was not primarily responsible for George Eliot' was an argument that needed to be made. "Maybe marriage is better when it doesn't have to actually be marriage" is clearly a point she's excited to make, given which one does wonder why she doesn't pull any Victorian long-term same-sex partnerships into her thematic examination. And the answer, probably, is 'I'm interested in specifically in the narrative of heterosexual marriage and heterosexual power dynamics and the ways they still leave an imprint on our contemporary moment,' which is fair, but if you're already exploring a thing by looking outside it .... well, anyway. I just looked up her bibliography out of curiosity to see if she ever did write about gay people and the answer is "well, she's got a book about Josephine Baker" so I may well be looking that up in future so I can have fun arguing with Rose some more!