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).
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
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:
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):
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):
Thursday, May 2, 2013
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).
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).
Sunday, April 28, 2013
The E-Book Has Launched!
It costs less, as it should since there's no paper involved or anything, and it has a snappy, slightly different cover, and a hyperlinked table of contents and EVERYTHING.
Follow this yellow brick link.
If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for FREE and what kind of a great deal is that?
If you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for FREE and what kind of a great deal is that?
Monday, April 15, 2013
It's Publication Day!
As I said over on my other blog, it's been five years in the making - now it is here. As of today, anyone the wide world over can get the paperback, here.
Soon it should be generally available on Amazon, in paperback and as an ebook. Please don't hesitate to click that link or to get in touch.
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Soon it should be generally available on Amazon, in paperback and as an ebook. Please don't hesitate to click that link or to get in touch.
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Thursday, March 28, 2013
How'd You Get the Idea In the First Place?
As it happens, I can tell you!
This whole story came to me in a flash one spring morning in 2007 as I was walking along the Stowe, Vermont Recreation Path. (That's a picture of the Rec Path in spring right there, look down. Inspirational, no?).
I was listening to Adele’s first album on my iPod, and I got thinking about how important it was for gifted people to arrive at the right place and time if their gifts are to be realized.
I've always been a reader, of course, and my major in college was English literature. So when this thought flitted across my mind, I immediately thought of Thomas Gray’s famous poem, ‘Elegy Writtenin a Country Churchyard,’ which includes this notion as one of its major themes. That is, what might have been if people weren't constrained by the circumstances of their birth?
So, I thought, what if the Universe had a way of, very occasionally, correcting these mistakes? Of shifting people born in the wrong time and place to the place where they and their talents can flourish? How might that be done? How might a good story about this be told about this.
The book unfolded itself right there.
Well, sort of unfolded itself. I then had to spend the next five years working it all out.
I’ve always been an anglophile
(since way before Downton Abbey), a fan of antiques, vintage bikes,
typewriters etc. I was immediately
captivated by the idea of writing a coming-of-age story that would allow me to
explore this topic along with all my other favorite things and places.
It was a great journey and I am thrilled to have made it. I am hoping at least a few other people will like reading it as much as I liked writing it. If you like it let me (and the rest of the world) know- Amazon allows you to write reviews you know! If not, you can keep that to yourself. (Kidding! [sort of]).
This whole story came to me in a flash one spring morning in 2007 as I was walking along the Stowe, Vermont Recreation Path. (That's a picture of the Rec Path in spring right there, look down. Inspirational, no?).
I was listening to Adele’s first album on my iPod, and I got thinking about how important it was for gifted people to arrive at the right place and time if their gifts are to be realized.
I've always been a reader, of course, and my major in college was English literature. So when this thought flitted across my mind, I immediately thought of Thomas Gray’s famous poem, ‘Elegy Writtenin a Country Churchyard,’ which includes this notion as one of its major themes. That is, what might have been if people weren't constrained by the circumstances of their birth?
So, I thought, what if the Universe had a way of, very occasionally, correcting these mistakes? Of shifting people born in the wrong time and place to the place where they and their talents can flourish? How might that be done? How might a good story about this be told about this.
The book unfolded itself right there.
Well, sort of unfolded itself. I then had to spend the next five years working it all out.
It was a great journey and I am thrilled to have made it. I am hoping at least a few other people will like reading it as much as I liked writing it. If you like it let me (and the rest of the world) know- Amazon allows you to write reviews you know! If not, you can keep that to yourself. (Kidding! [sort of]).
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Where is Quarter Sessions?
Welllll... It's actual situs is only in my imagination but for purposes of Up, Back, and Away, I located it in the Malvern Hills, in the far west of England, hard by the border with Wales. There is at least one real town in England called "Tipton." It's in the West Midlands. This Tipton is not the Tipton of U,B,A ( FYI, there is also a Tipton, Indiana, a Tipton, Iowa and a Tipton, Missouri so I am not the only one who thought it was a good name for a town). When I chose "Tipton," however, I was tipping my hat to George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and her very great novel, Middlemarch, which is my favorite book of all time.
George Eliot by Sir Frederick Burton 1864 (Wikimedia Commons)
Middlemarch is Eliot's fictional English village and several of the main characters share a home at Tipton Grange. I hope Mrs. Lewes (as George Eliot called herself in her later days) will not mind my using the name she chose for such an important place in such an important book.
Westfield, where the Peppermores live, is a hamlet near Tipton. Again, there are many Westfields in English-speaking towns and countries around the world, but U,B,A's Westfield was inspired by one of my favorite Vermont villages. Westfield, Vermont, like the Westfield in U,B,A, is also a very small town that never had any manufacturing industry. It has been a farm town since the beginning. It now has a store and a
Westfield First Congregational Church (Vt Conference of the United Church of Christ web site)
lovely church (the building survives though it is without a congregation), a garage specializing in the repairs of Hondas and Toyotas, a little common opposite the former one-room school house. The school has been successfully made over into a community center. It has an auction gallery where I am well known... I don't think it supported it's own doctor in 1928; but it might have done. My Westfield's main claim to fame these days is the Benedictine Monastery of contemplative nuns that rises from green fields just south of the village (nuns are very occasionally glimpsed walking or biking on Route 100). Westfield is also on the main road for those coming from the south to the ski resort that flourishes on Jay Peak, just to the north.
