Part One

Many months ago I wrote a blog entry about the 1930s covering in a very whirlwind and utterly selective manner a few people places and things which got my “interesting stuff” antennae twitching.  At the time I called the 1930s my second favourite decade (there has been no change in rankings in the interim) and now 9 months later it’s time to complete my tribute to this era with a look back at some films from the libraries’ collection which makes me flip my lid.

She (1935) – Based on H. Rider Haggard’s 1887 novel  She: A History of Adventure – Believe it or not this was already the 5^th film adaptation of this work (and we think Hollywood recycles ideas now!) directed by the King of Stop Action Claymation  Ray Harryhausen who only died just last May. The original plan was to film in  colour but at the last minute was switched to black and white (it was finally colourizied by Harryhausen in 2006) She was unfortunately a disaster at the box office and in fact was thought lost for years until rather bizarrely an original print was found in Buster Keaton’s garage. The film features an amazing set of grand art deco design and starred Helen Gahagan in her only film role playing the menacing queen of Kor aka She (Who Must Be Obeyed).   Five years after playing She Who Must Be Obeyed, Gahagan was one of the first women to be elected to the US House of Representatives as a left leaning Democrat, had a public love affair with Lyndon Johnson (seriously…LBJ!?) and eventually ended her political career after losing to Richard Nixon  but not before she coined the nickname Tricky Dick.

Another adventure film based on a book was The Lost Horizon ( 1937). James Hilton wrote the book and Frank Capra (who had a run of classics in the 30s and 40s) directed the film. The story tells of  group who stumble upon the hidden paradise of Shangri-La deep in the Himalayas after a rescue mission gets hijacked and subsequently crash lands.  It turns out once you find paradise where nobody ages; it becomes a tough habit to quit.  This film was also a bust initially and went way over budget. Like She, The Lost Horizon was also considered for colour film but was deemed too expensive, even so it still went way over budget and initially ended up with a whopping 6 hours run time eventually whittled down to a more manageable 134 minutes.  Somehow through all the cutting and re-releasing and re-editing a total of 7 minutes of the film has been lost forever which explains why in the library’s dvd contains just the audio track and various promotional stills which fill in the gap of the missing footage.  It’s a bit jarring upon first viewing but “lost forever “ is “lost forever” so what are you gonna do?

Vaughan Reads 2013

Further Reads

Here is a list of some reading suggestions that you may want to explore after reading The Tale-Teller by Susan Glickman.  Also included here are the two other runner ups in our first edition Vaughan Reads – Beautiful Mystery and The Deception of Livvy Higgs. We hope that The Tale-Teller sparked your interest in related subject matter and similar great literature. Don’t forget to come out to the Bathurst Clark Resource Library on Sunday, December 8th at 1 pm to see The Tale-Teller author Susan Glickman in person!

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet                                                                                                                                 

Mitchell, David / FIC Mitch

In 1799 Dutch trader Jacob De Zoet lands in closed off Japan for a five year mission. As in The Tale-Teller, this book describes the life of a stranger in a strange land in centuries past. Personally speaking, this was one of my favourite books from the last few years. Highly recommended..by me.

Life of Pi

Martel, Yann / FIC Marte

Shipwreck survivor Pi has only animals for company as his lifeboat drifts in the Pacific. Yann Martel won the Man Booker Prize for this book back in 2002. which is a pretty big deal in the publishing world.

Kamouraska                                                                                                                                         

Hebert, Anne / FIC Heber

A tale of horror and imagination based on a real 19^th century love triangle in rural Quebec. Also made into a hard to find film directed by the great Quebecois Director Claude Jutra.

Robinson Crusoe

Defoe, Daniel / FIC Defoe

The diary of an Englishman shipwrecked for almost thirty years on a small isolated island. As mentioned in The Tale-Teller , Robinson Crusoe is an important book in Esther’s life.

The Midwife of Venice

Rich, Roberta / FIC Robert

16^th century Venice: a Jewish midwife is asked to illegally deliver a noblewoman’s baby. Hannah Levi is known throughout sixteenth-century Venice for her skill in midwifery. When a Christian count appears at Hannah’s door in the Jewish ghetto imploring her to attend his labouring wife, who is nearing death, Hannah is forced to make a dangerous decision. Not only is it illegal for Jews to render medical treatment to Christians, it’s also punishable by torture and death. Moreover, as her Rabbi angrily points out, if the mother or child should die, the entire ghetto population will be in peril.

The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi: a novel

Park, Jacqueline / FIC Park

So begins the “secret book” of Grazia dei Rossi — a written legacy from a mother to her son. Heiress to a Jewish banking dynasty, secretary to the world-renowned Isabella d’Este, married to the Pope’s Jewish body physician, and lover of the Christian Lord Pirro Gonzaga, Grazia dei Rossi is a woman suspended between two cultures, forced to choose between two men, two worlds.

Mistress of the Art of Death

Franklin, Arianna /FIC Frank

Going back in time even further than The Tale-Teller and The Midwife of Venice is Mistress of the Art of Death which is part of the ongoing 12th century mysteries featuring medical examiner Adelia.  Like Esther, Adelia is Jewish but due to the rampant anti Semitism of the times, she must hide her faith from those around her.

