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awesomehoggirl · 6 years ago

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rooftops | chapter one

it’s one of those things that’s known, not taught: everyone has a soulmate, just like everyone breathes and sleeps and has a heart beating in their chest. their name is written on your wrist and it’s up to you to find them from there - but you will, of course. everyone does.

...well, everyone except virgil. everyone in the world, except virgil webb, has a soulmate.

did the universe slip and miss a spot? does life just absolutely hate him? virgil doesn’t know, but he sure would like to.

(in which virgil ignores, hates, detests and loves the empty space on his wrist.)

pairings: prinxiety, logicality, one-sided moxiety warnings: swearing, angst, unrequited crush, bullying, sympathetic deceit (he’s a toddler with a corn snake) chapter two | chapter three | ao3

chapter one: patton moretti is far too sweet

virgil’s wrist was blank. at first, he really didn’t mind.

because when you’re a kid, you just don’t care about the future. when you’re young, applesauce and milk are the only things that matter. don’t know what you’re going to be? who gives a shit! here, crawl around in a box of sand for three hours and you’ve filled your quota for the day. do babies just sit up in the middle of naptime and go ‘woah, oh man, i better start looking for collages or i’ll end up working in retail for the rest of my life!’ then start chewing anxiously on their tiny baby nails whilst considering their degree? no they do not! goddamn it, why couldn’t it stay like that? why couldn’t he just salivate and cry for the rest of his life? why’d he have to get smart?

virgil webb didn’t remember the day he looked at his blank wrist and realised what it really, truly, actually meant in the grand scheme of things. he remembered his mother’s gentle smile and her tortured eyes as she stroked his pale little forearm on the night of his sixth birthday. he didn’t remember what his response was when she started crying.

he didn’t remember.

at some point, though, he learned and acknowledged that he had no name on his wrist: ergo, he had no soulmate, ergo, he was alone for life. did he sink into a depression at the tender age of six, give or take a couple of days? no he did not! he was six! all he cared about was batman and fingerpainting! he probably realised he would die alone, shrugged it off, and went downstairs to push a vase off the table or something.

virgil had a friend - patton moretti, a small, freckly kid with a mess of dark brown curls, two years his senior, who lived next door. their houses were barely a metre apart. if he stood on his windowsill, opened his window and reached, his fingertips could brush the brickwork of the other house. it was comforting.

he and patton were a classic duo. the former was shy and timid whilst the latter was outgoing and lovable - they made a great team. together, they chased cats through fields and climbed trees then fell out of them and conquered the woods in their name, as best friends do.

‘i don’t have... any words on my wrist,’ virgil admitted once, nestled into the crook of a tree.

‘oh, that’s cool,’’ said patton, hanging upside-down from a branch. ‘let’s go look for fairies by the lake!’

they went to different schools but they were closer than brothers, two peas in a pod, and they would stay that way regardless of what it said (or rather, didn’t say) on their wrists. so, for kid virgil, everything was pretty darn great. he had patton and his parents and a gigantic book about bats to read at bedtime, who needed a soulmate?

unfortunately, virgil was not bitten by a vampire or cursed (blessed?) to remain a child for life. instead he did as kids generally do and grew up into a quiet eleven-year-old who soon traded the fingerpaints for a neat little set of colouring pencils. he wore oversized hoodies and didn’t raise his hand in class, so nobody at school found out about his…soulmate-less-ness. there, he was just a shy art kid - a slightly moody, very normal art kid, not really a people-person, as his mother loved to say, a self-declared outcast, not a forced one. older-but-still-young virgil was pretty happy.

until a girl saw his empty wrist during p.e one lesson.

did this girl stop to consider virgil’s feelings before opening her mouth to the entire school? hell no! this was middle school - a juicy piece of gossip was like an instant popularity potion! the truth came out, and the kids in his class, as kids generally do, decided to bully virgil mercilessly from that moment on.

he’d never had reason to consider himself as deformed or wrong before. his parents were supportive, patton was great, and he himself didn’t really mind being different. but now, here, kids were afraid of him. kids took one look at him and assumed he was some kind of freak. kids would avoid him and whisper about him and stay away from him, all because he didn’t have a name on his wrist.

‘you don’t have one because nobody loves you,’ one faceless kid called out to him one lunchtime, before scampering away to snicker at him from afar. virgil had never thought about it like that before.

he decided that he didn’t need a soulmate anyway, and that all the other kids in his school were lame and boring, and that he didn’t need anyone’s company but his own. nobody wanted to sit with him? he didn’t care. now he had a whole lunch table to himself, cool! he was alone for every group project? great! no annoying partners or lack of contribution on their part. no friends? patton was enough, and he saw him on the weekends, so he was doing fine! yes, virgil was fine, fine, fine. he didn’t want to stupid name or a stupid soulmate or a stupid social life or friends.

and so at ten years old, virgil was no longer fine with his wrist’s stark blankness, no matter how he pretended to be.

one night, a few years later, virgil was staring aimlessly out of the window to avoid at his homework when he spotted patton’s silhouette hunched on the roof, face turned away. something cold and heavy filled virgil’s heart, but he shimmied through the open window onto the broad windowsill anyway and hoisted himself onto the warm slate. crossing the daunting gap between rooves was never fun, but he completed the leap with barely a shiver and lowered himself down behind patton. his chocolate curls were mussed and he held his head in his hands.

‘pat? are you…’ patton swung around, his eyes wet and shining. not for the first time of the late, virgil’s eyes wandered to the words on his honey-dark wrist, and everything fell into place with an unsettling click.

‘that boy,’ virgil whispered, numb with something almost like fear. ‘did you find out his name?’

‘yes,’ breathed patton, trembling. ‘it’s logan. he’s logan. he’s my soulmate.’

they sat in silence for a moment, a warm breeze ruffling their hair as they gazed up at the heather sky, dotted with hazy stars.

‘how’d you find out?’

‘well…’ patton took a deep, shaky breath,

‘i passed him in the corridor as usual and he looked kind of stressed or tired so i said “why do flamingos sleep with one leg up?” and he went “to retain body heat-“ and i yelled “because if they slept with two legs up they would fall over!” and he rolled his eyes and groaned and said “you are the worst person i have ever met-“‘

‘geez, harsh…’

‘and then i said “no, i’m patton!” and he let out this soft little wheeze which he tried to cover up with a cough and my heart was thumping so i was like “are you okay?” and he said really quietly “no, i’m logan” then smacked himself with his chemistry textbook and ran to his next class! and i tried to follow him but he…’ patton paused to gulp for air, his frenzied smile falling a touch, ‘he was gone.’

‘you sure he’s the right logan?’ virgil asked (out of genuine interest, absolutely not false hope).

‘i looked him up in the yearbook, he’s definitely logan lockheart! and he’s my age but in the grade above me, and he’s really really smart and serious, and vee, i’m so… i’m so confused!’ patton hugged his knees, fresh tears welling up in his eyes. virgil nodded slightly in encouragement. he couldn’t quite catch his breath. ‘i like him, i really do, but… i don’t understand. i always thought he’d be… y’know, different. sweet! an animal lover! someone who laughs a lot and likes dog walks on the beach! not… well, him.’

‘aww, pat…’ virgil ran a hopefully comforting hand over patton’s back. ‘he could still be those things, you know. you barely know him.’ or not. there could be a mistake. we could both be soulmateless together.

patton’s lip trembled but he forced a smile. ‘you’re right, vee. assumptions are bad and i shouldn’t have judged him so quickly.’

a mistake. a flaw in the system. maybe logan didn’t have patton’s name on his wrist! it was wrong to hope, evil to hope, but all the same…

pat’s sniffles diminished into a comfortable silence as a dark flush spread across the horizon and the warm tiles below them began to grow colder. the great willow which grew in between their gardens nodded and whispered in the breeze, silhouetted against a rosy sky. something was crumbling in virgil’s chest, some deep-rooted fantasy he’d never acknowledged before.

after a while, patton turned with a gentle smile. ‘the sunset’s lovely, isn’t it?’

‘mmm,’ murmured virgil. he didn’t quite have patton’s eye for beauty, but it certainly was very nice.

‘it’s getting cold, anyway. i’d best be going in. hey! you can come over for dinner if you want! mom’s making our special pasta recipe.’

oh, he wanted to accept. he ached to, to laugh and slip through patton’s window and joke around with his mother and play with his little brother declan, to help put the garlic bread in the oven and to breathe in the heavy scent of woodsmoke and spice, to be part of the beautiful mundanity of the moretti family for just a minute, just a second. through the settling darkness, virgil caught sight of patton’s wrist again. logan lockheart, it read, plain as day.

‘vee? coming?’

‘i…’ virgil swallowed, tears beginning to rise up in his eyes. ‘i have to go. congrats, though. really. it’s great.’

he jumped down onto his windowsill and ducked through the window, pulling the shutters tightly closed.

he might’ve heard the frantic knocking. he might’ve heard his best friend’s gentle voice, confused and afraid, calling out to him. he might’ve heard patton’s mother yell something in italian and the choked-up reply. he might’ve heard patton’s blue converse scraping against the windowframe as he turned away.

it was far easier to pretend he hadn’t.

the next day, virgil would knock on patton’s door, eyes full of tears and stuttered apologies. patton would forgive him, and they’d hug before going indoors. the kitchen would be cozy and cluttered, his mother would ruffle virgil’s hair and offer him a lick of her wooden spoon, declan would be playing with his corn snake under the table. they’d rush into the garden to follow the family cat on its trails, under the hedge and across the brook and into the cool, dark woods. they’d climb a mossy oak, talk awhile, then slip back down to chase bejewelled dragonflies as they flitted idly over the lake. they’d run up the banks and through the fields, fall into the long tufts of grass and lie, dreaming, until the sun sank lower into the sky. they’d return home with armfuls of flowers, which mrs. moretti would gather into an exquisite glass vase and set on the table with dinner. they would eat together under the soft glow of the fairylights, which declan loved. ‘they look like stars,’ the five-year-old would giggle through a mouthful of pasta. everyone would smile.

but for now, virgil threw himself into his pillow and cried himself to sleep.

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nightmarecatart · 6 years ago

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Myths and Lies- Chapter 1- Part 1

Chapter 1

Present day

When I was five, I learned how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism because I was bored. I had no brothers to keep me occupied and I learned from an early age, the only way my half sister and me would see eye-to-eye would be if I ripped her eyes out. Tempting, shame it would be illegal with a long prison sentence.

Me being bored happened a lot.

At five years, old I also figured out the only contribution my dad had to my life is his DNA. I’ve got –my mum- Diana’s blonde hair but I’m pretty sure I got my brown eyes from him. In the name blaming game, apparently, my mum chose my first name; Alexa and he chose the unmentionable middle name. I wasn't sure if my mum was just angry with, 'invisi dad,' that day. Another story is my middle name came from one of the mutual likes both my parents had.

People bond over TV programmes, food, technology. My parents bonded over Greek mythology. Out of all the Greek Mythology names they could have picked, they picked the name of a Goddess who got kidnapped to the land of the dead. I envy kids who grew up with fairy tales as bedtime stories and girls who got to dress as princesses. I got the adventures of Zeus and got sent in a toga for fancy dress day.

On top of that, shortly after I was five, it was announced to me Father Christmas didn’t exist. By the age of six, I figured men and fathers were trouble.

The past almost thirteen years after that realisation, the male gender has done nothing to make up for themselves. Except occasionally throwing me the odd chocolate on Valentines Day. However, when I was thirteen Valentines Day chocolates did more damage. The current boyfriend at the time gave me a packet of Revels. Toffee Revels do not mix with braces. I spent my time in the orthodontist chair, thinking how I was going to dump that boyfriend. Due to my interest in science, I was split between using gravity: dropping a rock with the message on him or burning the message on his morning registration table using PH1 acid. I swayed more to the first option, as I wouldn't have to face a reminder of that relationship for the rest of my time at school.

My lack of faith in men has sort of left a large gap, when it comes to my tolerance in them. Enough to say the guy who stole my first kiss, ended up with a broken nose and I ran away screaming. Any confrontations with boys, my friends ultimately dealt with them for me. This means the first boyfriend got saved from being hit by a rock.

Fate had it; I was born in the summer. I could spend the last few days of my year staring up at the sky behind sunglasses, sipping ice-cold cola. Thankful, that the braces went before I turned fourteen; therefore, I can drink those kinds of, “Bad for your teeth,” Drinks. The orthodontist, who lived down the road from me, wouldn't catch me and tell me off with a lecture on braces rules. I know dentists don't live in their surgeries, but why does mine have to live down the road? Or did he offer some sort of same postcode discount? Apart from the orthodontist living near me, another thing was bad about summer. I was born on the wrong side of summer.

My mother gave birth to me in the middle of July. Meaning I have to spend my birthdays in school. Visions of me sunbathing down by the brook or the back garden, turned into sunbathing on the school field listening to screaming school kids. On this occasion, my birthday is on the final exam of my sixth form life. At least this gave two things to celebrate. My eighteenth birthday and the end of sixth form and I can start my gap year then get off to university.

It is due to my mum I’m taking a gap year. She hinted at things I could be doing, not one of the hints put me out of fifty miles’ radius of our, 'busy when it wants to be,' town. I put it down to she didn't want to be left alone in the oversized house and the desire she has to keep me from the outside world.

Annoyingly, from the age of eighteen she let Sarah, my half-sister, go travelling. Sarah disappears at the end of spring then reappears at the end of winter. She brings with her blossom on the trees, warmer weather and my desperate want to shoot her. My mum makes up the story that she is with her dad. That isn't proven in the Facebook photos Sarah posts. Pretty sure I've seen Sarah's dad, he doesn't look like any of the men in the photos.

Growing up, my mum did the thing of smothering me, I'm nearly eighteen and I still have a curfew. I'm expected to spend the next year working in a travel agent; I’m still waiting for my mother to see the irony.

The only good things coming my way this year: My two friends have decided to stay, and I get to stay in a clean house with my garden obsessed mother who will feed me.

Hopefully, my mind won't be damaged too much; chances are my mum's friend Athena will be over on her weekly visits making sure I'm not glued to the TV.

“I cannot believe it is our final few days here.” A blur of white and black wheeled past me in the student council room. The blur woman is being the monster of distraction. I’ve been trying to do some revision for the biology exam, which is sometime after lunch, or fifth period according to the timetable. I say sometime after lunch as the exam hall or gym is across the field, down a hill and past the smokers. I might as well start making my way there early, in case the hill decides to hate me.

“Really? You have a calendar that has counted down to these very days since September!” I sighed, pointing over to Yuuki's vibrant wall in the student council room. How Yuuki got on the student council I have no idea… actually blackmail comes to mind. The calendar is pinned in the corner is only thing that hasn't changed on her wall since September. Yuuki covered the walls in her latest Hollywood crush. This month it’s Clark Gable.

“Well I needed to put something in the calendar! Really Alexa, not everyone takes these exams seriously.” She’s probably hinting at the fact my calendar had counted down to these exams since the beginning of the year. “Besides I like the cute kittens on my calendar.” She smirked, revealing blue teeth and the fact she had been on the blue raspberry Popsicles again. At least her white shirt isn't Popsicle tie-dyed, like last time.

“Yuuki, shouldn't you either be revising or finalising student council things? For once, follow the rules on what we should, be doing in here.” Sophia called buried under paper at the other side of the room. Sophia made me glad I’m not a part of this council. It looked too much work, even if you did have Yuuki proving you could do this work with little effort, but then she normally did nothing.

However, I felt part of their pain. My luck my two close friends dragged me to wait outside every fortnightly meeting.

“If we are playing by rules. I'm kicking Alexa out; she isn't a member of the council!” Yuuki argued.

“Please do that. I might get some work done.” I groaned, tempted to bash my head on the wooden desk. I only come in here because they decide to do work every so often, or Sophia does work, Yuuki messes about. Sophia's auburn hair poked out of the paper after that.

“Alexa isn't going anywhere.” Sophia replied bluntly, pushing her reading glasses up.

“Actually, I might as well get some air. This exam might kill me. Or at least make me kill the person in front of me, that way I can examine their lungs to get the respiration questions right.”

“This is why I was against you taking biology.” Sophia stated.

“To be honest, Soph. You were against her taking nearly all the subjects here. What was it? Textiles, she would stick pins into people’s eyes... Not that she has the imagination for the arts-.”

“Yuuki. Shut up.” I said. I didn't need this a short time away from the exam. Like usual, Yuuki is too persistent and continued talking about me to Sophia.

“Geography, you were worried she would learn where to plant explosives or bury bodies. Sociology and psychology, we didn't need her to find out more things wrong with society or find out exactly how the mind works. You were pretty sure, that if she took those two subjects we would be looking at a real-life psychological horror film.”

“Ok Yuuki.” Sophia interrupted. “I complained a lot two years ago, I get it.”

“Complained?” Yuuki coughed with sarcasm, dragging out another melting ice pop, from God knows where.

“I'm going out.” I sighed. I’m used to the words that came with how my mind worked, hence I’m used to the isolation. I’m the seventeen-year-old female who is uncomfortable around people especially men, but I am also the person who understood people to the point it became freaky.

“Alexa!” Sophia called. I walked out of the modern decorated room to the pale corridor. Sophia will tell me to get back inside, if I obeyed her and stopped in the stuffy room, my headache would worsen.

Anyone else would have to add in time to figure out how to get through the labyrinth of corridors and one-way system this school has. Luckily after a few hit and miss tries here when I first started this school about six years ago, I got the navigation down to an art.

I felt like running out of the gates and throw myself on the long grass near the pond in the middle of the woods. If only, ‘I didn’t fancy doing the exam,' turned out to be an appropriate excuse to get out of an A-level exam. Maybe I should do that. Thanks to my mother, my life isn't going anywhere. She might as well chain me to the side of a cliff like they do in Greek Mythology.

