Angela Carter’s short story “The Bloody Chamber” is a Bluebeard tale in which the young narrator, a penniless pianist (“a virgin of the arpeggios”), becomes the bride of the richest man in France. He whisks her off to a remote seaside castle bristling with treasures: A Bechstein in the music room, cabinets of Limoges and Sèvres, a library lined with “calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spines, the octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco.” From all this we’re to conclude that this Bluebeard is a connoisseur and collector of many fine things, including wives. For these hapless young ladies, their husband’s art collection must serve as a first warning sign, including, amid the Fragonards, Watteaus and Pouissins, an ominous trio of Symbolist paintings: A Moreau entitled Sacrificial Victim, an Ensor called The Foolish Virgins, and a late Gauguin called Out of the Night We Come, Into the Night We Go, which depicts “a tranced brown girl in the deserted house.”*
Rereading “The Bloody Chamber” this weekend I grew interested in the bride’s trousseau, especially a Poiret dress that she wears twice in the story — once to the opera, when she is taken to Tristan during the courtship, and a second time when she loses her virginity at the castle by the sea. The dress is described as “a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string under the breasts,” although later it’s a “chaste little Poiret shift.” So: It’s sensually provoking to wear, yet virginal to look at. Both times M. Bluebeard requests that his child-bride wear the dress with a choker of crimson rubies around her throat, an aristocratic fashion rooted in guillotine humor. (Later, he will try to lop off her head. Ladies, I implore you, inspect those gifts of jewels for all possible meaning and significance before accepting!)
Interestingly, decapitation also pops up in an anecdote connected to Poiret’s own life. As Hamish Bowles recounts in Vogue, the Parisian designer’s early clients were put off by the “brazen modernity of his designs, such as a Confucius coat innovatively cut like a kimono. ‘What a horror,’ Poiret recalled the formidable Russian Princess Bariatinsky exclaiming when he presented her with it. ‘When there are low fellows who run after our sledges and annoy us, we have their heads cut off, and we put them in sacks just like that.'”
Other gratifying Poiret links:
• A gallery of images from the Met’s 2007 “Poiret: King of Fashion” exhibit.
• A slideshow paying tribute to Poiret’s freeing influence on women’s fashion (illuminating to tie this to the dress’s stimulating qualities in the Carter story).
• A lengthy but fascinating article by Whitney Chadwick that highlights Poiret’s costume design.
• Poiret paper dolls!
* I can’t find images of these paintings online or indeed any mention of them independent of discussions of “The Bloody Chamber,” so I leave it to ALN readers to tell me if Carter made them up.
The Poiret dress shown here is a 1913 “Théâtre des Champs-Élysées” evening gown made of ivory silk damask with an overskirt of ivory silk tulle. Credit: Photograph Studio, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

It’s A Wonderful Life leaves Mr. Tingle va klempt but I tend to wander off halfway through. However, there are a few movies we always watch together this time of year: Thin Man (for the Christmas party scene); Wonder Boys (not technically a Christmas movie but it feels like one, and not just because of all the snow and sleet); and the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy (because nothing says “Merry Christmas!” like 10,000 Orcs on your doorstep).
The other Christmas-watching tradition calls for Mr. Tingle (who is a tolerant man) to trundle an old television with VCR attachment from our attic so I can watch a VHS tape of Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing The Nutcracker. This year I intended to pair it with Mark Morris’s Hard Nut, which Terry recommended here a while back, but Netflix has alas, not obliged.
I plan to pop in here next week. But just in case: I wish you all a merry and joyful holiday!

