Historical Notes

[osprey_archer]

I've been wistful about the fact that I didn't include historical notes when I published The Threefold Tie and Honeytrap, and it has occurred to me that since I will need to update their backmatter ANYWAY to include links to The Larks Still Bravely Singing, I could definitely rectify this mistake by writing those now and bunging them into the ebook files.

OTOH, I am not sure the world is Ready for a historical note for The Threefold Tie which is 50% facts about the sexual mores of 19th century American utopian experiments (do you KNOW how much information about the Oneida Community I had to cut out of the infodump scene? Do you KNOW), 50% William Dean Howells books, and 0% 19th century American attitudes about queerness because I definitely did not research that at all for this book. Although now that I HAVE done some research on it, I don't think I did too badly, so I guess I did a REALLY good job extrapolating from the snippets of Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900" that George Chauncey quotes in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940.

Also for Honeytrap I have about twenty sources about the Soviet Union and, like, two books about the US. I feel that the distribution should perhaps be less uneven and also, perhaps, that is too many sources for one historical note. But they are all so good! How could I cut any more of them! I already sacrificed the gulag memoirs (waffling about whether to add a few back in; I really feel some of the stuff about fatalism illuminates Gennady's character, even though he was never in a gulag) and the Soviet movies. Surely that's as much as anyone can ask.

Comments

[oracne]

It sounds geektastic!

[osprey_archer]

Surely what everyone wants in their lives is more information about the Oneida Community!

[sovay]

OTOH, I am not sure the world is Ready for a historical note for The Threefold Tie which is 50% facts about the sexual mores of 19th century American utopian experiments (do you KNOW how much information about the Oneida Community I had to cut out of the infodump scene? Do you KNOW)

I always enjoy that sort of thing, personally.

[osprey_archer]

The first line of the historical note could be "This book was inspired by the fact that nineteenth century American sexual mores were fucking WILD, man."

[sovay]

The first line of the historical note could be "This book was inspired by the fact that nineteenth century American sexual mores were fucking WILD, man."

Repeat, not dissuaded.

In case you have not run across it, I feel I should point you toward L.A. Fields' The Annotated Joseph and His Friend: The Story of America's First Gay Novel (2018).

P.S. Don't cut the gulag memoirs.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that including ~5 gulag memoirs in the historical note for a book where no one goes to a gulag might be excessive, but on the other hand the best gulag memoirs are SO good, surely I am doing everyone a favor by offering them the chance to discover the memoirs of Eugenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam?? Obviously, everyone deserves the opportunity to have their hearts ripped out by Varlam Shalamov's short stories of the gulag.

[thawrecka]

I always enjoy author end-notes about all the cool research they did.

[osprey_archer]

I figure that if people aren't interested, they can skip it, and if they ARE, then it's a gold mine.

[aurumcalendula]

I love reading historical notes!

[osprey_archer]

I feel that my DW is probably self-selected for people who love historical notes, but I suppose people who DON'T love historical notes can always just skip them, right?

[kore]

I would love notes for both those books!

[potofsoup]

okay ngl I would be one of those people who'd just want the historical notes.

[osprey_archer]

I'll probably end up posting them here, or at least a rough draft of them, in the hopes of getting some William Dean Howells feelings out of my system and cutting the historical notes to a reasonable length for the books. So you may get your wish!

WDH

[lauradi7dw]

I hadn't really thought about William Dean Howells in the decades since we had to read "Silas Lapham" in high school, but the wikipedia entries are interesting, and now I at a minimum want to learn more about Elinor Mead Howells.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dean_Howells_House_(Cambridge,_Massachusetts)

Re: WDH

[osprey_archer]

He seems to have known absolutely everybody who was anybody in Gilded Age America. Such an interesting person.