Lev Raphael's Blog, page 68
June 14, 2011
Women's Work Was Everywhere--in 1905 New York
Remember Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth? Remember how faded socialite Lily Bart drops down the social ladder, from unpaid secretary for her wealthy friends to untrained seamstress in a hat shop?
It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.
Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.
Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."
Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."
I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."
In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.
It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.
Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.
Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."
Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."
I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."
In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.
Gilded Age Women Weren't Always Trapped in a Cage
Remember Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth? Remember how faded socialite Lily Bart drops down the social ladder, from unpaid secretary for her wealthy friends to untrained seamstress in a hat shop?
It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.
Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.
Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."
Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."
I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."
In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.
It's a steep, hopeless, miserable decline, and highly dramatic, but Wharton presented a false portrait of Lily's possibilities. There were dozens of options open to women like Lily in 1905 New York. I discovered them while researching my novel Rosedale in Love , which tells Wharton's story from a completely different angle.
Looking for Gilded Age books in varying genres, I found the eye-opening How Women May Earn a Living. It was published in 1900 by Helen Churchill Candee, a successful journalist, author, and interior decorator, who would later survive the Titanic and keep writing and traveling until she was 80.
Candee explained that the world of work in 1900 was expanding for women way beyond the menial labor Lily Bart ends up doing. She gave very specific advice in surveying the pluses and minuses of dozens of professions that included some you might expect like nursing, waitressing, and secretarial work. Others might surprise you: life insurance agent, realtor, and personal shopper. Yes, that was an actual profession over a hundred years ago! Candee called it "private shopping."
Candee didn't neglect careers that required more education like architecture, medicine and law. But no matter what the profession -- from florist to freelance journalist -- she closely examined the needed skills, the training involved, the expenses, the joys and burdens, and most importantly, the typical salaries. The New York Times Book Review praised her sensible and useful book, noting that it made no distinction whatsoever between men and women: "in the field of business there is no sex. Practical capacity is the keynote to success."
I wrote Rosedale in Love because I wanted to tell Wharton's story from the perspective of Jewish outsiders. One is the banker Simon Rosedale, a character in The House of Mirth whose inner life and background she completely ignores. The other main character is his cousin Florence, a woman I invented along with everything else about his family. Florence may seem privileged, but she's always aware of her outsider status as a "Jewess."
In my research, I learned a great deal about New York in 1905, but one of the most surprising discoveries was how many types of jobs were open to women who needed to support themselves or their families. Wharton ruthlessly narrowed Lily Bart's options in life to make her seem trapped. Reading Candee's book is a reminder that what novelists leave out of their work can be as significant as what they include, and that artistic vision can sometimes cloud the facts.
June 7, 2011
What I Wish Weiner Had Said Last Week When the Twitter Scandal Broke
The American poet John Greenleaf Whitter had some wise words that apply to everyone who tweets first and thinks afterwards: "For of all sad words of tongue or pen,/The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
Imagine how different this last week and a half might have been if Anthony Weiner had fessed up and used some of that caustic New York wit he was famous for. He could have said something like this:
"Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I'm here today as a man who has suffered all his life with an unfortunate last name. I begged my parents time and time again to change it to anything else, but they refused.
You can't imagine the jokes I grew up with, the constant taunting in school. But once I hit puberty, I realized that I would have the last laugh. Because that photo circulating on the Internet of a substantial man's underwear, that is in fact me. It has not been photo shopped. Every pixel you see there is a Weiner pixel. And, as is now obvious, there's nothing "wee" about this Weiner.
Just as my name has influenced my life, so has my sizable endowment. Along with my deep commitment to aiding my fellow New Yorkers, I've also been committed to enjoying life in the city that never sleeps. Yes, I tweeted that photo. What can I tell you? I'm from New York, home of The Statue of Liberty, the Trump Tower, and the Empire State Building. We like it big in the Big Apple. We're proud of who we are.
Those who question my morals or want me to resign, well, you know there can only be one reason: they just don't measure up.
So to my enemies, I say this: you can try to roast this Weiner, but you won't keep me down."
Imagine how different this last week and a half might have been if Anthony Weiner had fessed up and used some of that caustic New York wit he was famous for. He could have said something like this:
"Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I'm here today as a man who has suffered all his life with an unfortunate last name. I begged my parents time and time again to change it to anything else, but they refused.