The Deception of Livvy Higgs

Morrissey, Donna / FIC Morri

Livvy Higgs is besieged by a series of small heart attacks which prompt her to revisit a past devastated by lies and secrets.

The Beautiful Mystery

Penny, Louise / FIC Penny

A choir director at a monastery is found dead, C.I. Gamache  is called to investigate.

Since The Tale-Teller takes place during 1738 – 1739 I thought it could be useful to learn a little more about what was going on with the world during this time period in order to better understand the times Esther lived in.

After leaving no stone unturned during an comprehensive and exhaustive 90 minute binge of skimming and glossing over all the internet has to offer while simultaneously working at the Information Desk, here is a snapshot of some of the highlights and lowlights of 1738/39.

In ‘39 The English declare war on Spain in the intriguingly named conflict: The War of Jenkins’ Ear. What an odd name you may say. Surely it doesn’t literally refer to an ear that belonged to a man named Jenkins.  Yes. Yes it does.  The Spanish boarded a British merchant ship and liberated Robert Jenkins from his ear (or maybe it was the other way around). The detached ear was later held up for inspection during a meeting of the British Parliament.  The war on behalf of this severed ear lasted until 1742.  When I think of severed ears the first thing that comes to mind (obviously) is Blue Velvet.  

Other big news: The Methodist Church was founded after John Wesley converted from Anglicanism.  A few weeks after that took place in ’38, the future king of England – Mad George III was born.  Towards the end of his long life George suffered from dementia as portrayed in the film The Madness of King George (tag line: His Majesty was all powerful and all knowing. But he wasn’t quite all there). He was also is a character in Susanna Clarke’s great novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Butcher turned famous highway man and member of the Essex Gang, Dick Turpin got his start in the deer theft racket in the early 1730s. (Deer theft as weirdly quaint as it sounds to my somewhat modern ears was an offense that would get you 7 years in an overeas penal colony such as Australia…I like to imagine the prisoners exchanging stories about why they were incarcerated – “I’m in for murder..what are you in for?”  “ I stole a deer”.  Turpin was executed in 1739 but his legend lives on in ballads, books and fanciful tales. 

One of the first cuckoo clocks ever was made.

The Royal Swedish Academy of  Sciences was founded.

To the dismay of the Flat Earth Society, Sur la Figure de la Terre was published by Pierre Louis Maupertuis which solidifiedNewton’s idea that the earth is an oblate spheroid.  Published in 1738…just in time to ease the fears of Esther’s shipmates.  Maupertuis also came up with the Principle of Least Action..I don’t know exactly what this entails but I pride myself in following my own improvised version of this principle each weekend.

American Founding Father, long time Govener of New York and the only guy to be Vice President under two different Presidents – George Clinton was born in 1739. I had trouble coming up with a physical representation  of Clinton but after some heavy duty searching I think I finally got it.

 1739 was witness to a very special Handsel Monday.  What is Handsel Monday you wonder? I was like you before yesterday – totally ignorant of this much overlooked tradition in Scotland and Northern England celebrating the first Monday of the New Year by giving a small gift to those people in your life who provide some household service. servants, mail carriers and the like.  But 1739 was no ordinary Handsel Monday for it was on this day that the following miracle took place.

“It is worth mentioning that one William Hunter, a collier (residing in the parish of Tillicoultry, in Clackmannanshire), was cured in the year 1738 of an inveterate rheumatism or gout, by drinking freely of new ale, full of harm or yeast. The poor man had been confined to his bed. for a year and a half, having almost entirely lost the use of his limbs. On the evening of Handsel Monday, as it is called, some of his neighbours came to make merry with him. Though he could not rise, yet he always took his share of the ale, as it passed round the company, and in the end he became much intoxicated. The consequence was that he had the use of his limbs next morning, and was able to walk about. He lived more than twenty years after this, and never had the smallest return of his old complaint”           

You will likely know him simply as Etteilla but to his mother he was called Jean-Baptiste Alliette. Born in 1738, Eteilla (or Alleitte backwards) rose to prominence at the first star of the Tarot reading circuit. In fact he was the first person who be able to support himself solely on tarot readings ( I imagine the happy day when he finally quit his day job of washing dishes or shoeing horses etc)..he died in 1791…just in time to avoid seeing the awful destruction wrought by the guillotine during the French Revolution. Joseph Ignace Guillotin like Eteilla was born in 1738. I had no idea that Guillotin not only did not invent the guillotine he was actually against the death penalty. He became so well known for campaigning against this instrument of death machine that his last name improbably got associated with it. He lobbied to get the machine’s name changed but was unsuccessful and his family ended up changing their own name instead.  As a footnote, there was later on a  Frenchmen whose last name happened to be Guillotin who met his fate by…the guillotine.

And rounding out this exploration of people and events of 1738/39 is the Canard Digérateur or the Digesting Duck. Invented in 1739 by Jacques de Vaucanson the duck is exactly what it sounds like. A automated duck that eats and digests grain and then… um…expels the waste.  Imagine a clockwork duck with similar functions to one of those creepy Baby Alive Learns to Potty dolls which likewise simulates bodily functions.  The duck was quite a sensation in France at the time and Voltaire himself wrote “without…the duck of Vaucanson, you will have nothing to remind you of the glory of France.”