#also it's the first time i found out william congreve was an actual person

[beatricebidelaire]

professor reed, who painted triptych what happened to beatrice

gina sue, socialist who rode horses

jacob snicket’s longtime bridge partner

snake charmer living in egypt

tatiana, sculptor who created twisted, cracked, and hopelessly broken

madame dilustro, a good friend, an excellent detective, flew into a rage if you arrive even 5 minutes later than her invitation states.

bela, who owned a yacht

dr. lorenz, who explained the the scientific principles of the convergence and refraction of light to lemony snicket

organist of cathedral of the alleged virgin

----

professor charley patton from scriabin institute for accuracy in music

c. m. kornbluth, mechanical instructor working at valley of four drafts

cheesemakers who maintained close associates with entire snicket family

william congreve, playwright who wrote the mourning bride

[autodidact-adventures]

Ballet History (Part 16): John Weaver’s Experiment

John Weaver was born in 1673 in Shrewsbury; his father was a local dancing-master who taught ballet to “aspiring gentlemen” at the Shrewsbury School.  Weaver followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a dancer and a teacher; he would eventually run a respectable boarding school in town, and he taught social dancers to the nobility in London.

Weaver was known for his clowning and comic skills, and he had a taste for practical jokes.  He often performed in light entertainments, usually inserted between the acts of plays.  They had titles such as “that delightful Exercise of Vaulting on the Manag'd Hourse, according to the Italian manner.”

Weaver belonged to a small ground of like-minded ballet-masters who lived & taught in London.  They included Queen Anne's dancing-master Isaac, and Thomas Caverley, who ran a well-regarded school in Queen's Square.  This group (like dancing-masters everywhere) closely followed Parisian developments.  In 1706, Weaver translated & published Feuillet's treatise on notation.

Several years later, he also published An Essay Towards an History of Dancing, In which the whole Art and its Various Excellencies are in some Measure Explain'd.  The work was ambitious and freewheeling (and also plagiarized in parts).  It was dedicated to Caverley, and published by Jacob Tonson, a Whig bookseller who also published Congreve, Dryden and Milton.

Later, Weaver would publish Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures of Dancing, The History of the Mimes and Pantomime, and various other writings.

In the early 1700's, London became a thriving metropolis, and the centre of English cultural life (displacing the court).  In 1670, its population was 475,000; in 1750, it was 675,000.  One person remarked that the city was a “mighty Rendezvous of Nobility, Gentry, Courtiers, Divines, Lawyers, Physicians. Merchants, Seamen, and all kinds of Excellent Artificers, of the most Refined Wits and the most Excellent Beauties.”

The theatrical season drew aristocrats from their country estates to the city.  Art, entertainments, and leisure activities flourished. The Licensing Act lapsed in 1695, leading to a dramatic increase in publications, and the emergence of Grub Street (the world of impoverished “hack writers”).  Commercial publishers rivalled each other to fill the demand for literature, news and gossip.

Coffee-houses and clubs brought together like-minded people to discuss current affairs and topics.  One of them was the Kit Kat Club, which was founded in 1696 by a group of noble Whigs, including William Congreve and Jacob Tonson; also Horace Walpole, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (the latter two writers).

The Kit Kat Club was influenced by men such as the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, who had been educated by the philosopher John Locke.  They developed an ethic of “politeness”, and hoped that it would become the foundation of a new, stable, English urban & civic culture.  “All Politeness is owing to Liberty,” wrote Shaftesbury.  “We polish one another, and rub off our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.”

This politeness was not the same as the “Court-Politeness” of Louis XIV's court, which had corrupted Charles II's court as well. Shaftesbury believed that France was a modern-day Rome: decadent and declining.  They needed a simpler style of social interaction, and an aesthetic that was “above the modern turn & species of Grace, above the Dancing-Master, above the Actor & the Stage, above the other Masters of Exercise.”  A new kind of moral authority would take precedence, with its roots in urban life and the freedoms of Britain's parliamentary system.

Addison and Steele founded The Spectator in 1711 for this purpose.  It soon became the most important journal of the time, and its essays were widely circulated and reprinted.  An issue cost a penny, which was a reasonable price, and it appealed to men & women of both the elite and aspiring classes.  “Mr. Spectator” was a gentleman of the time: he was born on a rural estate, lived in London, and spent his time debating standards of style and taste.