You can't imagine the jokes I grew up with, the constant taunting in school. But once I hit puberty, I realized that I would have the last laugh. Because that photo circulating on the Internet of a substantial man's underwear, that is in fact me. It has not been photo shopped. Every pixel you see there is a Weiner pixel. And, as is now obvious, there's nothing "wee" about this Weiner.
Just as my name has influenced my life, so has my sizable endowment. Along with my deep commitment to aiding my fellow New Yorkers, I've also been committed to enjoying life in the city that never sleeps. Yes, I tweeted that photo. What can I tell you? I'm from New York, home of The Statue of Liberty, the Trump Tower, and the Empire State Building. We like it big in the Big Apple. We're proud of who we are.
Those who question my morals or want me to resign, well, you know there can only be one reason: they just don't measure up.
So to my enemies, I say this: you can try to roast this Weiner, but you won't keep me down."
What Weiner Should Have Said Last Week When the Twitter Scandal Broke
"Ladies and gentlemen of the press, I'm here today as a man who has suffered all his life with an unfortunate last name. I begged my parents time and time again to change it to anything else, but they refused.
You can't imagine the jokes I grew up with, the constant taunting in school. But once I hit puberty, I realized that I would have the last laugh. Because that photo circulating on the Internet of a substantial man's underwear, that is in fact me. It has not been photo shopped. Every pixel you see there is a Weiner pixel. And, as is now obvious, there's nothing "wee" about this Weiner.
Just as my name has influenced my life, so has my sizable endowment. Along with my deep commitment to aiding my fellow New Yorkers, I've also been committed to enjoying life in the city that never sleeps. Yes, I tweeted that photo. What can I tell you? I'm from New York, home of The Statue of Liberty, the Trump Tower, and the Empire State Building. We like it big in the Big Apple. We're proud of who we are.
Those who question my morals or want me to resign, well, you know there can only be one reason: they just don't measure up.
So to my enemies, I say this: you can try to roast this Weiner, but you won't keep me down."
You can't imagine the jokes I grew up with, the constant taunting in school. But once I hit puberty, I realized that I would have the last laugh. Because that photo circulating on the Internet of a substantial man's underwear, that is in fact me. It has not been photo shopped. Every pixel you see there is a Weiner pixel. And, as is now obvious, there's nothing "wee" about this Weiner.
Just as my name has influenced my life, so has my sizable endowment. Along with my deep commitment to aiding my fellow New Yorkers, I've also been committed to enjoying life in the city that never sleeps. Yes, I tweeted that photo. What can I tell you? I'm from New York, home of The Statue of Liberty, the Trump Tower, and the Empire State Building. We like it big in the Big Apple. We're proud of who we are.
Those who question my morals or want me to resign, well, you know there can only be one reason: they just don't measure up.
So to my enemies, I say this: you can try to roast this Weiner, but you won't keep me down."
June 6, 2011
The Parisian Way to Be Chic
So my best friend in New York calls, and she says to me, "I want to send you a book, but it's kind of girlie."
I'm thinking, chick lit? We've shared plenty of books over the years, mysteries, World War II history, memoirs, but chick lit would be a first. I ask, "Girlie how?" She doesn't answer directly: "It's French."
Well, now I'm curious. I studied French for eight years, have been to France half a dozen times. My friend and I once attended a conference together in Paris. Her time there was pretty stressful. She almost passed out from the flu in the Palais Royale and was also thrown out of a cab at the Place d'Italie in the middle of a transit strike. But she recovered and bears no grudges.
"It's about fashion and style," she's telling me. Okay, I'm hooked, because I've read Joan deJean's awesome The Essence of Style about how the French basically invented everything glamorous, from champagne to high-end shopping.
"It's by a model, it tells you how to dress, what to wear, it's changed my life, it's changed how I see everything. I walk into a room and picture what should be different with the decor, I notice who has the right accessories for their outfit. I never noticed things like that before! I went to a party tonight and took a clutch! I never carry a clutch. I wore a black cashmere sweater. When have you ever seen me in a black cashmere sweater? And I wore Oscar de la Renta shoes."
