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Monthly Archives: January 2006

We’re very pleased to welcome as our first guest Pam Rosenthal, writer of historical erotic romance and erotica, and a frequent visitor to this blog.

“Where are the really sexy, well-written novels for grown-up, sophisticated readers? At long last, I found one…” The Contra Costa Times on Almost a Gentleman
“…a love story about people who love books nearly as much as each other.” Romantic Times BOOKClub on The Bookseller’s Daughter

“…will send genteel readers into seizures… adventurous, different, and unconventional.”Mrs. Giggles on A House East of Regent Street in Strangers in the Night

Welcome to the Riskies, Pam. In one of your comments on Risky Regencies, you said you came to write romance by an indirect route. What was that, and what appealed to you about the genre?
I came to romance from erotica — which wasn’t so well trodden a path a few years ago as it is now. I’m the author of one of the books Janet recommended as a year-end favorite. Some of you might remember the one with the bare-assed cover — CARRIE’S STORY, by Molly Weatherfield (and thanks, Janet, for bringing down the tone so eloquently).
It’s a very explicit and (imo) rather witty book — Carrie yacks non-stop in a mordant intellectual chicklit voice — which, given all the heavy doings she’s subjected to, is my way of making the SM subgenre poke fun at itself, while also poking fun at myself for my fascination with the SM subgenre. And which must have worked (I’m proud to say that CARRIE’S STORY is in its ninth printing and sometimes called a “classic”), leaving me to wonder how in the world I’d brought my mild-mannered self to such a pass.
So I started reading about the history of erotic writing. And discovered THE FORBIDDEN BEST SELLERS OF PRE-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE, by the historian Robert Darnton. From which I learned that smut and enlightenment philosophy were both smuggled into France and sold surreptitiously by booksellers during the years before the revolution. The smut/enlightenment combo seemed right up my alley, my husband’s a bookseller, and the smuggling angle led me to believe there was a historical romance in there. And there was — THE BOOKSELLER’S DAUGHTER.

As for what appealed to me about the romance genre — this was sort of weird, because I hadn’t read any romance in a long time. But I knew how popular it was and I was especially curious about the bodice-ripper covers I’d been seeing during the preceding years. And somehow I was sure (correctly, as it turns out) that since I’d grown up in the Technicolor fifties surrounded by exuberant HEA mythology, my fantasies were quite romance-inflected already.

How did you get interested in the Regency period and what do you like best about it?
I was so naïve a first-time romance writer that I didn’t know how unpopular a venue France is (or was, with romance readers — I think they’ve lightened up now). But I’d had such a good time writing THE BOOKSELLER’S DAUGHTER that I didn’t want to stop writing romance — and if Regency England was the historical venue of choice, so be it and I was happy to reacquaint myself with Jane Austen.
I don’t have any smart takes on the period — yeah, it’s the clothes for me too. The men’s coats, the tight pants, the boots. Georgian architecture. Adam rooms. Wedgwood. I think of all that poise and balance as coiled-up energy waiting to burst forth as the industrial revolution and the nineteenth century British Empire.
I would say I’m attracted to the wit of the period, but I suspect that all periods have their great wits (hey, the soggy, earnest Victorians had Thackeray and Lewis Carroll). I think it’s interesting, though, how genre writers — historical and contemporary — seem to need some modicum of wit, to provide concision, momentum, a way of being modest, tough, reliable good authorial company.
And then there are ways in which I don’t like the Regency at all, for its snobbery and political reaction. Which is also a good reason to write about a period — a love-hate relationship can be an extremely productive and interesting one.

Tell us about your next book [Signet Eclipse, Sept. 2006].
It’s another sexy Regency-set historical. But this is the first of my historical books built around an actual event rather than made-up murder and mayhem. The Pentrich Revolution of 1817 was a genuine popular uprising — well, it was genuine and it wasn’t, because it was fomented in large part by an agent provocateur, in the pay of the Home Office.
My heroine and hero, Mary and Kit, run athwart of the provocateur plot on the way to solving their own problems. They’re already married, though they were legally separated before Kit marched off to fight Napoleon — but needless to say they’re still deeply, hotly, and most confusedly and contentiously in love. The erotica is quite explicit, but I think what I most enjoyed doing was the contentiousness, the way they argue at the slightest provocation, jostle for physical space and interrupt each other in mid-sentence because they know each other’s speech rhythms so well. There’s something delightfully provocative (half dance, half pugilism) about watching two people who know and love each other go for the jugular.
But until it’s listed in the publisher’s catalog, I’d better not announce the title because they could always change it.