The Spectator (June 7th, 1711).

Weaver managed to convince Steele that ballet was a valuable civic tool.  Its manners and graces weren't necessarily effete and Frenchified-frilly, but a form of politeness that could be used for their aims.  In 1712, he published an open letter in The Spectator, with an introduction by Steele, arguing that dancing was not only a high art, but also an educational tool “of universal Benefit” (as he later put it) “to all Lovers of Elegance and Politeness.”  Also in 1712, Tonson published Weaver's Essay Towards a History of Dancing.

From then on, Weaver devoted himself to reforming French ballet, and making it a cornerstone of English civic culture.  Dancing could help men regulate their passions, and behave with civility.  It could be a social glue – used to smooth over the differences between people, and the tensions that threatened to undermine civic life.  Unlike French ballet, Weaver insisted, the point was not to support social hierarchies, but to quash them.  Politeness wasn't a shallow, surface thing – it could make you more moral on the inside.

Giovanni Andrea Gallini was an Italian dancing-master who had spent his life in London.  He added to Weaver's assertions, saying that dancing “ought to be recommended to all ranks of life...It is certainly not eligible for a nobleman to have the air and port of a mechanic; but it will not be a reproach to a mechanic to have the port and air of a nobleman.”  Steele said, “The Appellation of a Gentleman is never to be affixed to a Man's Circumstances.”

Weaver pushed ballet further, not being content with just politeness. He wanted to make it a respected theatrical art, and to do this, he moved away from France and towards antiquity – towards the classical art of pantomime.  The aristocracy studied Latin and Greek as part of their education, so this would help Weaver's goal of respectability.  It also fitted in with the early-1700's surge of interest in the Ancients, which included new translations such as Dryden's version of The Iliad (1700), and Pope's (1715-20).

Weaver believed that English ballet-masters were the right choice to create a path between the decadent, immoral spectacles of the French, and the low tricks of the Italians.  They would create a new and serious type of pantomime, modelling it on the Ancients.  It would be tasteful and moral without being dull.  Thus it would be an English form of ballet, and polite.

In 1717, he staged The Loves of Mars and Venus at the Drury Lane Theater, the first production of this new ballet genre.  He described it as “A Dramatick Entertainment of Dancing Attempted in Imitation of the Pantomimes of the Ancient Greeks and Romans.”

The Drury Lane was actually Richard Steele's theatre.  A while back, Jeremy Collier (critic & cleric) had started a strong debate over the morality of theatrical life in London.  He lambasted both directors and playwrights for “Their Smuttiness of Expression; Their Swearing, Profainness, and Lews Application of Scripture; Their Abuse of the Clergy; Their Making their Top Characters Libertines, and giving them Success in their Debauchery.”  Other calls for reform were made.  In response to all of this, in 1714 George I appointed Steele to govern the Drury Lane Theater.  One of Steele's colleagues, who agreed with the need for reform, was glad for this “happy Revolution”, which might create “a regular and clean Stage...on the side of virtue.”  John Gay (playwright) remarked that Steele knew how to “make virtue fashionable.”

Steele had rather a large challenge ahead of him: he still had to sell tickets, and the competition was fierce (including from Italian opera).  His main rival was the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theater, which was run by John Rich.

Rich was part of a theatrical family, and he'd grown up playing Italian pantomimes on the boards of London theatres.  He knew what people wanted and how to give it to them, and he pitched his shows downmarket.  One critic later rubbished his shows as “monstrous Loads of harmonious Rubbish" - but he certainly brought in the crowds.

John Rich as Harlequin (c. 1720).

And yet against all this, The Love of Mars and Venus was a hit.  It was a pantomime play set to music by Henry Symonds, and a comic Cyclops was included in a concession to popularity.  No singing, familiar tunes, or placards were used.  Hester Santlow performed the role of Venus, dropping the usual seductive poses for “Delicacy”.

The story was told through “regulated gesture” and facial expressions (like masks), which were like the expressions laid out by physiognomists who mapped the physicality of character & emotions.  Jealousy was shown as “a particular pointing the middle finger to the Eye”; anger was “the left Hand struck suddenly with the right; and sometimes against the Breast.”

John Rich struck back with a parody: a burlesque called Mars and Venus: Or, The Mouse Trap.  The serious roles were performed in the lowest Italian acrobatic style.