“Persephone. Why did they have to pick Persephone?” I almost screamed it out loud to stop myself from hitting my head against something hard or going back to my habit of pulling my hair. As if knowing Greek Mythology stories weren't enough. I get reminded of it every time someone says my full name. “Why not let the ground swallow me up and take me to the Underworld like in the story?” I groaned, kicking a stone by the tree near the broken fence.

I rested my forehead on the tree trunk closing my eyes tight. Wishing for change. Something light land on my head, I opened my eyes and stepped back to find a dozen leaves floating to the ground.

“I've lost it.” I muttered.

“Persephone Kora.” I jumped. Turning to find the man who had sang that, he sounded proud of himself. This is the reason I’m not allowed to carry any sort of weapon on me.

“That is not my name.” I hissed, curling my fists at my sides.

“You said it was a moment ago.” The light-haired man grinned.

“No, I didn't.” I answered, trying to remember exactly what I said in that rant. I know for certain I did not say, 'I'm Persephone,' I'd rather pull my hair out, which is what I might end up doing if I don't stop pulling my hair at the roots, thanks to stress.

“Do you know what sort of reward I'd get, if I took you back?”

“A special padded cell?” I think I have found someone crazier than my mum, at least she didn't show any signs of being deluded into thinking I am Persephone from the stories. “Plus, you're on school grounds.” I pointed out trying to seem calm, hoping he didn’t need to be told that is a rule he is currently breaking.

His smug look turned into one of anger. I tried running towards the school he grabbed me by the arm pulling me in the opposite direction, muttering something about, Hades.

“Who the hell are you?” I yelled trying to kick him, missing every time. “I am not who you think I am!” There must be other females out there whose actual name is Persephone.

“You need to come with me!” He commanded. If he thought I’m going to go with him by saying that, he is 100% wrong. I tried pulling myself away; forcing him to move slightly forward in the direction I’m going, causing him to tighten his grip. Making my arm he’s holding hurt more.

“I'm not going with anyone!” I shrieked. Where is everyone when you need them?

“Fine.” He said stopping suddenly. No part of me took that, as he is about to give up.

Of course, he didn't.

He seized me and threw me on his shoulder. Then I began screaming blue murder, while kicking and watching the school grow further away as he walked across the field outside of the fence. My whole body warned me to get away as soon as possible and I believe my stomach is threatening to throw up.

“If you don't shut up and stop moving I'll make you.” He sneered. I coughed back a laugh. I’m the one at fault here?

“I'll make you put me down!” I snapped. I knew however, I'd probably never be able to do that. This has never happened to me before! I never expected to be kidnapped. I tried living a quiet life where I blended in, not causing too much attention, ignoring the slight hiccup that happened every so often. I have never learned how to get out of these situations!

Oh no. He'll kill me then throw my body in a ditch.

“Let me go!” I shrieked.

I’m on the edge of screaming, 'I don't want to die,' my emotions started to turn, slowly giving up as I felt the tears gather.

In our small town, there is a secluded area. Although, I’m not facing the direction we are going, I had a suspicion that we are heading to that area.

In the middle of this small private area is a large stone temple. As far as I knew, no one had been in it. There’s a town law that stated you needed special permission to even walk on the steps around the building. The town council were probably over cautious, thinking someone is going to vandalise the white stone, or the worn statues around the perimeter of the walls.

“Please, let me go.” I pleaded; hoping for the millionth time it would make difference. I knew we are in the private area. The old trees surrounding the temple proved it. My fear heightened once hearing the creak of the metal gate that kept people out. He had to kick the black iron door a few times, while twisting the golden door handle in the middle of it. A cloud of dust exited the dimly lit hall before he dragged me in.

“Stay still.” He threw me off his shoulder. My spine slammed against one of the inner stonewalls. I shrank back thinking how to get away. I booted him; he grabbed my wrists harsh enough I’m sure they would be bruise.

He tied my hands together, ignoring my struggles, with a loose bit of rough hanging rope that he got from one of the spikes sticking out from the wall. He walked through a wooden door into another room with a window dome, which to be honest needed to be cleaned, on the ceiling.

“I'm not who you think I am!” I cried collapsing further by the wall; I curled up in the entrance. I hid myself from the main hall.

He had locked the front door, unless I became the master of knocking down sturdy looking doors, I’m stuck.

I tried to quieten my breathing when talking in the next room started. I began panicking more inside.

He is going to kill me.

I’m going to be a sacrifice to whatever God he worshiped.

“My lord. I found her.” He muttered, over and over again, sometimes mentioning the name, 'Persephone,' Sometimes other incomprehensible things.

There’s no reply. I calmed a bit. He was busy preoccupying himself in a fictional belief. I leaped at the door.

“Get back here!” The man in the next room commanded, hearing me trying to open the door; the clunking of the gold door handle was obvious. He marched forward grabbing the sides of my shirt and dragging me back into the dusty room. I started to scream for help, when it he decided he'd be able to drag me back better if he held me by my waist and not my shirt. Panic and pain began to intensify the longer he touched me.

There’s a shiny marble alter in the middle of the room. Once there, he used the chains, which I guessed were used for actual sacrifices, and linked them to the rope that is rubbing my wrists. I couldn't see what he is doing due to being on the wrong side of the table.

His mutterings commenced again. This time they didn't last for long.

“You had better have a good reason for this!” Another voice sneered.

I kept quiet.

If I gave myself up the more likely these people would kill me. They had to be insane; the one who had just talked must live here.

“I-I,” He stuttered, almost sounding as if he’s in shock. “She-.” It is if he can't get out more than one word.

I wanted to go home. Forget the exam I have. Chances are it would be starting any minute. I wanted the new English accented man to give up go away and then I might be able to get out of here.

“Over there.” The kidnapper squeaked. I would probably have had the same reaction, if it weren’t caught in my throat, after hearing footsteps begin walking this way. I wished for once in my life the unrealistic thing would happen, and I would become invisible.

I shrank back again, shuffling, far away from the sound of footsteps.

The man who the footsteps belonged to suddenly appeared.

I could see him... And he could see me. A smile grew on his pale face.

I feel like I’m caught in headlights.

Another first, I am speechless in a man’s presence and not running away. There’s something about him that made my eyes lock onto him and even approach him, which for me, it’s the weirdest feeling ever.

“You are an idiot.” He abruptly said turning back to the kidnapper. His dark hair, which reached his shoulders, shifted with the air at his quick movement before walking away.

“What?” He shrieked in a reply. The kidnapper seemed to be the one about to have the panic attack. My respiratory system is still frozen from shock of the, Dark and Mysterious man’s stare.

“As much as I wanted to know she existed, there were rules put in place!”

I climbed up, still shaking from fear but my want to get out of here is slowly eating away at my sanity and me. I'm putting me wanting to get cosy and getting to know, Dark and Mysterious guy over there down to I'm becoming insane.

“Can I go home please?” I breathed.

“No.” Dark and Mysterious said, without even thinking.

“I really need to go.” I trembled. I’m not a people person or a person who went well with stress.

“Idiot.” He muttered shaking his head, making his way back to me.

My back is against the pillar next to the altar I’m stood next to.

“Are you going to kill me?” I worried. He then looked at me like he’s shocked that I would think of that.

“No. No. I'd never...”

“Then let me go. I won't say anything.” I don't know if anyone would believe me that there is a Greek cult here.

“I'm not letting you go.” He answered angry with me.

#creative writing #writers #writing #mythology #greek mythology #greek gods #greek goddess #posiedon #Hades #hades and persephone #persephone #demeter #underworld #romance #fantasy #zeus #Japanese mythology #yuuki onna #mortal

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fictional-redheads · 6 years ago

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Tropes of Toxic Masculinity in the Male “Heroes” of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“It's terribly simple. The good guys are always stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and, uh, we always defeat them and save the day.” Rupert Giles says this faciously to his charge, Buffy Summers, at her request for him to lie to her about how easy her life as a slayer will one day come to be, in the seventh episode of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fittingly titled “Lie to Me.” The term “guys” in this context, by the time the episode was written and premiered in 1997, was meant and understood to be gender neutral, but put into the larger context of the series as a whole could easily be limited to “guys” in the traditional, masculine sense. In Buffy, it is men’s actions that are most often morally ambiguous, with few exceptions. Even more, it is the men who fight beside Buffy in the battle against evil whose actions hurt her the worst, Giles included. Each of the male “heroes” in Buffy the Vampire Slayer illustrate the different shades and extremes of toxic masculinity by exemplifying an inherently flawed trope. Each of them, in accordance with their corresponding trope, take choices away from Buffy and cause lasting psychological damage with ranging degrees of acknowledgement from both her and/or the narrative. In this paper, I am going to scrutinize the three who were introduced early on and stayed through to fight the final battle alongside Buffy: Giles, Spike, and Xander.

Let’s start with the character that has been previously mentioned, Rupert Giles, typically referred to by both characters and fans alike simply as “Giles.” Giles is introduced in the pilot episode, titled “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” as a “Watcher” for Buffy (see figure 1). He has been assigned to her by the Watcher’s Council, an age-old organization dedicated to the elimination of vampires and demons from the Earth, to prepare and assist her in the fight against evil-essentially being the brains to her brawn. As the series goes on, however, Giles’ role in Buffy’s life transitions from that of detached supervisor and is built up to fulfill that of the Father Figure trope. Buffy’s own father is divorced from her mother and is never seen again in a non-dream sequence after his second-time appearance in the premiere episode of the second season. The creator of the series, Joss Whedon, admitted in an interview with the New York Times that this phase out had a relevant purpose: “It’s true that Buffy’s father started out as just a divorced dad and then turned into this sort of "evil pariah" figure of not even bothering to show up, and that was simply because we had a father figure in Giles…”

Giles’ attachment to Buffy as a surrogate child rather than simply as his trainee arguably first gets shown to the viewer in the season 1 finale entitled “Prophecy Girl.” Giles has come across a prophecy that predicts her death at the hands of the current Big Bad, the Master, and Buffy overhears him telling her love interest Angel about it so that they may form a plan without her. “Read me the signs! Tell me my fortune!” she yells, throwing his books at him (see figure 2). Buffy’s knowledge of her destiny since the pilot has been filtered through Giles, who struggles to serve his dual roles of both Watcher and father figure. In his role as the latter, he withholds information from her that he learned in his service to her as the former, and acts on his own instead in order to protect her. This will be the crux of their relationship throughout the series, and feminist scholar Gwyneth Bodger feels it is emblematic of a larger issue,

Indeed, he acts as a substitute father for Buffy, and it is here I would argue that the series departs from a feminist ideology. As a powerful figure in the series, Buffy has the potential to become the figure of the unruly or disorderly woman. In order to prevent this, she must be "owned"; her power must be channeled and controlled by a man, in this case, a father figure..

Fast forward to season three, and Giles’ role as father figure becomes explicitly textual in two episodes in particular: episode six, “Band Candy,” and episode twelve, “Helpless.” In “Band Candy”, Buffy returns home from visiting Angel to find Giles and her mother, Joyce, angry that she lied to them both that she would be with the other, rather than Angel. The mise-en-scené clearly indicates that Giles and Joyce are a united front in the way any functioning pair of parents would be (see figure 3). Later, in the same episode, having been placed under the influence of magical chocolate bars that revert them back to their teenage personalities, the two sleep together. In doing so, Giles-if only temporarily; this is the only time that he and Joyce sleep together-officially takes over all “fatherly” duties in the Summers household. Buffy is disgusted when she finds out they had sex, but only to the extent any teenager would be to discover their parents’ sex life.

In “Helpless,” just as Buffy’s birth father betrays her by missing her birthday, Giles betrays her by removing her powers for a Watcher’s Council ordered test that has historically been conducted if a slayer reaches her eighteenth birthday. Even more devastatingly, he does so right after Buffy asks him if he would like to take her father’s place in their now broken birthday tradition. He soon comes to his senses when Buffy is nearly killed by the vampire who escaped the Council’s control, but it’s far from enough to immediately salvage their relationship. “You poisoned me!” she cries, wrenching her arm from his pleading grasp, “I don’t even know you.” It is only when he arrives to help Buffy save her mother from the same vampire as earlier, and the head Watcher points out what makes Buffy and Giles’ relationship unique - “Your affection for your charge has rendered you incapable of clear and impartial judgment. You have a father's love for the child, and that is useless to the cause.” - that fences are mended, symbolically shown by Buffy allowing Giles to help clean her wounds (see figure 4). His role as father figure has been reinstated, as well as reinforced. In the same swoop, Giles is kicked out of the patriarchal Watcher’s Council, which as Buffy scholar Ian Martin puts forth in his video guide for the episode, “is symbolic of him no longer being a contributing member of the patriarchy. He disobeyed a direct order. He broke with tradition.” However, it is Martin’s next words that are haunting: “While they have appeared to have reconciled by the end of the episode, Giles’ betrayal represents a sobering loss of innocence here for Buffy, tied to her actual father ditching her at the beginning of the episode.”

The next two seasons primarily serves to build their relationship further, but are not without their caveats. In the ninth episode of season four, while Buffy is under a spell that compels her to be engaged with her tenuous ally Spike, she asks Giles if he would walk her down the aisle. Initially Giles is touched by her request, but after a moment snaps back into the reality of the situation and dismisses it, hurting Buffy in the process. In the sixteenth episode of season five, when Joyce dies from an aneurysm, it’s Giles that Buffy leans on for support. In the eighteenth episode, Buffy tells Giles “I love you,” for the first time. However, by the next episode, Giles becomes concerned that Buffy is coming to depend on him too much, to her own detriment, and begins to withdraw. Yet, if Giles were to listen to and respect what Buffy was saying, he would realize that’s not what she needed. Joyce’s passing heaped even more responsibility on her shoulders-raising her little sister Dawn and maintaining a house-so what she needed was someone to share the responsibility she was drowning under with someone she trusted and looked up to. Someone like a father figure.

This dilemma would be picked up mid-season six, after Buffy’s friends had wrenched her out of heaven and back to a “loud and violent” life. In an episode filled with stylistic exhibitionism, “Once More with Feeling,” Giles sings a song that betrays his feelings on the matter: “I wish I could say the right words to lead you through this land, Wish I could play the father and take you by the hand, Wish I could stay, But now I understand, I'm standing in the way.” At the end of the following episode, he departs to England for the rest of the season, leaving Buffy to fight her growing depression and duties alone.

Giles returns at the end of season six and mostly remains for the rest of the series, but enacts one last, glaring betrayal. In the seventeenth episode of season seven, appropriately entitled “Lies My Parents Told Me,” he distracts Buffy while elsewhere one of their new allies attempts to kill Spike, who since “Something Blue” Buffy has grown to trust and have complicated feelings for. It’s the equivalent of a shotgun-toting father facing off against their daughter’s new boyfriend, only Giles would have gone through with it. Giles also has a rather misogynistic outlook on Buffy’s motivations, believing that Buffy’s protection of Spike must be driven by her emotions despite her logical insistence that after her Spike is the best warrior they have on their side. Buffy realizes what Giles is doing, the assassination attempt fails, and Buffy literally shuts the door on Giles in her life as a father figure as she says, “I think you’ve taught me everything I need to know” (see figure 5). Buffy no longer wants or needs Giles to lie to her, regardless of the place of fatherly love those lies stem from.

Spike, of course, is far from innocent either. For the sake of brevity-Spike has more academia written about him than any other character in the series minus Buffy herself- I will be focusing on Spike’s place in the fifth and sixth seasons in which he fulfills the trope of “The Suitor.” The fifth season is when Spike really becomes a part of Buffy’s team and starts to get close enough to her that he can hurt her emotionally, when previously all they were presented as feeling for each other was animosity. He realizes that he’s in love with her at the end of the fourth episode of that season, and so his role as The Suitor begins.

Spike, formerly known to human society as William Pratt, was turned into a vampire in Victorian England in 1880 at 27 years old. The ways in which Spike goes about trying to earn Buffy’s affections throughout season five parallel a twisted version of the courtly love sensibilities that would have been popular when he was turned, even if the term itself had not yet been coined. In her scholarly article, “‘Ain’t Love Grand?’ Spike and Courtly Love,” Victoria Spah outlines and describes exactly what this means:

The term "Courtly Love" is used to describe a certain kind of relationship common in romantic medieval literature. The knight/lover finds himself desperately and piteously enamored of a divinely beautiful but unobtainable [sic] woman. After a period of distressed introspection, he offers himself as her faithful servant and goes forth to perform brave deeds in her honor. His desire to impress her and to be found worthy of her gradually transforms and ennobles him; his sufferings—inner turmoil, doubts as to the lady's care of him, as well as physical travails—ultimately lends him wisdom, patience, and virtue and his acts themselves worldly renown… Like any intricate allusion, references to the various pertinent aspects of the mythos (which itself has no definitive version) are woven subtly throughout without heavy-handed complete correspondence. Spike and Buffy are after all modern characters and as such must retain the psychological depth lacking in medieval stock characters, and thus their story is not informed solely by the Courtly Love tradition. The correspondence, ironic and teasing at times, straight-forward at others, is however quite fascinating and worth further examination.

The first stage of courtly love is, “Attraction to the lady, usually via eyes/glance.” The actor who played Spike, James Marsters, has stated in multiple interviews over the years that, “As an actor, I right away played an attraction to Buffy.” In his first episode, “School Hard,” Spike stalks Buffy, watching her dance at the Bronze and then having her fights secretly videotaped so that he can study her moves (see figure 6). Even these early scenes have, as Marsters himself admits, “a heavy sexual undercurrent.” The watching of the videotapes in particular is inherently voyeuristic, and presents a modern take on how “glance” and gaze has changed since the middle ages.

