okay, so, if I write someone a letter, and I'd kind of like them to write back -- is it totally gauche to include a self-addressed and stamped envelope?? Maybe with a card or sheet of stationery paper in it??

I think it might be nice to include such a thing because I'm sure most people don't already have envelopes/stationery/stamps etc on hand, and it might make writing back more fun (and more possible) if all they have to do is literally write a message and then send it.

But it also seems possibly rude because it's a lot more demanding?? Usually I send letters/cards not really expecting a reply at all, or at least not a reply in letter form (I understand that letters are very anachronistic, so most people reply to a letter by... texting me.) A self-addressed and stamped envelope seems like I'm burdening my friend with the expectation of a reply, and if they don't write back soonish, what if it sits on their desk mocking them for months?? I would be totally fine not hearing back, or hearing back months and months later, so I don't want to make it seem otherwise.

Basically -- would such a thing reduce stress, or add stress??

I picked up Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England and encountered an anecdote that fascinated me:

One of adolescent Emily Shore's several intimates, Elizabeth, gave her a "chain made of her beautiful rich brown hair" before leaving England, which Shore considered a token of her friend's affection and looked forward to displaying as a sign of social distinction: "I have generally worn a pretty little chain of bought hair, and when people have asked me 'whose hair is that?' have have been mortified at being obliged to answer 'Nobody's.' Now, when asked the same question, I shall be able to say it is the hair of my best and dearest friend." (Marcus 57)

It didn't surprise me that friends might exchange hair jewelry (and Marcus has firmly established that these girls were "just" friends; this section is about the actual friendships that get overlooked when scholars are too eager to dwell on the "friends" who were lovers or partners) -- but it does surprise me somewhat that "bought hair" was a phenomenon!

I suppose, when hair jewelry is a common sentimental accessory, someone might wish to look like the other fashionable, interesting girls regardless of whether one has a beloved to memorialize. I would have thought that one might ask for hair from a less-interesting relative -- maybe a mother, if she doesn't have (or care much for) a sister? But it seems not!

I am REALLY enjoying it so far, but a fuller report of the good bits will have to wait until another time. For now, I simply couldn't let it go unrecorded that one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's granddaughters was named Christabel! Yes, like his very lesbian poem!!

I thought it was bonkers enough that anybody would name their child Christabel Coleridge in the 1840s, but for it to have been one of Coleridge's relatives just makes it even more wild, to me. Alas, she does not appear to have any siblings named Kubla Khan or Ozymandias.

EDIT: omg, for more great names, she was part of a fascinating-sounding ladies' literary society called The Goslings, in which her pen name was CHELSEA CHINA! (Because she was born in Chelsea, presumably, and because ???). These names are fantastic: QUEEN BEE. ALBATROSS. BLUEBELL. FROG.

I'm especially charmed by MAVIS, for Mary Avice Butler, because it's so clearly formed from the sound of her actual name, in exactly the way that nicknames sometimes happen. I'm also charmed by POTATOE.

I've once again added a few more of my recently-completed books to my halfhearted bespoke reading challenge... Although I've felt like I've been 'mixing up' my reading a fair bit this year, in terms of books completed it's mostly Dorothy Sayers with a big of PG Wodehouse for colour. But I have no fewer than twelve books in progress (and six more in Libby that I intend to begin soon!) which are all something a bit interesting, with some potential to liven up reading statistics.

In the interest of following the spirit of this "challenge" a little more (rather than just jotting down my completed books every now and then and dispiritedly noting that they apply to almost none of my prompts): any recs for a book whose titles contain the words "Last," "Call," "Nightshade," or "Lounge"?

I have been reading The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, and I'm currently dragging myself through a painfully dense and jargonistic chapter on religious debates that mean very little to me, and I was startled and alarmed by what seemed to be a colloquial sense of humour suddenly stuck into the middle of the following paragraph:

However close these doctrinal and devotional similarities, the two reli- gious phenomena diverged in precisely those areas most pregnant with polit- ical possibilities. To be sure, Pietists, like Jansenists, frequently appealed to the individual conscience or Gewissen and later evolved into ‘patriots’, but in Pietism’s case neither of these translated into adversarial politics. Unlike eighteenth-century Jansenism, which persisted in arguing Augustinian grace against Unigenitus, Pietism’s quarrel with Lutheran ‘orthodoxy’ was not really doctrinal. While Pietists may have wanted less emphasis on doctrine, they did not call for a different doctrine. Their de-emphasis of reason in favour of the heart gave Pietism the political consistency of pudding. That absence of polemical edge extended even to the domain of ecclesiology where, despite Spener’s inaugural condemnation of caesaropapism and a marked impatience with rigid hierarchicalism, Pietism did not really call for structural reform. Nothing in Pietism corresponds to Richerism or conciliarism.

