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dr_pretentiousHere are two novels I didn't expect to love and a how-to book I'm embarrassed to be indebted to as profoundly as I am.
Recommendation the First:
Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
I don't usually buy a second copy to lend out to friends, but I intend to press this book on everyone I know.
I tracked this one down after I saw Jo Walton remark (on Making Light?) that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell seemed to her to be the heir to a lost branch of the fantasy tradition, and now I really see what Walton meant. Mirrlees's fairy otherworld is creepy in ways that are still fresh, despite all the traffic fairyland has had since 1926, when the book was first published. All the characters are flawed and wonderful, with an extra order of flawed on the side.
Sometime that isn't right now, I'll say stuff about what Lud-in-the-Mist borrows from Mirrlees's housemate (companion? wife? mother figure?--it's not clear from the front matter what their relationship was when they ceased to be student and teacher), the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. My dissertation's chock full of Harrison, since she was also a big influence on the poet I was writing about.
Why should anybody care about Harrison? Because everything you know, or think you know, about women's mysteries comes from her work. Everything.
You can take the girl out of academia, but you can't take the academia out of the girl.
Recommendation the Second:
Kalpa Imperial, Angelica Gorodischer (Ursula K. LeGuin, trans.)
Okay, now I see why Small Beer Press is such a big deal. I love this book for the same reason I love the Lemony Snicket books: it breaks all the alleged rules of good writing, and all the rules of salable writing, flagrantly, and it triumphs anyway, on its own terms, with a big screw-you attitude. This has got to be the least commercial volume of fantasy I've read...ever. Who else but Small Beer was going to touch it? So thank the gods for Small Beer.
If Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino light up any of the pleasure centers in your brain, you'll like Kalpa Imperial. If they don't, not. Borges's Dreamtigers swept me away, back in my teens, and Calvino's Invisible Cities is still one my ten favorite books of all time, though I'd never want to write like either of those guys do. About Kalpa Imperial--I think I would never write a book this chilly, this determined to keep most of its characters at arms length, this swift to drop characters just when they've started to do something, this loaded with exposition, etc. It even indulges (a little bit, in just one of the stories) in a display of postmodern theoretical pyrotechnics. I thought grad school had used up all the patience I was ever going to have in this lifetime for postmodern literary theory. This is not the book I long for. And yet, and yet, every page was a pleasure, an absolutely elemental pleasure. How does she do it?
Recommendation the Third:
Best Dressed, Suzy Gershman
What the hell is a fashion how-to book doing on a list of recommendations alongside Mirrlees and Gorodischer?
And well you might ask.
One of my friends from the anthropology department turned me onto Gershman when I was first trying to build a teaching wardrobe. I'm under five feet tall, and the semester I taught night classes, many of my students were older than my parents. I needed a wardrobe that would get my class to shut up and listen for long enough to find out that I actually knew my shit, but the process of learning my shit had rendered me so geeky, I had no clue about clothing. Inasmuch as I have any clue now, I stole it from Gershman.
Don't think of her as a fashion maven; think of her as a garb geek. A geek like us, just in a different fandom.
Do not be alarmed by the clothes she's pictured in on the cover. She will not advise you to look like that, I promise.
If you get nothing else out of this book, you will at last understand how that particular pricetag ended up on that particular garment, which is useful no matter what kind of thing you want to wear.
Someday maybe I'll tell the story of the research expedition to the Mall of Three Furriers with my trusty companions, the Oklahoman anthropologist and the brilliant former fashion designer with massive post-stroke brain damage. But not today.
Recommendation the First:
Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
I don't usually buy a second copy to lend out to friends, but I intend to press this book on everyone I know.
I tracked this one down after I saw Jo Walton remark (on Making Light?) that Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell seemed to her to be the heir to a lost branch of the fantasy tradition, and now I really see what Walton meant. Mirrlees's fairy otherworld is creepy in ways that are still fresh, despite all the traffic fairyland has had since 1926, when the book was first published. All the characters are flawed and wonderful, with an extra order of flawed on the side.
Sometime that isn't right now, I'll say stuff about what Lud-in-the-Mist borrows from Mirrlees's housemate (companion? wife? mother figure?--it's not clear from the front matter what their relationship was when they ceased to be student and teacher), the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. My dissertation's chock full of Harrison, since she was also a big influence on the poet I was writing about.
Why should anybody care about Harrison? Because everything you know, or think you know, about women's mysteries comes from her work. Everything.
You can take the girl out of academia, but you can't take the academia out of the girl.
Recommendation the Second:
Kalpa Imperial, Angelica Gorodischer (Ursula K. LeGuin, trans.)