Getting back to the focus on season five, the second stage is, “Worship of the lady from afar.” After Spike realizes he’s in love with Buffy, it quickly turns into an obsession. He lingers outside Buffy’s house, chain smoking cigarettes and watching at her bedroom window. He sniffs her sweaters when she isn't home. He rehearses conversations with her on a look-a-like mannequin that rapidly turn violent when he anticipates her rejections. He even has a “Buffy shrine” dedicated to her, filled with pictures and sketches of her, her sweater that he stole after he sniffed it, a bloody gauze that was used to bandage a severe stab wound she recently got, and multiple of her stakes. Buffy is disgusted and horrified by this when she comes across it in the episode “Crush.” Her keen sense of violation is made clear when she punches Spike across the room and into the shrine, destroying it (see figure 7). It’s a beat that summarizes the worst of their relationship in these two seasons in a single snapshot: Spike sees Buffy as an object of worship that with enough prodding he can bring down to his level, but Buffy destroys that dream every time.

The episode “Crush” is a major one for their relationship, as it is when Spike reveals his feelings to her for the first time in accordance with the third stage, “Declaration of passionate devotion,” as well as the fourth stage, “Virtuous rejection by the lady.” Spike makes these declarations twice in this episode, but after Buffy rejects him the first time he makes the second one bigger, grander. He chains her up while she’s unconscious and makes an oath to either stake his sire/ex to prove his love for her, or let his ex kill her if she doesn’t admit to feeling something in return. He’s performing, putting on a show in anticipation of completion of the fourth stage. Even he knows that doing this is not the way to get Buffy to change her mind from her previous refusal. He’s taken it upon himself to move her from passive object of desire to active participant in the courtly ritual. It’s another example of him violating her agency and sense of self.

After this episode, Spike takes a turn for the better for the rest of the season. He does one last disgusting, literally objectifying thing-having a likeness of Buffy made in the form of a sex robot-but before the end of that same episode is willing to be tortured and killed before he would give up information that would lead to Dawn’s death. Spike proves with word and action multiple times before the season ends that he would be willing to die for Buffy, thus completing the fifth stage, “Renewed wooing with oaths of virtue and eternal featy.” For his trouble, Spike earns the knightly favor of exactly one kiss from Buffy before she dies in the season finale, arguably completing the sixth stage, “Heroic deeds of valor which win the lady’s heart.” However, it is worth noting that with that kiss, Spike’s redemption, or lack thereof, officially becomes yet another of Buffy’s responsibilities.

Spike’s role as “The Suitor” shifts in season six, after Buffy comes back from the dead. Courtly love has been completed, but not to any great satisfaction for him: Buffy still doesn’t love him. Per her depression, she doesn’t feel like she can love anyone, let alone a vampire without a soul regardless of his recent good deeds. Every sexual advancement that occurs between them stems from Buffy’s pain-of being torn out of heaven, of depression, of Giles leaving. Their sexual relationship for her is a form of self-harm. On Spike’s side, the first time they have sex is after they realize that Spike can hit her again, despite the government chip in his head that prevents him from hurting people. Courtly love is inherently aspirational, about being devoted to a woman who is unquestionably above you. When Spike’s ability to hit Buffy returns, Spike sees them returned to the equal playing field they had before he fell in love with her, and so turns into an abusive boyfriend kind of suitor rather than the virtuous knight he strived to be previously. Not only does he abuse her physically, but he also equips the classic abuse tactic of attempting to separate the victim from their loved ones, telling her that she belongs in the dark with him instead of dancing in the light with her friends (see figure 8). This all culminates in the nineteenth episode of season six, “Seeing Red,” in which Spike attempts the ultimate betrayal and taking away of a woman’s choice: trying to rape Buffy.

Spike goes to Buffy’s house after she’s put an end to their sexual relationship to try to get her back, while Buffy has been put through an ordeal that significantly weakens her. He forces himself on her despite her protests in the hopes of “getting her to feel it [love for him],” and then snaps out of it, disgusted with himself, when she manages to kick him off. As Buffy scholar Lani Diane Rich puts it in her video about the episode, “Spike is horrified by his own behavior and that’s good, he should be, but it doesn’t do anything to mitigate Buffy’s experience here...the shock and horror of that experience is something you carry with you always.”

Spike’s self-disgust leads him to a cave in Africa, where he endures a series of trials to earn, the viewer is led to believe, his greatest wish: the chip out of his head. In a moment of narrative spectacle in the season finale, however, the viewer is shocked to learn that it’s not the ability to hunt humans again that is Spike’s greatest wish (see figure 9). It’s getting his soul back, so he can, as he puts it, “give Buffy what she deserves.” In the established mythology of the series, the souled and unsouled versions of an individual are in many ways separate entities, with individual desires. Spike fighting for and earning his soul is akin to committing suicide so that a better version of him, a version more genuinely selfless and caring of Buffy’s needs, may rise from the ashes. The Suitor, both knightlike and abusive, is dead.

There’s a male character left in Buffy’s life who doesn’t face the consequences of his toxic actions the way Giles and Spike do: Xander Harris, the Best Friend. To be more specific, the “friendzoned” best friend, particularly in the first two seasons. When the viewer is introduced to Xander in the first episode in the series, it is immediately made apparent that he has a crush on Buffy, and equally made apparent she doesn’t reciprocate through her budding attraction to Angel. Yet, Xander continues to go forward with his feelings anyway. In S. Renee Dechert’s essay, “‘My Boyfriend’s in the Band!’ Buffy and the Rhetoric of Music,” Dechert describes a fantasy Xander has in the fourth episode,

As Xander dusts a troublesome vamp at the Bronze, an enraptured Buffy watches. After the fight, she exclaims, “You hurt your hand! Will you still be able to…?” “Finish my solo, and kiss you like you’ve never been kissed before?”... Then he jumps onstage and whips out a Hendrixesque guitar solo while an awed Buffy looks up at him. (The camera angle further empowers Xander here, shooting up at him as he stands above the crowd, the light outlining his phallic guitar and empowered-and fashionably dressed-body.) (see figure 10)

To Xander, the perfect fantasy is him being the empowered in their relationship in all masculine senses of the word-most relevantly, being the only man in Buffy’s eyes.

In the sixth episode, when he is possessed by the spirit of a hyena, his feelings are twisted into an animalistic form that prompts him to sexually assault Buffy. After the spirit has been removed from him, he pretends that he doesn’t remember his experiences while he was possessed, and Buffy never finds out he’s lying. In the first season finale, when he works up the courage to finally ask her out and she gently rebuffs him, he lashes out, “I guess a guy’s gotta be undead to make time with you,” but the narrative makes clear we are supposed to empathize and pity him for it, not resent him. In season two, in the episode “Surprise,” Xander details a whole revenge fantasy in which Buffy gets her heart broken by Angel, only to be saved by Xander. Again, it’s played off as a joke. Three episodes later, Xander uses magic to make his ex infatuated with him so he can reject and humiliate her, but it backfires by having all the women of Sunnydale, including Buffy, be infatuated with him instead. The narrative actually has Buffy earnestly thank Xander for having the “strength” and “self-control” not to rape her. Finally, in the season two finale, Xander is sent by the rest of the Scoobies to tell Buffy on her way to fight a now soulless Angel that Willow has discovered a way to restore Angel’s soul. Yet, he takes it upon himself to instead tell Buffy to “kick his ass,” giving Buffy no hope of any alternative to killing the man she loved. In the scholarly article, “‘Jimmy Olsen jokes are pretty much lost on you’: The Importance of Xander in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the author presents a perspective I’ve never before considered, “Xander doesn’t deliver the message in favor of disseminating more violence… Angelus was very powerful, but Xander decided that Angel’s death was more important than Buffy’s safety.” It’s the peak of male entitlement-the death of the competitor is more important than the physical and emotional wellbeing of the woman sworn to be the beloved.

Willow does restore Angel’s soul, just a moment too late, and Buffy is traumatized by having to kill the man she loves while he is the man she loves. If Xander had told her the truth, that information could have spared her from that. His role in Buffy’s trauma only gets brought up one time, five seasons later, and even then goes barely acknowledged (see figure 11). So why does Xander get to go scot-free from consequences? Cast and fans alike have posited that it’s because he’s a self insert for Joss Whedon himself.

For years, Buffy creator Joss Whedon was hailed by nerd culture as one of the leading male feminists in Hollywood. Then it was confirmed that he seemed to fire one of the actresses on the Buffy spinoff, Angel, for getting pregnant. Then Avengers: Age of Ultron got released, which featured an unfortunate scene in which Black Widow refers to herself as a “monster” because she is infertile. Then his misogynistic, stereotypical Wonder Woman script got leaked. Then his ex-wife published a letter condemning his years of infidelity and emotional abuse. And then, and then, and then. Just like Buffy experienced, oftentimes it is those who fight besides us, the ones who we feel we can trust, that hurt us the most. Perhaps our believing this time would be different was just our desire to be lied to.

@andieb4650

#buffy the vampire slayer

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your-dietician · 3 years ago

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Things to know about your health as you turn 40

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/health/things-to-know-about-your-health-as-you-turn-40/

Things to know about your health as you turn 40

Let’s begin with a head to toe examination.

DALLAS — It is time for your health check!

And this week, we have a special series of health checks in honor of a big birthday our Sonia Azad has coming up: she’s turning 40 on Friday. As part of the lead up to the day, she will be asking medical experts their advice for what health details you need to focus, whether you’re staring down the big 4-0, just celebrated the milestone, or beyond.

It’ll all culminate in a celebratory “Bar Crawl” – but healthy, of course!

So, what are those big health topics you need to keep top-of-mind? Let’s begin with a head to toe examination.

Prevention

Dr. James Pinckney II, M.D. from Diamond Physicians says while aging feels like it happens overnight, it’s actually a gradual process, and the things we do today will affect how we feel tomorrow.

“Our metabolism slows down, we don’t produce as much of certain hormones, we don’t have the same energy levels,” he explained.

He encouraged everyone facing 40 to know their numbers:

Blood pressure

Cholesterol

Baseline heart rate

His doctors even do a “neck to pelvis” scan that takes a look at organs and assesses a patient’s future risk for heart disease by looking at the plaque in their arteries

Pinckney said taking that deep dive now can prevent bigger problems later.

“Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in this country and has been for the last 20 years, and it’s really something you have to focus on in your youth,” he explained.

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Also important for prevention: eye and dental health.

As we get older, our vision changes and sometimes that can get in the way of day-to-day life, like driving at night, reading menus in dark restaurants – or simply checking your text messages.

“What happens is, the internal structure of the eye, which are really flexible all of our life, that structure loses its flexibility,” explained Dr. Anisah Shahizadeh with EyeQ Vision.

While Shahizadeh said there’s not much that can be done to prevent this natural process, heavy computer use is contributing to more vision problems for people, across the board. A yearly dilated eye exam with your eye doctor is key to detecting any issues early, so they can be treated.

Checking for diabetes, high blood pressure, sleep apnea – all these things really do affect our visual health, as well.

As for dental health, it might be something we usually neglect until there’s something wrong, like pain, cavities, or gum disease. In fact, half the population over age 30 experiences gum disease, and 95% of people end up with at least one cavity in their lifetime.

Dr. Michael Fooshee, DDS at Apex Dental Partners said as we age, “more and more people end up on medications, which leads to dry mouth. That actually leads to a lot of issues with cavities in patients.”

Consider fluoride. He said it decreases the risk of future cavities by 75%.

Correct your bite. Fooshee said consider braces or Invisalign if your teeth have shifted out of alignment. Moving teeth back into place actually reduces the risk of gum disease because when your teeth are in alignment, you can clean them better.

Be careful of crunching on ice or hard foods. That can cause fractures over time.

Avoid highly acidic foods. They can lead to increased risk of cavities.

Get regular check ups. They are critical, and should be done every six months.

Skin Health

Age may be just a number, but let’s be honest – part of feeling young is looking good. That includes your largest organ: your skin!

Three of the most common complaints from people over 40: Wrinkles, acne and thinning hair.

There’s no specific guidelines saying that when you turn 40, you need to get your skin checked. But Dr. Corinne Erickson, a board-certified dermatologist said this age is “really a great time when you’re 40 to say, ‘alright, looking ahead 10 years, what do I want my skin to look like? What do I want to feel like at 50?'”

Erickson, who just turned 40 last year, said it’s never too late to start taking care of your skin.

“Some damage has been done, but a lot of damage hasn’t been done, so you still have an opportunity to protect what you have right now,” she encouraged.

Some ways to do that? Start with sunscreen.

“Starting to wear sunscreen every day can make a big difference,” she explained. “The magical number is 30. So, you want an SPF of 30. But feel free to go higher.”

Erickson recommends zinc- and titanium-based sunscreens. She recommended looking at the labels and trying to stick to less than two ingredients.

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Noticing differences in your skin tone – and texture? The good news: you’re not crazy.

Collagen break-down, over time, reduces elasticity, and we end up with wrinkles and fine lines. As for discoloration, those dark spots, freckles and redness appear for two reasons: genetics and photo-aging.

Photo-aging, Erickson said, are the changes that UV exposure induces on the skin. She said you can reverse some photo aging with either products or procedures – or a combination of the two. Anything that helps stimulate collagen or promotes more skin cell turnover.

That could include topical antioxidants like vitamin C, or even over-the-counter retinols, or retin-A. Erickson said it’s important to seek guidance from a dermatologist because those are not for everyone.

One more thing to talk about when it comes to skin: hormones.

If you’re wondering why you’re waking up with less hair on your head and more of it in undesired places, blame it on androgens, a group of hormones that become more apparent in your 40s. They’re the hormones responsible for female adult acne, and a lot of other fun stuff – for men and women.

“Androgen hormones can cause shrinking, decreased density of hair follicles on our scalp and promote hair growth in women where we prefer not to be growing hair,” Erickson explained.

When it comes to thinning hair, Erickson said PRP, or platelet rich plasma, injections can help, if you can afford it. But there are also oral medications, topical formulas targeting hormone-induced skin changes and other procedures. But again, whether you’re trying to grow hair – or get rid of it – the method is unique to you and requires a conversation with your dermatologist.

“There’s not a one-size-fits all solution for unwanted hair removal, especially because there are different types of unwanted hair, and it depends on the type of hair, the color of hair, texture of hair as well as the skin type.”

According to the American Academy of Dermatology, more than one million people are living with melanoma, and one person dies of the disease every hour.

So, something simple you can do today: make an appointment for a full body skin check.

Breast Cancer

One-in-eight women will get breast cancer in her lifetime.

For “average risk” women, the recommendation is to start yearly mammograms at age 40. But for high-risk women, you may qualify for screening earlier than 40 if you have a family history (particularly a parent, sibling or child) of breast cancer or if you have a “known genetic mutation” for developing it.

Why 40? Studies show one-sixth of all breast cancers in women happen younger than age 50.

“You’re in the developmental stages of breast cancer below 40 or below 50, and you don’t even know it,” explained Dr. Sean Raj, the medical director of Baylor Scott and White’s High-risk Breast Program.

That’s right – cancer is a slow process usually.

“The reason we do screening mammography is to be able to find cancers when they’re smallest and most treatable,” he explained.

At Baylor, every woman who comes in for a screening mammogram gets a risk assessment �� at no cost.

I got a 3-D mammogram. It involved taking four pictures at different angles, with staff guiding me thru when to breathe, and when not to.

You feel a little pressure, but the whole thing is over in minutes. Then, the results. Typically there’s a waiting period, but for the purposes of our story, Dr. Raj offered me immediate feedback: nothing concerning on the initial pictures. But, he pulled up my screening images from 2017 for comparison. Because of my family history, I decided then to start screening earlier than guidelines suggest.

There was one area that Dr. Raj wanted to look at more carefully, so they took one more picture in order to look more closely at some subtle changes he noticed between 2017 and now.

After examining the layers of dense breast tissue, he gave me the all-clear.

“There you go. You got a clean bill of breast health. Congratulations,” he said. “That’s what we’re going for here.”

Along with stressing the importance of prevention, there are some myths about breast cancer that Dr. Raj busted”

1. That it’s painful. He said pain is usually not associated with breast cancer. If you are feeling pain, that’s likely either hormonal, or the result of a poor fitting bra.

2. That women with smaller breasts can’t get be diagnosed with breast cancer. That’s false. Breast cancer doesn’t discriminate.

3. That men can’t get breast cancer. Also false! While men don’t need screening mammograms at 40, they can get breast cancer. So, for men and women, if you notice any changes – a lump, rash, discoloration, focal pain or bleeding – definitely talk to your doctor for further examination.

RELATED: Take it from a survivor: Breast cancer is a ‘guy thing’ too

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blackkudos · 7 years ago

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Jazmine Sullivan

Jazmine Marie Sullivan (born April 9, 1987) is an American singer-songwriter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her debut single "Need U Bad," produced by Missy Elliott, reached number one on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, while her second single, "Bust Your Windows," produced by Salaam Remi, peaked at number four. Elements of R&B, reggae, dub, pop, jazz, neo soul and doo-wop can be heard in her work. Jazmine cites singers Brandy, Changing Faces, Kim Burrell, Lauryn Hill, and Dorinda Clark-Cole as her main influences and inspirations.