I've never heard my friend even mention a designer, and when she goes on to try and pronounce the author's name, I know who she means: "Ines de la Fressange? She's famous." So we end the conversation talking over each other: I keep assuring her I'll read anything she thinks important, and she keeps warning me not to read straight through. "Dip," she advises.
Well, she's right. When it comes, Parisian Chic has the heft and size of one of those Dorling Kindersley travel guides, and within minutes I discover how much fun it is for someone who's been to Paris enough times to have noticed and appreciated Parisian style and attitude.
It's a sexy, humor-filled passport into the world of chic, revealing the mindset and the maneuvers of Parisian women like the author. Filled with advice for all kinds of occasions and settings, photos of de la Fressange illustrating killer Parisian looks, and listings of her favorite shops in Paris and on-line, the book is addictive. It really is a guide book to another world, one where people belt a tuxedo jacket over jeans or wear a "simple" diamond necklace with a denim shirt.
Even if you don't have de la Fressange's striking looks and height (or her diamonds), it offers advice for looking and feeling chic the French way -- at all ages. You'll learn about the right accessories and the wrong matches, how to organize your closets and how to organize your life -- it all hangs together under the rubric of chic, Parisian-style.
Is it girlie? Maybe for some people. For me it's like The DaVinci Code: high-energy, filled with fascinating facts, stylish, wildly self-confident and sometimes improbable. My friend used to be given to winter wooly hats with pompoms, hats that look like they were bought at a thrift shop. I think she may be switching to berets. She's already having her hair cut and colored differently, and sh's changed her lipstick, all based on Parisian Chic. She's shopping strategically and reconsidering her eyebrows. "I'll never be a size 4," she admits, "but I can carry myself as if I am."
And me, I'm wondering when de la Fressange will start offering advice to men. I'm partway there, no? Most of what I wear is black.
I'm thinking, chick lit? We've shared plenty of books over the years, mysteries, World War II history, memoirs, but chick lit would be a first. I ask, "Girlie how?" She doesn't answer directly: "It's French."
Well, now I'm curious. I studied French for eight years, have been to France half a dozen times. My friend and I once attended a conference together in Paris. Her time there was pretty stressful. She almost passed out from the flu in the Palais Royale and was also thrown out of a cab at the Place d'Italie in the middle of a transit strike. But she recovered and bears no grudges.
"It's about fashion and style," she's telling me. Okay, I'm hooked, because I've read Joan deJean's awesome The Essence of Style about how the French basically invented everything glamorous, from champagne to high-end shopping.
"It's by a model, it tells you how to dress, what to wear, it's changed my life, it's changed how I see everything. I walk into a room and picture what should be different with the decor, I notice who has the right accessories for their outfit. I never noticed things like that before! I went to a party tonight and took a clutch! I never carry a clutch. I wore a black cashmere sweater. When have you ever seen me in a black cashmere sweater? And I wore Oscar de la Renta shoes."
I've never heard my friend even mention a designer, and when she goes on to try and pronounce the author's name, I know who she means: "Ines de la Fressange? She's famous." So we end the conversation talking over each other: I keep assuring her I'll read anything she thinks important, and she keeps warning me not to read straight through. "Dip," she advises.
Well, she's right. When it comes, Parisian Chic has the heft and size of one of those Dorling Kindersley travel guides, and within minutes I discover how much fun it is for someone who's been to Paris enough times to have noticed and appreciated Parisian style and attitude.
It's a sexy, humor-filled passport into the world of chic, revealing the mindset and the maneuvers of Parisian women like the author. Filled with advice for all kinds of occasions and settings, photos of de la Fressange illustrating killer Parisian looks, and listings of her favorite shops in Paris and on-line, the book is addictive. It really is a guide book to another world, one where people belt a tuxedo jacket over jeans or wear a "simple" diamond necklace with a denim shirt.
Even if you don't have de la Fressange's striking looks and height (or her diamonds), it offers advice for looking and feeling chic the French way -- at all ages. You'll learn about the right accessories and the wrong matches, how to organize your closets and how to organize your life -- it all hangs together under the rubric of chic, Parisian-style.