I share basically so you can all sympathize with me that I am trying to make my way through this writing. Why is that the only sentence in 35 pages that seems like it was written by a human??

Cecilia, by France Burney: This has been my primary reading occupation since I began it mid-February, as sometimes happens when I sink into a long 18thC work: they move so slowly that I need to spend all my time on them to get anywhere. I've been gradually falling in love with Burney as an author who I can't believe isn't more widely read: Cecilia, as a character, is completely unlike Evelina, the protagonist of the other Burney novel I've read (titled Evelina), but Cecilia is equally fascinating and endearing to me.

(Incidentally -- I really like how the convention of naming books after their heroines imbues the book itself with something like personhood: one can talk about 'spending a nice afternoon with Cecilia' and it really does feel like, by picking up such a large book focused on just one person, one is spending time with the narrative person of Cecilia.)

The premise of Cecilia is unusual: Cecilia is an independently wealthy heiress (whose virtue is, naturally, matched only by her beauty) whose only problem on the marriage market is that her husband must take her last name or her wealthy estate will pass to the next person in line for it. The first half of the book takes us through a range of interesting suitors, but actually settles on a clear favourite roughly halfway through, and from there the plot is concerned with the difficulties of getting their marriage sorted out to everyone's satisfaction.

I'd highly recommend this novel to someone with the patience for a long 18thC work -- I think it demonstrates the satisfactions and strengths of this literary tradition really well! Also, I'd love to be able to talk about it with someone; maybe I can write a more spoilery post in the future.

Puttering along: I always have a few books that I'm making my way through a page or two at a time; these are The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (up to p 133) and La Nouvelle Heloise, vol 1, which I am reading in French a few sentences at a time (up to p 49).

On the horizon: The downside of having a Good 18thC Novel on the go is that I make it through fewer distinct titles than when I'm reading more voraciously; I have a long backlog of things that I want to get to. For pleasure I'd like to do the next Lord Peter Wimsey or the next Jeeves & Wooster, but I think actually I will try to dive into some books I've hastily checked out on Japan. After spending the last several years agreeing with a friend of mine (who used to teach English in Japan) that we should go visit together some time when there was a deal on plane tickets, I have surprised myself by actually buying some extremely cheap tickets to Osaka, and we will be in Japan in April! So I don't have much time to orient myself to the country before we are there -- I'd like to have more knowledge than a teenage fondness for manga has provided me.

#overlyhonestmethods: The touchstone authors of this dissertation are Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Turner Smith, Hannah More, and Mary Robinson, because I didn't feel like writing about men.

I’ve been wanting, for a while, to “look more queer,” and the more I contemplate this as a direct goal, the more annoyed/fascinated I become at the disconnect between the signal I’m trying to send (“gay femme here!!”) and the actual actions I have to spend my time on in order to SEND that signal. Every time I see someone and love the way they look, I think to myself, "I wanna look like that! But without having to take any of the actions which lead someone to have that appearance."

By that I mean— if I want an eclectic and fabulous wardrobe with lots of accessories, I have to spend a lot of time SHOPPING. But I don’t particularly like shopping! It’s not a love of shopping that makes me gay! Or if I want a hip, queer haircut (rather than looking I belong in the movie for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), I need to schedule regular haircuts. But making, and then showing up on time to, recurring boring appointments isn't gay! The things which would help me look queer actually have nothing to do with being queer. Taking clothes to a tailor isn't gay! Waking up early to have time to put on makeup isn't gay!