Reddlegowt, the village on the northeast English coast, seat of the Earls of Reddlegowt, is another fictional place. I was inspired, as anyone familiar with the area will have ascertained, by the old resort town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. I liked "Reddlegowt" because it could be a real English place name. Reddle, as readers of the Thomas Hardy classic The Return of the Native will recall, is an old name for red ochre. It was used for marking sheep and the the main character of Native, Diggory Venn, is a reddleman. He travels with reddle for sale and it has dyed him red from head to foot. I was a big fan of Hardy back in high school and I wanted to tip my hat to him in this way. "Gowt" is an old English term for "go out," as in an outlet. I imagined the cliff-top town of Reddlegowt as including a reddish waterfall.
What Does "Quarter Sessions" Even Mean?
If you were to Google it - oh, don't bother - here's a link, you see that it was a court in England where low-level crimes and some civil matters were handled. Fascinating as this is (really, legal history is practically my favorite thing about being a lawyer), the estate's name is not in any way associated with these venerable (but rather disreputable) old courts. I am hopeful that one day a reader may guess what inspired me to name the the seat of Lord and Lady Fisher "Quarter Sessions." (Here's a clue, the founder of the estate was French...)
Erdigg Hall, Wrexham, Wales - not Quarter Sessions, but an inspiration. (Wikimedia Commons)
Quarter Sessions, like Westfield and Tipton, is not a real place. I drew heavily, however, on a real great house called Erdigg, which is not in England, but just over the border in Wrexham, Wales. The house and land are now owned and operated by the National Trust. The pre-Trust proprietors of the estate had an uncommon interest in documenting the lives of those who served below stairs. (This was of special interest to me given that I wanted to explore in Up, Back, and Away the English class system and how it might appear to an modern American boy).
I haven't been there myself (yet) but there are several excellent books about Erdigg and the National Trust has a pleasing web site that you should pop over and see.
Middlemarch is Eliot's fictional English village and several of the main characters share a home at Tipton Grange. I hope Mrs. Lewes (as George Eliot called herself in her later days) will not mind my using the name she chose for such an important place in such an important book.
Westfield, where the Peppermores live, is a hamlet near Tipton. Again, there are many Westfields in English-speaking towns and countries around the world, but U,B,A's Westfield was inspired by one of my favorite Vermont villages. Westfield, Vermont, like the Westfield in U,B,A, is also a very small town that never had any manufacturing industry. It has been a farm town since the beginning. It now has a store and a
Westfield First Congregational Church (Vt Conference of the United Church of Christ web site)
lovely church (the building survives though it is without a congregation), a garage specializing in the repairs of Hondas and Toyotas, a little common opposite the former one-room school house. The school has been successfully made over into a community center. It has an auction gallery where I am well known... I don't think it supported it's own doctor in 1928; but it might have done. My Westfield's main claim to fame these days is the Benedictine Monastery of contemplative nuns that rises from green fields just south of the village (nuns are very occasionally glimpsed walking or biking on Route 100). Westfield is also on the main road for those coming from the south to the ski resort that flourishes on Jay Peak, just to the north.
Reddlegowt, the village on the northeast English coast, seat of the Earls of Reddlegowt, is another fictional place. I was inspired, as anyone familiar with the area will have ascertained, by the old resort town of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. I liked "Reddlegowt" because it could be a real English place name. Reddle, as readers of the Thomas Hardy classic The Return of the Native will recall, is an old name for red ochre. It was used for marking sheep and the the main character of Native, Diggory Venn, is a reddleman. He travels with reddle for sale and it has dyed him red from head to foot. I was a big fan of Hardy back in high school and I wanted to tip my hat to him in this way. "Gowt" is an old English term for "go out," as in an outlet. I imagined the cliff-top town of Reddlegowt as including a reddish waterfall.
What Does "Quarter Sessions" Even Mean?
If you were to Google it - oh, don't bother - here's a link, you see that it was a court in England where low-level crimes and some civil matters were handled. Fascinating as this is (really, legal history is practically my favorite thing about being a lawyer), the estate's name is not in any way associated with these venerable (but rather disreputable) old courts. I am hopeful that one day a reader may guess what inspired me to name the the seat of Lord and Lady Fisher "Quarter Sessions." (Here's a clue, the founder of the estate was French...)
Erdigg Hall, Wrexham, Wales - not Quarter Sessions, but an inspiration. (Wikimedia Commons)
Quarter Sessions, like Westfield and Tipton, is not a real place. I drew heavily, however, on a real great house called Erdigg, which is not in England, but just over the border in Wrexham, Wales. The house and land are now owned and operated by the National Trust. The pre-Trust proprietors of the estate had an uncommon interest in documenting the lives of those who served below stairs. (This was of special interest to me given that I wanted to explore in Up, Back, and Away the English class system and how it might appear to an modern American boy).
I haven't been there myself (yet) but there are several excellent books about Erdigg and the National Trust has a pleasing web site that you should pop over and see.
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