Harry Potter and the Grand Tour

US cover of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with Roman arches and columns.

It's been a while since I wrote a Harry Potter post, and something must be done about that! Actually I was watching part one of The Deathly Hallows during Christmas, and I realized that Harry's, Hermione's, and Ron's last year of education is similar to the English tradition of the Grand Tour.

The Grand Tour started in the mid-17th century and, by the 19th, was considered a necessary part of every young man's education (at least if you were part of the upper-class). After studying the classics, the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and reading about the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the best way to conclude one's schooling was by seeing the art and the ruins of these civilizations for oneself. Obvs, since they didn't have the intrawebs or photography back then, the only way to do this was to travel.

Like Ron, Hermione, and Harry, travelers on the Grand Tour would take EVERYTHING with them. I don't know about you guys, but when I go somewhere, even for a really long time, I pack ONE bag. If I need more clothes, I can buy them when I get there. For travelers on the Grand Tour, though, they packed like they were going to the moon and included every single thing they could possibly need, in quantities to last them the years it would take before they returned to England. Unlike the Harry Potter People, however, they didn't have a bottomless purse to stuff everything in, so they had to hire carriages and porters to carry it all. Not to mention guards to keep from being robbed by unscrupulous highwaymen!

More importantly, people on the Grand Tour had a typical set of destinations that defined it as "the" tour. They went in search of specific objects, places, and knowledge. Like, you HAD to visit Paris and sleep with a prostitute, or else what was the point? Haha. They also typically visited the Vatican, saw the Sistine Ceiling and paintings by Raphael, saw an opera, and sketched the Roman Forum. The itinerary for the Grand Tour wasn't too different from the typical modern tourist's to-do list in Italy, actually.

Of course, Harry, Ron, and Hermione don't go to Italy, but they do take a "tour" of sorts of the British Isles, and this is further emphasized in the locations of the films. They visit the Giant's Causeway, Buckinghamshire, Yorkshire, Suffolk, and Wales, among other locations. Also, although Harry isn't technically traveling to "finish" his education, he does learn a lot about himself and the past--especially the past of his hero, Dumbledore. He also collects objects (the Deathly Hallows), similarly to how people on the Grand Tour collected souvenirs.

What would a Grand Tour look like for you?

Review: THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER by Kate Summerscale

On the morning of June 30th, 1860, a toddler named Savill Kent was discovered missing. Later that day, his body, throat slashed, was found on the grounds of the Kents' home. Suspicion pointed everywhere--including the parents--but the police were unable to discover who the murderer was. Enter Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the stars of the newly formed Scotland Yard detectives division, who was assigned from London to close the case. Although Whicher believed he knew who killed Savill Kent, he was never able to prove it.



The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a true crime book detailing a case from Victorian England that bears striking resemblances to the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey in our own time, including the media storm surrounding the investigation. I had a few problems with this book, and the major ones aren't really the book's fault. First of all, I listened to it audio. The reader, Simon Vance, did a great job of indicating imbedded quotes using accents and making the text interesting to listen to. But I don't read non-fiction books in the same way I read fiction books--I tend to read them back-to-front and out of order, so listening to a non-fiction book where I couldn't jump around from chapter to chapter at will was a little difficult for me. It also drove me CRAZY that I couldn't see citations (which I certainly hope Kate Summerscale included) or read footnotes.

Secondly, the subject. If anything else, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher reminded me why I avoid true crime. Killing a toddler is some hardcore shit. For some reason I thought, since the murder was a really long time ago, it wouldn't be so bad; but trust me, it is. And if hearing every single detail about the death of a little kid doesn't depress you enough, Whicher's investigation will nicely send you over the edge. Summerscale invests a lot of time in making Whicher appealing--unfortunately, this case is what's called a career-ender, and it isn't likely to end happily or bring about justice for anyone. I suppose, being one of the first detectives to ever investigate a murder like this, Whicher didn't realize that; but still, it doesn't make for cheerful reading.

That being said, if you have any interest in the nineteenth century or Victorian detectives, you should consider picking up this book. There is a ton of delicious detail concerning Scotland Yard in the 1860s, what types of crimes they fought against, how they investigated, what a detective's work routine was like, and so on. Since I never got a look at Summerscale's footnotes or bibliography, I can't swear to the historical accuracy of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, but based on what I already know her research seems very solid and thorough.

