Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Another Plug from Julian Fellowes

Worth wedding gown from 1896 (too late for Cora, actually), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum

I’m interrupting my Patrick O’Brian reverie to share news from London. (Actually posted to the To Marry an English Lord FB page by the daughter of my co-author Gail MacColl. Thank you, Isabel!) Evidently Julian Fellowes is now contemplating a prequel to “Downton Abbey”! As he reiterates in today’s Daily Mail, TMAEL inspired the premise for “Downton.” And now, apparently, rather than continuing to trudge forward into the 20th century, Fellowes is considering flashing back to Cora and Robert Grantham’s original courtship! No word on casting, timing, etc. But we can be sure of this: if it comes to pass, the costumes will be magnificent. (Golly, just imagine Cora’s wedding dress: could it look like this, do you think?)

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Grace Metalious, “Peyton Place”

Sometimes, my friends, I read books so you don’t have to.  Peyton Place was a controversial fixture of mid-20th century culture so when it crossed my path recently, I wanted to investigate. I don’t remember the publication of the book but the soap opera was huuuuge. In my small town, and presumably many others, any faintly scandalous nugget of gossip prompted someone to exclaim, “It’s just like ‘Peyton Place!’” There were titanic battles in my house about whether or not we children were allowed to watch it, with the totally predictable outcome that the youngest saw it all in reruns a few years later, when the battleground had moved on to, say, birth control for the elder sibs.

Yes, there is a direct line between birth control and Peyton Place. In the book they don’t have any, and disastrous plot developments ensue. But unwed mothers aren’t the only scandals: there’s chronic inebriation, financial chicanery, incest and illegitimate children. In fact, there’s hardly a character in the book who doesn’t have a secret.

The novel by Grace Metalious was published in 1956 and some of the book’s impact must have come from her device of tearing the mask of respectability off the small-town characters. The 1950s were conventional years, but by the same token there’s voyeuristic satisfaction in seeing conventions ignored. But the other part of the book’s scandalous appeal was the frank and frequent discussion of sex. Certainly the characters never get up to anything that would be rated higher than “R” by today’s MPAA, but that was pretty hot stuff at the time.

Literary quality? Middling. Some of the characters are individuals, most are just outlines. The writing is not distracting, for good or for ill. The book’s structure is episodic, but not in a way that builds tension; events are strung along, with very little connecting emotional charge. This isn’t a big book like Gone With the Wind, where you feel the pull of various narrative tensions through the length of the tale. It reads like what it became: soap opera.

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“The Woman in Black;” Book into Movie Alert

The Woman in Black opens today, starring Daniel Radcliffe and — be still, my heart — Ciaran Hinds. The review in my hometown paper is not a rave, but respectable. Good news for the ever-admirable Susan Hill. Also good news for those of us who enjoy being terrified. Me, I tried to watch the trailer a while back and wigged out long before the end.

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Monetizing My Fiction Habit?

I have to love a blog post from the Harvard Business Review that mentions Lee Child in the first paragraph. Evidently social scientists have found that habitual readers of fiction are better-attuned to the emotional states of their co-workers than folks who don’t indulge in the fiction habit. And this leads to greater productivity. Actually, since my co-workers are mostly in my head, I’m already pretty well in touch with them. But if the commercial classes take to fiction as a productivity tool, I can’t complain.

Besides, the author of the blog post quotes Trollope. And any day you read even a snippet of Trollope in the Harvard Business Review is worth celebrating.

 

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Versatile!

Well! According to the lovely and generous Christina (who appears to have just returned from Paris where she shopped for books and if she hadn’t just paid me a huge compliment I would be green with envy), I am a versatile blogger. Yes, you see the award sticker before you — ta-da! This world of book bloggers is a generous and democratic one and the Versatile Blogger Award is not one of those old-style exclusive things where one statuette is handed to one skinny gal in a sequined gown. No, there are lots of versatile bloggers because most of us are interested in lots of things. So here are the rules I’ve followed, sort of:

1. Thank the person (s) who shared the aware with you by linking back to them in your post.

2. Pass this award to 15 recently-discovered blogs and let them know that you included them in your blog post.

3. List 7 random things about yourself.

4. Copy and paste the Award Image into your acceptance post.

5. Remember to tell the people you nominated that you have done so!

I am not passing the award to 15 people because, though they are certainly out there, I am, OK, just too lazy to undertake all the linking. There it is. Maybe the award should be amended to “Versatile and Lazy Blogger.” Here are 4 instead:

The Literary Stew  Three recent authors read by Mrs. B? Daphne Du Maurier, Julian Barnes (yes, his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending) and Miguel Lopez de Leon. If that’s not versatile, I don’t know what is!

BethFishReads Because on the weekend, she also cooks, and hosts “Weekend Cooking.” This is a really professional blog, with lots of followers: you’ll see why.

A Work in Progress  Names I plucked from Danielle’s 2011 list are Agatha Christie, Tim O’Brien, Rose Macaulay, and she’s currently reading Iris Origo’s war diary!

Nathalie Foy’s blog is subtitled, “on books about books,” so you may wonder what makes it versatile. But if you scroll down, you’ll see that even within that category, there’s a huge variety.

It was this or a picture of the cat.

Similarly, I can’t believe anybody really wants to know 7 things about me, so here are 4 instead, for the sake of symmetry.

1. I sing in a church choir with my husband. Very quaint.

2. My second desk drawer contains 23 decks of cards, 18 combination locks, 22 bottles of nail polish and 3 half-eaten chocolate bars, minimum 70% cacao.