Early life

Jazmine Sullivan was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her mother Pam is a former backup singer for Philadelphia International Records. When she was five years old, her father landed a position as a curator for the city's Historic Strawberry Mansion in the Strawberry Mansion section, and her family moved into the historical landmark. She is a 2005 graduate of the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts where she was a vocal music major. Sullivan began singing as a contralto in the children's choir, then a few years later in the adult choir. Sullivan's exposure to secular music was initially limited, "I was doing solos in church and someone wanted me to sign to a gospel label when I was eleven but I wasn't ready to do that," she recalls. "Then when McDonald's had a competition for kids in major cities, I got a chance to perform 'Accept What God Allows' on It's Showtime at the Apollo and the audience responded really well". She sang with Stevie Wonder at his grandson's birthday at the age of 13. Sullivan was initially signed to Jive records at the age 15. There, she recorded an entire album, but the album was never released. Sullivan was eventually dropped from the label. She maintained a working relationship with Missy Elliott, who produced a number of the tracks for her debut project, including the buzz single "Backstabbers"—produced by Timbaland and written by Elliott. While unsigned, Sullivan took songwriting into her own hands, and would later re-team with Elliott for her first two studio albums after being signed to J Records in 2007.

Artistry

Sonically, Sullivan alternates between modern productions and an 1980s sound which gives her old school sound. She's a singer with a contralto vocal range and takes vocal inspiration from singers Kim Burrell, Lauryn Hill, and Brandy particularly their "thundering voices" and "smooth runs." Jazmine has a voice with a metallic and raspy ring to it in her upper chest. The lower register remains warm and airy, while still being supported. Her range spans all the way to an A2, while still being clearly audible, to a C6. Jazmine's versatility is also surprising considering how thick her tone is. She can carry all her weight up to G5, while doing some extremely complicated (almost coloratura) runs and melismas. She's often mistaken for a Mezzo Soprano due to her dark, rich and slightly androgynous voice in the lower register. Nonetheless, the middle register remains "bright" but "fragile". She describes her writing style as "flashbacks", in reference to her songs about failed relationships that were both physically and emotionally abusive. Her music displays her responses to these relationships famously with the song Bust Your Windows. She writes just how she is feeling, which in turn, taking a day or up to a month to complete. During the recording of the album Reality Show, Sullivan spent so much time revising and re-recording, that the producers had to force her to release the album to prevent a delayed release. But this only contributes to her perfectionist personality that she puts in the composition of her songs. Sullivan is well known for penning her songs which in turn, receive universal critical acclaim from critics and fans.

Music career

Songwriting and career beginnings (2003–present)

Jazmine's first recorded appearance was a guest appearance on Kindred the Family Soul's song "I Am" as well as background vocals on the song "Party's Over" and the title track to their 2003 debut Surrender to Love. Before releasing her debut album, a song that Jazmine had written and recorded with producers Cool & Dre titled "Say I" was given to Dre's then-girlfriend Christina Milian for her third album, So Amazin'. The song became the lead single, peaking at #13 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart as well as #21 on the Hot 100. After achieving her own success (she co-wrote her entire debut), Jazmine went on to pen songs for Jennifer Hudson, Tamia, Monica and Fantasia Barrino. She produced the result of the completion of the sessions an album titled Break My Little Heart in 2004 but she was dropped and it remains unreleased.

2008–2009:

Fearless

Sullivan first appeared on the music mainstream scene with her debut single "Need U Bad", released in May 2008. The song, which featured additional vocals by Missy Elliott and Sandy "Pepa" Denton of Salt-n-Pepa fame, went to number one on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and also peaked at number thirty-seven on the Billboard Hot 100. Sullivan's debut album Fearless was released on September 23, 2008. Sullivan wrote every song on the album, and she served as the album's executive producer alongside Missy Elliott, Salaam Remi and Peter Edge. The album received production from Elliott, Remi, Stargate, Carvin & Ivan, Jack Splash, and Fisticuffs. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip Hop Albums chart and debuted at number six on the Billboard 200.

Sullivan followed up her successful debut single with the second single from Fearless, "Bust Your Windows", which was released in September 2008 and reached number four on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and number thirty-one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming her most successful single on that chart to date. "Bust Your Windows" appeared on the debut episode of the Fox hit television show Glee and was also nominated for a Grammy for Best R&B Song, though it did not win the award. A couple years later, in 2014, Stevie Wonder claimed he considered "Bust Your Windows" a classic song. "Lions, Tigers & Bears" was released as the album's third single in December 2008. It scored her third consecutive top ten on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, reaching number ten on that chart, and garnered some mainstream success by reaching number seventy-four on the Billboard Hot 100.

Sullivan later pursued success in the UK when she released "Dream Big" as her first official UK single in February 2009, though it failed to chart there. The song was later released as the fourth US single from the album in April 2009, but also failed to chart there. The album's fifth and final single, "In Love with Another Man", was released in August 2009 and was only moderately successful by reaching number thirty-seven on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. A sixth single, "Switch!", was going to be released in November 2009, though its release was later cancelled. The album received Gold certification by the RIAA, and has sold more than 510,000 copies in the United States so far.

Sullivan was featured on a song entitled "Smoking Gun" with Jadakiss on his 2009 album The Last Kiss. She was also a supporting act for R&B singer Maxwell on his highly successful 2008 U.S. tour and was the opening act for Ne-Yo's 2009 Year of the Gentleman Tour. She additionally appeared on Ace Hood's second album, Ruthless, on a song called "Champion". She also participated in the Essence Music Festival in June 2009 and headlined a few dates leading up to her Essence Festival performance with support from R&B singer/producer Ryan Leslie. In 2009, Sullivan appeared in commercials for Cotton Incorporated. Additionally, Sullivan made a guest appearance on Snoop Dogg's tenth studio album Malice n Wonderland on the song "Different Languages".

2009–11: Love Me Back

Sullivan began working on her second album, Love Me Back, in 2009. Producers contributing to the album included Missy Elliott, Lamb, Ne-Yo, Anthony Bell, Los da Mystro, Ryan Leslie, and Salaam Remi, who was also a major contributor to Fearless. Songs recorded for the album include "Love You Long Time,"Don't Make Me Wait" (a tribute to Prince), "Redemption," "Excuse Me," "Good Enough" and the reported sequel to "Bust Your Windows" titled "You Get On My Nerves", which was co-written by Ne-Yo. The album was completed in June 2010 and released on November 30, 2010. The album's lead single, "Holding You Down (Goin' in Circles)", was released on July 10, 2010. The song reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The album's second single, "10 Seconds", was released to radio in late September, and peaked at 31 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs. The song was originally set to be released on October 25, but was eventually released on November 22 ; the music video for the single was released on November 12. In early December 2010, Billboard honoured Sullivan as the 'Rising Star' for 2010.

2011–present: Return with new album Reality Show

In January 2011, Sullivan announced via Twitter that she was indefinitely leaving the music industry saying, "I promised myself when it wasn't fun anymore I wouldn't do it. And, here I am. I'm not saying I won't ever sing again in my life because I don't believe that. But in this moment… right now… [I] got some things to figure out". In 2014, she announced her new album Reality Show.

In a 2014 interview with Billboard, Sullivan described her return as inevitable say she "...can't escape [her] calling.". In May 21, 2014, Sullivan came out of her "musical retirement" after having a reason to sing again. She based Reality Show on watching reality shows during her hiatus which inspired the namesake. The album consisting of 14 songs, and featuring production from Key Wane and Salaam Remi. The first official single is called "Dumb", featuring Meek Mill, and was released on May 12, 2014, to favorable reviews.

On January 13, 2015 Jazmine Sullivan released Reality Show to widespread critical acclaim which garnered a No. 1 on the Billboard R&B Albums chart and No. 2 on Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums. The album sold 30,000 copies in its first week. Slant Magazine recognized Sullivan as, "Despite what the rasp in her voice might suggest, Sullivan clearly sees herself as something other than R&B's next great queen of pain. Her central themes—love and self-image—don't stray far from genre convention, but her musical versatility and keenly observed characters make her one of the most captivating artists in R&B today." The album has recently earned Sullivan three Grammy Award nominations for Best Traditional R&B Performance, Best R&B Song, and Best R&B Album

In 2016, Sullivan was featured in the visual album "Endless" by Frank Ocean, whom she had already expressed several times the immense desire to collaborate with musically. Jazmine lent her vocals to four songs from the album: "Alabama", "Wither", "Hublots" and "Rushes".

Discography

Fearless (2008)

Love Me Back (2010)

Reality Show (2015)

Jazmine Sullivan (2017)

Wikipedia

#Jazmine Sullivan #04-09

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forktruck65-blog · 6 years ago

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Game Recap | Another Night, Another Dominant Win

Snapshot:

This whole owning the opponent thing?

Not a bad look for the 76ers (16-8).

Up until the last two games, there wasn’t a lot that had come easy for the Sixers, despite the team getting off to one of the best starts in the NBA.

Following Wednesday’s 26-point rout of the New York Knicks, and another convincing victory for an encore Friday against the Washington Wizards (8-14), the Sixers are playing more and more like the well-rounded team they’ve been striving to become.

Sure, the Sixers’ 16th win of the season, earned by the lopsided score of 123-98 at The Center, wasn’t official until 48 minutes had tick tocked off the clock. But make no mistake - game was over long before that.

All in all, it was a solid, balanced performance, with eight players in double-figures.

“It’s good,” Joel Embiid said of the Sixers’ third win in a row. “We picked up our intensity defensively. I think we’ve been much better on that end, and offensively, we just keep moving the ball, and that’s working pretty well.”

Embiid was a significant part of the Sixers’ strong start, which was keyed by impressive two-way interior production.

By the end of the first quarter, the home squad had a 31-19 edge on the scoreboard, and already established a dominant 24-10 rebounding advantage (9-0 on the offensive glass). They had scored 14 points in the paint, too.

Embiid accounted for nine of those boards, and managed to register his NBA-leading 22nd double-double a mere three minutes into Friday’s second frame.

For the night, the Sixers needed only 22 minutes from Embiid, who finished with 16 points and 15 rebounds. None of his fellow starters logged more than 25 minutes, as Brett Brown removed the last of the first-stringers in the latter stages of the third quarter, with his group up 28

Thanks to their reserve corps contributing 65 points, the Sixers went on to lead by as many as 35 before Friday’s buzzer sounded. T.J. McConnell paced the second-stringers with 15 points.

Against Washington, Ben Simmons racked up his 15th double-double this fall, with 13 points (5-5 fg), 10 assists, to go along with eight rebounds. Jimmy Butler went for 11 points, seven rebounds, four assists, and four steals.

In all, the Sixers bested Washington 58-42 on the backboards, while cranking out 54 points in the paint.

Defensively, the Sixers limited the Wizards to 40.2 percent shooting, and an 8-28 showing from 3-point territory. All-Star guards John Wall (11 pts) and Bradley Beal (19 pts) combined for an inefficient 10 for 28 from the floor.

Brett Brown said, “We were able to rest guys, eight guys in double figures, defense was pretty good throughout the night. Did a pretty good job on the boards; the disparity, the difference is what wins games. Twenty-nine assists, that’s a good number, all those types of things.”

The Sixers’ consecutive 25-point victories marked the first for the club since March of 2008.

Click here for a complete box score.

Notable Nuggets:

All on Your Head

During Thursday’s practice in Camden, Ben Simmons, wearing white, and Jimmy Butler, wearing blue, were spotted sporting headbands.

Friday, the duo took the look to the court in a game setting.

The apparel choice was a topic of conversation after the Sixers’ latest win.

As for the origins?

“I’ve just been wearing it at practice,” Ben Simmons said. “Then, [Butler] said if I wear it, he’s going to wear, so we might as well just wear it tonight.”

“It’s Ben’s fault,” joked Butler. “I think headbands are in right now, so we’ll ride the wave.”

Brett Brown approved of the fashion statement, but for deeper reasons.

“I love it,” said the Sixers’ sixth-year head coach. “They are defensive brothers, okay? You know they’re blood brothers - the band signifies to me their bonding, a defensive bonding. I’ve asked Jimmy to put Ben under his wing, and really help Ben be all he can be defensively.

“So that’s what it is, a bonding of defensive brothers.”

Shake’s Shot

About a minute and a half into Friday’s fourth quarter, and the Sixers in front by 25 points, Brett Brown felt it was time to do something he hadn’t done yet this year.

Bring Shake Milton into a game.

Upon checking into his first regular season contest, the SMU product wasted little time getting involved, hitting a 3-pointer on his first possession (and first touch). He ended the evening with five points and two assists.

“It felt good just to get out there, get a sweat, put in a bunch of work,” Milton said. “Just to get to where I am now, it’s motivating, and it’s going to keep me going.”

The 54th overall pick in this year’s draft, Milton, along with Demetrius Jackson, is one of the Sixers’ two two-way contract players.

He’s enjoyed an encouraging start with the Delaware Blue Coats, the organization’s NBA G League affiliate, averaging 20.7 points in six games.

Milton said playing in the G League made him feel prepared for Friday, his NBA debut.

“Philly has amazing fans,” he said. “As long as you’re out there playing hard, they’re going to support you 100 percent.”

Special Salute

Between the first and second quarters of Friday’s game, the Sixers made a noteworthy recognition on big scoreboard at The Center.

Seeing your kid put his generational talents on display from a courtside seat the day you retire is certainly a good way to usher in a new phase of life. Thomas Embiid also celebrated his birthday the previous day.

His oldest son heard the cheers when the above message was shown to the crowd.

“It’s great,” said Joel Embiid. “Like I say, Philly fans, they’re so passionate and they show a lot of love. You know every time they show my dad’s at the game they always show him a lot of love, so I really appreciated that.”

Sixers Social:

Defying the Earth’s pull, delivering dunks.

Up Next:

The Sixers will put a wrap on their second three-game homestand in two weeks this Sunday against the Memphis Grizzlies. The match up will be the last of the season between the two teams. Back on November 10th at FedEx Forum, Memphis held off the Sixers, 112-106. With the Jimmy Butler trade being finalized at the time, the Sixers only had nine players available in the game.

Source: https://www.nba.com/sixers/news/buzzer-another-night-another-dominant-win

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joannechocolat · 8 years ago

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Scent and memory

(And here’s the piece...)

My earliest memories are of scent. The corner shop in which I was born, with its atmosphere of fresh cardboard and old newspapers, and the coal fire that smoked, and the cellar in which my grandfather kept potatoes and pickles and home-brewed wine. The scent of the Mustela baby lotion that my mother used on my skin, and which she always brought home from France. The blue-green reek of the tidal flats on the island of Noirmoutier, where my family had a house; and which to me was the smell of the sea, so that every other coast seemed to me to be missing some essential ingredient.

Scent awakens memory; it speaks to the other senses; it seems to exist outside of time; it sometimes even awakens the dead. My grandfather’s pipe tobacco, Clan, has such a sweet and distinctive scent that, twenty years after his death, it still evokes his presence. And its colour is a faded red, like the fisherman’s smock he used to wear when we went sailing together, and the colour still smells of sunshine, and wind, and a hundred happy memories.

To me, most scents have colours. It’s a form of synaesthesia, in which the brain confuses stimuli, converting sounds to shapes, or sounds, or tastes, giving colours to days of the week, or in my case, converting colours to scent, so that sometimes I find it difficult to separate one from the other. Perhaps this is why, in my house, there are so many brightly-coloured things; and why I always like to keep my favourite perfumes close by, alongside my books and my paintings.

Perfume is my greatest indulgence. Not chocolate, not shoes, but bottles of scent; dozens - no, hundreds - of bottles, each one containing a genie that, when uncorked, can work everyday miracles of memory and mood. Some perfumes are little capsules of time; like the Ô de Lancôme I wore the year I first met my husband – I was sixteen, at sixth-form college - and its colour is the same bright-green as the pullover I used to wear, a fresh and vibrant citrus scent that still brings back those happy days more clearly than a photograph. Or Guerlain’s Chamade, with its dark chypre base, which I wore at university – being an impoverished student then, I couldn’t afford the eau de parfum, but used the bath oil as perfume instead and thought myself very sophisticated. Or Yves Rocher’s Ispahan, which somehow smells of our first home, a rather run-down terrace house, with colourful murals on the walls and a perpetual fog of patchouli and frankincense.

Our sense of smell is the first of our senses to develop. As infants, it is the sense of smell that first connects us to the world. I remember, in the maternity ward, when my daughter was born, holding her – just a few hours old – up to a vase of freesias standing by the bedside. Her reaction was immediate; her little head turned; her mouth opened in an immediate and instinctive desire to explore and to experience.

As adults, we can too often become jaded by the multitude of sense–impressions coming at us all the time. Traffic, televisions, radios, billboards, mobile phones, the constant comings and goings of other people – all can contribute to a sensory overload that can lead to stress and confusion.

But close your eyes, relax, and the sense of smell comes back into its own. Scent speaks directly to the subconscious, sometimes evoking whole scenes that even photographs cannot convey. It has strong emotional associations, too; often linked with memory. Nothing brings back the past like a scent; nothing speaks so clearly and directly to the heart.

I once held a writing seminar in a women’s prison near my home. The women were all different ages and from wildly different backgrounds; at first I struggled to find a way to engage their creativity. Then I asked: “What smells do you miss?” Each reply was a story. By the end of the day, I had poetry; short fiction; essays; letters to the dead. The next time I came, I brought perfume samples. In that sterile and utilitarian environment, each one was like an oasis.

Another time, a friend of mine suffered a stroke that left her completely paralysed, unable to speak or to swallow. I knew she dreamed of food and drink, so I brought her the closest things I could find; fruit-scented lip salves from the Body Shop; pomegranate bath bombs from Lush; chocolate-scented lotions to rub into her hands and feet. On her birthday, I made her a virtual birthday cake – a cocktail of scents in a bottle. I used dark chocolate, Kahlua, cinnamon and black pepper. It was inedible, but smelt divine. She kept it by her bed for six months, until she was be able to eat again – in spite of her doctor’s prediction that this might never happen. Such is the positive power of scent and the energy it can harness.