• It’s hard to read this list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels and not want to head immediately to the store to pick up the ingredients for some Smoking Bishops. (via Bookslut.)
• Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder (so secondeth Strindberg).
I’ve not yet had absinthe, and I long to try a thimbleful. My adult self feels about it the way my kid self once felt about Turkish delight. As you’ll remember, Turkish delight is what the White Witch gives Edmund a packet of in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it sounded so mysterious and delectable. I have a distinct memory of standing in front of the candy counter at the Marshall-Fields in Chicago as a child looking in vain for the tray of Turkish delight. (A few years ago a friend brought some home from a cruise in Greece, and I finally got to try some. It turns out that Turkish delight is made up of oddly nubby, jelly-like candies covered in powdery sugar. Not quite what I imagined — which was something even more snowy with a deep emerald center — but still very satisfying to eat.)
It’s funny how many of the food descriptions one reads as a child stick. For me it wasn’t just the Turkish delight from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe that I fancied, but also the buttery toast points and tea Lucy has with Mr. Tumnus. The blancmange Jo brings Laurie in Little Women. The acorn pancakes in My Side of the Mountain. And the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the toad in the hole in Danny the Champion of the World.
Meanwhile, the list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels makes me want to re-read Pickwick Papers and make a list of all the food consumed in it. The club eats so many gluttonous meals, many of the components of which, if I remember correctly, are pleasantly strange and slightly disgusting to read about now.

Earlier this week Terry asked OGIC and me to put together lists of ten films released since the fall of 2005 for he and Mrs. Teachout to watch. The one caveat: “No spinach, please: I’m out for pleasure, very broadly construed, so don’t send me to anything I ‘ought’ to see (whatever that means) unless it’s also something that you loved.”
It has been fun to deliberate; and I’ve tried to be true to the no-spinach rule (“In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”). Here are my first five, listed in no particular order, with the rest to follow next week. I note with some chagrin that Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle came out a year too early to make the 2005 cutoff, otherwise it would have a spot here. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I think you should see it too, if you haven’t already.
1. Casino Royale: I’m a big Bond fan, so this movie was a great treat — and a relief after the franchise’s sad last installments, which were like watching video games. Lots of explosions, no feeling. This one seemed to return Bond to the physical realm. A lot of this is thanks to Daniel Craig, who plays the role rougher and with a lower center of gravity than anyone since Connery. Early on there’s a fantastic chase sequence on foot — showcasing freerunning star Sébastien Foucan — that’s so witty and exhilarating that I went back to see the movie twice. So much fun. And j’aime Eva Green.
2. Inside Man: A fresh, intelligent thriller that uses New York the way Collateral used L.A. Its bank robbery plot doesn’t quite hang together but I love this movie for the life in it: There’s a lot of delight in it for how everyday people talk and act. Plus, it’s beautifully shot. The bit where a woman brought in to translate negotiates to get her parking tickets fixed is one of my favorite film scenes of recent years: I wish more movies used their bit characters so well and shined so much around the edges.
3. Pan’s Labyrinth: Gorgeously conceived and wrought. I had to hide out for portions of it, though: It’ll wring you out.
4. Serenity: Joss Whedon presents Cowboys In Space! Rethinks and improves on the Firefly TV series. The script’s a little klunky with exposition in places but it’s a nice little ride all the same.
5. The Devil Wears Prada: I liked this comedy: It’s bitchy and tart, and there are some lovely clothes to look at (which I know matters a great deal to you, Terry). I also find it amusing to think of this film as a sort of Her Girl Friday, with Streep in the Cary Grant role. Lately, so many love stories on screen seem so neutered — all hugs and sweaters and understanding gazes (it’s like the heroines aren’t searching for love so much as a good therapist) — it’s nice to see a romance with some pepper even if it’s not, strictly speaking, a romance.

So, I was late to get a cell phone and I still don’t really get texting or my phone’s other features. Once in a while the phone will make a crazy tweet and I’ll find a message on the screen, which I’ll read and then phone or email the sender back.
Just now the phone made its crazy tweet and there was a message saying, “Fwd: We are at the hospital.” I didn’t recognize the number but managed to tap out my first-ever text message: “Sorry Wrong number.” And then the phone tweeted again with the message: “Dear Dumbass: One of your dearest friends is currently in labor. Love, her husband.”
Actually, that’s not what he typed. But he should have.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. This week’s installment comes from Matthew Eck, whose novel The Farther Shore is the Lit Blog Co-op’s Read This! Selection for winter. In a review for Salon, Stephen Elliott described Eck’s book as “a truly great war novel by a writer of sizable talent who has come close to war.” Keep up with the LBC discussion of the novel going on this week here.
It’s that time of the year where we like to get depressed and we like to drink. We visit family and friends — and pets are left alone for days on end with too little water. In the title I use the word “around” because not all the writers on this list drink. I use the word “few” because I’ve already embarrassed myself enough out there in the world. But never apologize — even as you knock over the Christmas tree.
I’m not saying that writers have to drink either, don’t get me wrong there. I never drink anything but coffee when I’m writing. Don’t dull your senses. Don’t introduce bad habits into your writing time.
I think I really chose these books because I must have somehow gotten a little depressed around all these writers at one point. But it’s that little bit of depression I carried back to the beauty of their books, their work heavy with loss.
1. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. This is one of those novels where I’ll let the writing speak for itself. It has one of the greatest first lines in all of literature: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
The writing in the book is unbearably beautiful. Case in point, later in the book:

