Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 42
June 15, 2011
Getty 2
Summer excursions: this one to the Getty Villa in Malibu. Beautiful gray afternoon, which made the gardens almost luminous. Scents of roses and herbs, Greek food at the café, black-figure wine-cups and portrait-busts. Severe lecture from my friend that I must post SOMETHING on LJ/FaceBook EVERY DAY.
I will try to be good.
June 9, 2011
Best In Show
This year I mentioned this to the only other member of the History Department to turn up for the occasion (the Dept Chair broke his ankle this weekend, and the other two full-timers live a LONG way away. I was the only adjunct to put in an appearance). We were well situated in the front row, and during the speeches, we'd been watching a gopher duck in and out of his hole between us and the band, nervously getting his dinner. But once the graduates started coming by, we both got into the shoe-patrol with such enthusiasm that three female and one male professor in the seats behind us joined in, and there were some truly stunning stilettos on parade. (I don't know how they got across the lawn in those things). There were, I should say, a number of beautiful and classic pumps, plus the usual sprinkling of Converse All-Stars and jeans. One girl had bright-colored sixties-flowers-and-rhinestones - flat heels, like a sensible girl - and another, horrifying lavender stilettos with long, pointy toes. She must have been in agony. I've for years been a complete sucker for gladiator-sandals, but I've never understood high-heeled ones; how would you fight anybody that way? There was a small but impressive Men's Division as well.
I must say we all got pretty rowdy - there in our academic Time Lord robes. Opinion on Best in Show was split between the silvery spectator stilettos with LITTLE BALLS on the bottoms of the heels (to prevent them sinking into the ground?) which gave a rather Queen-of-Outer-Space effect, and a beautiful pair of black suede pumps with tiny white polka-dots, classy and gorgeous.
Commencement was fairly short this year, and I got home around 9 p.m. and went to bed.
June 7, 2011
Adventures in Research - 4
Adventures in Research 3
Who Turned out the Lights?
At one of the 18th-century homes I visited on my most recent research trip back East – it was a couple of years ago now, so I don’t have a clear recollection: it might have been Paul Revere’s or Abigail Adams’s – one of the docents pointed out a notch cut in the bannister of the stairway, about a foot back from the newel-post at the end. He (or she?) said, “That’s to warn someone coming down in the dark, that they’re about to come to the end of the stairs.”
The invention of gas lighting at the beginning of the nineteenth century changed the world in a way that we in the twenty-first can’t wholley comprehend. Previous to that time, when night fell it was dark and you went home. You can’t run a factory by candle-light. Once gas-lighting was invented, workers were given the option of selling their rest-time for a couple cents extra per night, which of course they had to take, though that isn’t the topic of this entry. I've always suspected that this was one reason why the dinner-hour got moved back at about this time from three or four in the afternoon to seven or eight: because there was better lighting in the kitchen. (Suppers had always been prepared by oil-lamp, at least in the city where supplies of oil were more easily available – there’s a reason, in all those Regency novels, that people talk about “keeping country hours” and eating while it’s still light.)
This is something I try to keep in mind while writing historicals. That when night falls, it’s bloody well dark.
(And it’s something I have to work to remember, because in every movie Hollywood puts out, it ISN’T dark at night, not really, because we, the audience, have paid a ridiculous amount to see Mr. Depp’s handsome countenance. So I suspect several generations have grown up not realizing how LITTLE light a single candle – or even a single gas-jet – sheds).
Be that as it may. As a writer, I always have to keep in mind just how much light IS there in a scene, and where is it coming from? The moon? Big difference between full-moon and new-moon light. (The U.S. Navy, of all people, put out a website that gives phases of the moon for any year back to 1800 or so. Hugely useful, because I can never keep them straight). And even in the full moon, my heroine had dang well not be able to “see by his expression the doubt in his heart…” because she couldn’t. Ditto for, “He saw a flush of anger spread over her cheekbones.” Not by moonlight, he didn’t. Double ditto for indoors by candle-light. Try it sometime.
Candles smelled. Tallow candles especially. (For which reason beeswax were preferred; there are different words in French for a tallow candle and a beeswax one.) They also dripped wax like crazy, unlike the modern dripless variety – long accumulations of wax down the sides were called “winding-sheets” after the cloth used to wrap up the bodies of the dead. And they had to be fussed with, because the braided cotton wicks didn’t burn efficiently and had to be constantly trimmed with candle-snuffers – little scissors with a box built onto one blade – and the wick pricked up to stand up straight. (In New Orleans, for whatever reason, the French Creoles were noted for preferring the use of candles to the use of lamps – yet another thing I need to keep in mind).