I first became aware of perfumes through my great-Aunt Marie, an elegant old Parisienne, who had once known Chagall and Edith Piaf, and who until the day she died, always dressed in pink and white, and never wore any perfume other than Chanel Number 5. I remember the glass-stoppered bottle that stood on her dressing-room table, and the scent of impossible flowers, like something out of a distant dream. She was the one who taught me that scent is the oldest magic there is; a scent can change your identity; can bring back the ghosts of long-lost loves; like a fairy godmother, transform the most timid of wallflowers into a heroine, just for one night. Chanel Number 5 still brings her back, and she was the one who encouraged me to haunt perfume departments, to collect samples and bath oils, to discover the scents that would help me express my personality.

Nowadays, I tend to use scent much as I would my wardrobe. I have so many bottles that my husband bought me a cabinet as a gift, in which I keep all my perfume bottles, neatly categorized and ready to use. The top shelf is for gourmand fragrances, with their notes of gingerbread; vanilla; honey and chocolate. Muegler’s Angel; Rochas’ Tocade; Kurkadjian’s Absolue du Soir. The second is for florals; Chanel no. 19; Fracas; Trésor; Paris. The third, for herbal and citrus scents; Jo Malone’s Lime Basil; Acqua de Parma; Guerlain’s Mitsouko. The bottom shelf is for orientals: Habit Rouge; Coromandel; L’Autre; the lovely creamy sandalwood of Chanel’s Bois des Iles.

Every morning I choose a scent according to my mood. Wistful; exuberant; romantic; brave. Some days I look for an old friend; on other days I need a breath of fresh air. When I’m writing a new book, I often choose a scent on behalf of my protagonist. I wear it much in the same way that method actors sometimes use scent to get into character. Vianne Rocher was Aqua de Parma; Blueeyedboy was l’Heure Bleue; the seductive Zozie de l’Alba was scented with Guerlain’s Habit Rouge. The book I’m writing right now smells of a new Chanel perfume, Boy: a light and lovely unisex blend of lavender and vanilla, with which I’ve recently become more than a little obsessed.

For me, the most important aspect of attraction has always been about feeling good. There is a tangible radiance to well-being that no cosmetic can duplicate. That’s why I tend to give more thought to the scent I wear than to clothes or makeup, or even shoes. My wardrobe is made up of bottles, neatly lined up in my scent cabinet. Some are old friends; some, new discoveries. Each one fits me perfectly, tailored to my changing moods.

My little black dress is Coromandel; I wear it with heels and attitude. My sexy number is Bois des Iles, with its creamy sandalwood scent. Francis Kurkadjian’s Acqua Universalis is my favourite pair of jeans; almost, but not quite unisex, fresh and informal and effortless. I wear Fracas when I want to turn heads; with its blast of tuberose, it’s my strapless Oscar frock. Yves Rocher’s Ispahan is the hippy dress I can’t bear to throw out; I still have half a bottle (it’s now sadly discontinued) that I wear on special occasions. Houbigant’s Chantilly is there in the mornings for when I want to feel sixteen again. I wore it throughout my teenage years, and it always takes me back.

Besides, at 52, whatever I wear, it’s getting less and less likely that people will say in all honesty: “You look fabulous.” But very often, people do say (as did a grumpy Head Porter on a recent trip to my old college, startled out of his apathy by a passing whiff of Guerlain’s Samsara); “You smell fabulous.” Because beauty isn’t about how you look, but how you make other people feel. And whatever can make a Head Porter smile, on a dull autumn day in Cambridge, is surely a power to conjure with.

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jamesgraybooksellerworld · 5 years ago

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Author INDEX

J.B. 346J

Mary Barber 377J

Mary Barber

Madam De Bellefont 572G

Susanna Centlivre 347J

Susanna Centlivre 357J

Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon 348J

[Martha Hatfield].362J

Mary De La Riviere Manley 122F

Katherine Philips 103G

Mary Pix 376J

Madam Scuddery 296J

Madeleine Vigneron 323

•)§(•

346J J.B. Gent.

The young lovers guide,

or, The unsuccessful amours of Philabius, a country lover; set forth in several kind epistles, writ by him to his beautious-unkind mistress. Teaching lover s how to comport themselves with resignation in their love-disasters. With The answer of Helena to Paris, by a country shepherdess. As also, The sixth Æneid and fourth eclogue of Virgil, both newly translated by J.B. Gent. (?)

London : Printed and are to be Sold by the Booksellers of London, 1699. $3,500

Octavo, A4, B-G8,H6 I2( lacking 3&’4) (A1, frontispiece Present; I3&’4, advertisements lacking ) inches [8], 116, [4] p. : The frontispiece is signed: M· Vander Gucht. scul:. 1660-1725,

This copy is bound in original paneled sheep with spine cracking but cords holding Strong.

A very rare slyly misogynistic “guide’ for what turns out be emotional turmoil and Love-Disasters

Writ by Philabius to Venus, his Planetary Ascendant.

Dear Mother Venus!

I must style you so.

From you descended, tho’ unhappy Beau.

You are my Astral Mother; at my birth

Your pow’rful Influence bore the sway on Earth

From my Ascendent: being sprung from you,

I hop’d Success where-ever I should woo.

Your Pow’r in Heav’n and Earth prevails, shall I,

A Son of yours, by you forsaken die?

Twenty long Months now I have lov’d a Fair,

And all my Courtship’s ending in Despair.

All Earthly Beauties, scatter’d here and there,

From you, their Source, derive the Charms they bear.

Wing (2nd ed.), B131; Arber’s Term cat.; III 142

Copies – Brit.Isles : British Library

Cambridge University St. John’s College

Oxford University, Bodleian Library

Copies – N.America : Folger Shakespeare

Harvard Houghton Library

Henry E. Huntington

Newberry

UCLA, Clark Memorial Library

University of Illinois

Engraved frontispiece of the Mistress holding a fan,”Bold Poets and rash Painters may aspire With pen and pencill to describe my Faire, Alas; their arts in the performance fayle, And reach not that divine Original, Some Shadd’wy glimpse they may present to view, And this is all poore humane art Can doe▪” title within double rule border, 4-pages of publisher`s advertisements at the end Contemporary calf (worn). . FIRST EDITION. . The author remains unknown.

)§(§)§(

An early Irish female author

2) 377[ BARBER, Mary].1685-1755≠

A true tale To be added to Mr. Gay’s fables.

Dublin. Printed by S. Powell, for George Ewing, at the Angel and Bible in Dame’-street, 1727.

First edition, variant imprint..[Estc version : Dublin : printed by S.[i.e. Sarah] Harding, next door to the sign of the Crown in Copper-Alley, [ca. 1727-1728] 7pp, [1]. Not in ESTC or Foxon; c/f N491542 and N13607. $4,500

[Bound after:]

John GAY

Fables. Invented for the Amusement of His Highness William Duke of Cumberland.

London Printed, and Dublin Reprinted for G. Risk, G. Ewing, and W. Smith, in Dame’s-street, 1727.

First Irish edition. [8], 109pp, [3]. With three terminal pages of advertisements. ESTC T13819, Foxon p.295.

8vo in 4s and 8s. Contemporary speckled calf, contrasting red morocco lettering- piece, gilt. Rubbed to extremities, some chipping to head and foot of spine and cracking to joints, bumping to corners. Occasional marking, some closed tears. Early ink inscription of ‘William Crose, Clithero’ to FEP, further inked-over inscription to head of title.

Mary Barber (1685-1755) claimed that she wrote “chiefly to form the Minds of my Children,” but her often satirical and comic verses suggest that she sought an adult audience as well. The wife of a clothier and mother of four children, she lived in Dublin and enjoyed the patronage of Jonathan Swift. While marriage, motherhood, friendship, education, and other domestic issues are her central themes, they frequently lead her to broader, biting social commentary.

Bound behind this copy of the first edition of the first series of English poet John Gay’s (1685-1732) famed Fables, composed for the youngest son of George II, six-year-old Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, is Irish poet Mary Barber’s (c.1685-c.1755) rare verse appeal to secure a Royal pension for Gay, who had lost his fortune in bursting of the South Sea Bubble.

Barber, the wife of a Dublin woollen draper, was an untutored poet whom Jonathan Swift sponsored, publicly applauded, and cultivated as part of his ‘triumfeminate’ of bluestockings. She wrote initially to educate the children in her large family. Indeed this poem, the fifth of her published works, features imagined dialogue of a son to his mother, designed to encourage, specifically, the patronage of Queen Caroline:

‘Mamma, if you were Queen, says he, And such a Book were writ for me; I find, ’tis so much to your Taste, That Gay wou’d keep his Coach at least’

And of a mother to her son:

‘My Child, What you suppose is true: I see its Excellence in You. Poets, who write to mend the Mind, A Royal Recompence shou’d find.’

ESTC locates two variant Dublin editions, both rare, but neither matching this copy: a first with the title and pagination as here, but with the undated imprint of S. Harding (represented by a single copy at Harvard), and a second with the imprint as here, but with a different title, A tale being an addition to Mr. Gay’s fables, and a pagination of 8pp (represented by copies at the NLI, Oxford, Harvard and Yale). This would appear to be a second variant, and we can find no copies in any of the usual databases.

Mary Barber was an Irish poet who mostly focussed on domestic themes such as marriage and children although the messages in some of her poems suggested a widening of her interests, often making cynical comments on social injustice. She was a member of fellow Irish poet Jonathan Swift’s favoured circle of writers, known as his “triumfeminate”, a select group that also included Mrs E Sican and Constantia Grierson.

She was born sometime around the year 1685 in Dublin but nothing much is known about her education or upbringing. She married a much younger man by the name of Rupert Barber and they had nine children together, although only four survived childhood. She was writing poetry initially for the benefit and education of her children but, by 1725, she had The Widow’s Address published and this was seen as an appeal on behalf of an Army officer’s widow against the social and financial difficulties that such women were facing all the time. Rather than being a simple tale for younger readers here was a biting piece of social commentary, aimed at a seemingly uncaring government.

During the 18th and early 19th centuries it was uncommon for women to become famous writers and yet Barber seemed to possess a “natural genius” where poetry was concerned which was all the more remarkable since she had no formal literary tuition to fall back on. The famous writer Jonathan Swift offered her patronage, recognising a special talent instantly. Indeed, he called her “the best Poetess of both Kingdoms” although his enthusiasm was not necessarily shared by literary critics of the time. It most certainly benefitted her having the support of fellow writers such as Elizabeth Rowe and Mary Delany, and Swift encouraged her to publish a collection in 1734 called Poems on several occasions. The book sold well, mostly by subscription to eminent persons in society and government. The quality of the writing astonished many who wondered how such a simple, sometimes “ailing Irish housewife” could have produced such work.

It took some time for Barber to attain financial stability though and her patron Swift was very much involved in her success. She could have lost his support though because, in a desperate attempt to achieve wider recognition, she wrote letters to many important people, including royalty, with Swift’s signature forged at the end. When he found out about this indiscretion he was not best pleased but he forgave her anyway.

Unfortunately poor health prevented much more coming from her pen during her later years. For over twenty years she suffered from gout and, in fact, wrote poems about the subject for a publication called the Gentleman’s Magazine. It is worth including here an extract from her poem Written for my son, at his first putting on of breeches. It is, in some ways, an apology and an explanation to a child enduring the putting on of an uncomfortable garment for the first time. She suggests in fact that many men have suffered from gout because of the requirement to wear breeches. The first verse of the poem is reproduced here:

Many of her poems were in the form of letters written to distinguished people, such as To The Right Honourable The Lady Sarah Cowper and To The Right Honourable The Lady Elizabeth Boyle On Her Birthday. These, and many more, were published in her 1755 collection Poems by Eminent Ladies. History sees her, unfortunately, as a mother writing to support her children rather than a great poet, and little lasting value has been attributed to her work.

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3) 379J BARBER, Mary 1685-1755≠

Poems on Several Occasions

London: printed [by Samuel Richardson] for C. Rivington, at the Bible and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard 1735 $2,000

First octavo edition, 1735, bound in early paper boards with later paper spine and printed spine label, pp. lxiv, 290, (14) index, title with repaired tear, very good. These poems were published the previous year in a quarto edition with a list of influential subscribers (reprinted here); this octavo edition is less common. Barber was the wife of a Dublin clothier and her publication in England was helped by Jonathan Swift, who has (along with the authoress) provided a dedication in this volume to the Earl of Orrery. Constantia Grierson, another Irish poetess, contributes a prefatory poem in praise of Mary Barber.

ESTC Citation No. T42623 ; Maslen, K. Samuel Richardson, 21.; Foxon, p.45. ;Teerink-Scouten [Swift] 747.

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4). 572G Léonore Gigault de,; O.S.B. Bellefont (Bouhours)

Les OEuvres spirituelles de Madame De Bellefont, religieuse, fondatrice & superieure du convent de Nôtre-Dame des Anges, de l’Ordre de Saint Benoist, à Roüen.Dediées à Madame La Dauphine.

A Paris : Chez Helie Josset, ruë S. Jacques, au coin de la ruë de la Parcheminerie, à la fleur de lys d’or, 1688 $2200

Octavo 6.25 x 3.6 in. a4, e8, i8, o2, A-Z8; Aa-Qq8 ; *8, **4. This copy is very clean and crisp it is bound in contemporary calf with ornately gilt spine. La vie de Madame de Bellefont”, on unnumbered pages preceding numbered text./ “Table des chapitres . . .” and “Stances” and “Paraphrases” in verse on final 24 numbered pages./ In the “Avant propos” this work is ascribed to “feüe madame Lêonore Gigault de Bellefont”, but most authorities credit Laurence Gigault de Bellefont with authorship See Sommervogel I 1908 #25

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5) 374J [ Susanna CENTLIVRE,]. 1667-1723

The gamester: A Comedy…

London. Printed for William Turner, 1705. $4,000

Quarto. [6], 70pp, [2]. First edition.Without half-title. Later half-vellum, marbled boards, contrasting black morocco lettering-piece. Extremities lightly rubbed and discoloured. Browned, some marginal worming, occasional shaving to running titles.

The first edition of playwright and actress Susanna Centlivre’s (bap. 1667?, d. 1723) convoluted gambling comedy, adapted from French dramatist Jean Francois Regnard’s (1655-1709) Le Jouer (1696). The Gamester met with tremendous success and firmly established Centlivre as a part the pantheon of celebrated seventeenth-century playwrights, yet the professional life of the female dramatist remained complicated, with many of her works, as here, being published anonymously and accompanied by a prologue implying a male author.

CENTLIVRE, English dramatic writer and actress, was born about 1667, probably in Ireland, where her father, a Lincolnshire gentleman named Freeman, had been forced to flee at the Restoration on account of his political sympathies. When sixteen she married the nephew of Sir Stephen Fox, and on his death within a year she married an officer named Carroll, who was killed in a duel. Left in poverty, she began to support herself, writing for the stage, and some of her early plays are signed S. Carroll. In 1706 she married Joseph Centlivre, chief cook to Queen Anne, who survived her.

ESTC T26860.

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An early Irish female author

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Political satire by An early Irish female author

6) 375J. Sussana Centlivre

The Gotham Election, A farce.

(London 🙂 printed and sold by S. Keimer,1715. $ 1,900

The Gotham Election, one of the first satires to tackle electioneering and bribery in eighteenth century British politics. It proved to be so controversial that, despite Centlivre’s popularity as a playwright, it was supressed from being performed during the turbulent year of 1715. Centlivre was renowned as one of the greatest female playwrights of her day, and her plays, predominately comedies, were responsible for the development of the careers of actors such as David Garrick. However, despite her popularity, she also made enemies in the literary world of the early-eighteenth century. Most notably Alexander Pope, who, in his Dunciad, referred to her as a ‘slip-shod Muse’, possibly in reference to her participation in the work The Nine Muses, which was published in 1700 to commemorate the death of John Dryden.

English Short Title Catalog, ESTCT26854

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A collection of Poems and Letters by Christian mystic and prolific writer, Jeanne-Marie Guyon published in Dublin.

7) 348J François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon 1651-1715 & Josiah Martin 1683-1747 & Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon 1648-1717

A dissertation on pure love, by the Arch-Bishop of Cambray. With an account of the life and writings of the Lady, for whose sake The Archbishop was banish’d from Court: And the grievous Persecution she suffer’d in France for her Religion. Also Two Letters in French and English, written by one of the Lady’s Maids, during her Confinement in the Castle of Vincennes, where she was Prisoner Eight Years. One of the Letters was writ with a Bit of Stick instead of a Pen, and Soot instead of Ink, to her Brother; the other to a Clergyman. Together with an apologetic preface. Containing divers letters of the Archbishop of Cambray, to the Duke of Burgundy, the present French King’s Father, and other Persons of Distinction. And divers letters of the lady to Persons of Quality, relating to her Religious Principles

Dublin : printed by Isaac Jackson, in Meath-Street, [1739]. $ 4,000

Octavo 7 3/4 x 5 inches First and only English edition. Bound in Original sheep, with a quite primitive repair to the front board.

Fenélon’s text appears to consist largely of extracts from ’Les oeuvres spirituelles’. The preface, account of Jeanne Marie Guyon etc. is compiled by Josiah Martin. The text of the letters, and poems, is in French and English. This is an Astonishing collection of letters and poems.

“JOSIAH MARTIN, (1683–1747), quaker, was born near London in 1683. He became a good classical scholar, and is spoken of by Gough, the translator of Madame Guyon’s Life, 1772, as a man whose memory is esteemed for ‘learning, humility, and fervent piety.’ He died unmarried, 18 Dec. 1747, in the parish of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and was buried in the Friends’ burial-ground, Bunhill Fields. He left the proceeds of his library of four thousand volumes to be divided among nephews and nieces. Joseph Besse [q. v.] was his executor.

