it has been a literal year because i'm very lazy & do all my blogging from my phone, and also because i got super busy after i last posted: i got a job, and then the job was on balance kind of bad but i had it for a while, and then i got a new job, which is so far pretty okay.



in between all of this i developed and explored some research interests and knitted a sweater, and found various other ways to fritter the time away. i think i read like, maybe three books last year, not counting all the ebooks i forgot i read. so maybe like twelve books? maybe i should make a list moving forward just so i like, stop having a complex about my inability to read anything other than fanfiction and small chunks of academic nonfiction. there's nothing objectively wrong with reading fanfiction and academic nonfiction i just feel like this is not who i thought i'd be when i was in fifth grade and bitterly being denied the reading award (it went to a boy) even though i had accomplished his incredibly cool reading feat (it was not cool) in the second grade, and all i got for it was my teacher's assistant being like 'nice.' letting myself down here, you see

anyway, one of the emergent effects of this tendency of mine to pursue various goofball boring research interests is that certain things will grab me & i'll think up complicated fanfiction AU concepts that i then will never write because i have 0 followthrough, but it's so fun to think about.

like, here's one: stephen burroughs was one of the most famous & successful (these things are opposed but whatever) frauds and counterfeits of the early american republic. he retired to canada and wrote a probably heavily fictionalized memoir about it, and he one time wrote in to defend his reputation to a publication about counterfeiting produced by a bank / publishing house, which is very funny (the exchange is on the wikipedia page for gilbert & dean, the bank and publishing house; due to some strange wikipedia function, stephen burroughs doesn't have his own wikipedia page).

so OBVIOUSLY it would be funny if neal caffrey were in this time frame. it would actually make a lot of sense: neal's talents as written in the show are absurdly oversized (not strictly a complaint), but they do kind of suit the unregulated american currency of the early nineteenth century, where most circulating paper currency was produced by banks rather than any state institution, and because there were so many banks with varying degrees of credibility and far too many different currencies for even a savvy consumer to be able to easily spot a counterfeit, counterfeiters had an absolute golden age and did hilarious things like make up fake banks or make currency that looked good but bore no actual resemblance to the currency produced by a particular institution. i think this would've suited neal very well, in part because it would've been fairly easy to stay good at this and not have to shoot anyone ever.

but where's peter? peter works at the publishing house and bank. the fbi did not exist in the early republic, and counterfeiting enforcement was often local and a total disaster; plus also i hate cops, so peter's just a boring accountant man who likes to help the public inform themselves. he's exactly as stodgy and reliable as i like him to be, which is just enough to make a good foil for neal, so he's probably got at least one really weird hobby but i can't think what. also for the sake of my enjoyment in this completely fluid story everyone involved is an abolitionist, and maybe peter has some interesting ties to the black press in new york.

but where's elizabeth? she's the editor in chief of their publications. this is perhaps slightly strange but not really; gilbert & dean had a magazine for several years which was edited by a woman, and anyway, more importantly, i can do what i want, and what i want to do is project my vaguely scholarly concerns about the connections between currency & sovereignty onto this dumb fanfiction concept.

in my brain it involves a lot of masterfully peripheral politics. there's an exchange between peter & neal i like to imagine early on, when this is still mostly epistolary, where peter objects stridently to neal relying on the confidence created by honest institutions to swindle consumers, and neal points out in response that the difference between a counterfeiter and a bad bank is essentially a matter of honesty, and neal has that on his side (this opinion was not unpopular at the time). the currency really was terribly regulated; merchants often preferred passable-but-not-good counterfeit to genuine money from undercapitalized banks, because, of course, the real magic of counterfeit is what happens the moment someone takes the money in exchange: it begins to operate like money, because money is sort of a shell game anyway. neal would be extremely sensitive to this and have made his peace with it; peter, i think, is more rigidly idealistic, and never would have quite squared himself to it. elizabeth, i imagine, is aware of some sharper economic injustices, and mostly stays out of it. anyway, i like to imagine peter reading neal's letters out loud to elizabeth and arguing with her about them, and then writing private responses; maybe very early on, publishing them, and contributing to the complicated and loud public discourse about the state of the money and its relationship to, say, the state of the union. there's a pun in there, maybe.

at the end of it all neal can retire from his life of crime to work for the peter and elizabeth's publishing house / bank, as a convenient expert on counterfeiting. also, obviously, he has a loft apartment or something near peter and elizabeth and they're all married and have a dog, duh. unlike gilbert & dean, they're going to safely come through the circular crises and panics of the nineteenth century, and neal's going to write a memoir. having come up with this scenario, which allows me to think of basically everything i like about white collar while ignoring everything that i find annoying about white collar (mainly, the cops), i am going to probably never finish the last six episodes of season 5 that i still haven't gotten to because i've been rewatching clone wars & am busy alternately marveling at it & yelling at dave filoni.

anyway. things are fine. i want to be on here more, so maybe that'll happen