In the article, I explore the depiction of artworks in Little Women and some of Alcott’s lesser known texts.  I sort through her weird hatred of J.M.W. Turner and try to parse why exactly she was so negative about the painter, given that her sister Abigail was famous in New England for copying his works and bringing them into art classrooms for study (a common practice in the late 19th century, since we lacked high-res photography, slide projection, and Google Art).

Here’s a small taste:

Describing Amy’s attempts [in Little Women] to copy masterpieces, a regular form of art study at the time, the narrator pillories artists including Rembrandt and Turner.  “Oily brown shadows of faces, with a lurid streak in the wrong place, meant Rembrandt… Turner appeared in tempests of blue thunder, orange lightning, brown rain, and purple clouds, with a tomato-colored splash in the middle, which might be the sun or a buoy, a sailor’s shirt or a King’s robe, as the spectator pleased” (203-204)…   In Alcott’s 1873 novel Work: A Story of Experience, the flighty Mrs. Stuart, “having just returned from Italy, affected the artistic”: “Madame was intent on a water-color copy of Turner’s ‘Rain, Wind, and Hail,’ that pleasing work which was sold upsidedown and no one found it out” (Alternative Alcott 250-251).  Though “Rain, Wind, and Hail” is an apocryphal work, the title references one of Turner’s best known paintings, Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway, a hazy, barely-specific evocation of a steam engine traveling through a mere suggestion of a landscape. Turner’s art in Work is a byword for false appreciation by those for whom art is an affectation; however, it is telling of Alcott’s attitude toward Turner that Mrs. Stuart is not the only one duped by the upside-down painting. The implication here is that Turner’s work is so devoid of realism that no one can tell its correct orientation – that, as with Amy’s copy, the work can be wrongly interpreted “as the spectator pleased.” His art is, the joke argues, inherently devoid of meaning.

Read the article in its entirety here.

That’s why I was beyond excited to see that Flourish Klink (of Harry Potter fandom fame) just released her most recent stellar project: a text-based interactive fiction game set in the HP world called Muggle Studies.

Muggle Studies is a work of interactive fan fiction. That means it’s sort of what would happen if you crossed Zork with Harry Potter, then added in a pinch of inspiration from Dykes To Watch Out For.

You play a young teacher whose life is in shambles: your beloved grandmother died, your girlfriend left you, and you’re out of a job. When you’re offered a place at Hogwarts College in Scotland – far away from memories of that girlfriend – it seems like a godsend. When you finally meet the headmaster, however, you discover that you’re in way over your head… and soon you’re trying to process the fact that there’s a secret world you never knew about, while simultaneously saving a passel of wizards from magic gone wrong.

I played the game through in one night and found it to be absolutely delightful.  It transforms the world of wizarding into something a lot more inclusive, challenging, and thought-provoking.  It also has cool puzzles.

You can either play Muggle Studies on the website, or download it and play it with an interpreter.  Flourish has done a great job explaining and providing resources on how to play interactive fiction — even a relative newbie like me can understand and enjoy the gaming experience.

Great-Grandpa Joe and Great-Grandma Cora, circa 1940.

I don’t know about other people, but the opening of the 1940 census is basically a holiday to me.  I have a whole slew of people I need to look up—just as soon as the servers can handle the rush of traffic!  I’m really interested to see if Great-Grandpa Joe was still working as a machinist for West Publishing Co., or if he had retired by then.  I know that my Great-Aunt Goldye was over a decade into her 50-year career at West, probably still working as a linotype operator.

Because Schankler is a composer and musician associated with the field of music perception and cognition, in large measure his aim is to give a more accurate picture of the study by the psychologist John Sloboda that was mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and on NPR. But a more general protest emerges. Schankler resists “the implication that music is like a science of emotional manipulation through sound, and that it’s as simple as applying a ‘formula’ to achieve commercial and artistic success.”

Being a total music novice but something of a dedicated researcher of affect theory, I suspect that music suffers this fate in the mainstream press because it seems more scientific than literature or visual art.  Music is based on math, right? is how I imagine a lot of the thought processes involved happening.  The mathematics of musical notes seems a lot more open to “formulas” than, for instance, brush strokes on a canvas or words on a page.*

So I think Ross is absolutely correct in noting that the press doesn’t cover stories about reductive emotional readings of other art forms:

Perhaps I’m overlooking stories in other fields, but I don’t seem to see headlines along the lines of “How do paintings make us feel?” or “Why do movies with unhappy endings make us cry?” or “What about thrillers makes us tense?”

But that doesn’t mean that sophisticated theorizing about such questions isn’t going on.  Sianne Ngai, for example, has written an absolutely stellar book called Ugly Feelings that tackles, among other things, the question of “what about thrillers makes us tense?”  Mixing literary theory, cultural studies, philosophy, and aesthetic theory, Ngai digs into a wide range of works in an attempt to understand where emotion (or affect, as the fancypants theorists call it) could be said to exist in a text.  If it’s a topic that interests you, I highly recommend the book.

*This is in itself a reductive bit of theorizing on the motivations of mass media outlets, so pot, kettle, etc.  Still, I do think there’s something to the math/music link that creates a tendency to want to understand music “scientifically,” and this faux-science is much easier to shrink into a soundbite than the kinds of complicated work being done without numbers and charts and quantifiable results.

Hefner writes about James P. Johnson and the composition that gave the dissertation its title, “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic.”  Johnson is mainly remembered for composing the “Charleston,” but as Hefner explains, singer Ethel Waters credited him with inspiring “all the hot licks that ever came out of Fats Waller and the rest of the hot piano boys.”

