Berenice Abbott – Changing New York 1935-1938 – photography

While researching New York in the mid 1930′s for No Soft Soap I have had the sheer pleasure of discovering the work of American Photographer Berenice Abbott, and the amazing project she undertook from 1935 -1938 - Changing New York.

Murray Hill Hotel; From Park Avenue and 40th Street. Nov. 19, 1935.  ID: 482742

Changing New York was a Federal Art Project that documented the city’s rapidly changing cityscapes. Skyscrapers growing out of an old world, an amazing collection of beautiful and thoughtful images. New York Public Library are the custodians of the collection, and have made the images available through their digital collection. Follow the link below to scroll through this fascinating and now historically important documentation.

 Berenice Abbott – New York Public Library

November – #NaNoWriMo and #NaBloPoMo

November
National Novel Writing Month & National Blog Posting Month
#NaNoWriMo & #NaBloPoMo

It all starts now!
National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month are two completely separate writing initiatives, that I have joined up for, in the Month of November. I have popped the links up in their titles so if you wish to also participate, or watch my progress, and or the progress of the many talented (crazy) authors that have decided to participate, you have the information with a click of your mouse.

The Novel Writing Month, proposes 50K words of the first draft of a novel. So I hope to pump into No Soft Soap and complete the first draft by the end of the month. There is a lot to do..but I am really looking forward to fleshing out that plot. 

Deciding to participate in the National Blog Posting Month as well, came from having plans for this project, that life and chaotic work ethic have hindered. So I am hoping November is going to be a formative month, helping me to create a productive structure that lets me achieve the goals I set out for myself. I will be posting daily with a cross section of themes. There will be erotic romance snippets, author critiques and interviews, research I have found interesting and things I haven’t even thought of yet.

I have a huge Thank – you to Karen Andrews ( @miscmum ) for writing about her participation in both these events. She inspired me to investigate further and as a result I signed up.

……Play and Stay Safe! 

circa 1933 Semi Nude

Knitting for the unemployed in 1931

I found this footage of performer Fanny Brice promoting the knitting of sweaters to help support the unemployed in 1931. Gretchen is a beautiful knitter, and participated in this promotion, and many others that assisted the unemployed and homeless.

Introducing Gretchen

I found this beautiful picture of actress Sylvia Sidney. She wonderfully gives visualization to my leading lady, Gretchen “Ginger”, isn’t she just divine.

Punctuate it!

During Six Sentence Sunday last week, I was given some amazing feed back. In particular, April Dawn highlighted my struggling punctuation and clumsy use of passive voice. However, she phrased it far more tactfully.

Today I found a fantastic paper on passive voice so I am starting to create my own strategy or checklist to ensure that I only use it when appropriate. I have also definitely gotten lazy with my punctuation; I tend to write like I talk. This causes me confusion when punctuating, I think it will take some concentrated effort on my behalf to resolve.

Below I’m going to use the Green Pen of Hope, inspired by Epic Black Car, and his Red Pen of Doom. Hopefully when I’m ready to submit my first page to him, it won’t bleed too much.

The Original Six:

They hadn’t really made it past the front door, it had unfolded, urgent and lustful. He had fucked her hard, a primal urge he couldn’t control: the heavy sweet smell of sex still lingering in the room. It was holding him, caressing him, keeping his head spinning, and heart pounding; but she was gone.
He could hear the shower running,  the warm steam dancing to it’s own seductive tune. Her silhouette had stopped him from moving any closer, his eyes drawn to her form, her nipples pert on the crest of her breast,  the soft curve of her back, all of her was swirling and tumbling around in his thoughts.
He was going to taste her again, but now he was going to take his time.

The Green Pen of Hope:

They hadn’t really had hardly made it past the front door, it had unfolded, urgent and lustful. He had fucked her hard, a primal urge he couldn’t wasn’t prepared to control. The heavy sweet smell of sex remained. Lingering in around the room, it was holding him, caressing him, keeping forcing his head spinning to spin, and his heart pounding to pound; but she was gone.
He could hear heard the shower running, then felt the warm steam dancing to it’s own seductive tune.  Her silhouette had stopped him from moving any closer, his eyes drawn to her form, her nipples pert on the crest of her breast,  the soft curve of her back, all of her was swirling and tumbling around in his thoughts.  He stopped, his eyes drawn to her silhouette through the opaque curtain. The shape of her breast and her pert nipples, the soft curve of her back, she had made him want her.
He was going had to taste have her again, but now he was going to take his time.

* I’m still struggling with the tense.

The result:

They had hardly made it past the front door, it had unfolded, urgent and lustful. He had fucked her hard, a primal urge he wasn’t prepared to control. The heavy sweet smell of sex remained. Lingering around the room, it was holding him, caressing him, making his head spin and his heart pound; but she was gone.