That being said, some of her conclusions, particularly in regard to Whicher and his influence on Victorian literature, seem like a stretch. Summerscale draws connections between Whicher and detectives in novels by Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. The Big Three of Victorian writers, no? While it seems likely Whicher might have provided some inspiration for some aspects of some of the detective characters in the authors' novels, the direct and pervasive influence Summerscale argues for in this book isn't backed up by solid evidence, in my opinion. Evidence of a solid and pervasive influence would include being close friends with the authors, meeting with them on a regular basis, and plot points in said authors' novels directly mirroring events in the detective's life--which IS the case with Eugène François Vidocq, the world's first private detective and several very popular writers in early 19th-century Paris (see my post about Vidocq at PGP). A random turn of phrase or investigative technique that was probably shared by all of Scotland Yard, on the other hand, isn't entirely convincing. One gets the feeling that if Summerscale would have logically been able to argue Whicher influenced Edgar Allan Poe's mysteries, she would have thrown him into the mix as well.

Meanwhile, her focus seems to be on the über-famous male writers of this era. I started reading Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon around the same time I began The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (completely by coincidence) and there are a lot of similarities between the Kent case and Lady Audley's Secret, as well--more direct similarities, it seems to me, than any novels by Dickens or Collins. Yet Summerscale only briefly addresses those parallels, I suspect merely because Braddon isn't as famous a writer as Dickens. Not to get all nitpicky or anything, but there are only 6 mentions of Braddon in the book, as compared to 46 mentions of Dickens and 24 mentions of Collins. Even Poe, who at the time of the Kent murder was long dead, receives over 20 mentions in the book. Based on these numbers, I think Summerscale's goal is to elevate the fame of Whicher, not truly investigate the Kent murder's influence on Victorian literature.

Other than that, however, I was impressed with the level of research in The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. It's certainly not a book I would recommend to everyone--it is not history that reads like a detective novel. It's more of a true crime novel meets historical research. If you don't like true crime or those history books where there is massive infodump, you should probably not read it. But I did learn a lot and think it's a good resource and a fascinating case.

Weekend Cooking Review: THE FOUNDING FOODIES by Dave DeWitt

I was SO excited about Founding Foodies when I first saw it. I heart cultural history of any sort, whether it addresses dance, art, cooking, literature, film--you name it. Not to mention that one of my favorite things to eat is mac & cheese, and one of my favorite things to think about while making it is that Thomas Jefferson served the first dish of macaroni and cheese. How cool is that? In a way it ties me and Thomas Jefferson together. As a result, I've always been curious about Jefferson and his pals, and how their legacy can be found in food as well as politics. Since many of the men involved in the American Revolution were tavern owners and farmers, it stands to reason they knew their food.

Founding Foodies purports to tell us about the beginnings of "America's diverse food culture," as well as give us original Founding Father recipes like George Washington's beer and Martha Washington's fruitcake. How fun is that?! Unfortunately, the answer is not very fun at all, because this book fails on practically every level imaginable.

My high expectations of Founding Foodies started to plummet in the introduction. Perhaps it's just my years of being in school, but I expect the introduction of a non-fiction book to summarize the topic, lay out the central argument or point of the book, and provide a brief run-down of how that point is going to be made. What was in Dave DeWitt's intro? First, he talks about why he likes Jefferson (he went to the University of Virginia), and then he spends the rest of the introduction defining the terms "foodie" and "founding father." This was worrisome because both of these terms are generally understood by the North American public; so either we as readers are being talked down to, or DeWitt does not know what the fridge he is talking about.

Things, shockingly, did not improve from there. The first chapter doesn't start with the Founding Fathers at all, but with Sir Walter Raleigh, and it takes PAGES before food is even mentioned. The timeline jumps all over the place, from 1492 to 1850, and there is no central argument or point to be had anywhere in this book. Take the chapter on Thomas Jefferson, for example (I was sure DeWitt would at least manage a solid on this one, since he was such a self-professed Jeffersonian), which goes something like this: Thomas Jefferson, man of the world and lover of different cultures, founding foodie extraordinaire. Let's talk about him! Wait, let's talk about his slaves. He fed them! What a guy! Wait, let's talk about tomatoes. Now let's talk about ice cream, but let's discuss muffins while we're talking about that. Now let's talk about Jefferson's garden. What was his favorite vegetable? The debate rages. And why didn't we talk about tomatoes in this section? I don't know! UHG.

Even if there had been a point DeWitt was trying to make, the book is way too generalized to make it. Hey, did you know they served food at the White House? And people ate corn? It's true. They ate corn. I did like that DeWitt included a lot of information about what the slaves ate, but like much of the information in The Founding Foodies, it lacked a whole lot of context.

