The winner of the Amanda and Carolyn double the fun post is::::
LibraryPat!
Can you please email your mailing address to carolyn AT carolynjewel.com so Amanda and I can get your prize winging its way to you?
RWA National, here in New York City, is coming up. For people who might not know, RWA is the Romance Writers of America, and our national conference is 2000+ people strong, plus this year it’s in my hometown!
(Which just means, sadly, I am not rooming with Risky Carolyn, instead staying at home, since justifying a hotel room wasn’t within my powers of persuasion.)
But on a happier note, it does mean I can see my writing friends. Even though they might think of me as their ‘non-writing friend,’ since I haven’t done more than poke at my mss. in the past few months, since taking on the new job. The agent is still out with several projects, so hope springs eternal that something will happen, writing-wise.
Okay, fine, yay me. But if you’re coming to NYC also, we should be announcing plans for Risky get-together, plus you’ll get to be in NYC! Where the food is amazing and despite rumors to the contrary, cheap. You just need to know where to go, and where not to go.
I heartily recommend Carolyn and her mad baking skillz find time to visit Momofuku Milk Bar, which offers the Crack Pie. In addition to other insanely good cookies, etc.
Banh mi is a Vietnamese sandwich that includes a baguette, pork, pate, jalapenos, cilantro, pickled carrots and is pure nom. There are many, many places to obtain this sammie, and it is well worth it (not likely worth the French colonial domination of Vietnam, but the collision of cultures is obvious, and delicious).
Apparently, Koreans kick butt on making fried chicken, although I haven’t tried it yet myself. It’s on the list. There’s a Koreatown right near Macy’s.
And when in doubt, go ethnic; it’s cheap, it’s usually delicious, and can be found all over the city.
And now I am hungry. Darn.
I’ve been thinking about reviews.
Specifically, should writers post reviews of books in the genre in which they write? Now this may come as a shock to you but I don’t read much romance and if I do there’s this weird expectation that I must either button my lip or say nice things. Just like our foremother taught us. So if I’m on goodreads.com and compelled to put in some sort of feedback I put in a number of stars. That’s it. It gets very tricky dealing with the village that is the romance community and the overall respectability and decorum one must maintain for else one’s reputation is gone and gone forever. Oops, no that’s Cranford, I think.
Which brings me to the issue of the Online Presence. I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with a couple of fans recently–actually not my fans, but Colleen Gleason’s–who said they never visited writers’ websites but did keep an eye out on Facebook which is how they knew she’d be in that particular B&N at that particular time. So, Facebook. Now that’s a Cranford. I don’t have a continual stream of nice and interesting things to say unless it’s about something happening with the release of a book or a cover or … come on, do you really want to hear about my yard (vines growing back, big patch of poison ivy, I have mega pump container of Roundup for it) or the tendonitis in my knee (getting better, thanks, developed in fight against vines). Or what I’m having for dinner? (I hope it involves bacon.)
But I do like Twitter. It’s a nice, fast way to share content with a link. Very impersonal, which means I don’t have to work at being nice and inoffensive as FB seems to demand. In fact it seems to encourage snarkiness, which is fine by me.
But back to reviews. If you’re a writer, do you post reviews of books by people you know or might meet?As a reader, do reviews influence your decision to buy? Colleen’s two fans, by the way, said it was the back cover blurb that sold them. What do you think?
Check out the new bit of my website, spice.janetmullany.com. I’m still updating so there’s more content to add but it’s done!
I have two new fashion books, both of which are awesome for different reasons. The first one is Napoleon and the Empire of Fashion, 1795-1815 by Cristina Barretto and Martin Lancaster (Skira) 2010. It was published for an Italian exhibition of period clothing. The translation into English is rocky at times, but this book has some of the most amazing pictures I’ve ever seen. There are close ups of the fabrics that are just luscious. There are frustrations, too, in that some pictures are just too small.
I tried reading the text but found it hard going and then downright strange. As mentioned, the translation is not very good, but some of the history struck me as not trustworthy and I’m still struggling to understand why there’s a picture of a bare-busted porn star. Yes, she has big tits, but she’s in a book on Empire and Directoire fashions, why?
I just rolled my eyes at the concluding remarks which more or less blamed the CIA for Modern Art. I blame Matisse, but that’s just me.
Anyway, the gowns in this book are beautiful and the book is worth it for the pictures. Incoherent political ramblings are just a side benefit. (Napoleon was amazing! The Best Dictator General Ever!!! He was Sicilian French!!! Vive La France) OK, so he had that little thing at Waterloo that didn’t work out so well, but LOOK! Here’s an amazing purple velvet royal cloak and . . . That cloak is amazing. It’s worth the price of the book.
You can flip through this book– I don’t recommend reading much, it will only give you a headache and make you hate American Cultural Imperialism (that’s an anagram for the C.I.A., did you notice that?] French, you know, was the language of diplomacy until some how English got free of the Norman Cultural Imperialism (which any student of irregular English verbs can tell you still haunts us today) and now everyone speaks English even though French is way better –and really get a sense of how idiosyncratic gowns could be.
One point made early in the book before I was sobbing in hot tears about how Jackson Pollock ruined art all because of the Marshall Plan (which idea the US stole from Napoleon) was that gowns were custom-made and therefore fit the wearer precisely. Then they said the female form was actually different and that somehow between Napoleon and the rise of the CIA, women’s boobs moved lower on the torso. And I kept waiting for them to clarify that they meant foundation garments gave the female shape a different form, but no. Then I flipped back to the porn star picture and her boobs didn’t look like they were lower on her chest, but there was silicon involved I think, plus she had her arms crossed underneath all that bounty so maybe she was pushing them up the way they did in the Regency.
Regency woman had porn star boobs I guess.
Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about all those Modern Artists like, Marcel Duchamps (Oops French! but Joyce Kilmer totally hated him for Nude Descending a Stair) and that Pablo Picasso guy (lived in PARIS!), that Ce n’est Pas Une Pipe dude, Magritte (FRENCH!) that I started getting distracted about art.
The other book is The Art of Dress, Clothes and Society 1500-1914, by Jane Ashelford. (Abrams 1996). It covers a much broader period, but there are good photographs of actual clothing along with description and explanation. I wish there were more pictures. Or at least a world view unaffected by anything like facts.
Napoleon vs. Chuck Norris. Call it folks. Who wins?
(The answer is Jet Li.)