Which of your books is your favorite?
Right now the current one, because learning the history was a challenge and an entertainment. My husband and I visited the region where it happened and also spent a day in the National Archives at Kew, reading the Home Office papers — correspondence between magistrates, spies, the provocateur, and Lord Sidmouth, the HO secretary. These were microfiches of the originals, in very scrawled handwriting — the immediacy of the past gave us goose bumps.
But I’d also like to give a nod to SAFE WORD, the Molly Weatherfield sequel to CARRIE’S STORY. May I quote to you what an Amazon reviewer said about it? “I loved this book. Not just as porn, but as a real book . . . it made me rethink all those [SM] myths, and the impact that their beauty and their despair had on my own self-view. I don’t know how I can say more about a book than that.”
And (since I did a lot of rethinking in order to write that book) I don’t know how an author could want more from a reader’s response.

What do you like to read?
Mostly fiction, literary and not-so-literary both. Within that mixed bag, I think I’ve been looking for a certain kind of story since I got my first library card. The librarian of our local branch asked if I liked “family stories,” and I, being six or seven at the time, nodded dumbly, never having considered that there was any other kind of story.
And in fact I do like stories that situate people in a nexus of relationships foregrounding the familial ones. I worked hard to create an extensive familial world for Mary and Kit, who first came to consciousness of each other as children of rival Derbyshire landowners. So it’s not just a political world they learn to situate themselves within — it’s the continuing presence of their pasts and their families.
Books that I loved for this reason last year were all (coincidentally, I think) written by way-smart Englishwomen: ON BEAUTY by Zadie Smith, WIVES AND DAUGHTERS by Mrs. Gaskell, and DEDICATION by Janet Mullany. Runners-up (also by Englishwomen as it happens) were by new-to-me authors Penelope Fitzgerald and Mary Stewart — and the latest HARRY POTTER was pretty nifty too. I also was happy finally to read way-smart Englishman Nick Hornby: I loved A LONG WAY DOWN and his essay/book chat collection, THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE. The American wild card in the deck was Truman Capote’s gorgeous, distressing IN COLD BLOOD.

How do you do your research?
Well the unvarnished truth is that my husband Michael is doing increasingly more of it, since he jumped in when I needed him for this last book, to shed some light onto the darkness of British post-Waterloo domestic espionage. He’s been a bookseller all his life; he’s got a wide knowledge of what’s in print and a sharp professional instinct for what people will enjoy and what they need to know. So when I needed to understand how the British Home Office was spying on Britain’s parliamentary reform clubs (or for that matter, what the parliamentary reform clubs actually were), he found the resources for me and traced the references to the boxes of Home Office microfiche at the National Archives . . . I’m very grateful. Of course, we’re only starting to learn how to work together, but this last research trip to England — hiking around Derbyshire, finding the site of the Pentrich uprising, and reading those amazing documents — was our most fun vacation ever.
Oh, and he also writes my synopses — or takes my drafts and turns them into readable synopses (he wrote up his hints for synopsis-writing and I’m going to post them on my web site). I do write the novels, though. Honest.

What are you working on now?
I’m still finishing up the current one. My ideas for the next are still pretty embryonic.