Furthermore, I really don't think DeWitt has any clue to what someone who would pick up a book like this would be looking for. Just as an example, at no point does he address the famous macaroni and cheese dish. If I've heard about it, it's got to be well-known; and it's one of America's favorite meals to this day. Yet there's NOTHING. ABOUT IT. ANYWHERE, other than a small note in the recipe section that Jefferson did serve a pasta dish with Parmesan cheese. No recipe, no date, no discussion. Does DeWitt know anything about his audience? Anything at all?



Frustrated, I flipped to the bibliography (there isn't a conclusion, which is probably for the best), and realized that was what I should have done in the first place, because many of DeWitt's sources are Wikipedia pages. HE LITERALLY CITES WIKIPEDIA AS A MAJOR SOURCE IN HIS BOOK! Not just a few times, but regularly. In the intro to the bibliography, DeWitt tries to excuse himself by saying he fact-checked Wikipedia to make sure it was correct. Oh, really?! You fact-checked Wikipedia? Why didn't you just use the sources you found while making sure Wikipedia was accurate then, hmmmmm?

To make it matters even worse, the writing style is stupefyingly boring. If I wasn't going to be put off by the total lack of logical organization and saddest excuse for research I have ever come across in a published book, the writing would do it. It's like reading the narration to a History Channel special, and I do not mean that in a good way.

So just to summarize: this author wrote a book that he basically researched using Google. And now we know why it sounds like he doesn't know what he's talking about: HE DOESN'T.

There are some books that make me wonder how on earth people get published, and this is one of them. Even the index is a piece of crap, that's how bad this book is. You can do better. Might I suggest Wikipedia?

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up over the weekend.

Book Review: HURRELL'S HOLLYWOOD PORTRAITS by Mark A. Vieira

When people think of Hollywood's "Golden Era," images of beautiful actresses and formidable leading men captured in a black-and-white that seems sharper and more brilliant than any color film dominates in one's mind. To a great extent, the definable "look" of Classic Hollywood is attributable to one man: photographer George Hurrell.

In this book, film scholar and photographer Mark A. Vieira discusses Hurrell's career and photographic techniques from 1925 to just before WWII. The book isn't as scholarly--or gossipy--as Sin in Soft Focus, also by Vieira, but it is the best book book about Hurrell that I've encountered so far. It's true that Vieira doesn't break a lot of new ground here (most of the information he gives about Hurrell's encounters with Hollywood's famous stars and his technique can be found in Hurrell Style), but he does present what he wants to discuss in a very readable and accessible writing style. There are several themes running through the book, but Vieira isn't heavy-handed with them, and for the most part this is a straight-forward mini-biography of a photographer. Also, the pictures in this book are very well-chosen to both illustrate the text and demonstrate the best of Hurrell's technique.

Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits sketches the story of an artist always impatient and on the move--Hurrell rarely stayed in one place more than two years before boredom had him dropping everything and moving on to something new, and that included college. Whitney Stine described Hurrell as a painter who turned his hobby of photography into a chance career; but the fact was that even though Hurrell went to school to be a fine artist, he had years of experience working as a retoucher and portrait photographer in Chicago. Even though he kept painting throughout his life, by the time he moved to California in the 1920s, he knew painting was too slow a process for him to make a career out of.


Please note this caption contains a typo; the subject's name is spelled Novarro.

The distinctive "Hurrell style" was characterized by sensuality, what Vieira calls an "almost-scientific" clarity, and abstraction achieved through unique lighting and framing of his subjects. When Hurrell started in photography, portraits where based on paintings (logically enough) and were very stiff and posed. They were also typically in soft-focus: the popular photographic style at the time was pictorialism, also known as the fuzzy-wuzzy school. Although pictorialism was artistic, there were practical reasons for it as well, since negatives at the time weren't very light-sensitive. Photographing someone in soft-focus was much easier on both the subject and the photographer.

Hurrell changed the soft-focus, posed portrait, at least within Hollywood. Partly because of new film and lenses that made it possible to create very sharp images, partly due to his new lighting technique, and partly due to the retouching techniques he adapted for both. Of all three, the lighting was probably the most innovative: Hurrell designed a boom light (like a boom mic, except for lighting) that he could hold and use to highlight the subject from any angle.

Traditionally portrait photographers used three stationary lights to highlight the subject from the front, back, and to shine on the backdrop. Hurrell didn't bother lighting the background, used the boom light to highlight their hair, and then had a reflective surface or another boom light them from below. And because he could move the boom light anywhere he wanted, he could pose the stars wherever he wanted, including the floor (incidentally, photographs of actresses lying on the floor were called "oomph" shots--and if you want to get an idea of what Hurrell's sessions for an oomph shot were like, according to the studio publicity department anyway, all you need to do is watch this scene from Blow-Up).

