Strange, Fun Fragment of a Lost World

I know eight minutes is a lot of time to commit to anything from the Internet, but for those who like an odd little window on the past, I've got one for you that I especially enjoyed.

A couple of things that jumped out at me from this old movie short.  In addition to my affection for the look of the animated scenes of the brothel-cum-nightclub featured here, where sinful elephants, bears, and cows sway in time to the music with their rubbery limbs,  I was taken with how they cleared the dance floor so Betty Boop could present the evening's entertainment. (I have a similar scene in the book  set in the fictional London nightclub, The Ginger Jar- dancing ends, floor show starts, there's sin at the back of the house).  I liked the odd little confirmation of my research.  So hard to imagine the young people of today in tuxes and gowns out for a debauch...

Also of particular interest to me is the way this urged the audience to sing along to "Just a Gigolo."  This sing-along business has a long history (which I also mined for the book) and is not altogether dead.  Adele's concerts feature them, which is one reason I  view her, in part as a modern day iteration of the grand girl singer of the music hall.  The DNA, at least, is there...

So, for your viewing pleasure:

Live and In-Person: Bear Pond Books, Stowe - August 17

Jane Faintly, my New York publicist, just sent me this press release with strict instructions to post it here. (If you don't like it, blame Jane F. and remember, I didn't have a big publicity budget. [FYI, Jane works for peanuts but she is very stern]).

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK - The international book trade has been wondering for months about the elusive K. Velk, author of the time-travel adventure story, Up, Back and Away.  Who is she, really?  Why does she keep her clamoring readership at arms length?  Well, answers may be had, and soon.

It has been said of Velk that she is so retiring that she makes the famously reclusive J.D. Salinger look like a Kardashian sister. Now, in an astonishing volte-face, this veritable Willie Wonka unicorn of an author, has announced that she is emerging from her cone of silence on Saturday, August 17 to sign copies of Up, Back, and Away at Bear Pond Books on Main Street in Stowe, Vermont.  

Velk will be coming down out of her mountainside hideaway on that day from 11 AM to 1 PM to sign paperbacks. "If anyone wants one, that is," Velk said.  "Assuming there is not a line down the street, which is a fairly safe assumption," she added, "I'm just as happy to chat with people, take questions about the book, or about how they might write and produce their own book. Maybe I'll bring some butterscotch candies or something.  Maybe a thermos of tea.  Maybe the first five people or so can have the tea.  The candy should hold out for the full three hours."

Here's a link to the Bear Pond Facebook page for more info: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bear-Pond-Books-Stowe/232454216764792

Thumbs Up From Canada

I don't really need another reason to love Canada.  I feel demi-Canadian myself, but I got one today anyway.

Here's a link to a fresh and lovely new review of the book (or, as I think of it THE BOOK) from the Ontario-based book blogger (and exquisitely perceptive genius) the Teatime Reader.  She's a children's librarian by day so I am particularly gratified to get a nod of approval.

Book bloggers today largely occupy the space once taken by newspaper book review supplements and book review sections. Those have all but disappeared, but there are lots of amazing reviewers who have taken up the slack.  I am very pleased to have these bloggers take note, especially since I am not really kidding about how good they are.  Did I post link earlier to another nice review over at A Garden Carried in the Pocket earlier this spring?  Can't remember, but while we're on the subject, here's that.

All right. I ought to do something nice for you, gentle reader, for having stopped in and listened to me trumpet about my reviews.  Since I am feeling grateful to Canada again today, I have just the thing.

Some months ago I was moving pictures around in my new house and my attention was drawn to a letter I received more than 25 years ago from the great Canadian writer Robertson Davies.

Of course "Morgan Davies" the Professor Emeritus and owner of the Britannic Wheelman in Up, Back, and Away was heavily influenced by the late, great Robertson Davies.

I have always valued the letter highly, but it had become a fixture in its little box frame and I hadn't stopped to consider it in a long while.  Before I re-hung it,  I re-read it and decided that this relic of the pre-internet days should be shared.  I scanned the letter and wrote a blog post about it then over on my other blog.  I had the bright idea one late night this spring to send a link to the post to Margaret Atwood, whom I follow on Twitter (me along with a significant portion of the English-reading world).  She re-tweeted it, and the response was quite impressive.  Anyway, while I am feeling all grateful to Canada again today, and as a reward for you who have read to the end here today, here's a link to that lovely, wise letter.  

Talismans

I am superstitious, about the usual, stupid things. I don't like the number thirteen.  Tails-up coin on the floor? DON'T PICK IT UP! Black cat crossing path? Change course! If I spill some salt, I make it better by throwing more salt on the floor, over my left shoulder. I make my kids do the same thing, which I am sure will be a big help to them down the road.

The post before this one (re: "Giveaway Weekend!"), was post number thirteen on this blog.  

Irksome.  Possibly dangerous.  

True, the weekend went quite well and thanks to all of you who downloaded the Kindle book.

Now, to make sure that those of you who procured it will like it, I am back here with post number fourteen.  (The flip side of this particular symptom of a weak mindedness is that I also have a belief in lucky charms. If some things are unlucky, others are lucky, right?)  