Do you feel that your erotica is related to your romance writing? How?
I have the same attitude about physical sexuality in both cases. Which is that it’s less about body parts and more about how lovers see and know and understand themselves and each other in time and space. Which isn’t to say that I don’t write very explicitly about body parts or voyeurism or fetishism or bondage or any of those good things. But I do try to think how this particular pair of lovers in this particular situation will eroticize or fetishize or play domination games or get creative in bed.
The difference is that in the erotica, love wasn’t a given. I did have a sort-of hero and heroine, but they were each involved in a series of very baroque SM situations, and it wasn’t a given that they’d be together by the end of the two-part series — in fact I truly wasn’t sure how it would end until I was well into the second book. Of course I learned that when you put a lot of gorgeous people into a lot of hot situations some of them will, shall we say, conceive tendres for each other. Love made its way into those books whenever and however it wanted to — in certain cases I found myself most pleasantly surprised (and this was one of the things that made me think I could write a romance). The CARRIE books are about love, as it happens, even if obliquely.
And I think I brought something of that to the romances. A curiosity about voyeuristic and fetishistic psychology developed my skills with point of view. I like to keep it fluid and yes, sometimes oblique. I like to have minor characters take on the burden of narrative from time to time, I like to flash onto their stories, and I’m trying to learn how to make my main and subplots interact a little more. I find it sexier and more democratic that way.

In your romance books, were you aware that you were taking risks? In retrospect, what can you see that was risky about them?
Aside from the risk of saying on these august pages that there are ways I quite dislike the Regency period? Or of exposing my most cherished and fraught sexual fantasies? Or the risk of seeming preachy, along the way to presenting an episode of popular rebellion?
Well sure. All risk all the time. I mean one spends so much time (and I’m slow) writing a book that says, in one way or another, I think this is hot or I think this is interesting. And then a reader comes along and says you think what? Making one feel like a total idiot. But isn’t the risk the point of the thing? I hate roller coasters, but I seem to like putting myself through something very similar when I write a book.

Critique night for me was last night, and it was at my house,
and in my case that entails quite a bit of preparation since I am not easily made “company ready.” So I spent a few hours picking up,
rushing around with this and that, and running various noisy machines, all of which had my four cats either staring at me in astonishment or running in the opposite direction. It all came together though, and we
got together, ate (an important component of our critiques), read our chapters and discussed. We always have a very good time, too—and it was late before we were finished, again usual for us, which is why we meet on Friday nights.

Well, today I am suffering from the aftereffects! I am sore, tired, and ready to write. It just happens to be a tiny bit later than usual…Ahem.

I thought I’d put up a few shots of some pictures I have on my hard drive from the Beau Monde conference I attended in 2003.

Here is Gail Eastwood, Elena Green, and I at the evening event. I fail to remember the theme, but we attend in appropriate costume and have various activities—lessons in the card games of the period, lessons in dance (conducted by Gail Eastwood, who is knowledgeable not only of Regency dance, but of other periods as well) and the like.

All of these photos were taken in a closed room under artificial lighting, so it is hard to get the colors right. I did some photo editing to try to make the best of it.

Here are some shots of the dancing…and gorgeous costumes!




And some of my favorite costumes…

The flowered gown below is our Cara. The “gentleman” is Regina Scott, whose “Reginald” steals the evening.

Below is a lady, whose name I unfortunately do not have, who told me that her gown (orange and gold) is made from sari material. I tried to get a better shot of her gown, but my batteries died. 🙁

I truly love this gown. I believe she said it was made by a seamstress in India—but my memory could be failing me. It doesn’t show well in this small picture, but it is a figured material–there are tiny blue flowers all over it.

Another lovely white gown.

Please, everyone—pitch in and supply names of anyone I could not, or if I have wrongly identified anyone…thanks so much!

PS–I am wearing my Golden Heart from the previous year, and if I remember correctly, this is the year that Cara won the Beau Monde Royal Ascot contest and Ammanda won the Bookseller’s Best. Am I right?!

Laurie
LORD RYBURN’S APPRENTICE
Signet, January, 2006


There’s a new film coming out called Tristam Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story, which “attempts to shoot the adaptation of Laurence Sterne‘s essentially unfilmable novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” Tristam Shandy, if you’ve never read it, is a brilliant, frustrating, hysterical deconstructed novel written in the eighteenth century. It is a totally modern novel, despite being written almost 300 years ago, and Sterne’s ability to play with language and go off on tangents is comparable to twentieth-century masters such as Joyce and Pynchon.