Is it girlie? Maybe for some people. For me it's like The DaVinci Code: high-energy, filled with fascinating facts, stylish, wildly self-confident and sometimes improbable. My friend used to be given to winter wooly hats with pompoms, hats that look like they were bought at a thrift shop. I think she may be switching to berets. She's already having her hair cut and colored differently, and sh's changed her lipstick, all based on Parisian Chic. She's shopping strategically and reconsidering her eyebrows. "I'll never be a size 4," she admits, "but I can carry myself as if I am."
And me, I'm wondering when de la Fressange will start offering advice to men. I'm partway there, no? Most of what I wear is black.
June 2, 2011
Rebuilding Edith Wharton's House of Mirth
Certain books change your life, and Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth
changed mine. The novel's brilliance blew me away in college, deepening my desire to become an author. It also helped open me up emotionally, which meant my own fiction started going deeper.
It's the story of Lily Bart, a Gilded Age society woman living a life of bad options, bad choices, and very bad luck. Wharton offers stunning insights into the power of shame and humiliation, the ways in which even privileged women suffer in a patriarchy, and the high price of our American pursuit of happiness. Wharton became famous in 1905 with this devastating portrait of a corrupt, male-dominated, money-mad society.
But the book had a nasty sting for me: its shallow portrait of Simon Rosedale. A Jew on the make who's after Lily Bart, Rosedale is painted as crude, vulgar, and calculating. A complete stereotype. Over the years in subsequent readings, I wondered about him because Wharton only shows us his surface. We don't know anything about his family, his past, his secret network of wishes and fears.
Rereading the book not so long ago, I decided to fill that enormous void. The idea for Rosedale in Love possessed me, and writing my response to Wharton, I spent a few years immersed in The Gilded Age and New York history. To "discover" who Rosedale was and where he came from, I went beyond the secondary literature to explore authors from the period itself. I wanted to hear unmediated Gilded Age voices and see New York when it was a "lush and simmering paradise," in the words of Barbara Uruburu's stunning biography American Eve .
Rosedale in Love may be written in a period voice and set in 1905, but it's about American verities: the drive for success and the corrupting power of money.
Columnists keep invoking the age of the Robber Barons to describe our current economic situation, and we definitely share the opulence and conspicuous consumption of those feverish years. We also share the same overwhelming cultural fixation on what things look like and how we appear to others. That makes us every bit the "frivolous society" Wharton condemned over a hundred years ago.
It's the story of Lily Bart, a Gilded Age society woman living a life of bad options, bad choices, and very bad luck. Wharton offers stunning insights into the power of shame and humiliation, the ways in which even privileged women suffer in a patriarchy, and the high price of our American pursuit of happiness. Wharton became famous in 1905 with this devastating portrait of a corrupt, male-dominated, money-mad society.
But the book had a nasty sting for me: its shallow portrait of Simon Rosedale. A Jew on the make who's after Lily Bart, Rosedale is painted as crude, vulgar, and calculating. A complete stereotype. Over the years in subsequent readings, I wondered about him because Wharton only shows us his surface. We don't know anything about his family, his past, his secret network of wishes and fears.
Rereading the book not so long ago, I decided to fill that enormous void. The idea for Rosedale in Love possessed me, and writing my response to Wharton, I spent a few years immersed in The Gilded Age and New York history. To "discover" who Rosedale was and where he came from, I went beyond the secondary literature to explore authors from the period itself. I wanted to hear unmediated Gilded Age voices and see New York when it was a "lush and simmering paradise," in the words of Barbara Uruburu's stunning biography American Eve .
Rosedale in Love may be written in a period voice and set in 1905, but it's about American verities: the drive for success and the corrupting power of money.
Columnists keep invoking the age of the Robber Barons to describe our current economic situation, and we definitely share the opulence and conspicuous consumption of those feverish years. We also share the same overwhelming cultural fixation on what things look like and how we appear to others. That makes us every bit the "frivolous society" Wharton condemned over a hundred years ago.
Reinventing Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Certain books change your life, and Edith Wharton's
The House of Mirth
changed mine. The novel's brilliance blew me away in college, deepening my desire to become an author. It also helped open me up emotionally, which meant my own fiction started going deeper.
It's the story of Lily Bart, a Gilded Age society woman living a life of bad options, bad choices, and very bad luck. Wharton offers stunning insights into the power of shame and humiliation, the ways in which even privileged women suffer in a patriarchy, and the high price of our American pursuit of happiness. Wharton became famous in 1905 with this devastating portrait of a corrupt, male-dominated, money-mad society.