Here though, I am a little more original.  No rabbits feet or four leaf clovers for me.  As I was writing Up, Back, and Away, I surrounded myself with bits of English things that I felt would beam genius at me, or at least a little inspiration.  I wrote it in a few different places.  Mostly in this cabin behind our farmhouse.

I kept certain things near me in there like this:

This plate and one of its mates hang on the wall in the cabin, right over my writing desk.  (English pottery, particularly English transferware, has a role to play in the story and I have LOTS of it - don't start me).

I also had the works of Shakespeare, in a gimcrack 19th century multi-volume set, on the book case behind me.  I had an old Union Jack, the sort people might wave at a parade, stuck into a salt-glazed jug made by T.J. Mayer, Longport and dated 1851 on my writing table.

I had this stamp (and its penny and a half companion) in a little frame on the window sill:

I had these guys.  They MUST be lucky:

I had this 1917 pound note on my desk in a protective plastic sleeve.  It's just like the ones Miles brings with him on his journey.

And I had this: the original "Banded Stone."

You'll have to read the story, maybe on that free Kindle download, to find out what this is all about.  

These rocks are common in some places in Vermont.  I encountered them at one of my favorite places in the world, Shelburne Farms in Shelburne, Vermont.  If any place has magic, Shelburne Farms has magic.  I dragged my kids there one day while I was deep into writing the story and made them round up some choice examples to inspire me.  This is the one I actually wound up describing in the book. 

Lucky?  

I can't help feeling so.

Thanks again for your interest.  I hope you will enjoy the book as much as I liked writing it. Fingers crossed.

"The Past Is Never Dead..."

It isn't even really past.
- William Faulkner

In one of the more delusional maneuverings of a literary executor, as you may have heard, the Faulkner  Estate sued Woody Allen and Sony Pictures last year for misquoting that line in the fabulous film, Midnight in Paris.  (Allen's script rendered it: "The past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past.")

Anyway, let's put that aside.  I came here tonight to praise and commend the thought and its expression by both Faulkner and Allen.  It recurred to me again tonight when this lovely bit of film, which I watched part of during my research for U,B, and A, was posted on Twitter.

The past doesn't seem so very far in the past, when you can see it in color.  Here's London in 1927, amazingly, in color (or "colour" if you prefer).  (The code to embed the video just wouldn't work so you'll have to click through.  Sorry).

Giddy London

I have been spooking around British Pathe again...  While I was writing Up, Back, and Away, I was always dipping into bits and pieces of the 1920s for inspiration.  There was a popular musical at the London Hippodrome in 1925 called Mercenary Mary.  The story was forgettable, but a couple of the songs are favorites of mine and, (getting back to British Pathe) here's a little film clip that speaks to the glories (and the oddness) of London in the 1920s:

MOVIE MOMENTS FROM MERCENARY MARY

The film is silent, but maybe you can watch it after you listen a bit of to the music. (Sorry, I can't seem to get the movie and the music to open separately):

Speaking of Illegitimacy...

Does anybody anymore?

One of the the great contrasts for Miles in Up, Back, and Away, between life in 1928 and his life back home in contemporary America is the difference in moral attitudes toward sex.  Of course, whenever this topic comes up these days, it is the evolving (now in some corners fully evolved), attitude toward homosexuality.  But Miles finds himself grappling with the (now) dull, old-fashioned issue of what is still technically known as fornication - that is, sex out of wedlock.  I think it is next to impossible for young people today, at least those who live in mainstream America, to grasp the risk that unmarried women took when they "gave in."  The great terror was of pregnancy.  At least for middle class people, illegitimacy was a shame of Biblical proportions and one that contorted many women's lives into terrible shapes.

 I am a great admirer of the writing of Dorothy L. Sayers' - although (oddly) I haven't really found the mystery story that moves me.  My admiration is chiefly for her book The Mind of the Maker which is (in its quiet, reflective way) a thrilling bit of philosophy. (And believe me when I tell you I am not one who normally reads for anything but fun).

Sayers' personal story, along with the ideas she articulates in M of M,  was very much on my mind as I was writing my own book.  I don't think people today have any sense at all of the absolute crushing scandal that illegitimacy caused in those days, at least for middle-class people.  Dorothy Sayers was the daughter of clergyman and her family was nothing if not respectful.   When she was a young woman in the early 1920s, she became pregnant by her married lover.  She went into seclusion until after the baby was born, with all the secrecy that could be managed.  The baby, John Anthony, was was sent to live with a cousin of Sayers's who ran a foster home.  While Sayers remained part of his life for all of the rest of her life, the truth of his birth was never publicly discussed.  (For a nice blogpost detailing Dorothy Sayers life and career, click here).  In my own family, we found out only after my mother's older sister died a few years ago that she'd had a child out-of-wedlock in the 1950s.  It had never been spoken of, even among family.  My mother had no idea about it it at all, though she was in her 60s when her sister passed, and her parents (my grandparents) had never gotten over it, and really, had never forgiven my aunt.

My poor aunt's hard experience, and Sayers' herculean efforts to hide her relationship to her child, provide just a couple examples of how drastic the change in social mores have been in the last 100 or so years (and which account for attitudes and codes of conduct that baffle Miles).