But I’m not hear to blab about the Modern Novel, although at a more erudite time, I probably would be. As I was thinking about the Tristam Shandy movie, and how funny–and oddly true to the book’s spirit–it sounded, I was thinking about other books I read that were “classic” works of literature, and how the movies (with the clear exception of Jane Austen) just don’t evoke the same feel. And let me say there’s nothing I like more than a good–or bad–historical movie. Now, here’s where you can start wracking your brain to find more exceptions on the good side of the equation (Oh, the 1973 Three Musketeers springs to mind, actually–but Dumas was a better storyteller than a writer). Thackeray‘s Vanity Fair toned down the single-minded ruthlessness of Becky Sharpe; Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon was beautiful, but s-l-o-o-w. Henry Fielding‘s Tom Jones did a pretty good job, but lost some of the nuanced jibes that made the book’s narrative so biting (and Fielding was a darn good storyteller, too).
There have been a few versions of Wuthering Heights, all of which spotlight the oftentimes ridiculous melodrama of Emily Bronte’s prose, but miss the poignant heartbreak and longing of your first crush/obsession. Jonathan Swift‘s Gulliver’s Travels totally missed the scathing satire. There’s also Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, the many incarnations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons (and its wimpy younger brother, Valmont)

(Caveat: Of course there are the A&E/BBC/Other Initialed creations, but they have more than two or three hours to get the job done, so they can stick to the book better.)

Of books that haven’t yet been made into films, I’d suggest Francois RabelaisGargantua And Pantagruel, a brilliant, bawdy, grotesque, sophmoric, clever book. I also think it’d be fun to read some of those ‘horrid novels’ Regency heroines (and sometimes heroes) are always reading (and sometimes writing) and see if any of those would make fun films.

So here’s where the class participation comes in: What movies have done a good job at bringing a classic novel to life? And what classic books would you like to see made into movies that haven’t been already?

Thanks for recommending some more for my film queue,

Megan
www.meganframpton.com


The big day–his 250th–is actually tomorrow, but I volunteered, although posting so late in the day it’s already 27th in Vienna.

Well, what can you say about Mozart that hasn’t been said, much better? Here’s Tim Page in last Sunday’s Washington Post:

It is now 250 years since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria — and some 245 years since this prodigy among prodigies fashioned his first little pieces for keyboard under the helpful eye of his father, Leopold. The world has changed radically since 1756 but Mozart remains a constant — we continue to regard the mixture of clarity, grace and formal balance in his music with undiminished awe. He seems to have been incapable of vulgarity or overstatement: In his mature works, there is hardly a wasted gesture or a note out of place. And yet it all seems so effortless, so absolutely spontaneous.
Indeed, because Mozart’s music is so flowing, direct and eloquent, many listeners think it must be easy to perform. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although almost any third-year piano student can read through the Mozart sonatas, it is a different matter entirely to play them well . Many other composers demand more in terms of muscle, pyrotechnics and flashy virtuosity, but there is an extraordinary transparency to Mozart’s music, and any imbalance, no matter how slight, is glaringly obvious. As such, the interpretation of Mozart remains one of the supreme tests of any great musician.


Rather than rave about my favorite Mozart recordings/works (oh, okay. For the record, off the top of my head: Mitsuko Uchida playing the sonatas, Richard Goode and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra playing the piano concertos, the Skittles Trio, the quintets, the Dissonance quartet, the piano quartets, the Requiem, the wind serenades, the Prague Symphony [38]–you know it’s time to stop when you’re in double parentheses)–I thought I’d actually try and relate this to the regency period. And this is actually a follow on from my last post on pianos–how they were used to bring orchestral music into the home.

