Ratatam

AM STRAM GRAM, expression. My three year old came home from school saying “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” recently. He ignored my questions about where he learned it as thoroughly as if I were asking him to take off his shoes or put away his toys. This seems fitting: children’s counting rhymes have a sort of omnipresent, eternal quality, like they just coalesce from the air. My kid couldn’t or wouldn’t say who taught him, and nobody really knows where any of them come from. A lot of these verses sound sort of like numbers, but they’re not quite, or they’re numbers from some other language that we used to know.

My family has a book of nursery rhymes in French, bought in a fit of optimism when my son was an infant and I got to pick all the books we read and things we talked about. Back then I didn’t even know the French word for backhoe (une tractopelle)—nor that I would be talking about them every day. (Please don’t take from this brief anecdote that I possess the spiritual fortitude to negotiate with my three year old in French. I don’t even have authority in English.)

Anyway, there is a distinct lack of construction equipment in our book of French nursery rhymes, so we set it aside for a long time. Fortunately, “am stram gram” has the same singsong appeal for three year olds as “eeny meeny miny moe,” and is, as far I can tell, free from the specter of racism.

(Seriously, why are so many children’s counting rhymes appallingly racist? Unless one of you brilliant readers wants to weigh in on that, I’m going with the simple explanation that racism permeates every single aspect of the United States, even nursery rhymes. Awful.)

Anyway, back to am stram gram! There are variations, but it goes like this:

am stram gram
pic et pic et colégram
bourre et bourre et ratatam
am stram gram

It’s nonsense, but it must have come from somewhere. For what it’s worth, the two competing theories on French Wikipedia are “phonetic deformation of a Germanic counting rhyme” and “Nordic incantation used in Frankish funeral rites inviting a wolf spirit to possess the speaker.” As I’ve said before in this newsletter, my usual rule is “the boring etymology is the true one,” but damn, this one hurts.

I wish I'd read more than one small-r romance this time so you could use a counting rhyme to determine which one to read, but alas, I've been distracted. I do have one to tell you about, though:

Good in the Zak (m/f/f, all cis and bi, contemporary) by Jess Savage. Movie star Chance Zak and his new wife Daphne star in Good in the Zak, a reality show about their celebrity marriage, but it's not what it seems. Chance asks his childhood best friend Minnie to accompany Daphne while she's filming a movie in the Yucatán to make sure Daphne doesn't get caught cheating and ruin the show's ratings. Unfortunately—and fortunately—for Minnie, this is a nearly impossible task. She and Daphne are wildly attracted to one another. If you've ever complained that women are too boringly nice to each other in sapphic romance novels, please know that these two absolute freaks engage in a lot of horny lying and cheating and blackmail, and it's fun as hell. This book is the first of a series and the ending is more happy-for-now than happily-ever-after. Free ebook from Amazon in 2024.

In things that are romance-adjacent, I read and loved Notorious Sorcerer and Shadow Baron by Davinia Evans, two fantasy novels full of luscious worldbuilding and messy bisexuals. For me, one of the all-time character archetypes is a rule-following society lady with a molten core of rage, plus infinity bonus points if she's queer, and I have high, high hopes for Anahid. And Bezim, the city this series is set in, feels so real, and it’s kind of… Ottoman-inspired? and a little bit Venetian? A center of global trade ruled by a rich class of merchants, full of swordfighting street gangs, gamblers, opera singers, and scholarly alchemists—even though alchemy is technically illegal and will get you picked up by the inquisitors if you’re not of the right class. It’s fun for me to step outside genre romance and get excited by multiple point-of-view characters (common in fantasy and sci-fi, but it feels like a thrill to me). And I’m always envious when writers are good at spatial descriptions—not just giving the layout of any given scene, but making the reader understand the layout of a city over the course of a book. As always, I love a book that feels like traveling, and since I can’t go to Bezim because (1) it’s fictional and (2) I would die, I will simply have to finish the series. Library loans, print.

I don’t know if I can call Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear (1943, library ebook) “romance adjacent,” since Greene loves to end a novel with a man and a woman getting together despite the big fatal secret they are keeping from each other. But it was a compelling thriller, at times very funny (and British):

Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering.

Greene is usually sparing, and often can’t be bothered with dialogue tags—you have too high an opinion of my intellect, Graham Greene, please just tell me who is talking—but on special occasions, he reveals himself gymnastically adept with a long sentence:

A screech owl cried over the dark flat fields; their dimmed headlights just touched the near hedge and penetrated no farther into the wide region of the night: it was like the coloured fringe along the unexplored spaces of a map. Over there among the unknown tribes a woman was giving birth, rats were nosing among sacks of meal, an old man was dying, two people were seeing each other for the first time by the light of a lamp; everything in that darkness was of such deep importance that their errand could not equal it—this violent superficial chase, this cardboard adventure hurtling at seventy miles an hour along the edge of the profound natural common experiences of men. Rowe felt a longing to get back into that world: into the world of homes and children and quiet love and the ordinary unspecified fears and anxieties the neighbour shared; he carried the thought of Anna like a concealed letter promising just that: the longing was like the first stirring of maturity when the rare experience suddenly ceases to be desirable.

Okay, first of all, the hedges. I have only ever been a passenger in England because I am a lily-livered American who doesn’t even like to drive in places that were built for cars, like my own fascist nightmare home country. Can you imagine driving between two enormous, devouring English hedges at seventy miles per hour with your headlights dimmed because it’s 1941 and the Nazis are bombing everything they can see? I too would long for “ordinary unspecified fears,” Jesus fucking Christ. Also, how did they hear the screech owl over the motor?

Just kidding, I don’t care how, it’s too beautiful not to include. What a feat of a paragraph this is, juxtaposing a distinctly undesirable rare experience against the power and beauty of the ordinary.

That's all for this time. I will be back in your inbox on May 18!