Martin’s name is best known in connection with ‘A Letter from one of the People called Quakers to Francis de Voltaire, occasioned by his Remarks on that People in his Letters concerning the English Nation,’ London, 1741. It was twice reprinted, London and Dublin, and translated into French. It is a temperate and scholarly treatise, and was in much favour at the time.

Of his other works the chief are: 1. ‘A Vindication of Women’s Preaching, as well from Holy Scripture and Antient Writings as from the Paraphrase and Notes of the Judicious John Locke, wherein the Observations of B[enjamin] C[oole] on the said Paraphrase . . . and the Arguments in his Book entitled “Reflections,” &c, are fullv considered,’ London, 1717. 2. ‘The Great Case of Tithes truly stated … by Anthony Pearson [q. v.] . . . to which is added a Defence of some other Principles held by the People call’d Quakers . . .,’ London, 1730. 3. ‘A Letter concerning the Origin, Reason, and Foundation of the Law of Tithes in England,’ 1732. He also edited, with an ‘Apologetic Preface,’ comprising more than half the book, and containing many additional letters from Fénelon and Madame Guyon, ‘The Archbishop of Cambray’s Dissertation on Pure Love, with an Account of the Life and Writings of the Lady for whose sake he was banish’d from Court,’ London, 1735.

[Joseph Smith’s Catalogue of Friends’ Books; works quoted above; Life of Madame Guyon, Bristol, 1772, pt. i. errata; registers at Devonshire House; will P.C.C. 58 Strahan, at Somerset House.]

C. F. S.

Fénelon was nominated in February, 1696, Fénelon was consecrated in August of the same year by Bossuet in the chapel of Saint-Cyr. The future of the young prelate looked brilliant, when he fell into deep disgrace.

The cause of Fénelon’s trouble was his connection with Madame Guyon, whom he had met in the society of his friends, the Beauvilliers and the Chevreuses. She was a native of Orléans, which she left when about twenty-eight years old, a widowed mother of three children, to carry on a sort of apostolate of mysticism, under the direction of Père Lacombe, a Barnabite. After many journeys to Geneva, and through Provence and Italy, she set forth her ideas in two works, “Le moyen court et facile de faire oraison” and “Les torrents spirituels”. In exaggerated language characteristic of her visionary mind, she presented a system too evidently founded on the Quietism of Molinos, that had just been condemned by Innocent XI in 1687. There were, however, great divergencies between the two systems. Whereas Molinos made man’s earthly perfection consist in a state of uninterrupted contemplation and love, which would dispense the soul from all active virtue and reduce it to absolute inaction, Madame Guyon rejected with horror the dangerous conclusions of Molinos as to the cessation of the necessity of offering positive resistance to temptation. Indeed, in all her relations with Père Lacombe, as well as with Fénelon, her virtuous life was never called in doubt. Soon after her arrival in Paris she became acquainted with many pious persons of the court and in the city, among them Madame de Maintenon and the Ducs de Beauvilliers and Chevreuse, who introduced her to Fénelon. In turn, he was attracted by her piety, her lofty spirituality, the charm of her personality, and of her books. It was not long, however, before the Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was, began to unsettle the mind of Madame de Maintenon by questioning the orthodoxy of Madame Guyon’s theories. The latter, thereupon, begged to have her works submitted to an ecclesiastical commission composed of Bossuet, de Noailles, who was then Bishop of Châlons, later Archbishop of Paris, and M. Tronson; superior of-Saint-Sulpice. After an examination which lasted six months, the commission delivered its verdict in thirty-four articles known as the “Articles d’ Issy”, from the place near Paris where the commission sat. These articles, which were signed by Fénelon and the Bishop of Chartres, also by the members of the commission, condemned very briefly Madame Guyon’s ideas, and gave a short exposition of the Catholic teaching on prayer. Madame Guyon submitted to the condemnation, but her teaching spread in England, and Protestants, who have had her books reprinted have always expressed sympathy with her views. Cowper translated some of her hymns into English verse; and her autobiography was translated into English by Thomas Digby (London, 1805) and Thomas Upam (New York, 1848). Her books have been long forgotten in France.

Jeanne Marie Guyon

b. 1648, Montargis, France; d. 1717, Blois, France

A Christian mystic and prolific writer, Jeanne-Marie Guyon advocated a form of spirituality that led to conflict with authorities and incarceration. She was raised in a convent, then married off to a wealthy older man at the age of sixteen. When her husband died in 1676, she embarked on an evangelical mission to convert Protestants to her brand of spirituality, a mild form of quietism, which propounded the notion that through complete passivity (quiet) of the soul, one could become an agent of the divine. Guyon traveled to Geneva, Turin, and Grenoble with her mentor, Friar François Lacombe, at the same time producing several manuscripts: Les torrents spirituels (Spiritual Torrents); an 8,000-page commentary on the Bible; and her most important work, the Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (The Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, 1685). Her activities aroused suspicion; she was arrested in 1688 and committed to the convent of the Visitation in Paris, where she began writing an autobiography. Released within a few months, she continued proselytizing, meanwhile attracting several male disciples. In 1695, the Catholic church declared quietism heretical, and Guyon was locked up in the Bastille until 1703. Upon her release, she retired to her son’s estate in Blois. Her writings were published in forty-five volumes from 1712 to 1720.

Her writings began to be published in Holland in 1704, and brought her new admirers. Englishmen and Germans–among them Wettstein and Lord Forbes–visited her at Blois. Through them Madame Guyon’s doctrines became known among Protestants and in that soil took vigorous root. But she did not live to see this unlooked-for diffusion of her writings. She passed away at Blois, at the age of sixty-eight, protesting in her will that she died submissive to the Catholic Church, from which she had never had any intention of separating herself. Her doctrines, like her life, have nevertheless given rise to the widest divergences of opinion. Her published works (the “Moyen court” and the “Règles des assocées à l’Enfance de Jésus”) having been placed on the Index in 1688, and Fénelon’s “Maximes des saints” branded with the condemnation of both the pope and the bishops of France, the Church has thus plainly reprobated Madame Guyon’s doctrines, a reprobation which the extravagance of her language would in itself sufficiently justify. Her strange conduct brought upon her severe censures, in which she could see only manifestations of spite. Evidently, she too often fell short of due reserve and prudence; but after all that can be said in this sense, it must be acknowledged that her morality appears to have given no grounds for serious reproach. Bossuet, who was never indulgent in her regard, could say before the full assembly of the French clergy: “As to the abominations which have been held to be the result of her principles, there was never any question of the horror she testified for them.” It is remarkable, too, that her disciples at the Court of Louis XIV were always persons of great piety and of exemplary life.

On the other hand, Madame Guyon’s warmest partisans after her death were to be found among the Protestants. It was a Dutch Protestant, the pastor Poiret, who began the publication of her works; a Vaudois pietist pastor, Duthoit-Mambrini, continued it. Her “Life” was translated into English and German, and her ideas, long since forgotten in France, have for generations been in favour in Germany, Switzerland, England, and among Methodists in America. ”

P.144 misnumbered 134. Price from imprint: price a British Half-Crown. Dissertain 16p and Directions for a holy life 5p. DNB includes this in Martin’s works

Copies – Brit.Isles. : British Library, Dublin City Library, National Library of Ireland Trinity College Library

Copies – N.America. : Bates College, Harvard University, Haverford Col , Library Company of Philadelphia, Newberry, Pittsburgh Theological Princeton University, University of Illinois University of Toronto, Library

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8) 362J James FISHER and [Martha HATFIELD].

The wise virgin: or, A wonderfull narration of the various dispensations of God towards a childe of eleven years of age; wherein as his severity hath appeared in afflicting, so also his goodness both in enabling her (when stricken dumb, deaf, and blind, through the prevalency of her disease) at several times to utter many glorious truths concerning Christ, faith, and other subjects; and also in recovering her without the use of any external means, lest the glory should be given to any other. To the wonderment of many that came far and neer to see and hear her. With some observations in the fourth year since her recovery. She is the daughter of Mr. Anthony Hatfield gentleman, in Laughton in York-shire; her name is Martha Hatfield. The third edition enlarged, with some passages of her gracious conversation now in the time of health. By James Fisher, servant of Christ, and minister of the Gospel in Sheffield.

LONDON: Printed for John Rothwell, at the Fountain, in Cheap-side. 1656 $3,300 Octavo, 143 x 97 x 23 mm (binding), 139 x 94 x 18 mm (text block). A-M8, N3. Lacks A1, blank or portrait? [26], 170 pp. Bound in contemporary calf, upper board reattached, somewhat later marbled and blank ends. Leather rubbed with minor loss to extremities. Interior: Title stained, leaves soiled, gathering N browned, long vertical tear to E2 without loss, tail fore-corner of F8 torn away, with loss of a letter, side notes of B2v trimmed. This is a remarkable survival of the third edition of the popular interregnum account of Sheffield Presbyterian minister James Fisher’s 11-year-old niece Martha Hatfield’s prophetic dialogues following her recovery from a devastating catalepsy that had left her “dumb, deaf, and blind.” Mar tha’s disease, which defies modern retro-diagnostics, was at the time characterized as “spleenwinde,” a term even the Oxford English Dictionary has overlooked. Her sufferings were as variable as they were extraordinary the young girl at one point endured a 17-day fugue state during which her eyes remained open and fixed and she gnashed her teeth to the breaking point. In counterpoise to the horrors of her infirmity, her utterances in periods of remission and upon recovery were of great purity and sweetness; it is this stark contrast that was, and is, the persistent allure of this little book. The Wise Virgin appeared five times between 1653 and 1665; some editions have a portrait frontispiece, and it is entirely possible that the present third edition should have one at A1v, though the copy scanned by Early English Books Online does not. Copies located at Yale, and at Oxford (from which the EEBO copy was made). ONLY Wing F1006.

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122F Mary de la Rivière Manley 1663-1724

Secret memoirs and manners of several persons of quality of both sexes. From the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediteranean.

London: Printed for John Morphew, and J. Woodward, 1709 $4500

Octavo 7 1/2 X4 3/4 inches I. A4, B-Q8, R4. Second edition. This jewel of a book is expertly bound in antique style full paneled calf with a gilt spine. It is a lovely copy indeed.

The most important of the scandal chronicles of the early eighteenth century, a form made popular and practiced with considerable success by Mrs. Manley and Eliza Haywood.

Mrs. Manley was important in her day not only as a novelist, but as a Tory propagandist.

Her fiction “exhibited her taste for intrigue, and impudently slandered many persons of note, especially those of Whiggish proclivities.” – D.N.B. “Mrs. Manley’s scandalous ‘revelations’ appealed immediately to the prurient curiosity of her first audience ; but they continued to be read because they succeeded in providing certain satisfactions fundamental to fiction itself. In other words, the scandal novel or ‘chronicle’ of Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood was a successful form, a tested commercial pattern, because it presented an opportunity for its readers to participate vicariously in an erotically exciting and glittering fantasy world of aristocratic corruption and promiscuity.” – Richetti, Popular Fiction before Richardson.

The story concerns the return to earth of the goddess of justice, Astrea, to gather information about private and public behavior on the island of Atalantis. Delarivier Manley drew on her own experiences as well as on an obsessive observation of her milieu to produce this fast-paced narrative of political and erotic intrigue. New Atalantis (1709) is an early and influential example of satirical political writing by a woman. It was suppressed on the grounds of its scandalous nature and Manley (1663-1724) was arrested and tried. Astrea [Justice] descends on the island of Atalantis, meets her mother Virtue, who tries to escape this world of »Interest« in which even the lovers have deserted her. Both visit Angela [London]. Lady Intelligence comments on all stories of interest. p.107: the sequel of »Histories« turns into the old type of satire with numerous scandals just being mentioned (e.g. short remarks on visitors of a horse race or coaches in the Prado [Hyde-Park]). The stories are leveled against leading Whig politicians – they seduce and ruin women. Yet detailed analysis of situations and considerations on actions which could be taken by potential victims. Even the weakest female victims get their chances to win (and gain decent marriages) the more desperate we are about strategic mistakes and a loss of virtue which prevents the heroines from taking the necessary steps. The stories have been praised for their »warmth« and breathtaking turns.

Manley was taken into custody nine days after the publication of the second volume of Secret Memories and Manners of several Persons of Quality of Both Sexes, from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean on 29 October 1709. Manley apparently surrendered herself after a secretary John Morphew and John Woodward and printer John Barber had been detained. Four days later the latter were discharged, but Manley remained in custody until 5 November when she was released on bail. After several continuations of the case, she was tried and discharged on 13 February 1710. Rivella provides the only account of the case itself in which Manley claims she defended herself on grounds that her information came by ‘inspiration’ and rebuked her judges for bringing ‘w woman to her trial for writing a few amorous trifles’ (pp. 110-11). This and the first volume which appeared in May 1709 were Romans a clef with separately printed keys. Each offered a succession of narratives of seduction and betrayal by notorious Whig grandees to Astrea, an allegorical figure of justice, by largely female narrators, including an allegorical figure of Intelligence and a midwife. In Rivella, Manley claims that her trial led her to conclude that ‘politics is not the business of a woman’ (p. 112) and that thereafter she turned exclusively to stories of love.

Delarivier Manley was in her day as well-known and potent a political satirist as her friend and co-editor Jonathan Swift. A fervent Tory, Manley skilfully interweaves sexual and political allegory in the tradition of the roman a clef in an acerbic vilification of her Whig opponents. The book’s publication in 1709 – fittingly the year of the collapse of the Whig ministry – caused a scandal which led to the arrest of the author, publisher and printer.

The book exposed the relationship of Queen Anne and one of her advisers, Sarah Churchill. Along with this, Manley’s piece examined the idea of female intimacy and its implications. The implications of female intimacy are important to Manley because of the many rumours of the influence that Churchill held over Queen Anne. ESTC T075114; McBurney 45a; Morgan 459.

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9) 103gPhilips, Katherine.1631-1664

Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus

London: printed by W.B. for Bernard Lintott, 1705 $5,500

Octavo,6.75 X 3.75 inches. First edition A-R8 Bound in original calf totally un-restored a very nice original condition copy with only some browning, spotting and damp staining, It is a very good copy.

It is housed in a custom Box.

10) 376J Mary Pix 1666-1720

The conquest of Spain: a tragedy. As it is Acted by Her Majesty’s Servants at the Queen’s Theatre In the Hay-Market

London : printed for Richard Wellington, at the Dolphin and Crown in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1705. $4,500

Quarto [A]-K4. First Edition . (Anonymous. By Mary Pix. Adapted from “All’s lost by lust”, by William Rowley)

Inspired by Aphra Behn, Mary Pix was among the most popular playwrights on the 17th-century theatre circuit, but fell out of fashion.

“It is so rare to find a play from that period that’s powered by a funny female protagonist. I was immensely surprised by the brilliance of the writing. It is witty and forthright. Pix was writing plays that not only had more women in the cast than men but women who were managing their destinies.”

Pix was born in 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London, and grew up in the culturally rich time of Charles II. With the prolific Aphra Behn (1640-1689) as her role model, Pix burst on to the London theatre and literary scene in 1696 with two plays – one a tragedy: Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks, the other a farce – The Spanish Wives. Pix also wrote a novel – The Inhuman Cardinal.

Her subsequent plays, mostly comedies, became a staple in the repertory of Thomas Betterton’s company Duke’s at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and later at the Queen’s Theatre. She wrote primarily for particular actors, such as Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, who were hugely popular and encouraged a whole generation of women writers.

In a patriarchal world dominated by self-important men, making a mark as a woman was an uphill struggle. “There was resistance to all achieving women in the 18th century, a lot of huffing and puffing by overbearing male chauvinists,” says Bush-Bailey.

“Luckily for Pix and the other women playwrights of that time, the leading actresses were powerful and influential. I think it was they who mentored people such as Pix and Congreve.”

Davies believes the women playwrights of the 1700s – Susanna Centlivre, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Delarivier Manley and Hannah Cowley – “unquestionably” held their own against the men who would put them down. “What’s difficult is that they were attacked for daring to write plays at all,” she says.

One of the most blatant examples of male hostility came in the form of an anonymously written parody entitled The Female Wits in 1696, in which Mary Pix was caricatured as “Mrs Wellfed, a fat female author, a sociable, well-natur’d companion that will not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers [alcoholic drinks] in a hand”.

While Pix’s sociability and taste for good food and wine was common knowledge, she was known to be a universally popular member of the London literary and theatrical circuit.

“The Female Wits was probably written, with malice, by George Powell of the Drury Lane Company,” says Bush-Bailey. “It was a cheap, satirical jibe at the successful women playwrights of the time, making out they were all bitching behind each others’ backs. So far as one can tell, it was just spiteful and scurrilous.”

Mary Pix (1666 – 17 May 1709) was an English novelist and playwright. As an admirer of Aphra Behn and colleague of Susanna Centlivre, Pix has been called “a link between women writers of the Restoration and Augustan periods”.

The Dramatis personae from a 1699 edition of Pix’s The False Friend.

Mary Griffith Pix was born in 1666, the daughter of a rector, musician and Headmaster of the Royal Latin School, Buckingham, Buckinghamshire; her father, Roger Griffith, died when she was very young, but Mary and her mother continued to live in the schoolhouse after his death. She was courted by her father’s successor Thomas Dalby, but he left with the outbreak of smallpox in town, just one year after the mysterious fire that burned the schoolhouse. Rumour had it that Mary and Dalby had been making love rather energetically and overturned a candle which set fire to the bedroom.

In 1684, at the age of 18, Mary Griffith married George Pix (a merchant tailor from Hawkhurst, Kent). The couple moved to his country estate in Kent. Her first son, George (b. 1689), died very young in 1690.[3] The next year the couple moved to London and she gave birth to another son, William (b. 1691).

In 1696, when Pix was thirty years old, she first emerged as a professional writer, publishing The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betrayed, her first and only novel, as well as two plays, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks and The Spanish Wives.