I knew this happened later on in the century, with Liszt’s famous transcriptions of Wagner, for instance, but I was amazed to find how much material dated from our period, published in London, based on Mozart’s operas. I looked up music inspired by Don Giovanni, my favorite Mozart opera (I think, or is it The Magic Flute?) and found a website at the University of Southampton, England devoted to research on Mozart performances during the nineteenth century. And, not surprisingly, the majority of pieces are for piano, or piano four-hands, with flute and piano and flute duets coming in next. I have no idea who most of the arrangers were, and some were anonymous–Clementi (a music publisher as well as a composer and piano builder) was the only one I recognized. There were lots of arrangements of the overture (including one for harp and piano) and the big tunes, like the minuet from the final act, as you’d expect. C. von Boigelet, whoever he was, managed to concoct twelve gavottes from the opera. In 1809, The Royal Musical Magazine published an arrangement of Batti, batti (surely one of the most un-PC arias ever written) for piano four-hands.

And in our own time there’s the movie Amadeus, a very fictional account of the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri, but eminently watchable.

Any other Mozart faves or facts you’d like to share?

When I was putting together last week’s post on best and worst Regency dress fashions, I also ran across many…um…inspiring images of headgear. As with the dresses, some were gorgeous and flattering (just what we like to see on a proper Regency heroine) and some were downright ridiculous (let’s save them for comic villainesses, please!)

Some of my favorites:

Best #1 (upper left): 1810, from Ackermann’s. This style was called a “cottage hat”. I think it’s nice and simple and just the thing to go with the elegant dresses of the time. It also strikes me as a bit 1920’s ish, but I’m no expert on that.

Best #2 (right): 1811, also from Ackermann’s. For me, this is the right way to use flowers. Not too many (even though it does look rather as if she has a bee in her bonnet!) and the asymmetry is cute.

Best #3 (left): A gypsy hat, popular for country wear throughout the early 19th century. Nice and casual and, in the days before SPF 45, good protection for that delicate skin. I also saw a portrait of a somewhat older woman wearing one of these, and it looked great on her, too.

Best #4 (right): Gilmore’s portrait of Sarah Reeve Ladson, 1823. Turbans often look ridiculous to me, but this one struck me as kinda cool, exotic, maybe a bit Byronic. Not everyone could pull this off, but if you have this sort of sultry dark coloring, I think it works.

Now for the sublimely ridiculous…

Granted, some of these are caricatures of contemporary styles, but they give us an idea of the results of a trend gone wild!

Worst #1: “Lady Godina’s Rout — or — Peeping-Tom spying out Pope-Joan. Vide Fashionable Modesty”, a March 12th 1796 caricature by Gillray. OK, this one speaks volumes on its own. But I’ll add that feathers do appear to have their use as a hiding-place. Also, perhaps, to balance out wide hips????

Worst #2 (right): French satire on the poke bonnet (“Invisible”); No. 16 in the series of engravings, “Le Suprême Bon Ton” from the second half of the 1810’s. More proof that outrageous millinery has its uses. Any guesses as to what they’re actually doing in there? But of course, these people are French. Need I say more?

Worst #3 (left): 1810 turban. I’m rather surprised she can stand upright under that thing. Looks like she’s wearing a miniature beanbag chair on her head, and the feathers look like they came from an anemic rooster. If you’re going to wear dead bird feathers on your head, at least invest in some good peacock or pheasant!

Worst #4: 1817, The Lady’s Magazine. Everything I’ve heard about carriages of the time indicates they were rather small. Did the lady wearing this have to crawl in on hands and knees? Just think about what she might have exposed in doing so! OTOH maybe this is a style adopted by petite women in a vain attempt to look taller. You’re not fooling anyone, dears, just embrace who you really are!

Worst #5: 1818, from La Belle Assemblée. These bonnets trimmed with a profusion of flowers and/or fruit make me wonder. Imagine you’re wearing the latter out for a drive with a rakish gentleman, and then unexpected weather drives you to seek shelter in some secluded cottage or barn (of course that never happens in novels!). Perhaps you could disassemble and eat it.

Actually, I have to admit this last one is kinda fun, the sort of thing that would be a blast to wear to a costume party, for laughs. I think it would be fun to wear a turban sometime, too, though most of them seem a bit . . . dowagerish. For now, I’d rather see myself as a stylish matron.

So, Riskies and dear guests, which hats do you like, or think you would most enjoy wearing?

Elena
LADY DEARING’S MASQUERADE, RT Reviewers’ Choice Award nominee
www.elenagreene.com

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