He heard the shower running, then felt the warm steam dancing to it’s own seductive tune. He stopped, his eyes drawn to her silhouette through the opaque curtain. The shape of her breast and her pert nipples, the soft curve of her back, she made him want her.

He had to have her again, but now he was going to take his time.

the sexiest political idea

The post title is quite objective, some might say objectionable but so is the nature of politics, similarly objective is what gets people sexually aroused. They are also both incredibly relative; it is almost impossible to separate life experiences, our cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs from how we form opinions, and react sexually. So I qualify by stating this is the sexist political idea I have had the pleasure of entertaining in many years. I’ve toiled over getting it into one succinct statement, and I’m really only three quarters happy with it. but I want to finish this post tonight.

The legalised lending of money at interest is at the centre of our economic malaise, making moneylending with interest illegal will change the world with benefit for all.

I don’t know if I can adequately and eloquently, explain just how much this very simple idea has turned me on. Firstly I need to tease you through, introduce you to parts of it’s journey. The idea comes from Peter Maurin. Maurin believed lending with interest allowed people to live off the physical labour of anothers. Important to his idea was that while people were taking the profit they weren’t exercising any responsibility for the land. He believed that everything had been has been mortgaged from homes, to government to the church, and he felt the financial owners were then absent from making responsible decisions about it’s usage.

I feel his sense of betrayal and abandonment, society wasn’t focused on making our biggest resource look after us for the future. Maurin believed when people started only producing for profit  the values of society were only then concerned with competition instead of co-operation. He often uses the terms individualist; as in profit emphasised competition rewards only the individual versus personalist; where he is trying to describe localised co-operation through emphasising the person as human beings with our earth, our biggest resource. Maurin began to feel the bank account had become the dominant standard for our values.

I absolutely love thinking through the idea of a world without banks. It makes my heart beat faster and I explode numerous ideas. Importantly I begin to feel that there is hope to finding other ways, and my children and my grandchildren have a chance. As my mind races, my palms start to sweat, think I might be heading out on a first date as I could dance with this idea for hours.

Maurin’s ideas eventually culminated with other thinkers and economists into the theory of distributism. A third economic system! We don’t have to choose a spot on the political spectrum just between communism and capitalism anymore, how ridiculously sexy is that! I can’t tell you how many times, I have felt frustrated and almost stagnant having to place  my political bent somewhere between left and right. I often felt I slid up and down that political pole far too much. However creating a triangle of options, of differing, almost three dimensional places to sit my opinion is so wonderfully tantalising it almost makes me feel faint.

Self Organisation by Peter Maurin published June 1, 1934

If only the politicians of today could voice their ideas through this kind of simplicity and expression.

Self Organisation by Peter Maurin   June 1, 1934

People go to Washington
asking the federal government
to solve their economic problems
while the federal government
was never intended
to solve men’s economic problems.
Thomas Jefferson says that
the less government there is,
the better it is.
If there is less government there is
the better it is,
then the best kind of government
is self government.
If the best kind of government
is self government,
then the best kind of organisation
is self organisation.
When the organisers try
to organize the unorganised,
then the organisers don’t organise themselves.
And when the organisers
don’t organise themselves,
nobody organises himself.
And when nobody organises himself,
nothing is organised.

Union Square 1933

Gil Elliot – the landscape

Gil Elliot , Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, 1972 pp 189 -190

The landscape might begin with that broad diffusion of death over the plains and poor hills of China and Mexico dislocated by war and revolution; with life draining back from exhausted towns into a countryside and into Novgorod. The peasants of those vast provinces…wither under the blight of man-made famine, [as] marching armies uproot them from the shallow misery and leave them on the bare earth battered and bleached like old cardboard boxes smelling sour in the sun and the rain. You might see some such landscapes as familiar, others with fresh surprises like waking on a long train ride as rings of dusk creep hills recalling new countries and old stories: and indeed the citizens of these parts are cosmopolitan and have have many stories. Nigerians and Germans alike squeezed to death by economic blockade, Armenians massacred in the gaps between large and small wars, train-loads of Europeans dying between frontiers: Paraguayans, Chinese, French, Americans falling to disease in the intervals of fighting. Truly a universal nation, of which impressions must be as fleeting as those tantalising glimpses of quiet static things from a train window, in the foreground rushing past and in the distance a slow revolving panorama…. When it comes to an industrial landscape you can not see so much, apart from general greyness, black chimneys, slag heaps and waste pools, from a train window. But of course! the railway sidings, so important to those nineteenth century regions of the dead. The labour camp regions, with Vorkuta and Karaganda at the very end of those railway lines that push up into the Arctic and the east, down to Siberia and the south. The thick-clanging of trucks that took the living and half living from the ghettos of Poland, Russia and the Baltic States: and pumped eager uniformed lads into the battle regions of the Western front, the Ukrainian front, the Don, the Caucasus, the Italian front. The concentration camps with their own railway sidings.