Though from quite different backgrounds, Pix quickly became associated with two other playwrights who emerged in the same year: Delariviere Manley and Catherine Trotter. The three female playwrights attained enough public success that they were criticised in the form of an anonymous satirical play The Female Wits (1696). Mary Pix appears as “Mrs. Wellfed one that represents a fat, female author. A good rather sociable, well-matured companion that would not suffer martyrdom rather than take off three bumpers in a hand”.[4] She is depicted as an ignorant woman, though amiable and unpretentious. Pix is summarised as “foolish and openhearted”.

Her first play was put on stage in 1696 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, near her house in London but when that same theatrical company performed The Female Wits, she moved to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They said of her that “she has boldly given us an essay of her talent … and not without success, though with little profit to herself”. (Morgan, 1991: xii).

In the season of 1697–1698, Pix became involved in a plagiarism scandal with George Powell. Powell was a rival playwright and the manager of the Drury Lane theatrical company. Pix sent her play, The Deceiver Deceived to Powell’s company, as a possible drama for them to perform. Powell rejected the play but kept the manuscript and then proceeded to write and perform a play called The Imposture Defeated, which had a plot and main character taken directly from The Deceiver Deceived. In the following public backlash, Pix accused Powell of stealing her work and Powell claimed that instead he and Pix had both drawn their plays from the same source material, an unnamed novel. In 1698, an anonymous writer, now believed to be Powell, published a letter called “To the Ingenious Mr. _____.” which attacked Pix and her fellow female playwright Trotter. The letter attempted to malign Pix on various issues, such as her spelling and presumption in publishing her writing. Though Pix’s public reputation was not damaged and she continued writing after the plagiarism scandal, she stopped putting her name on her work and after 1699 she only included her name on one play, in spite of the fact that she is believed to have written at least seven more. Scholars still discuss the attribution of plays to Pix, notably whether or not she wrote Zelmane; or, The Corinthian Queen (1705).

In May 1707 Pix published A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Lords Commissioners for the Union of the Two Kingdoms. This would be her final appearance in print. She died two years later.

Few of the female playwrights of Mary Pix’s time came from a theatrical background and none came from the aristocracy: within a century, most successful actresses and female authors came from a familiar tradition of literature and theatre but Mary Pix and her contemporaries were from outside this world and had little in common with one another apart from a love for literature and a middle-class background.

At the time of Mary Pix, “The ideal of the one-breadwinner family had not yet become dominant”, whereas in 18th-century families it was normal for the woman to stay at home taking care of the children, house and servants, in Restoration England husband and wife worked together in familiar enterprises that sustained them both and female playwrights earned the same wage as their male counterparts.

Morgan also points out that “till the close of the period, authorship was not generally advertised on playbills, nor always proclaimed when plays were printed”, which made it easier for female authors to hide their identity so as to be more easily accepted among the most conservative audiences.

As Morgan states, “plays were valued according to how they performed and not by who wrote them. When authorship ―female or otherwise― remained a matter of passing interest, female playwrights were in an open and equal market with their male colleagues”.

Pix’s plays were very successful among contemporary audiences. Each play ran for at least four to five nights and some were even brought back for additional shows years later.[10] Her tragedies were quite popular, because she managed to mix extreme action with melting love scenes. Many critics believed that Pix’s best pieces were her comedies. Pix’s comedic work was lively and full of double plots, intrigue, confusion, songs, dances and humorous disguise. An Encyclopaedia of British Women Writers (1998) points out that

Forced or unhappy marriages appear frequently and prominently in the comedies. Pix is not, however, writing polemics against the forced marriage but using it as a plot device and sentimentalizing the unhappily married person, who is sometimes rescued and married more satisfactorily.”(Schlueter & Schlueter, 1998: 513)

Although some contemporary women writers, like Aphra Behn, have been rediscovered, even the most specialised scholars have little knowledge of works by writers such as Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley or Mary Pix, despite the fact that plays like The Beau Defeated (1700), present with a wider range of female characters than plays written by men at the time. Pix’s plays generally had eight or nine female roles, while plays by male writers only had two or three.[

A production of The Fantastic Follies of Mrs Rich (or The Beau Defeated) played as part of the 2018 season at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Pix produced one novel and seven plays. There are four other plays that were published anonymously, that are generally attributed to her.

Melinda Finberg notes that “a frequent motif in all her works is sexual violence and female victimization” – be that rape or murder (in the tragedies) or forcible confinement or the threat of rape (in the comedies).

^ Kramer, Annette (June 1994). “Mary Pix’s Nebulous Relationship to Zelmane”. Notes and Queries. 41 (2): 186–187. doi:10.1093/nq/41-2-186

PIX, Mrs. MARY (1666–1720?), dramatist, born in 1666 at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, was daughter of the Rev. Roger Griffith, vicar of that place. Her mother, whose maiden name was Lucy Berriman, claimed descent from the ‘very considerable family of the Wallis’s.’ In the dedication of ‘The Spanish Wives’ Mrs. Pix speaks of meeting Colonel Tipping ‘at Soundess,’ or Soundness. This house, which was close to Nettlebed, was the property of John Wallis, eldest son of the mathematician. Mary Griffith’s father died before 1684, and on 24 July in that year she married in London, at St. Saviour’s, Benetfink, George Pix (b. 1660), a merchant tailor of St. Augustine’s parish. His family was connected with Hawkhurst, Kent. By him she had one child, who was buried at Hawkhurst in 1690.

It was in 1696, in which year Colley Cibber, Mrs. Manley, Catharine Cockburn (Mrs. Trotter), and Lord Lansdowne also made their débuts, that Mrs. Pix first came into public notice. She produced at Dorset Garden, and then printed, a blank-verse tragedy of ‘Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks.’ When it was too late, she discovered that she should have written ‘Ibrahim the Twelfth.’ This play she dedicated to the Hon. Richard Minchall of Bourton, a neighbour of her country days. In the same year (1696) Mary Pix published a novel, ‘The Inhuman Cardinal,’ and a farce, ‘The Spanish Wives,’ which had enjoyed a very considerable success at Dorset Garden.

From this point she devoted herself to dramatic authorship with more activity than had been shown before her time by any woman except Mrs. Afra Behn [q. v.] In 1697 she produced at Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and then published, a comedy of ‘The Innocent Mistress.’ This play, which was very successful, shows the influence of Congreve upon the author, and is the most readable of her productions. The prologue and epilogue were written by Peter Anthony Motteux [q. v.] It was followed the next year by ‘The Deceiver Deceived,’ a comedy which failed, and which involved the poetess in a quarrel. She accused George Powell [q. v.], the actor, of having seen the manuscript of her play, and of having stolen from it in his ‘Imposture Defeated.’ On 8 Sept. 1698 an anonymous ‘Letter to Mr. Congreve’ was published in the interests of Powell, from which it would seem that Congreve had by this time taken Mary Pix under his protection, with Mrs. Trotter, and was to be seen ‘very gravely with his hat over his eyes … together with the two she-things called Poetesses’ (see GOSSE, Life of Congreve, pp. 123–5). Her next play was a tragedy of ‘Queen Catharine,’ brought out at Lincoln’s Inn, and published in 1698. Mrs. Trotter wrote the epilogue. In her own prologue Mary Pix pays a warm tribute to Shakespeare. ‘The False Friend’ followed, at the same house, in 1699; the title of this comedy was borrowed three years later by Vanbrugh.

Hitherto Mary Pix had been careful to put her name on her title-pages or dedications; but the comedy of ‘The Beau Defeated’—undated, but published in 1700—though anonymous, is certainly hers. In 1701 she produced a tragedy of ‘The Double Distress.’ Two more plays have been attributed to Mary Pix by Downes. One of these is ‘The Conquest of Spain,’ an adaptation from Rowley’s ‘All’s lost by Lust,’ which was brought out at the Queen’s theatre in the Haymarket, ran for six nights, and was printed anonymously in 1705 (DOWNE, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 48). Finally, the comedy of the ‘Adventures in Madrid’ was acted at the same house with Mrs. Bracegirdle in the cast, and printed anonymously and without date. It has been attributed by the historians of the drama to 1709; but a copy in the possession of the present writer has a manuscript note of date of publication ‘10 August 1706.’

Nearly all our personal impression of Mary Pix is obtained from a dramatic satire entitled ‘The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate of Poets.’ This was acted at Drury Lane Theatre about 1697, but apparently not printed until 1704, after the death of the author, Mr. W. M. It was directed at the three women who had just come forward as competitors for dramatic honours—Mrs. Pix, Mrs. Manley, and Mrs. Trotter [see Cockburn, Catharine]. Mrs. Pix, who is described as ‘a fat Female Author, a good, sociable, well-natur’d Companion, that will not suffer Martyrdom rather than take off three Bumpers in a Hand,’ was travestied by Mrs. Powell under the name of ‘Mrs. Wellfed.’

The style of Mrs. Pix confirms the statements of her contemporaries that though, as she says in the dedication of the ‘Spanish Wives,’ she had had an inclination to poetry from childhood, she was without learning of any sort. She is described as ‘foolish and open-hearted,’ and as being ‘big enough to be the Mother of the Muses.’ Her fatness and her love of good wine were matters of notoriety. Her comedies, though coarse, are far more decent than those of Mrs. Behn, and her comic bustle of dialogue is sometimes entertaining. Her tragedies are intolerable. She had not the most superficial idea of the way in which blank verse should be written, pompous prose, broken irregularly into lengths, being her ideal of versification.

The writings of Mary Pix were not collected in her own age, nor have they been reprinted since. Several of them have become exceedingly rare. An anonymous tragedy, ‘The Czar of Muscovy,’ published in 1702, a week after her play of ‘The Double Distress,’ has found its way into lists of her writings, but there is no evidence identifying it with her in any way. She was, however, the author of ‘Violenta, or the Rewards of Virtue, turn’d from Bocacce into Verse,’ 1704.

[Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, 2nd ser. v. 110–3; Vicar-General’s Marriage Licences (Harl. Soc.), 1679–87, p. 173; Baker’s Biogr. Dramatica; Doran’s Annals of the English Stage, i. 243; Mrs. Pix’s works; Genest’s Hist. Account of the Stage.].

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11) 296J Mademoiselle Madeleine de Scudéri (1607-1701) A triumphant arch erected and consecrated to the glory of the feminine sexe: by Monsieur de Scudery: Englished by I.B. gent.London : printed for William Hope, and Henry Herringman, at the blew Anchor behind the Old Exchange, and at the blew Anchor in the lower walk in the New Exchange, 1656. $1,300

Octavo A4 (lacking a1&a4) B-P8 Q3 (A1 blank?). Title in red and black; title vignette (motto: “Dum spiro spero”) First edition,Authorship ascribed to Madeleine de Scudéry by Brunet; according to other authorities the work was written by both Georges de Scudéry and his sister. This copy is lacking A1 &a4 index f., titled holed, browned and with marginal repairs (without loss), stained, lightly browned, corners worn, rubbed, contemporary sheep, rebacked,Very rare on the market the last copy I could find at auction was in 1967 ($420)Scudéry was the most popular novelist in her time, read in French in volume installments all over Europe and translated into English, German, Italian, and even Arabic. But she was also a charismatic figure in French salon culture, a woman who supported herself through her writing and defended women’s education .Scudéry’s role as a model for women writers and for women’s education has also been an important topic of recent criticism. Critics including Jane Donaworth and Patricia Hannon have discussed her as an important influence on later women authors and even as a proto-feminist. Helen Osterman Borowitz has attempted to draw direct connections between Scudéry and the great French novelist Germaine de Staël. Critics have long acknowledged, however, that Scudéry was not only an influence on women novelists. Some have suggested that she also opened up new political possibilities. For example, Leonard Hinds has claimed that the collaborative model of authorship that existed in the salons was also a model for an alternative to absolutism, while Joan DeJean has suggested that her work can be seen as a response to political events of her age.In 1641 Madeleine published her first novel, Ibrahim ou l’illustre Bassa, under her brother’s name. This practice of using the name of her brother as her pseudonymous signature was one that she continued for most of her prolific career as a writer, despite the fact that her own authorship was openly acknowledged in the gazettes, memoirs, and letters of the time. Although the precise nature of his contributions is uncertain, Georges did clearly collaborate to some extent with his sister in the writing of her novels, and he wrote the prefaces to several of her books.

She won the first prize for eloquence awarded by the Académie Française (1671), but was barred from membership. Several academicians had attempted to lift the ban against women so that she could join their ranks, to no avail. Although her own authorship was widely acknowledged at the time, she used the name of her brother, Georges de Scudéry, as a pseudonymous signature throughout her career (Dejean)

Wing (2nd ed.), S2163 ,Thomason, E.1604[4]

Scudéry, Madeleine de. Selected Letters, Orations and Rhetorical Dialogues. Ed. and trans. Jane Donawerth and Julie Strongson. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8.

John Conley, “Madeleine de Scudéry,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/madeleine-scudery/.

Joan Dejean. Scudéry, Madeleine de (1608-1701). The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French (Oxford University Press 1995, 2005).

“Scudéry, Madeleine De (1607–1701).” Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. . Encyclopedia.com. 11 Apr. 2019

)§(§)§(

12) 323J Madeleine Vigneron (1628-1667)

La vie et la conduite spirituelle de Mademoiselle M. Vigneron. Suivant les mémoires qu’elle en a laissez par l’ordre de son directeur (M. Bourdin). [Arranged and edited by him.].

Paris: Chez Pierre de Launay, 1689. $3,200

Octavo 7 x 4 3/4 inches ã8 e8 A-2R8 (2R8 blank). Second and preferred edition first published in 1679. This copy is bound in contemporary brown calf, five raised bands on spine, gilt floral tools in the compartments, second compartment titled in gilt; corners and spine extremities worn; three old joint repairs; on the front binder’s blank is an early ownership four-line inscription in French dated 1704, of

Sister Monique Vanden Heuvel, at the priory of Sion de Vilvoorde (Belgium).

Overall a fine copy.

This is the stirring journal that Madeleine Vigneron , member of the Third Order of the Minims of St. Francis of Paola, she began to keep it in 1653 and continued until her premature death, (1667) It was first published in 1679 and again in the present second, and final, edition which is more complete than the first. Added are Madeleine’s series of 78 letters representing her spiritual correspondence.IMG_1410

In these autobiographical writings, which were collected and published by her Director, the Minim Matthieu Bourdin, Madeleine speaks of the illnesses that plagued her since childhood and greatly handicapped her throughout a life that she dedicated to God by caring for the poor. She received admirable lights on the divinity and humanity of Jesus Christ, on the mysteries of the spiritual life. The hagiographers have remarked her austerity, her patience, her insatiable desire to suffer for God. Those who knew her perceived in her a virtuous life that impressed them.

This is a very rare book: the combined resources of NUC and OCLC locate only one copy in America, at the University of Dayton which also holds the only American copy of the 1679 edition.

§ Cioranescu 66466 (the 1679 edition).

checklist of early modern writings by nuns

Carr, Thomas M., “A Checklist of Published Writings in French by Early Modern Nuns” (2007). French Language and Literature Papers. 52.

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End

Updated! A Dozen Early Modern Books by Women Author INDEX J.B. 346J Mary Barber 377J Mary Barber Madam De Bellefont 572G Susanna Centlivre 347J…

#female wits #Irish women #Nuns

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jessicakehoe · 6 years ago

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From the FASHION Archives: Karl, Before Chanel

Since its launch in 1977, FASHION magazine has been giving Canadian readers in-depth reports on the industry’s most influential figures and expert takes on the worlds of fashion, beauty and style. In this series, we explore the depths of our archive to bring you some of the best fashion features we’ve ever published. This story, originally titled “The Eccentric Luxe of Karl Lagerfeld” by Marci McDonald was originally published in FASHION’s Winter 1978 issue.

It was Karl Lagerfeld’s idea to throw the party at his house. “I thought it would be more personal,” he says. Six hundred of his most intimate friends were greeted at the doorway by liveried footmen in white wigs and blue-satin breeches brandishing gigantic silver candelabra. By the light of more than a thousand flickering tapers, they were led into his ivory-and-gilt 18th-century salons, large enough to hold a small gymkhana, only to confront buffer tables recreated to match Marie Antoinette’s finest. Three-tiered pièces montées, threatening to graze the ceiling frescoes, spilled over with foie-gras-trimmed dolphins and peacock-shaped saddles of lamb. The sweet table featured a 50-foot meringue fountain cascading petits fours and crowned by four life-sized jeweled sugar swans spouting green syrup water. Jean Seberg, his next door neighbour, came and declared it marvelous. Paloma Picasso, whose marriage to a penniless Argentinian playwright in Lagerfeld’s heart-shaped red-taffeta wedding dress had rivaled Princess Caroline’s as the social event of the season, remarked that it was “very Karl.” Only the host, looking a slightly dressier version of his usual cross between Count Dracula and Louis XVI, seemed to have any reservations, confiding later that he wished it all hadn’t been at the expense of promoting his new men’s perfume, instead of the simple little gathering of near and dear as he preferred to think of it. “Little do people know I lead such studious, down-to-earth life,” he sighs. “To be a celebrity – it’s very demanding. But I am my image, I’m afraid.”