Servants generally collected all the lamps in the house in the morning, hauled them into the lamp-room where the chimneys were cleaned of soot and the reservoirs re-filled with oil. That was part of morning chores. Then they were all set on a shelf until “lamp-lighting time”. You didn’t want oil-filled lamps sitting around in the parlors a minute before they had to be. Same for candles. Clean the candle-stands. The servants got to use the half-burned stumps of the old candles. Any left over got sold to the rag-and-bone man who came around nice neighborhoods for exactly that purpose: traditionally, the housekeeper got the money from re-selling the half-burned candles, and God help the parlormaid that pilfered a few to sell on her own. Candles were hugely expensive. And you didn’t leave them standing around in the rooms by day, because wax was edible, and would draw mice.
And, when your heroine leaves the room… Blow out the candle. Open flame is NOT the sort of lighting you want to walk out and leave unattended.
It’s why I habitually use those chintzy LED candles they sell at Christmastime for my own home lighting after dark.
June 5, 2011
scrabble
As a question: When I got my Facebook account hacked, I was told that activating "apps" on FB made getting hacked more likely. Is this true? Because I'd like to start playing FB scrabble again, but I REALLY don't want to get hacked again.
June 3, 2011
Ring-a-ding-ding
Was this just French? Just French upper-class? (Still doesn't explain Marie Antoinette...) Were wedding-rings something the English did (and their colonists) and not Europeans?
To my great disappointment and vexation, the Getty's main bookstore - the Credit Card Haemhorrage-Zone - was closed, though in one of their little outstation shops I picked up the book from the exhibit, and yet another Holy Grail in my collection of What Things Cost: Daniel Roche's The People of Paris. Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for: pinpoint descriptions, maniacally intensive research from public records (which, in the case of Paris, unfortunately mostly got burned in various revolutions and upheavals) and police-courts. Though the period of the book is the 18th century, it is a vast help in re-creating the Paris of 1827 - just in time for the read-through of the edit of Ran Away , which I'll get back to as soon as I finish grading exams (what I should be doing now, not messing around on-line).
Bet he doesn't mention wedding-rings, though.
Good news on another front: my website, barbarahambly.com, is back up, yay!
My goal this summer is to get two more stories up onto it.
May 25, 2011
End of semester
A week of reading research papers (and I use the word "research" loosely - part of this exercise is to teach them to WRITE a "research" paper, and quite a number of them very obviously were not listening in class when I outlined what I was looking for). Then finals. Then a week of grading finals. Then graduation. And in the midst of this, reading the copy-edit of Ran Away , which has just come back for corrections (and they want IT by the day of graduation, too).
But, beautiful weather, and the prospect of spending a little time with dear friends.
May 23, 2011
Hog Heaven
a) I LOVE this kind of thing!
b) I love 18th-century Paris.
c) It means I won't have to do major fiddling when the manuscript for Ran Away comes back because my guesses and extrapolations from that French book on pre-industrial apartment kitchens were correct, and I've portrayed the lodgings of Ben and Ayasha in Paris correctly.
I am insanely inquisitive about peoples' living-arrangements in other times and places. As a writer you get that way, especially if you write mysteries. COULD Suspect A have gotten from the kitchen door to the east dormer in the attic in time to shoot the victim as he rode out through the stable gates? (How accurate was the clock, if the household possessed one? How else would you have told the time? How accurate was Suspect A's rifle (or longbow, depending on the date) and how good a shot was Suspect A?
When I'd go out to eat in the French Quarter, I was always looking for excuses to slip away and check out the rest of the building that the restaurants were located in: what were the stairs like up to the attics? How big is the courtyard? How big are the rooms leading off it? Is there another way out of the courtyard or the house? Where would the servants have slept?
I've found this curiosity about physical space - probably one of the chief attributes of any mystery writer - carries over into all my writing, fantasies and media tie-ins as well. (Do Han and Leia's children have their own wing in the palace? How close is it to the main rooms? What does the main reception-room look like? IS there a cafeteria on the Enterprise?) (I got in a big arguement with the Approvals Loop on that one...)
May 20, 2011
Roses
It's back to work today - and gearing up for end of semester and finals. But it was good to get out.
May 17, 2011
Here
Class tonight, semester winding toward its conclusion. Windows of time in which to work.
Long afternoon at school. Long drive home over the cold hills in the dark.
May 16, 2011
To Infinity and Beyond...
I'm delighted. Children especially is one of my favorites, though the core story of Planet (R2 and 3P0 hitch-hiking across the galaxy) was a hoot to write.
A day out in Riverside yesterday, re-connecting with the old karate group (Sensei was being inducted into the local Hall of Fame).