But the book had a nasty sting for me: its shallow portrait of Simon Rosedale. A Jew on the make who's after Lily Bart, Rosedale is painted as crude, vulgar, and calculating. A complete stereotype. Over the years in subsequent readings, I wondered about him because Wharton only shows us his surface. We don't know anything about his family, his past, his secret network of wishes and fears.
Rereading the book not so long ago, I decided to fill that enormous void. The idea for Rosedale in Love possessed me, and writing my response to Wharton, I spent a few years immersed in The Gilded Age and New York history. To "discover" who Rosedale was and where he came from, I went beyond the secondary literature to explore authors from the period itself. I wanted to hear unmediated Gilded Age voices and see New York when it was a "lush and simmering paradise," in the words of Barbara Uruburu's stunning biography American Eve .
Rosedale in Love may be written in a period voice and set in 1905, but it's about American verities: the drive for success and the corrupting power of money.
Columnists keep invoking the age of the Robber Barons to describe our current economic situation, and we definitely share the opulence and conspicuous consumption of those feverish years. We also share the same overwhelming cultural fixation on what things look like and how we appear to others. That makes us every bit the "frivolous society" Wharton condemned over a hundred years ago.
It's the story of Lily Bart, a Gilded Age society woman living a life of bad options, bad choices, and very bad luck. Wharton offers stunning insights into the power of shame and humiliation, the ways in which even privileged women suffer in a patriarchy, and the high price of our American pursuit of happiness. Wharton became famous in 1905 with this devastating portrait of a corrupt, male-dominated, money-mad society.
But the book had a nasty sting for me: its shallow portrait of Simon Rosedale. A Jew on the make who's after Lily Bart, Rosedale is painted as crude, vulgar, and calculating. A complete stereotype. Over the years in subsequent readings, I wondered about him because Wharton only shows us his surface. We don't know anything about his family, his past, his secret network of wishes and fears.
Rereading the book not so long ago, I decided to fill that enormous void. The idea for Rosedale in Love possessed me, and writing my response to Wharton, I spent a few years immersed in The Gilded Age and New York history. To "discover" who Rosedale was and where he came from, I went beyond the secondary literature to explore authors from the period itself. I wanted to hear unmediated Gilded Age voices and see New York when it was a "lush and simmering paradise," in the words of Barbara Uruburu's stunning biography American Eve .
Rosedale in Love may be written in a period voice and set in 1905, but it's about American verities: the drive for success and the corrupting power of money.
Columnists keep invoking the age of the Robber Barons to describe our current economic situation, and we definitely share the opulence and conspicuous consumption of those feverish years. We also share the same overwhelming cultural fixation on what things look like and how we appear to others. That makes us every bit the "frivolous society" Wharton condemned over a hundred years ago.
May 27, 2011
Oh, America!
A
Kids in the Hall
skit once offered this pithy observation: "Americans know as much about Canada as straight people do about gays."
It struck me as especially funny because I'm a gay American living just two hours from Canada. It also seemed devastatingly true. I once watched a Canadian friend flummox a roomful of Americans by asking us to name all of Canada's provinces. One person thought Toronto might be a province. Nobody could get all the Maritime provinces. It was embarrassing.
And this was in Michigan! A good, solid percentage of attendees at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival have come from all over Michigan for decades. Both our peninsulas border Canada, we get Canadian TV stations, Michigan is filled with hockey fans, and yet....
My Canadian friend went on to name all 50 American states, alphabetically. He threw in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico for good measure, adding that of course they weren't states, but in his opinion, they should be.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Canada has been advertised for American tourists as "The World Next Door," but American ignorance of the world is legendary. My father's heavy accent in English immediately gives him away as foreign-born and all his life in the U.S., when he's told people he was from Czechoslovakia, they've asked, "Where is that?"
I'm happy to say that when it came to naming all the Canadian provinces, I got them right, though I wasn't certain about how to pronounce or spell Nunavut. But then, I was a geography maven as a kid, and even growing up in New York, I was curious about Canada and went there for the first time when I was 17. I was my high school's star French student and wanted to practice my French in Montréal.
