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Well, I Really Had a Ball Last Night….

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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

Adaptation.

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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 Rabelais‘ Gargantua 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

Happy birthday, Mozart

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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?

What’s Haute, What’s Not, Part II

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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

Jane Austen Evening

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On Saturday, I went to the annual JANE AUSTEN EVENING, which is sponsored by the Lively Arts History Association. (More info about them at http://lahacal.org/)

First was a lovely tea, followed by a performance by Herr Beethoven. Then supper, and then several hours of dancing to live period music. The dances were mostly country dances, ranging from easy (such as Child Grove) through intermediate and on to advanced (anything with a hey, apparently!) I was delighted to be able to dance several of the advanced dances this year. There were hundreds of people there, most in some sort of costume, and the whole thing was quite splendid.

Some, like me, were in simple handmade empire gowns…nothing fancy, but at least the right feeling. (That’s me, grinning away! And please keep in mind that empire gowns add thirty pounds, easily!) 🙂 Some, like my husband, were in fake-it-and-make-it-look-vaguely-period costume. But many were in the most detailed, intricate, amazing costumes ever. (Yes, I mean real corsets and everything!) 🙂

This is the third Jane Austen Evening I’ve attended, and each has been better than the last. I danced until my feet could take no more. And I danced three maggots — Dick’s Maggot, Jack’s Maggot, and Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot (easily the most famous, having featured in the BBC/A&E Pride and Prejudice.)

These photos are courtesy of my delightful friend Jean — she’s the one on the right in the final photo, in the red and gold gown. Jean and her handsome husband Jack are graceful and energetic dancers (beware Jack’s energy when he takes his Trip to Paris!) who have been dancing for a long time.

There don’t seem to be any English country dancing groups very near where I live (I’m iffy about driving twenty or thirty miles to one) but I can always hope! I danced with local groups when I lived in Santa Barbara and in Pittsburgh, and it’s great exercise as well as educational social fun. (That’s pretty much everything one could ever want rolled into one, if you add a little chocolate.)

All in all, I had a wonderful time (could you guess?) at the Jane Austen Evening, and can hardly wait until next year!

Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — from Signet Regency, on sale now!!!!

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