3. I am a committed fan of American pro football and spend Sunday afternoons alone, yelling at the TV. (It’s all about Wes Welker. And I’m not even from Boston.)

4. My cat won’t sit in my lap because he is too big and bits of him spill over.

So — cheers to all of you, and thanks again to Christina!

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Reading and the “Gift Economy”

Yesterday I found my way to this fascinating account in the UK newspaper the Telegraph, written by one of the women who judged the Booker Prize. The author, Gaby Wood, introduced me to a new idea that’s been rattling around in my head: reading as a “gift economy.”

This is apparently a common idea in the social sciences. Here’s the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia entry, links and all:

In the social sciences, a gift economy (or gift culture) is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists).[1] Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community. The organization of a gift economy stands in contrast to a barter economy or a market economy. Informal custom governs exchanges, rather than an explicit exchange of goods or services for money or some other commodity.[2]   

And here’s what Gaby Wood says:

After all the work and the controversy and the eventual jubilation, what remains most present in my mind is this idea of the gift economy. When the purpose of the prize is to offer something wonderful to readers and to support writers whose work you admire, it may seem selfish to end on this note. But the truth is, 138 novels later, those gifts are still intact. Regardless of where they ended up in the final count, there are corners of many books that still feel as though they’re mine. And for that I’d like to say, to all of their authors: thank you.

I’m not quite sure I follow her logic — is she writing about the gift of the prize to the writers? It seems so at first. But she ends with a different, and far more interesting idea: the notion of a book as a gift to the reader. In the face of the current economic turmoil in book publishing, my first cynical response is that, yes, writers get paid so little that they often do practically give their books away. And maybe in a “market economy” as defined above, that makes us writers losers.

But look at the benefits of the gift economy, among them  ”simultaneous or recurring giving.” Think about the last book you read that felt aimed directly at you. Or the one that granted you a few hours of respite from tedium or grief. Or the one that provided you with a new way to think about your life and the people in it. Gifts, right?

I don’t want to press this too hard. I am a professional writer, I want to sell my books, I need to make a living, and the gift economy, in 2011, isn’t going to help me a whole lot with that. I cannot always give my writing away. Yet at the same time, those of us who scribble for a living have to make peace with the idea that some of the rewards for our labor will not be either money or commodities. We might get the thrill of plying our craft; the enthusiasm of a reader; the simple (not-to-be-underestimated) treasure of being able to work at home, in pajamas, with the cat and really good coffee.

And of course, writers read. As research, as inspiration, we have to constantly consume what we aim to produce, and just think of the gifts we receive that way! In the last few weeks I’ve played baseball with Chad Harbach, turned red with Hillary Jordan, charmed horses with Meg Rosoff, fought a sad war with Emile Zola, loved and lost with Sebastian Barry. I’ve received prodigal gifts. And I guess what I’m groping my way toward here is the idea — which has to be central to a gift economy — that when you give a gift, you do not know exactly how you will be repaid. It’s as true for writers as for readers. It’s true on both sides of the transaction.

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Vincent Van Gogh Not a Suicide?

Forgive me, I must weigh in. Just watched the 60 Minutes segment (double!) promoting the new Van Gogh biography which has been touted as offering a new theory about Van Gogh’s death. It was great to see the footage of Auvers and the Auberge Ravoux where Van Gogh died but authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory Smith suggests that Van Gogh was shot by a couple of young men fooling around with a borrowed gun. One of their sources is the estimable scholar John Rewald who visited Auvers in the 1930s, and relayed a story told by an interview subject’s grandmother. Another source is a minor historian, Victor Doiteau, who tells of a youth called René Secrétan who teased Van Gogh dreadfully during July of 1890 in Auvers. (Doiteau himself doesn’t dispute the suicide.) Old gossip, in both cases, possible but not definitive. Against this, Van Gogh’s deathbed statement to the innkeeper Ravoux  – that “If I have failed, I will just have to do it over again.” And to Theo, “I did it for us all.”

I’m not saying the explanation offered in Leaving Van Gogh is the truth. But it sure is a more satisfying story!

Update: evidently the scholars at the Van Gogh Museum are not convinced by the Naifeh/Smith theory either.

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Are You There, Jeff Bezos? It’s Me, Carol…

… with a teeny suggestion. We hear that Amazon is going to release a new tablet reader called “Fire” before Christmas. (No so sure about that name, but “Kindle” has worked pretty well, huh? And I didn’t like that either…) Of course you’ll be sending them out to tech blogs for review but, hey, how about letting the real power users test-drive these devices? Don’t you think you should ship a bunch to book bloggers? Who are pretty adept at reviewing, too… You’ll find  a handy list to the right and below. Okay, just an idea. Thanks for your time.

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How I Influenced “Downton Abbey”

Maybe you could think of this post not as outright bragging, but as giddiness, OK? Because my brilliant friend and co-author Gail MacColl sent me an article from the UK Daily Telegraph’s Sunday magazine, in which Julian Fellowes, … well, just let me quote it. When he was originally approached about writing the script for this as-yet-unnamed TV series

Fellowes was reading a book called To Marry an English Lord, about American girls who had come over to England in the late 19th century and had married into the English aristocracy.

“It occurred to me that while it must have been wonderful for these girls to begin with,” he says, “what happened 25 years later when they were freezing in a house in Cheshire, aching for Long Island? That was where it all started — with the idea of a woman bringing up her children in a culture different to hers.’”

This is, as Gail put it, deeply satisfying.