I didn't get the chance to come back to Canada until I moved to Michigan in the early 1980s and started attending the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, eventually becoming a member. Some seasons my partner and I have gone up two or three times. But we've also branched out and have visited Toronto three times, and Montréal and Québec City twice each. We spent close to a week in Vancouver and added Victoria to a working vacation in Seattle.
We've stayed at a super B&B in the Niagara region several times and discovered some amazing wines there. We have also spent several romantic getaways at a country manor hotel and spa in Cambridge, Ontario. Canadian friends down the street have relocated to Calgary and we have an open invitation to stay with them. It's very tempting.
Even with its current government, Canada still seems like an outpost of sanity from the vantage point of a state that has banned gay marriage even though it's broke and everyone knows how much money marriages bring in to local economies. Too bad for Michigan.
Great for Stratford, where my partner and I got married on our 21st anniversary. Stratford has come to feel like a second home after 20 years and we couldn't think of a better place.
There's a Canadian flag on my desk that I got at the end of the wedding trip and it's more than a reminder of all the other wonderful days and weeks I've spent in Canada, and of my Canadian friends. It's a pointer towards freedom that I hope my own country will someday echo and embrace.
It struck me as especially funny because I'm a gay American living just two hours from Canada. It also seemed devastatingly true. I once watched a Canadian friend flummox a roomful of Americans by asking us to name all of Canada's provinces. One person thought Toronto might be a province. Nobody could get all the Maritime provinces. It was embarrassing.
And this was in Michigan! A good, solid percentage of attendees at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival have come from all over Michigan for decades. Both our peninsulas border Canada, we get Canadian TV stations, Michigan is filled with hockey fans, and yet....
My Canadian friend went on to name all 50 American states, alphabetically. He threw in the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico for good measure, adding that of course they weren't states, but in his opinion, they should be.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Canada has been advertised for American tourists as "The World Next Door," but American ignorance of the world is legendary. My father's heavy accent in English immediately gives him away as foreign-born and all his life in the U.S., when he's told people he was from Czechoslovakia, they've asked, "Where is that?"
I'm happy to say that when it came to naming all the Canadian provinces, I got them right, though I wasn't certain about how to pronounce or spell Nunavut. But then, I was a geography maven as a kid, and even growing up in New York, I was curious about Canada and went there for the first time when I was 17. I was my high school's star French student and wanted to practice my French in Montréal.
I didn't get the chance to come back to Canada until I moved to Michigan in the early 1980s and started attending the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, eventually becoming a member. Some seasons my partner and I have gone up two or three times. But we've also branched out and have visited Toronto three times, and Montréal and Québec City twice each. We spent close to a week in Vancouver and added Victoria to a working vacation in Seattle.
We've stayed at a super B&B in the Niagara region several times and discovered some amazing wines there. We have also spent several romantic getaways at a country manor hotel and spa in Cambridge, Ontario. Canadian friends down the street have relocated to Calgary and we have an open invitation to stay with them. It's very tempting.
Even with its current government, Canada still seems like an outpost of sanity from the vantage point of a state that has banned gay marriage even though it's broke and everyone knows how much money marriages bring in to local economies. Too bad for Michigan.
Great for Stratford, where my partner and I got married on our 21st anniversary. Stratford has come to feel like a second home after 20 years and we couldn't think of a better place.
There's a Canadian flag on my desk that I got at the end of the wedding trip and it's more than a reminder of all the other wonderful days and weeks I've spent in Canada, and of my Canadian friends. It's a pointer towards freedom that I hope my own country will someday echo and embrace.
May 16, 2011
America's Deadliest School Massacre Is the One You Never Heard Of
Say "school massacre," and most people think of Columbine or Virginia Tech.
But America's worst school massacre took place May 18th, 1927, in bucolic Bath, Michigan, not far from the state capital of Lansing. It was also our country's first.
The toll was 44 killed, 58 wounded. The means were unprecedented. The target was the small farming town's new consolidated school building.
Arnie Bernstein relates the grim story in Bath Massacre , following the decades-old trail of suicide bomber Andrew Kehoe. In his forties, this slightly odd farmer worked his eighty-acre property dressed to the nines, disliked certain people for unknown reasons, and didn't keep up with his mortgage. Some of his interactions with neighbors were borderline creepy but there was nothing deeply, obviously weird about Kehoe.