Behind her, the clouds surrendered their last crimson streaks to a soft, foggy gray. A single tall evergreen tilted against the falling sky. Behind me, the party began to rumble like thunder. Peggy relit the hash pipe, and this time I accepted it from her. We shared the smoke as the evening winds rose off the cold sea, rose up the wooded ridges, and herded the party inside, people muttering thin complaints like children called from play to the fuzzy dreams of the their early beds.

2. Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn. If you’ve ever wanted to be loved, read this book. And this next sentence has nothing to do with what I just said: Kirn has written some of the finest scenes about Mormon sex, in case that’s what you’re looking to give, or get, for Christmas. This is one of the few books that made me laugh until I cried — and not because it’s all funny.
3. A Stranger In This World by Kevin Canty. This is one of the few books that made me cry until I needed to laugh. I love to teach “Dogs” and “Pretty Judy.” Besides, the man turned me on to Babel. I’ll love him forever for that one.
4. The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. I do not know Lydia Davis — let me make that clear. But I once sat in a room where fifteen or twenty MFA-ers were trying to talk to her. Okay, so I wasn’t sitting, I was trying as well. I love this book for the way memory tumbles against memory. I love the “nothing” it offers.
5. Tom Thomson In Purgatory by Troy Jollimore. One of the notes I scribbled in the margins of this book reads, “Did you ever get laid on Christmas?” It’s not a note to Tom Thomson either. It was fodder for the friend I gave the book to. This is a book you’ll have to buy for someone else because it’ll say so much to you.

Well, Ms. Maud, I’ll see your Angela Carter on gentrification and raise you some Donna Tartt on McMansions.
In a hair-raising scene early in The Little Friend, young Harriet and her friend Hely are attempting to capture a poisonous snake. Their hunt for copperheads takes them to Oak Lawn Estates, a newer subdivision of their Mississippi town where all the houses “are less than seven years old: mock Tudor, blocky ranch and contemporary, even a couple of fake antebellums of new, spanking-red brick, with ornamental columns tacked on to their facades.” To make way for these outsize, expensive homes, the ground has been razed and plucked of all trees:

But Oak Lawn had taken its own revenge at being planed so brutally flat. The land was swampy, and whining with mosquitos. Holes filled with brackish water as soon as they were dug in the ground. The sewage backed up when it rained–legendary black sludge that rose in the spanking-new commodes, dripped from the faucets and the fancy multiple-spray showerheads. With all the topsoil sliced away, truckloads and truckloads of sand had to be brought in to keep the houses from washing away in the spring: and there was nothing to stop turtles and snakes from crawling as far inland from the river as they pleased.
And Oak Lawn Estates was infested with snakes–big and small, poisonous or not, snakes that liked mud, and snakes that liked water, and snakes that liked to bask on dry rocks in the sunshine. On hot days, the reek of snake rose up from the very ground, just as murky water rose to fill footprints in the bulldozed earth. Ida Rhew compared he smell of snake musk to fish guts–buffalo carp, mud or channel cat, scavenger fish that fed off garbage. Edie, when digging a hole for an azalea or a rosebush, particularly in Garden Club civic plantings near the Interstate, said she knew her spade was close to a snake’s nest if she caught a whiff of something like rotten potatoes.

If you’re a Project Runway fan, you’ll want to check out Jay McCarroll’s recaps of the show for Elle:
• Episode 1
• Episode 2
• Episode 3
• Episode 4
The recaps are wonderful — very, very funny about the show’s hoop-de-do (my favorite line: “Marion always looks shipwrecked.”) but also smart and constructive about breaking down the fashion going down the runway. The best thing since the launch of Project Rungay.