Okay, now I see why Small Beer Press is such a big deal. I love this book for the same reason I love the Lemony Snicket books: it breaks all the alleged rules of good writing, and all the rules of salable writing, flagrantly, and it triumphs anyway, on its own terms, with a big screw-you attitude. This has got to be the least commercial volume of fantasy I've read...ever. Who else but Small Beer was going to touch it? So thank the gods for Small Beer.
If Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino light up any of the pleasure centers in your brain, you'll like Kalpa Imperial. If they don't, not. Borges's Dreamtigers swept me away, back in my teens, and Calvino's Invisible Cities is still one my ten favorite books of all time, though I'd never want to write like either of those guys do. About Kalpa Imperial--I think I would never write a book this chilly, this determined to keep most of its characters at arms length, this swift to drop characters just when they've started to do something, this loaded with exposition, etc. It even indulges (a little bit, in just one of the stories) in a display of postmodern theoretical pyrotechnics. I thought grad school had used up all the patience I was ever going to have in this lifetime for postmodern literary theory. This is not the book I long for. And yet, and yet, every page was a pleasure, an absolutely elemental pleasure. How does she do it?
Recommendation the Third:
Best Dressed, Suzy Gershman
What the hell is a fashion how-to book doing on a list of recommendations alongside Mirrlees and Gorodischer?
And well you might ask.
One of my friends from the anthropology department turned me onto Gershman when I was first trying to build a teaching wardrobe. I'm under five feet tall, and the semester I taught night classes, many of my students were older than my parents. I needed a wardrobe that would get my class to shut up and listen for long enough to find out that I actually knew my shit, but the process of learning my shit had rendered me so geeky, I had no clue about clothing. Inasmuch as I have any clue now, I stole it from Gershman.
Don't think of her as a fashion maven; think of her as a garb geek. A geek like us, just in a different fandom.
Do not be alarmed by the clothes she's pictured in on the cover. She will not advise you to look like that, I promise.
If you get nothing else out of this book, you will at last understand how that particular pricetag ended up on that particular garment, which is useful no matter what kind of thing you want to wear.
Someday maybe I'll tell the story of the research expedition to the Mall of Three Furriers with my trusty companions, the Oklahoman anthropologist and the brilliant former fashion designer with massive post-stroke brain damage. But not today.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 09:27 am (UTC)I have always wanted to looks as professionally put together as you.
All I've ever accomplished is a 'frumpy stay at home mom trying to look professional'.
Can I pull off sexual... yup. years of costume making and knowing how to accent all the good bits & disguise or distract from the less good bits.
can I pull of 'looks like I belong here'? nope.
hey, can I be in the will to inherit the wardrobe? ;-)
no subject
Date: 2005-06-30 07:51 pm (UTC)Most of my really good pieces, I found at consignment shops. That red suit, The Hammer of My Authority? I paid eighty bucks for it, which was a stretch, but it would've been over 300 new. The consignment places and Goodwills in rich neighborhoods will have rich-people clothes. Rich people seem to think they need to replace their entire wardrobes every season, because other rich people who have too little else to think about will notice if they're wearing something more than 3 months old. Bah. Their loss. Nobody you'd want to spend time with will give a rat's ass that your whatsit is a few seasons or years, or even decades, out of date, if it's a classic design, built to last, and suited to you. Fortunately, there's a small population of sensible rich people who won't buy a garment unless they'll still be happy to see themselves wearing it in photographs ten or twenty years later. Those are the people whose clothes I pick up secondhand. Maybe it's the flinty New Englander ancestors talking, but I have an aversion to spending any sum in three digits on artifacts that don't stand a chance of outliving me.
My casual stuff all comes from The Avenue. Whoever their fitting model is for 18/20 petite, she's built kind of like me. Lane Bryant's fitting models must be awfully buxom--I can't wear any of their tops. The Avenue's dyes are consistent; an olive piece from this year can be worn with any olive piece from any previous year, etc., so you can build a varied wardrobe of separates very slowly. As long as you don't need petite lengths on trousers, you can pick stuff off the clearance racks at shockingly low prices. Just don't go with anything too trendy, or by the time it fits into your budget, it will already be socially wrong.
One of Gershman's tidbits that you can put into practice immediately is that salespeople (and probably lots of other kinds of people) assess social status by looking at three accessories: handbag, earrings, shoes. No matter what else you have on, if you've got those things right, people assume you have money. Well, with my weird feet, all I can hope for with shoes is an Inconspicuous look, so I aim to get earrings and handbags right. A Liz Claiborne handbag, found at a consignment shop, won't break the bank, will be well-built enough to last for years, and will have been designed by a master of the Tao te Pocket.
As to the will--the wardrobe's yours.