I dug around a bit to find out more about Johnson and came across this NPR story about another Johnson composition, “Yamekraw.”  It was inspired by one of my favorite jazz pieces, George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.”

George Gershwin plays “Rhapsody in Blue”

As NPR explains,

After his friend George Gershwin had such success with “Rhapsody in Blue,” James P. Johnson thought he’d try his hand at writing a piece for jazz piano and orchestra. Johnson’s piece is called “Yamekraw, A Negro Rhapsody.” It has some of the same exuberent bubble and bounce you might know from the Gershwin and it makes a fascinating counterpoint to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

The songs make excellent mood-setters for my Jazz Age reading sessions.

Internet Archive has a small selection of other Johnson songs.

The February 1913 issue of Scribner’s Magazine had a special theme: The Day of the Motor. Along with articles on driving the Pyrenees Route and the mission of the automobile, it includes two very different gems of magazine writing.

The first is a compelling account of “Discovering America by Motor” written by Ralph D. Paine. The author and a companion tour New Hampshire (which he deems “not as backwards as is supposed”) in a car with only 3 of its 4 cylinders working. They encounter various other motor tourists on the way, and Paine contemplates the new freedoms that motor travel has opened up:

The man behind the steering-wheel has become the lord of distances. His horizon has immeasurably widened, the highway is made panoramic and belongs to him, and the satisfaction of living has sensibly increased.

The article is accompanied by grainy photos of automobile tourists all over the country, like the one above. Mostly, though, I was struck by how consistently readable the piece was, like a Longreads article from days of yore.

The second notable piece is “Steam-Coach Days” by Theodore M. R. von Kéler, a weird and wonderful speculation piece that seems straight out of a steampunk novel of this decade. he argues that the idea of a steam-powered engine in a coach-like vehicle has been around since the ancient Egyptians (!):

It is difficult—in fact, almost impossible—now to fix upon the exact year in which the idea of a coach propelled by steam first took shape in the human brain. The most recent discoveries during archaeological investigations and excavations in Egypt and other sections of northern Africa have tended to show that a steampropelled carriage of ingenious construction was, if not actually used, at least built in model form by one of the old Egyptians.

But even better than this wild tidbit are the whimsical drawings depicting steam coaches of all manner and style (all of which apparently actually existed):

“James’s Steam Coach, 1829, which ran between London and Brighton.”

“Trevithick’s Steam Carriage, 1810.
“The first practical self-propelled vehicle to attain a speed of ten miles per hour.”

…

Twelve years of Scribner’s Magazine has been made available online for free through the Modernist Journals Project. Further issues are available through Google Books. (I’m kind of obsessed.)

This saucy pre-Code comedy was originally set to be adapted from Katharine Brush’s novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  When he took the picture in too serious a direction, the studio asked Anita Loos to step in and rewrite the script.

In Loos’s hands, the film became a raunchy and fun tribute to the social-climbing red-head at its center, played by (the usually blonde) Jean Harlow.  While I haven’t checked the original book, I’m fairly certain Loos added in the humorous opening in which Lil Andrews (Harlow) wryly name-checks Loos’s popular novel from seven years earlier: “So gentlemen prefer blondes, do they?”

Lil is a girl with a mission: to seduce Bill Legendre, the wealthy son of her boss.

Unfortunately for all parties involved, Bill is two things: already married but also powerless in the face of Lil’s fiery sexuality.  The script hints fairly baldly that Bill and his icy blonde wife, Irene, don’t have sex.  When Lil points her lips or shockingly exposed  her garters at him, he’s violently overcome.

After a series of adulterous encounters discovered by Irene, she divorces him and is left sleeping with her adorable puppy.

Lonely in the wake of the divorce, Irene decides to try to reconcile with Bill, only to find that he has married Lil in a blisteringly fast ceremony.  The marriage is doomed, however, both by Irene’s continued presence in their lives and the social outcast status that the divorce and remarriage have caused for the new couple.

High society can’t accept Lil, whose increase in status has made her snobby but not proper or decent.  (Check out the side boob she’s rocking in her fancy dress below!)  Because this is pre-Code, the film has some serious fun portraying Lil’s incorrigibly sexual behavior with increasingly racy scenes of her disrobing.

After several more rounds of love and betrayal and a snazzy dance scene to Lil’s own theme song, Bill ruins her chances to remarry by exposing the affair she’s having with her lover’s French chauffer.  She attacks the once-again reconciled Bill and Irene, shooting off a gun and causing Bill to wreck his car and nearly die.

But that’s not the end of it!  In any other film, one might expect Lil to be punished for her actions; instead, she ends the film married to an even richer (though uglier) old dude while also continuing her affair with the Frenchman, now employed by her husband.

As TCM notes,

The movie, and Harlow, achieved another kind of notoriety as well. Guardians of public morals throughout the country were incensed not only by the film’s frank treatment of sexuality but even more by the fact that Lil, an irredeemably bad girl who selfishly wrecks the lives of everyone around her, doesn’t get any kind of comeuppance or learn her lesson by the end of the story. Rather, she ends up rich, happy and accepted by high society without ever having to pay for her sins. Because of this, Red-Headed Woman is often cited as one of the motion pictures that brought about more stringent censorship under the Production Code, ushering in an era of enforced “morality” and coy dodges around sex for decades to come.

In the absence of the 1928 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes film (which has been lost), it’s fun to see Loos exercise her snappy wit and racy proto-feminist politics with yet another social climber who escapes punishment in the end.