In the end, he was that American cliché: the kind of man you'd never expect to go criminally berserk.
He was an expert with dynamite and pyrotol for blowing up tree stumps, the bane of any farm, and also enjoyed using explosives (rather than fireworks) to celebrate Independence Day. Because he'd been hired to do work on the Bath school's plumbing and electrical system, he had an intimate knowledge of the building which helped him place his dynamite, wiring, and dynamite caps.
On that May 18th morning, half of the solidly built new school was blown up with several hundred children inside. Kehoe had rigged the building with 600 pounds of dynamite, only 100 of which blew up, but that was more than enough to create horror and devastation out of a war zone.
At 8:45 AM, the explosion echoed for miles in every direction. He also blew up his entire property after apparently murdering his wife. And then he drove his shrapnel-filled truck to the bombed-out school and blew that up, too, killing several people, including the school superintendent whom he seemed to hate.
Nowadays, Kehoe's massive purchases of dynamite and blasting caps would have -- hopefully -- triggered alarms long before he could have used them. But back then, if anyone noticed, there was no history of lunatic bombings like his to make it seem suspicious.
Sadly, the author's knowledge of Kehoe is fragmentary, but it's particularly suggestive that he might have suffered a serious brain injury at some point in his life, and that he not only killed a neighbor's dog and one of his own horses, but might have rigged a stove to blow up his stepmother.
Despite the fact that Bath wasn't yet wired for electricity and seems to have been bypassed by the Jazz Age, the story feels painfully modern. You have the bodies dug out from rubble, frantic rescuers, the blood and dust, the stench of death, the grisly rain of body parts, the horribly injured bystanders, the freakish survival stories, the makeshift morgue, the "epic destruction and epic heartbreak."
But America's worst school massacre took place May 18th, 1927, in bucolic Bath, Michigan, not far from the state capital of Lansing. It was also our country's first.
The toll was 44 killed, 58 wounded. The means were unprecedented. The target was the small farming town's new consolidated school building.
Arnie Bernstein relates the grim story in Bath Massacre , following the decades-old trail of suicide bomber Andrew Kehoe. In his forties, this slightly odd farmer worked his eighty-acre property dressed to the nines, disliked certain people for unknown reasons, and didn't keep up with his mortgage. Some of his interactions with neighbors were borderline creepy but there was nothing deeply, obviously weird about Kehoe.
In the end, he was that American cliché: the kind of man you'd never expect to go criminally berserk.
He was an expert with dynamite and pyrotol for blowing up tree stumps, the bane of any farm, and also enjoyed using explosives (rather than fireworks) to celebrate Independence Day. Because he'd been hired to do work on the Bath school's plumbing and electrical system, he had an intimate knowledge of the building which helped him place his dynamite, wiring, and dynamite caps.
On that May 18th morning, half of the solidly built new school was blown up with several hundred children inside. Kehoe had rigged the building with 600 pounds of dynamite, only 100 of which blew up, but that was more than enough to create horror and devastation out of a war zone.
At 8:45 AM, the explosion echoed for miles in every direction. He also blew up his entire property after apparently murdering his wife. And then he drove his shrapnel-filled truck to the bombed-out school and blew that up, too, killing several people, including the school superintendent whom he seemed to hate.
Nowadays, Kehoe's massive purchases of dynamite and blasting caps would have -- hopefully -- triggered alarms long before he could have used them. But back then, if anyone noticed, there was no history of lunatic bombings like his to make it seem suspicious.
Sadly, the author's knowledge of Kehoe is fragmentary, but it's particularly suggestive that he might have suffered a serious brain injury at some point in his life, and that he not only killed a neighbor's dog and one of his own horses, but might have rigged a stove to blow up his stepmother.
Despite the fact that Bath wasn't yet wired for electricity and seems to have been bypassed by the Jazz Age, the story feels painfully modern. You have the bodies dug out from rubble, frantic rescuers, the blood and dust, the stench of death, the grisly rain of body parts, the horribly injured bystanders, the freakish survival stories, the makeshift morgue, the "epic destruction and epic heartbreak."