Flexibility with lighting and more light-sensitive film also gave Hurrell the opportunity to abstract his pictures into patterns of light of dark. He refused to let the stars wear foundation make-up while photographing them because he wanted to sculpt their faces with highlights and shadows that make-up flattened out.



Vieira's descriptions of Hurrell's photographic technique are solid and well worth the read if you're interested in photography. Not surprisingly, though, I was left wanting in his analysis of the images. He only briefly touches upon the abstraction that Hurrell was aiming for, and doesn't go into too much depth in placing Hurrell within the broader context of American photography or fine art.

Vieira also argues in some places that Hurrell captured some of the inner emotions and true character of his subjects. But I think in this case he's being torn between admiration for Hurrell and trying to make him appealing given our culture's current obsession with verism. If Hurrell did happen to catch a star's inner character, then I suspect that it was totally by accident and incidental in any event. From the very beginning, what Hurrell was really gifted at was making fantasy seem like reality. When Ramon Novarro, Hurrell's first celebrity client, showed his series of photographs by Hurrell to his friends, one of them said, "This isn't you, Ramon." That was the point--Novarro wanted to move from silent films to opera because of he was afraid his accent would make him unappealing in 'talkies,' but how to convince people he'd believable as an opera star? The answer was to pose in various operatic roles and have Hurrell photograph him.

And it worked! When Novarro showed the photographs to a studio exec, he was immediately cast in a movie where he could sing four light-opera songs. Likewise, Norma Shearer, Hurrell's next celebrity client, was such a straight-arrow that her own husband didn't believe she could star as a vamp in The Divorcee, until Hurrell took a series of photographs of her in a silk kimono.

What Hurrell and the studio publicity departments fed the public wasn't reality--it wasn't anything close to reality. Take, for example, this photograph of Joan Crawford before and after retouching. Even taken with my crappy cell phone camera, you can see a dramatic difference in the two images. Before retouching, Crawford has wrinkles, sunspots, and freckles; after retouching, she looks not just twenty years younger, but probably better than she looked when she was twenty years younger! The Joan Crawford of Hurrell photographs never existed, and the images in his portraits are idealizations, not reality.



In the opening paragraph of this book, Vieira wrote, "Hollywood aped our culture, fed our culture, and to certain extent was our culture." Considering that, one has to wonder if he's drunk a bit of the glamor koolaid. If he has, one can hardly blame him--everyone drank the koolaid, even the people who were actually living the reality! Hurrell himself said of pre-War Hollywood, "Those days were like a storybook.... We were the children of the gods." When Cecil Beaton visited Hollywood in 1930, he wrote, "Apollos and Venuses are everywhere. It is as if the whole race of gods had come to California. Walking along the sidewalks... I see classic oval faces that might have sat to Praxiteles. The girls are all bleached and painted with sunburn enamel." Ann Sheridan reflected, "There was a certain kind of fantasy, a certain imagination that is not accepted now. The world is too small."

I think Sheridan has the right of it: pre-War Hollywood was a time and place where the line between fantasy and reality was indistinct, maybe even non-existent, and the pictures--both still and moving--that were based on fantasy were so powerful they produced their own reality. It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words. That may not be true--in fact, photographs often need words in order to make sense--but I do know a picture, no matter how fabricated, is more memorable and convincing than any description in words. The stars of Hurrell's portraits were envisioned as eternally young, beautiful, and ready, and thus that's their enduring image.

Book Review: SIN IN SOFT FOCUS--PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD by Mark A. Vieira

Aside from being vaguely aware that there was some sort of up-tight rule book preventing nudity, sex, and cursing in olde timey movies, I didn't know much about the Hays Code or anything about "Pre-Code" Hollywood until I picked up this book. To say a movie is pre-Code is something of a misnomer: there had been guidelines governing so-called decency in film since the 1920s, and the Hays Code (nick-named after William Hays, but officially known as the Motion Picture Production Code) was instituted in 1930. However, Hollywood completely disregarded the Code and did mostly whatever they wanted up until 1935-ish, putting the onus of censorship on pre-production hand-wringing by the studios and SRC (a studio-sponsored censorship board), as well as locally--meaning a lot of films were cut down by state and municipal censorship committees before being shown. In many cases, these cut versions are the ones people are familiar with, not the director's original vision. If you're watching a movie from the 1930s and it feels like there are scenes missing, that's because there probably are.

Using contemporary reviews, scripts, production photographs, and--when available--the complete uncut film itself, Vieira reconstructs for us these pre-Code films and how they were made. I adore the idea of this project and Vieira executes it beautifully: the book is filled with fabulous stills from pre-Code movies; and while Vieira's writing style is probably more academic than most people are used to, I wouldn't say it's dry. It's filled with juicy gossip and portrayals of all the major early Hollywood players. Vieira also isn't afraid to give his personal opinion of a film and whether it worked or not, which is great because I've never even heard of most of the movies in here, and have seen less than a handful.


