The Lost Art of Dress
I've put off reviewing Linda Przybyszewski's The Lost Art of Dress: The Women Who Once Made America Stylish for several months now. In part because life was busy life-ing. In part because I had other things I wanted to write about. But mostly because I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the book.
The Lost Art of Dress is the history of what Przybyszewski calls the "Dress Doctors": teachers, writers, retailers and designers who taught American women how to dress in the first half of the twentieth century. And if that were all it is I would be perfectly happy with the book. She begins with the rise of home economics as a branch of the Department of Agriculture and ends with the 1960s, when youth revolted against dictates on personal style as well as other forms of social constraint. Przybyszewski's history is solidly researched, engagingly written and often surprising.*
But Przybyszewski has an axe to grind--the slovenliness of modern America--and she grinds it hard. (Now that I think about it, the title sort of gives it away) I have some sympathy with her position. I feel that Casual Friday in the workplace has proven to be the thin-edge of the wedge in many businesses. And I regularly see people wearing clothes in public that I would be embarrassed to wear at home while doing grimy work.** Nonetheless, I often found myself grinding my teeth, putting the book down and muttering "no, no, no".
There is a great deal to admire in The Lost Art of Dress. If you are interested in the history of clothing or the changing roles of women, I recommend it strongly.*** Perhaps with a salt-rimmed margarita on the side.
* I was particularly stunned by the feminist roots of home economics. My personal experience of home economics class was--not feminist. And not pleasant. My strongest memories are being yelled at for mixing biscuit dough with my hands (a great way to get the texture right but not hygienic enough for the instructor), walking around the classroom with books balanced on our heads for posture (I'm very good at this), and learning to take off gloves properly. Not to mention the girl who ran the sewing machine needle through her finger. Screams! Blood!
**Let me make it clear I am not talking about the creative and/or subversive dress styles of the rebellious young.
***If you're specifically interested in twentieth century clothing, let me point you toward The Vintage Traveler .
Laughter in Ancient Rome
At some level, humor is a personal thing, as any one knows who's made a joke only to be greeted with a fish-eye stare or squirmed uncomfortably as everyone around her laughs at something that seems--not funny. Humor seems to be tied to time, place, personality, age, and occasionally gender. If that's the case, why do we still laugh at some Roman jokes two thousand years later?
In Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up, classicist and social commentator Mary Beard addresses not only the questions of when, how and why ancient Romans laughed, but what their "laugh culture" tells us about their society--and ours.
After a brief introduction in which Beard considers two examples of laughter from Roman history, the book is divided into two parts. The first looks at theories of laughter (ancient and modern), the methodological difficulties of writing a history of laughter, the differences between Roman laughter in Latin and Greek texts and the question of what we mean by "that superficially unproblematic adjective Roman." The second part focuses on four aspects of Roman laughter: the famous orator Cicero's discussion of the proper (and improper) ways to evoke laugher in an audience, the relationship between laughter and power in ancient Rome, the importance of mimicry in Roman humor, and the Roman joke book known as the "laughter lover." Along the way, Beard debunks the popular image of Saturnalia as the precursor to Carnival, argues that smiling is a social construct, looks at the Roman roots of "monkey business" and stops just short of claiming that the joke as we know it was a Roman invention.
Written in Beard's trademark combination of erudition and effortless prose, Laughter in Ancient Rome is a fascinating combination of history, psychology, linguistic exploration and humor. This is scholarly writing at its best: using a seemingly narrow topic to illuminate larger cultural issues.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Some Old Favorites About World War I
"Cheshire Regiment trench Somme 1916" by John Warwick Brooke - This is photograph Q 3990 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 1900-13).
Recently I shared some of the most interesting new books about World War I that have landed in my mailbox.* Wonderful though many of the new books are, it would be a shame to forget the many excellent older books available.
Here are some of my favorites:
Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) is a rich discussion of the intersection between World War I (specifically the British experience on the Western Front)and literature: both the literature that came out of the trenches and subsequent attempts to remember and mythologize the war.
Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929 or 1957--the two editions are very different) is one of the classic memoirs of the war--a bitter, unsentimental and darkly comic farewell to pre-war England. (On opening Fussell at random, I see that he describes Goodbye to All That as the "stagiest" of the war memoirs. Read it for yourself and tell me what you think.) Depending on where you hang out, you may know Graves as the author of The White Goddess, a poetic study of European myth and/or as the author of the popular novel I, Claudius, which the BBC turned into an equally popular television series in 1976. Personally, I found The White Goddess unreadable and only watched one episode of I, Claudius.** But I was totally absorbed by Goodbye to All That. Graves does not simply paint a picture of his experience of the trenches. He sets that experience within the larger context of his life before and after the war, showing what members of a particular class and caste lost in the war. Reading Graves, the phrase "the lost generation" takes on richer meaning.
Samuel Hynes's A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (1990) looks at what he calls the "Myth of the War", which he describes "not as a falsification of reality, but an imaginative version of it, the story of the war that has evolved and has come to be accepted as true." In many ways a pendant to Fussell's work, A War Imagined considers the construction of the war by contemporary artists and writers--both officially and unofficially--and the post-war construction of monuments and anti-monuments. This kind of thing is intellectual meat and drink to me.
Last, but definitely not least, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August (1962) remains the standard against which I measure popular history. If I could only have one book about World War I on my shelf, it would be this one.*** Writing with transparent, often witty, prose and an eye for the telling detail, she takes a familiar story--the first month of World War I--and makes it into a page-turner. Hmm, I think I know what I'm taking to read on the road in September.
Looking at this list, I realize that it is Anglo-centric, with a Western front bias--a reflection of my academic roots in British imperialism. Can you help me shake that up a little?
*One of the side benefits of writing History in the Margins is that publishers send me review copies of books. My basic policy on this is that I only review them if I honestly think they are good. On the other hand, just because I didn't review something I received doesn't mean it's not good: I simply may have gotten to it yet. Time is short and the To-Be-Read shelves bulge with choices.
**Though on later reflection, the soap opera qualities that put me off were in fact a pretty realistic depiction of Roman dynastic politics at the time. I wonder how many classicists write for the soaps?
***Though Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow would come a close second.