May 7, 2011
A Mother Like No Other
If you think your mother is tough, now's the time to read
Mommy Dressing
by the late Louis Gould.
An awkward adolescent, Gould was once allowed to borrow a gorgeous silk party dress from her mother, but this wasn't an ordinary dress or a charming mother-daughter moment. Gould's mother Jo Copeland was a famous fashion designer noted for glamorous clothes that put American style on the map in the 1920s and 30s. She was haughty, exacting, beautiful and demanding. "Don't perspire in this dress," she warned. "I never perspire. Why must you?"
Of course Gould did sweat. She also passed out and threw up. The dress was ruined.
Gould's mother inhabited a luxurious world in which her daughter was basically a spectator. If she'd been prettier and more charming, she might have been as decorative as her pliable brother and Cary Grant-ish father. But she was difficult, obstinate, rebellious. She refused to smile, refused to eat, refused to worship her mother.
A mixture of Auntie Mame and Cruela deVil, her mother erected rigid barriers around herself and in her life that seem utterly bizarre. Moving into a new Park Avenue apartment, she instructed her children and the household staff in how to treat the foyer, which had a marble diamond-patterned black-and-white floor. Everyone had to promise "never to set foot on the white diamonds while traversing the foyer to reach our rooms, or when crossing in the opposite direction toward the kitchen. It was understood that we had little or no business in the dining or living rooms except to practice the piano."
What makes this memoir perfect is that Gould is never self-pitying. For all her eagle-eyed perception of her mother's outrageous and even cruel behavior, Jo Copeland comes across as a sympathetic character. You eventually see that she's created an image of herself she's desperate to believe in, one that buries her past under furs, cocktails, and movie star clients.
Her elegance and self-regard are monumental, leaving little room for messy, awkward children unwilling to be her acolytes.
The novelist in me can't help wondering if Gould would have produced so many fine novels if her mother had been the stuff of a Hallmark Christmas movie. She certainly wouldn't have left us this amazing memoir that offers one of the most chilling mother-daughter portraits ever written.
An awkward adolescent, Gould was once allowed to borrow a gorgeous silk party dress from her mother, but this wasn't an ordinary dress or a charming mother-daughter moment. Gould's mother Jo Copeland was a famous fashion designer noted for glamorous clothes that put American style on the map in the 1920s and 30s. She was haughty, exacting, beautiful and demanding. "Don't perspire in this dress," she warned. "I never perspire. Why must you?"
Of course Gould did sweat. She also passed out and threw up. The dress was ruined.
Gould's mother inhabited a luxurious world in which her daughter was basically a spectator. If she'd been prettier and more charming, she might have been as decorative as her pliable brother and Cary Grant-ish father. But she was difficult, obstinate, rebellious. She refused to smile, refused to eat, refused to worship her mother.
A mixture of Auntie Mame and Cruela deVil, her mother erected rigid barriers around herself and in her life that seem utterly bizarre. Moving into a new Park Avenue apartment, she instructed her children and the household staff in how to treat the foyer, which had a marble diamond-patterned black-and-white floor. Everyone had to promise "never to set foot on the white diamonds while traversing the foyer to reach our rooms, or when crossing in the opposite direction toward the kitchen. It was understood that we had little or no business in the dining or living rooms except to practice the piano."
What makes this memoir perfect is that Gould is never self-pitying. For all her eagle-eyed perception of her mother's outrageous and even cruel behavior, Jo Copeland comes across as a sympathetic character. You eventually see that she's created an image of herself she's desperate to believe in, one that buries her past under furs, cocktails, and movie star clients.
[She] spent her life seeking refuge from the physical realities of body -- birth, sex, passion, death. There she was, after finding her refuge, creating it, in the act of designing clothes. Such a perfection achieved; such a beautiful cover-up. Fashion as defense weapon, as bright armorial shield, for a body that must otherwise surely betray her. The art of dressing had to become not only life's work, but ruling passion, in order to be her salvation.
Her elegance and self-regard are monumental, leaving little room for messy, awkward children unwilling to be her acolytes.
The novelist in me can't help wondering if Gould would have produced so many fine novels if her mother had been the stuff of a Hallmark Christmas movie. She certainly wouldn't have left us this amazing memoir that offers one of the most chilling mother-daughter portraits ever written.