The image perches on a folding plexiglass chair in the fading afternoon light that invades the two-floor Chloé empire just off Paris’ fashionable rue de la Boétie and peers out at the world through rose-colored glasses. He used to favor smoky lenses, but finds things vastly improved since the change. “Everybody looks 10 years younger,” he says. Not that everything Karl Lagerfeld lays eyes on now meets his approval. “Ugly, ugly, ugly,” he dismisses the better part of the universe – a condemnation second only to “borrowing.” Offices are boring, as are desks and “fixed points” – which leaves the Chloé staff swirling around him among racks of tweed and sequins in apparent casual mayhem. Most of the clothes in which the hoi poloi parade outside his windows are boring, and frequently ugly as well. Neither sin, however, can be attributed to his image, which on this particular day consists of the usual: black smock emblazoned with a six-inch monogram, one of the hundred handmade shirts he orders annually from Hilditch and Key, shirtmakers to the Shah of Iran, which requires him to have custom-built luggage in order to preserve their starched stand-up collars, and, at his throat, a flowing black-silk bow. His greying shoulder-length tresses are pulled back into a ribbon, his complexion so pale that in certain lights it appears freshly powdered.

It is not an image that the casual bystander might associate with the semi-annual outbursts of witty sophistication and romantic chic that have come to characterize Karl Lagerfeld’s contributions to those feverish April and October follies known as Paris’ prêt-à-porter collections. But on reflection, it is nothing if not appropriate. While not everyone might be prepared to go around done up as he does, it is also true that not everybody can wear a Chloé.

In the 10 years since he has emerged as one of France’s trend-setting fashion triumvirate along with close friends Kenzo Takada and Yves Saint Laurent, his name has become synonymous with a look of rarefied elegance and eccentric luxe that makes him closer to the grand style of haute couture than any other ready-to-wear designer. Wherever two or more of the relentlessly à la mode are gathered, there is bound to be a slither of cleverly constructed silk by Karl Lagerfeld. The press has hailed him as one of today’s most influential stylists but, in fact, the sphere of his influence is limited. While Saint Laurent has set the silhouette for two decades of dressing and Kenzo has cut the pattern for almost every trend that has filtered down to the streets, Karl Lagerfeld has fashioned a unique niche for himself – not copied by the masses, but not ignored either; a label more applauded than pirated; a name that has come to mean class by itself. Buyers tend to swoon over his showings, which have twice inspired the shrewd Martha Phillips of Martha, Palm Beach and New York, to exit rhapsodizing that they were “like a beautiful song.”

But the music to her ears may have been the cash register bearing witness to the fact that, beneath Lagerfeld’s outlandish exterior, there lurks the canny commercial intelligence that has managed to create not only what the ads unabashedly call “the world’s most beautiful clothes,” but also some of the most wearable. Bianca Jagger, the Baroness Olympia de Rothschild and Margaret Trudeau all number Chloés in their closets, as – much to Karl Lagerfeld’s astonishment – did did his ailing mother’s private nurse. “She kept turning up in all these dresses of mine,” he says, tinted shades only half-betraying the intimation that there are, after all, limits to the democratization of prêt-à-porter. Discreet inquiries, however, finally assured him that the Chloés hovering at the bedside came of impeccable lineage – castoffs from a former patient’s wife named Jacqueline Onassis.

The tiny ready-to-wear house that he signed on with 14 years ago now boasts 11 boutiques and 95 outlets in the world’s toniest fashion emporiums under his signature, chalking up $9 million in wholesale clothing sales last year alone – triple the business of three years ago. If the growth rate is just short of phenomenal, it is no accident. Today, ethnic and organic are stunningly out and the fashion tyrannies of the crunchy granola set are going down to the yawns. In a year when the blue jean has resurfaced in gloriously co-opted little $300 leather versions and glitz has become de rigueur, it may not be entirely coincidental that the designer of the hour is an exotic of rare plumage whose idea of getting back to basics was once to show tennis shoes with chiffon ball-gowns and T-shirts of crepe de Chine. “Today, fashion is not made in the streets as much as it was in the early ‘70s,” he says, the relief clearly evident in his voice. “Now there’s a new sophistication that has nothing to do with the streets – in fact, it may not even reach them.”

Certainly, the pavement was not what he seemed to have in mind when creating his fall collection. An androgynous stray from a Cabaret set, in black chesterfield coat and top hat, waltzed down the runway and opened prison gates to release his latest inspirations: hip-hugging petal-hem skirts blossoming over stiletto heels, lamé tunic dresses afloat over skin-tight black-satin pants and tiny bellboy hats perched on the forehead, all topped off by mammoth fake jewels that dripped from tweed lapels like relics from a chandelier disaster. They were droll, they were outrageous, and the fashion press promptly went into delirium, demanding to know their meaning. “Why, they don’t mean anything – they’re just fun,” said Karl Lagerfeld, only surprised that anyone would ask. Relevance, significance – he waves them off as only slightly more boring than inquiries into the origins of his image. “Who knows where it came from,” he shrugs. “It was just there.”

For those inclined to favor the environmental theory of character formation, it was not perhaps a childhood designed to produce the average citizen. Born in 1938 in the heart of Hitler’s Germany, Karl Lagerfeld cannot recall ever growing up aware that there was some international unpleasantness going on. Life continued as usual at the château in the countryside outside Hamburg, where he found himself the last child of the last marriages of two not entirely typical members of Third Reich gentry. His father, a canned-milk tycoon with an inclination for marrying, was 60 at his birth. His mother, who had worn a Paul Poiret gown for her first wedding and a Vionnet for her second, favored Lanvin for the war. Their offspring passed his time reading her back issues of La Gazette du Bon Ton, sketching her wardrobe and changing clothes three times daily. “Already, I hated open shirts,” he said. “I had collars up to here, bows and ties, even hats. I was a fashion freak. Even as a child, I was overdressed.”

He does remember a parade of rather curious people showing up at the château who later turned out to be war refugees, but the memory concerns him only insomuch as one of them tortured him in French – a language he could speak with devoted fluency from his sixth birthday. When he was 12, his mother took his drawings to the director of a Hamburg art school who refused him admittance, declaring, “This boy is not interested in art. He’s interested in costume.” At 14, he begged to be allowed to finish high school in France, pointing out that he had, after all, immigrated in spirit. His arrival by train at the Gare du Nord did not disappoint him – it was dirty, it was decadent, and it was gloriously Paris, the city where he has lived ever since. Boarding school, however, was another matter – crowded and cloying. “In those days, if you were the slightest bit out of the ordinary, you were considered and eccentric,” he says. “I wanted to be alone.”

He won permission to rent an apartment on his own to prepare for his bacclauréat exams, provided that his father’s minions could keep an eye on him. When the other eye was closed, he secretly entered the International Wool Competition fashion contest for amateurs. He was just past his 16th birthday when his sketch of a little wool coat captured first prize and he was catapulted into a career that over the next 23 years was in many ways to mirror the progress of fashion itself.

The year was 1955 – mid-point in the heavy heyday of haute couture’s resuscitation by a one-time designer’s assistant named Christian Dior, who had opened his salons during the liberation sweep-up in 1947 with what he called the New Look, and was promptly hailed as the man who had saved Paris. Each July and January the world hung on his prophecies for hem lengths and hair lengths, while names like Jacques Fath, Pierre Balmain, Cristobel Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy were lesser stars who revolved around his headlines’ pivotal glare. In 1955, the press was in its usual uproar over Dior’s newest look, the A-line, and did not pay particular attention to the International Wool Competition fashion contest which two teenagers had just won: Karl Lagerfeld in the coat category and, in the dress category, a gangling blond 19-year-old who was to become one of Lagerfeld’s closest friends and two years later, Dior’s heir – Yves Saint Laurent.

While Dior plucked Saint Laurent out of the contest to become his dauphin, Balmain, one of the judges, sometimes known as the “couturier of queens,” offered Lagerfeld a stylist’s job. He worked with Balmain for three months before he had the courage to break the news to his parents, and stayed three years. He failed to meet any queens, but did help dress Anita Ekberg, Vivien Leigh, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and even Bardot, although in retrospect he cherishes no fond memories. “Pierre Balmain was very teacherlike,” he says. “But the whole atmosphere with models and all was very borellolike. I just thought it was not chic at all.” Bored, he toyed with the thought of going back to school, when a job offer as art director at the venerable couture house of Jean Patou saved him – but in the end, only for more boredom. “Twice a year, I turned out 50 dresses,” he says. “It wasn’t enough for me. I spent the rest of my life at nightclubs, on beaches, at parties. It was empty, completely empty. When I think about it today, it was really the most boring and stupid time of my life.” After five years, he dropped out of couture altogether, the bloom rubbed thin on the boyhood dream. “I didn’t like the atmosphere. You waited there for your private clients, then you flattered them so they’d keep coming back. But they were just boring. Uglies – all uglies. Today there are 50 girls in the street who look better than the women who wear haute couture. I didn’t like what Balenciaga was doing. I didn’t like what Chanel was doing – all those little suits – maybe because I saw so many ugly copies on so many ugly women.”

At 25, he decided to devote himself to a life of the mind, but found that finishing his high school diploma did not always provide sufficient inspiration to get up in the morning, nor even in the afternoon. A year of more parties. And more boredom. “Then suddenly I realized work was the most important thing in my life, more important than all the rest of that stuff. I knew couture was finished. But something was changing.”

It was 1964, two years before Saint Laurent descended from his haute-couture shrine on the right bank to set up a Left bank boutique for the vast unwashed, making mass retailing respectable. The Paris ready-to-wear industry was still a slightly disreputable collection of pirates devoted to churning out bargain-rate couturier rip-offs, thanks to the advances in mass production and manmade fabrics with such odd names as Orlon, rayon and Terylene. The idea of men’s fashion had become fashionable, and teenagers with fat disposable dispentions from daddy had created a new market that British upstarts like Mary Quant were blithely capitalizing on with the miniskirt.

But in Paris the only rustlings of a change in the wind were cries of indignation going up from the couturier salons. “Paris has lost its leadership,” fussed Pierre Cardin, while Courrèges fumed that, “I, for one, won’t stand for it,” though what he intended to do nobody had the slightest idea. Among the mass-market outlets, however, there was one tiny house called Chloé, owned by a former financier named Jacques Lenoir, which had delusions of grander things under a young designer named Gérard Pipart. When Pipart was hired away by the couture house of Nina Ricci, Lenoir regarding it as such a disaster that he replaced him with four newcomers – names like Graziella Fontana, Tan Guidicelli, Christine Baille and Karl Lagerfeld – and decided to let them fight it out.

“It was very inspirational,” Lenoir says. “They were like phagocytes in the blood, where the one eats the other. Karl learned a lot from the others, but when it came to competition, he always came out on top. He was stronger, he had more force of personality.”

Indeed, the strength is almost physically tangible when you meet Lagerfeld in person, the image only half concealing a surprisingly solid man with large fleshy hands who looks as if, should the need arise, he could arm-wrestle the ugly or boring to the ground. The sensuous mouth has a capacity for the brutal as it echoes its staccato bulletins in four languages, mingling high camp, high bitchery and exquisite manners with penetrating analyses of the most pragmatic sort. He is briskly efficient, sardonically high-charged – transformed from the languorous wunderkind who once could barely struggle into Patou by 3 p.m. and devoted whole evenings to pondering the meaning of life. But then, he had finally found it, at least for himself. The discovery released so much energy that he designed not only for Chloé, but whipped off freelance work for Charles Jourdan shoes and Fendi furs, along with a band of such other young free spirits as Kenzo and Sonia Rykiel, who were invading the transformed landscape of ready-to-wear.

“I did everything,” he says. “It was very tiring, but very amusing, too – getting up early to take trains to go to the factories, taking planes here and there. It was the best way to learn, because I had never gone to fashion school. And nobody had done it before. We were a little community of pioneers.”

Within 10 years, the little community of pioneers had left haute couture languishing in charming oblivion. Their rambunctious April and October showing stole the thunder – and the crowds – from the ancient rituals in mirrored salons where the faithful perched on little gold chairs. Prêt-à-porter began to hand down the prophecies for the world’s closets, and just as promptly to fill them up, inspiring its own cut-rate copiers, while its brash young stars eclipsed the old names in an entirely new firmament of fashion. No longer did a woman dress under one label. The new rule was that there were no rules and there were as many styles as there were brash young upstarts with chutzpah and scissors.

By 1974, the process of Darwinian selection had left only Karl Lagerfeld at Chloé, where he was offered an exclusive contract and, in tribute to his stardom, his own perfume. He chose a sweet, heavy, old-worldly scent in keeping with his image. “At the time, everything was light, green, duty-free as I call it,” he sniffs. “It set a new trend.” Elizabeth Arden, who holds the franchise, now sells $11 million worth of liquid Chloé a year. Having just launched a men’s cologne, Lagerfeld is already at work on a second feminine fragrance scheduled for 1980 unbottling – “something quite eccentric, I think.” Discussions are also underway for makeup and a men’s line, although he refuses to design for children and linen closets. “One day your name cannot be used any more – only for toilet paper.”

His place in posterity assured, he now looks down from the heights of chic to observe his former conferes of haute couture – like Marc Bohan of Dior – with charity. “Boring – they’re only allowed to do boring things. Of course, they’re only employees. Sleeping beauties, I call them.” He does not resent the phenomenal success of Saint Laurent who has outstripped him even in the prêt-à-porter arena, and they continue to be the closest of friends. “Yves was always more ambitious than I was. He likes high fashion. He never found it humiliating. And he made lots of efforts that I’d never have made.” For example? “Well, for example, I’d never have consented to live with Pierre Bergé (Saint Laurent’s business partner and companion) for 20 years. I mean, there are prices I wouldn’t pay.”

A tiny bronze buzzer swings open the massive iron door on rue de l’Université and a security guard points the way across a courtyard roughly the size of a skating rink. A greying housekeeper in a worn sweater leads the way up marble stairs to the lofty salons where Karl Lagerfeld has consented to be photographed in a little at-home portrait. He sweeps in 20 minutes late, brisk and understated, a shrunken monogram on his dun-colored smock, only a thin western string tie which was the gift of the people at Neiman Marcus in place of the usual flounce – a sobered image due perhaps to the fact that he had just celebrated his 40th birthday two days earlier at his 18th-century château in Brittany where his mother now presides.

“I always live in 18th-century houses,” he says. “For me, it’s the perfection of human culture – the top.” In fact, he once did not live in an 18th-century house when he was making his name as a freelancer, but in a Left Bank apartment surrounded by one of the most lavish Art Deco collections then in existence. He had a backdrop made for it, and immediately had to auction the whole thing off. “It was too much – too fragile, too beautiful. I couldn’t live in it. It was like waking up every morning in an opera set.” Besides, so many people were getting into Art Deco. Now he collects state beds – Madame du Barry’s, the Duke of Richelieu’s, the Princess of Conti’s. Most are in the country château, but there is one of the indeterminate ownership plumped here in the midst of a receiving room, its white-silk coverlet and headboard sumptuously embroidered with a motif of the four seasons. It turns out to be one of the few pieces of furniture in the entire place. He keeps the rooms empty on purpose. “I don’t want to look nouveau riche,” he says.

It is virtually the eve of his next collection, and there is not much time for the setting. A gentle-faced young man serves apple juice on a silver tray and Karl Lagerfeld keeps examining his watch. His fabrics are late in arriving from the factories, his fittings are delayed and he has not yet seen the drift of his next seasonal direction, which makes him tense, although never given to the bouts of hysteria Saint Laurent is said to glory in. “What’s the point?” he says. “A dress doesn’t last forever. In the business, you start all over again every six months.” Still, he shuns holidays and works so obsessively that colleagues confide that Karl Lagerfeld’s problem is not that he may one day dry up on ideas, but that he has to be stopped. His study, a crammed anteroom to one of the salons, erupts with costume histories and ancient fashion circulars that spill over from his drawing board and onto the floor, but he shies from specific discussions of the Muse. “Designers shouldn’t talk too much; they should design. I believe only in instinct, intuition. I believe in imagining things from a window.”

He does not like all of this boring talk of the nuts and bolts, the whys and wherefores. He prefers to deal in images. The night he threw a little candlelight dinner for 40 here in honor of Paloma Picasso’s wedding – “the whole table filled with flowers, orchids the same red as her dress. I must say it was magic.” The little costume ball that Saint Laurent’s associate LouLou de la Falaise held at a disco palace where he turned up in a crystal-beaded jumpsuit and feathers once worn by Josephine Baker. The evenings he insists he spends dining in these rooms alone, according to the counsel of his fortune teller, scarlet drapes drawn, the table splendidly laid for one, while scented candles cast a spell upon the air. He quick-sketches the scenes as one might imagine looking in upon a life through a window. With a stylist’s finely honed eye, he settles upon each detail he chooses to reveal.

It is, after all, no easy task to tread the uneasy line between mass design and mystique, between turning out dresses that everywoman can buy off the rack while leaving the impression that only the truly privileged could attain such a luxury. Karl Lagerfeld, who prefers to work his magic in crepe de Chine rather than cheesecloth, who introduced satin knickers and tried to bring back the fan, has a showman’s unwavering sense of his audience. Strangers are not invited to his workrooms. Colleagues are discouraged from answering questions about him. Upstairs and downstairs in this townhouse, which he writes off for promotion purposes on his taxes, there are other rooms – private apartments that are never seen, never photographed.

The camera clicks. The image is preserved in the splendor of an empty salon. Karl Lagerfeld is in a hurry for his next appointment and rushes off with the gentle-eyed young photographer, shaking hands all around. It is a demanding, tightly scheduled life where even the star of the hour cannot be sure he will not be upstaged a half-year away. It is sometimes not a glamorous life at all, although one only has his word for it.

“I don’t believe in glamour,” he says. “Glamour is very artificial.”

Our footsteps echo on the marble staircase as the housekeeper lets us out with two plastic garbage bags in her hand, which she deposits behind a closed 18th-century door.

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lindyhunt · 6 years ago

Text

From the FASHION Archives: Karl, Before Chanel

“I don’t believe in glamour,” he says. “Glamour is very artificial.”

Our footsteps echo on the marble staircase as the housekeeper lets us out with two plastic garbage bags in her hand, which she deposits behind a closed 18th-century door.

0 notes