Dorothy Mackaill as a secrety-turned-prostitute in Safe In Hell, 1931.

One of the more interesting threads in the book is the history of censorship in Hollywood. Whatever happened to free speech, you're no doubt thinking. In fact, free speech didn't apply to movies because they were considered a commercial product, like chewing gum or cigarettes, not an artistic statement (of course, nowadays corporations are considered "people," so that argument wouldn't hold water). This adds a whole new layer of understanding to the films of auteurial directors like Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford, who wanted to prove that film can be an art form. Censorship began before a film was even shot (the suggested subversion of Norma Shearer, known for her good-girl roles, starring in Divorcee gave the SRC fits), and was applied regardless of taste. To the censors, it didn't matter if a movie was good or not, as long as it didn't portray something someone disagreed with or was afraid of. Fortunately, there were people in Hollywood who did care about making good movies, and supported those who wanted to make them.


The "grapefruit scene" in Public Enemy depicted domestic violence.

So what were the censors cutting? Girls in skimpy clothes, people saying "Dammit to hell!" and whatnot? There was some of that, yes, but also orgies, homosexuality, prostitution, drug use, abortions, transgender issues, sexually transmitted diseases, bestiality, violence--you name it. The U.S. in the midst of the Great Depression wanted to see gritty "reality," not be fed platitudes. And the reality of pre-Code movies heroized sexually aggressive and confident women, violent gangsters, and general rule-breaking.

If you're interested in Hollywood history, this book is a delicious and interesting read. It's worth getting for the film stills alone, I think, but contains tons of information about a fascinating period of time filled with awesome creative talents who were constantly pushing the envelope. After reading this book, I'm amazed any picture ever got made; but they did and they continue to, and I think it's safe to say the world is a better place with pre-Code films than without them.

Book Review: A YALE ALBUM: THE THIRD CENTURY by Richard Benson

As indicated by the title, this is a photographic history of Yale University from the nineteenth century through the 1990s.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much from this book. I ordered it for a research project I was thinking of doing, but then lost interest in. I figured I might as well flip through it before I returned it to the library, and was surprised by the amount of great information and great photography that was contained in its pages!

For someone from Colorado, Yale seems pretty highfalutin. So you can imagine my surprise at seeing the nineteenth-century photographs of the university, which show practical, blocky buildings; tiny classrooms packed with cheap, very worn seats; and descriptions from undergrads stating they came to Yale expecting "an assemblage of Parthenons and cathedrals" and instead getting "rather dingy halls, [and] boxes...." Why, that sounds like the university I went to!


Pictures of Sterling Law Buildings, Yale University, 1930-1960. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

The architecture we now associate with Yale only came about in the twentieth century thanks to generous financial gifts and support from New Haven. This is the "New Yale," and includes iconic buildings like Sterling Memorial Library and Harkness Tower. The stone facades were artificially aged to look like they'd been standing since Yale's establishment in 1701 and hid the real architectural foundations, which consisted of twentieth-century-style steel construction.

The book isn't all about Yale's architecture, though; it's also about the "college experience" and how the university developed key aspects of its institutional character. There's an entire chapter on the arts, which is very interesting, and Paul Mellon looks super-nice and I want to give him a hug. There's also an entire chapter on the development of the library, which the book mentions frequently and definitely treats as the centerpiece of the school.

To be sure, this is a very pro-Yale narrative. Even the secret societies are painted as traditional and supportive rather than über-creepy (they still seem creepy, though--sorry, Benson); and unless you're specifically looking for it, you'll probably miss the fact that female undergraduates weren't accepted into the university until the '70s. The freaking nineteen-seventies!!!! Behind the times much, Yale? Although there is one picture of a black arts student and one or two of Asian students, I don't think anyone will be surprised that the portraits in this album are mostly of white males, despite the book's claim that, "the earlier conservative nature of the [university's] population had been transformed" in the 1960s. Yeahhh, still don't see Yale as a center of non-conformity, sorry. But going to Yale still looks like a total blast!

In spite of its one-sided nature, I think this book is great. It really does give one a sense of what going to Yale has been like through the last 100-ish years. The pictures are evocative of a privileged collegiate experience, and the descriptions are interesting and to the point. Overall this is a fascinating snapshot of one the US's greatest universities--minus most of the weirdness and snobbery that many might associate with it.

I definitely recommend this book if you have any interest in the subject.