Fancy Dresses Described;

The Hornet.

Fancy Dresses Described; or What to Wear at Fancy Balls is an 1887 costume guide, and it is amazing and wonderful. Some of the ideas would be best avoided in this century, but the costumes run the gamut from Five O’Clock Tea to Gold Mines to Backgammon to whole countries, and everything in between. Fascinating. The lists of illustrated costumes does not even come close to all the costume guides:

A sample of one page of descriptions:

The costumes are amazing and beautiful:

Magpie.

Oh, the Magpie! Who needs an excuse to wear that?

I haven’t even come close to perusing the whole book, but this caught my eye, and now I want this outfit:

Masherette. Black satin tail coat and skirt, with white waistcoat; black embroidered stockings; crimson silk handkerchief; opera hat and crutch stick; high Wellington boots; shirt front, high collar; eyeglass in eye; buttonhole.

Monte Carlo.

The book is a tremendous amount of fun, just on reading alone, and it’s a great resource and imagination spark for all the costume makers and wearers out there. Fuck, I really wish I could sew.  It’s as well to remember that this book did cater to the rich, just look at the entry for Night. Diamonds scattered in the hair, and much more. Of course, there’s no need for them to be real.

Victorian Occultism: Thought-Forms.

The Intent to Know.

Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book’s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras.

The book’s grand ambitions are evident from the first page. “To paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,” Besant laments, “is a hard and thankless task.” She insists that the images in the book “are not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to appear.” Rather, “they are representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary men and women.” And she hopes that they will make the reader “realise the nature and power of his thoughts, acting as a stimulus to the noble, a curb on the base.” This grandiloquence was typical: fin de siècle occult leaders produced some of the most baroque writing in literary history, the purplest of purple prose.

Yet what are we saying, exactly, when we call black words on a white page “purple”?

These sorts of underlying associations between words, colors and sounds were precisely what motivated Thought-Forms. In other words, the book was about synesthesia. The illustration of the music of Mendelssohn reproduced above, for instance, depicts yellow, red, blue and green lines rising out of a church. This, Leadbeater and Besant explain, “signifies the movement of one of the parts of the melody, the four moving approximately together denoting the treble, alto, tenor and bass respectively.” Moreover, “the scalloped edging surrounding the whole is the result of various flourishes and arpeggios, and the floating crescents in the centre represent isolated or staccato chords.” Color and sound had become commingled.

Going by the colours I like best, I end up with Strong Intellect, Selfish Affection, Pure Affection, Avarice, Anger, Sensuality, and Malice. Sounds about right. (If 2/2 was white, rather than a missing colour, that one would have been picked, too.)

You can see and read much more at The Public Domain. The book is available to view through Gutenberg.

The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I.

The Triumphal Arch of Maximilian I.

Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) was one of the most celebrated artists of his time. He produced some truly monumental works, one of the grandest of which was a ‘triumphal arch’ created for Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519). Dürer created several works for the emperor during his reign, but this massive print is probably the most impressive, at least in terms of sheer scale.

The image was created from 195 individual woodblocks and took almost three years to cut and print (1515-1518). The finished product was over 3.5 metres tall. Its form was meant to evoke the monumental arches commissioned by Roman emperors of antiquity, but rendered in paper rather than marble. It would have originally been intended as a form of wall decoration in one of Maximilian’s residences.

You can read much more about this at Medievalists, or you can head straight for the fun part, the interactive piece at the British Museum, which allows you a close look at this amazing work.

oooOOOoo Lesbian Nazi Regime ooOOOooo.

A whole 8 days ago, Rick Wiles was ranting about oooOOOoo Shadow Government ooOOOooo. I would venture a guess it didn’t go over well enough, because it has now morphed into a secret world government that is a gay/lesbian Nazi regime, but the death squads are still in place. Can’t lose the death squads.

“I stand by my claim that this country has death squads,” he said. “We have death squads in this country and it’s being run by a super secret agency, but there is participation at the state and local level.”

Yeah, yeah, we got that last time. I guess the whole Shadowmerica business didn’t go over so well though, because it’s been downgraded to a super secret agency. Right, that’s never been the plot of a million bad books, no. Does the super secret agency have secret squirrels? Inspector Gadget? Are Boris and Natasha involved?

“We’re in a fascist Nazi police state,” Wiles added, warning that “there will be a day that they tell law enforcement [officers] to execute your children right in front of you and they will do it.”

You’re so close to woke there, Mr. Wiles, but you take one twisted path to the side. Yes, we are in a fascist state, and the nazis are popping out of the woodwork all over the place. This is the current state of things, having the Tiny Tyrant perched in high office, praising nazis, embracing fascism, and fucking things up all over the place. As for cops, well, they already are, and have been executing peoples’ children, all over the place, every single day. You may not have noticed because the majority of them aren’t white.

“America has become a Nazi state. The deep state is a Nazi state,” Wiles said. “That is why Campos [Jesus Campos, the Mandalay Bay security guard ] appeared on a daytime talk show hosted by a fast-talking, dancing comedienne, and, let me add, a lesbian, because this Nazi regime is a gay/lesbian Nazi regime, just like Nazis in Hitler’s day. Hitler was a bisexual, the top Nazi leaders of the Nazi party were homosexuals. The Nazi takeover of Germany was a militant homosexual fascist takeover; that is what is taking place in America today.”

I expect there are much more venal reasons for the talk show appearance; it’s standard anymore, do the talk show rounds, grab all the money you can, have your 15 minutes of fame. There might be a side benefit of helping himself process the event, and helping others to do so as well.

As for the Nazis, um, Paragraph 175. Prosecution. Persecution. Concentration Camps. A whole lot of dead people. If the top leaders of the Nazi party were queer, they kept themselves in one deeeep closet, Mr. Wiles. Gay men were considered to be a great hindrance in the creation of that lovely master white race.

So, when another eight days have passed, are we going to have yet another revision of Secret Whatever with Death Squads™? You could turn this into a series! Or write yet another really bad book.

RWW has the story, and the soundcloud.