The next year, Weaver & Steele staged Orpheus and Eurydice, with a 25-page programme full of references to Ovid and Virgil.  But it was less successful than Mars and Venus, and it was only downhill from there.  Steele was forced to make more and more concessions to popular taste, with lewd comic touches, and tricks and stunts.  Weaver left the theatre in 1721, but by then their experiment had already died out.  The Drury Lane was being taken over by the low pantomime entertainments they had tried to rise above.

In 1728, Weaver tried again to make people listen, with a bitter, self-important account of serious pantomime theater.  But people were no longer interested.  Steele died the next year, and Weaver retreated to Shrewsbury and private life.  He ran his school, where he taught dance and rehearsed pantomimes from the old days.  He died in 1760, and it was hardly noticed.

[inketernal]

Book Review- The Mediator: Remembrance

"'Thus in this sad, but oh, too pleasing a state! my soul can fix upon nothing but thee; thee it contemplates, admires, adores, nay depends on, trusts on you alone.'" (William Congreve)

 First, I want to say how much I love this quote and the way the novel ended with it. I can think of nothing else more fitting to represent Suze and Jesse's relationship. Through all the secrets, ups and downs, near death experiences and even death itself, they were always each other's center. Everything they did was for one another and no matter how messed up things got, they never let it get in their way. They're soul mates in the purest form and their story is my favorite to read.

The original six books that started it all will forever be underrated in my opinion. I'm not saying that they were all perfection, because even I admit that some things were slow going, but they were definitely worth the read. They set up the stories of these amazing, relatable characters, building up not only their relationships but their personal growth as well. They are all some of the most well developed characters I've ever read, and continued to be so in the latest addition.

Not only have the characters gone from young adults to adults, but the writing and genre of the novel as well. The characters are very much the same ones I fell in love with from their earlier years but with the addition of more experience and knowledge. Meg Cabot manages to keep the characters relatable and familiar while also highlighting their growths. While I want to say that Jesse and Suze show the most growth of all, I can't help but feel that's not the case. Personally, I feel the most growth was found in Brad Ackerman; Suze's middle stepbrother. In high school he was the stereotypical "dumb jock" and taunting brother figure in Suze's life. But in Remembrance, he's a doting father of three, working to support his family and is even on civil enough terms with Suze where he sincerely apologizes for missteps and often relies on her for things.

Jesse also grew as a character, though there was admittedly a little more I would've liked to see. In the eight years that passed from the sixth book to this one, Jesse was very well adjusted to the 21st century while still staying true to much of his 19th century upbringing. We saw after effects of the mediator- ghost bond he shared with Suze, but I would've liked to see it explored a little more, along with the other effects from being a ghost reincarnated. But something I would've liked to have more focus on was Jesse's feelings on his century and a half long ghostly experience and the impact on his renewed life. The subject was touched and there were mentions every once in a while from Suze (as "the shadows in his eyes") but I still felt like it could've been interesting to know a little more, given the time he'd had to adjust somewhat.

All of the characters grew in some way over the years, but those two were most significant to me. Everyone else was more or less the same, with a more mature view of things to connect them with their age.

Something I both liked and disliked about the series as a whole was the constant re-glossing of information to keep the reader up to speed. I don't mind it much when it's the occasional reminder of something that happened a few books earlier, but at times it can be annoying too. It reads as a stream of conscious that can sometimes break the magic of the story. Yet, the most annoying thing about it, to me, was that sometimes the "reminders" were different then how they actually played out. For example, Jesse mentioned the "years" that he shared a room with Suze as a ghost, but in fact he'd only shared it with her for about one year. There were a few other examples, that unless you recently read through all the other books, you probably wouldn't notice because they were subtle. I, however, did reread the series in it's entirety before diving into this book and therefore noticed the lapses in the story. But, in the grand scheme of everything, this was only a minor issue that could easily be put to the side.

Though there were things that annoyed me, or I felt there could've been more of, I rate this book 5 out of 5. The character development was smooth and perfect. The characters, as well as much of the plot, was relatable despite the main characters dealing with ghosts. It's an easy and fast read while maintaining an adult tone and keeping you entertained. It was everything the Young Adult series was, plus more. Originally, I was worried about the series shifting from Young Adult to Adult because I've always been a strong believer that great things should be left alone to keep from ruining it. In this case, I was happy to be wrong and experience one of my favorite series at an adult level that still managed to hold on to the true essence of the series and characters.