Maybe if I was already investing more time and errand-power in my appearance, it would be simpler, to just buy gayer things when I go shopping, ask for a gayer haircut when I go for my regular haircut, add a bit of sparkle when I do my morning skincare routine, etc. But as much as I like feeling cute, I just... think of myself as a low-maintenance person. I actually might be a shabby side character in a Dickens novel, I'm maybe-too-little-maintenance.[1] But right now I can go from unconscious to walking out the door in 10 minutes.[2] This pleases me! This should be reconcilable with people being able to detect that I am gay??

So far I've taken the strategy of, when I am no longer able to avoid purchasing new clothes, I make sure to pick something as queer-looking as possible, so that my low-maintenance no-thinking routine is at least drawing from a more fabulous base pool of options. Also I wear a trans flag on my lapel and a rainbow stud earring in one ear. This is working, slowly but surely, but even its effectiveness feels perverse somehow: I am no gayer than I was before, but I look gayer over time through semi-begrudging investment of effort in unrelated tasks.[3]

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY, I have been getting kinda into painting my nails, and I think I like it in part because the actual underlying work of producing the fabulous femme appearance actually suits who I am as a person. Once a week or so I can take an hour or two at 4am, with an audiobook on, to do something that feels like "crafting" (i.e., painting something fussy), all of which is already stuff I like to do. And then I have something very cute about my appearance to be proud of!! (See: my first complete manicure, left, of which I was VERY proud!!!) So I guess this is a problem I've "solved."

Nonetheless, it still feels odd, somehow, that "self-expression" clearly seems to require supporting labour that may or may nor be at all harmonious with a natural "self."

---

[1] At any point in time I only have one pair of shoes that don't have holes in the soles (my special shoes for when the ground is wet!). I routinely wear clothes that are missing buttons, because I never quite get around to sewing them back on. I would fix these things if I minded them! (I fix things in my apartment every day! I polish the bathroom fixtures several times a week so they are always shiny! I straighten all of my doilies before bed at night!) But I don't mind, particularly!

[2] I get food and coffee on the way -- if I place a mobile order while walking down my hallway before my phone is out of range of the apartment wifi, it will be ready for me exactly as I walk through the Starbucks on my corner, so I literally don't even have to break my stride.

[3] There's a comparison to be made to home decoration, actually, in the "restore a castle" vein -- beautifying slowly over time... that's the approach I've taken with my apartment, which has been accumulating bits of ribbon and lace and doilies to encuten its generic IKEA furniture. I still don't love shopping for home goods but they feel easier to acquire, and I definitely enjoy putting them around the house and looking after them.

If I do two of these, does that make it more awkwardly apparent that I'm not actually doing it, or less? Really, I don't think I am ever going to make Dreamwidth my casually-post-stuff place, though I will probably keep trying for the next several years to make it a place I live.

Anyway, I picked the prompt "eigenvectors" because I've actually co-authored research that prominently uses eigenvector centrality, but then I realised that I can't explain what an eigenvector is because I don't really know.

Instead here is some interesting research (in blog form!) from someone who is willing to explain eigenvectors, and even apply them to eighteenth century literature.

Whenever I hear people in the digital humanities beginning to murmur about the hot new thing, word vectors, though, I almost feel despair at how little anybody talks to anybody else -- my mother did her dissertation on word vectors. This is a longstanding field! But that's in computer science, and nobody in literature wants to read a computer science paper.

This post brought to you by: My Career Strategy Of Reading Computer Science Papers Sometimes, To Incredible Acclaim

[inspiration from Shitpost February]

I've been spending a LOT OF TIME messing around with future federated fandom, which is very exciting and all, but it's all happening in Discord and Hubzilla even though I'm supposed to be, like, co-moderating a dreamwidth community for post_tumblr_fandom. There's a LOT I'd love to say about my experiences starting up My Very Own federated social network instance, but I can't say it over THERE yet because it doesn't actually work well enough for me to invite other people to come play in it. (I still intend to ruin and/or delete it in the near future as part of my learning process.)

So Shiposting February is basically perfectly timed! I hereby pledge to deliver, as penance for my absence, a due quantity of shitposts.

Also currently helpful to me -- learning from jesse_the_k's helpful post here that I can write DW posts in Markdown! AND, changing the setup of my browser-redirect service (which I use so that when I try to go on facebook my browser just loads my to-do list instead) so that twitter and facebook redirect to DW instead.

So hopefully I'll see you around more over here!