glamour - Kate Degelau-Pierce

Mystery and grace and glamour

While I get caught up on my reading for Cleopatra, I’m going to interject a couple of non-chronological posts. First up: glamour.

I know I keep beating this over the head, but it can’t be overstated: the major sources that we have for Cleopatra are all Roman. She was on the losing side of the Antony-Octavian civil war. History is written by the winners, and she lost.

But she is a queen. And her intelligence and glamour comes across in the ancient sources. Plutarch, for example, describes her meeting with Antony:

…she sailed up the river Cydnus on a gold-prowed barge, with sails of purple outspread and rowers pulling on silver oars to the sound of a reed-pipe blended with wind-pipes and lyres. She herself reclined beneath a gold-embroidered canopy, adorned like a painting of Aphrodite…

So what does it mean to be glamorous? Virginia Postrel, in her wonderful book, The Power of Glamour, explains that glamour has three main qualities: mystery, a promise of escape or transformation, and grace.

First, the mystery. We don’t know Cleopatra very well. There are only a handful of ancient sources about her. So we take what we know: she was well-educated and an able governor. Julius Caesar was at least in lust with her, and Antony was definitely in love. But beyond that, we don’t know much. So our minds tend to fill in the details. We don’t fill in details we don’t like or inconvenient truths. We fill in the details with even more luxury or decadence or hard work or intelligence… whatever we want to see.

Which leads us naturally into the promise of escape or transformation. It’s easy to daydream about how awesome being Cleopatra would be. To live in a cosmopolitan place like Alexandria, with the best tutors at your fingertips, with amazing food and luxuries around you all the time. Wouldn’t it be great to live like that? You can pick and choose the details you want. In the early 1900s, the decadence was emphasized. In Stacy Schiff’s book, the intelligence and hard work is. How we see Cleopatra is very much how we see ourselves.

And then the grace. She isn’t always described as beautiful (on her coins she has quite a large nose), but she is universally described as an intelligent, witty conversationalist. She was well-educated, spoke nine languages, could raise armies and managed her country ably. Not to mention that all her official propaganda packaged her as Isis – a goddess. She knew how to present herself with elegance and style.

Cleopatra is definitely glamorous, and exploring that glamour is one of the things I enjoy about her.

Not glamorous

What’s it about?
All Fall Down is a story about an ambassador’s granddaughter, Grace. There has been an accident and her mother is dead. She, however, is convinced that it wasn’t an accident. But no one will believe her. How will she ever prove that there is more going on than meets the eye?

Why should you read it?
You should read it if you, like me, are an Ally Carter fan (the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society series are fun). Otherwise, I might give it a pass. Ms Carter is a practical person – it helps her write no-nonsense characters who are good at getting things done. But All Fall Down should be about glamour. There are grand balls, tuxedoes, gowns, and secret tunnels. There is diplomacy and doublespeak and old European cities. Grace should remind me a bit of James Bond; but she is damaged in a way that isn’t, to my mind, alluring. (Her mother is dead. It would be weird if she were normal.) There is a way to make a character damaged and still fascinating – La Femme Nikita comes to mind. Grace should be competent but off her game. Instead she just came across as blundering. I didn’t get the underlying competence.

I will read the sequel – I am sure Grace has underlying competence. This is an Ally Carter series. I look forward to Grace finding it.

Media Studies 101

What’s it about?
Posting yesterday about the Mitford sisters and today about Scandals of Classic Hollywood may out me as liking celebrity gossip – as long as it’s from 80 years ago. Anne Helen Petersen is a former media studies professor who specializes in how celebrities use the media to shape their images (she writes for Buzzfeed now). Scandals is a series of essays about movie stars and their images and real life; it started as a series on Hairpin. Everyone quickly realized that it was awesome, and it turned into a book.

Why should you read it?
Because you live in a modern society where much information comes through some form of media. Because you want to know how the media chooses which information to share and which to hide and why. Because, thanks to social networking, we all craft an image of ourselves online – what information are you choosing to share about yourself? Why? Also, because gossip is fun.