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Usually I can easily pick up and put down things that I'm reading, or like, with some sort of reasonability, but these scans of antique magazines, because they're images and not text, can't be read on my phone. So that means reading on the laptop, which means they're in that endless scroll format that is so hard to stop and pick up again.
The main force propelling me here is getting a better and minuter grip on the changing fashions of this, my favorite period in history - well, maybe my favorite period goes up to WW2 at a stretch? So say just post Sherlock Holmes through the entire Golden Age of detective fiction. But it is really everything about the period, not just the detective fiction, that fascinates me. I suppose the detective fiction is just usually the only genre of contemporary (to that period) fiction that I find very readable, although I've read bits and pieces of the fiction from The Delineator that I've been browsing the past few days, and now McCall's (trying to get more issues from the 1920s, because apparently the latter days of The Delineator have been spottily digitized).
My fascination probably goes back to Singin' in the Rain being my favorite childhood movie, an appeal enhanced by learning my most mysterious Welsh great-grandmother had been a flapper. I think I maybe had more opportunities to speak with her than with the other two ggmas I was acquainted with (all three of them died when I was a teenager-young adult), and she actually stayed in our house for about three months when I was in middle school; but she remained the most elusive because she was almost catatonically depressed the entire time I knew her, from some time before I was born - around the time she retired after a long career as a nurse; she was a fun, active and glamorous grandmother to my dad when he was little - until she died just barely shy of her 100th birthday.
So I know she was Welsh monolingual until the age of five, how her wicked stepmother beat her whenever she spoke Welsh so that she forgot it by the time she grew up, how she started nursing as a teenager in World War I and emigrated to Canada after the war, where she became a wild flapper and once jumped into the Hudson river on a dare; how she was a private nurse and met my awful great-grandfather nursing him, how she refused to go on a date with him for months, how he showered her with expensive presents (the ill-gotten spoils of a history of opium and then fur smuggling and then probably other shady business), and how she divorced him when she found out he'd been cheating on her, when my grandpa was still a toddler, and raised my grandpa as a single mom...
I know all of that from my grandfather. It's not like you couldn't talk to her, but the responses were always slow and a bit delayed, like she was actually dreaming, or very very distracted. She had only the mildest interest in anyone except my grandfather all the time I knew her.
So my curiosity about her can never really be satisfied, could never be, even when I knew her, even when I had the chance. I did spend time with her when she stayed with us - by sitting in the darkened livingroom, on the sofa, while she watched soap operas and gameshows from the rocking chair. You never got more than a few words at a time from her. It's still kinda a warm memory though. And a strong preference for Earl Grey and tea in general has come through her to my grandpa to my dad to me. Family lore tells of a time she sent a teapot back to the kitchen because the water wasn't boiling as it poured into the cup. But you see why there's a frustrating element of mystery here, the unfulfillable desire both to know more about her life, which was so exciting and eventful and alien to me, and also just to know her.
I don't want to make it seem like I think about my ggma overwhelmingly, or even a majority of the time, in relation to the 1910s-1940s. It's passing thoughts, now. But that was definitely a bit of the spark behind my childhood and youthful interest in the 1920s, which gradually expanded the more I learned about it, and also expanded the parameters of that interest until, well, the current state of affairs, where I will reluctantly admit some interest in the 1940s after all the unavoidable exposure in my pursuit of the best interwar Golden Age detective novels, and am contemplating buying and making some reproduction 1900s-1910s skirts and blouses (technically shirtwaists, at that time) because they're just really good skirts and blouses.
The main force propelling me here is getting a better and minuter grip on the changing fashions of this, my favorite period in history - well, maybe my favorite period goes up to WW2 at a stretch? So say just post Sherlock Holmes through the entire Golden Age of detective fiction. But it is really everything about the period, not just the detective fiction, that fascinates me. I suppose the detective fiction is just usually the only genre of contemporary (to that period) fiction that I find very readable, although I've read bits and pieces of the fiction from The Delineator that I've been browsing the past few days, and now McCall's (trying to get more issues from the 1920s, because apparently the latter days of The Delineator have been spottily digitized).
My fascination probably goes back to Singin' in the Rain being my favorite childhood movie, an appeal enhanced by learning my most mysterious Welsh great-grandmother had been a flapper. I think I maybe had more opportunities to speak with her than with the other two ggmas I was acquainted with (all three of them died when I was a teenager-young adult), and she actually stayed in our house for about three months when I was in middle school; but she remained the most elusive because she was almost catatonically depressed the entire time I knew her, from some time before I was born - around the time she retired after a long career as a nurse; she was a fun, active and glamorous grandmother to my dad when he was little - until she died just barely shy of her 100th birthday.
So I know she was Welsh monolingual until the age of five, how her wicked stepmother beat her whenever she spoke Welsh so that she forgot it by the time she grew up, how she started nursing as a teenager in World War I and emigrated to Canada after the war, where she became a wild flapper and once jumped into the Hudson river on a dare; how she was a private nurse and met my awful great-grandfather nursing him, how she refused to go on a date with him for months, how he showered her with expensive presents (the ill-gotten spoils of a history of opium and then fur smuggling and then probably other shady business), and how she divorced him when she found out he'd been cheating on her, when my grandpa was still a toddler, and raised my grandpa as a single mom...
I know all of that from my grandfather. It's not like you couldn't talk to her, but the responses were always slow and a bit delayed, like she was actually dreaming, or very very distracted. She had only the mildest interest in anyone except my grandfather all the time I knew her.
So my curiosity about her can never really be satisfied, could never be, even when I knew her, even when I had the chance. I did spend time with her when she stayed with us - by sitting in the darkened livingroom, on the sofa, while she watched soap operas and gameshows from the rocking chair. You never got more than a few words at a time from her. It's still kinda a warm memory though. And a strong preference for Earl Grey and tea in general has come through her to my grandpa to my dad to me. Family lore tells of a time she sent a teapot back to the kitchen because the water wasn't boiling as it poured into the cup. But you see why there's a frustrating element of mystery here, the unfulfillable desire both to know more about her life, which was so exciting and eventful and alien to me, and also just to know her.
I don't want to make it seem like I think about my ggma overwhelmingly, or even a majority of the time, in relation to the 1910s-1940s. It's passing thoughts, now. But that was definitely a bit of the spark behind my childhood and youthful interest in the 1920s, which gradually expanded the more I learned about it, and also expanded the parameters of that interest until, well, the current state of affairs, where I will reluctantly admit some interest in the 1940s after all the unavoidable exposure in my pursuit of the best interwar Golden Age detective novels, and am contemplating buying and making some reproduction 1900s-1910s skirts and blouses (technically shirtwaists, at that time) because they're just really good skirts and blouses.
