Sunday, August 19, 2018

"The piano," [1993]: The Best Scene,--- [Such exquisite acting in such a beautiful and artistic film!!!]...

Friday, August 17, 2018

The Making Of The Movie, "The Piano,"...

"The Piano," --- [This stunningly beautiful and poetic, yet very quirky film won many awards. I LOVED IT!!!]...

Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Bold & Remarkable Nellie Bly...

Nellie Bly working in a factory producing boxes

At birth she was named Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She was born in "Cochran's Mills", now part of the Pittsburgh suburb of Burrell Township, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Her father, Michael Cochran, born about 1810, started out as a laborer and mill worker before buying the local mill and most of the land surrounding his family farmhouse. He later became a merchant, postmaster, and associate justice at Cochran's Mills (which was named after him) in Pennsylvania. Michael married twice. He had 10 children with his first wife, Catherine Murphy, and 5 more children, including Elizabeth, with his second wife, Mary Jane Kennedy. Michael Cochran's father had immigrated from County Londonderry, Ireland in the 1790s.

As a young girl Elizabeth often was called "Pinky" because she so frequently wore that color. As she became a teenager she wanted to portray herself as more sophisticated, and so dropped the nickname and changed her surname to "Cochrane". She attended boarding school for one term, but after her father's death in 1870 or 1871, was forced to drop out due to lack of funds.

In 1880 Cochrane's mother moved her family to Pittsburgh. A newspaper column entitled "What Girls Are Good For" in the Pittsburgh Dispatch that reported that girls were principally for birthing children and keeping house prompted Elizabeth to write a response under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". The editor, George Madden, was impressed with her passion and ran an advertisement asking the author to identify herself. When Cochrane introduced herself to the editor, he offered her the opportunity to write a piece for the newspaper, again under the pseudonym "Lonely Orphan Girl". Her first article for the Dispatch, entitled "The Girl Puzzle", was about how divorce affected women. In it, she argued for reform of divorce laws. Madden was impressed again and offered her a full-time job. It was customary for women who were newspaper writers at that time to use pen names. The editor chose "Nellie Bly", adopted from the title character in the popular song "Nelly Bly" by Stephen Foster. Cochrane originally intended that her pseudonym be "Nelly Bly", but her editor wrote "Nellie" by mistake and the error stuck.

Career

Pittsburgh Dispatch

As a writer, Bly focused her early work for the Pittsburgh Dispatch on the lives of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on women factory workers. However, the newspaper soon received complaints from factory owners about her writing, and she was reassigned to women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for women journalists, and she became dissatisfied. She then traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people; her dispatches later were published in book form as Six Months in Mexico.^[13] In one report, she protested the imprisonment of a local journalist for criticizing the Mexican government, then a dictatorship under Porfirio Díaz. When Mexican authorities learned of Bly's report, they threatened her with arrest, prompting her to flee the country. Safely home, she accused Díaz of being a tyrannical czar suppressing the Mexican people and controlling the press.

Asylum exposé

Bly being examined by a psychiatrist

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

Committed to the asylum, Bly experienced the deplorable conditions firsthand. After ten days, the asylum released Bly at The World's behest. Her report, later published in book form as Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation, prompted the asylum to implement reforms, and brought her lasting fame.

Around the world

A publicity photograph taken by the New York Worldnewspaper to promote Bly's around-the-world voyage

In 1888 Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070 kilometer journey.

She took with her the dress she was wearing, a sturdy overcoat, several changes of underwear, and a small travel bag carrying her toiletry essentials. She carried most of her money (£200 in English bank notes and gold, as well as some American currency) in a bag tied around her neck.

The New York newspaper Cosmopolitan sponsored its own reporter, Elizabeth Bisland, to beat the time of both Phileas Fogg and Bly. Bisland would travel the opposite way around the world, starting on the same day as Bly took off. To sustain interest in the story, the World organized a "Nellie Bly Guessing Match" in which readers were asked to estimate Bly's arrival time to the second, with the Grand Prize consisting at first of a free trip to Europe and, later on, spending money for the trip.

A woodcut image of Nellie Bly's homecoming reception in Jersey Cityprinted in Frank Leslie's Illustrated News on February 8, 1890.

During her travels around the world, Bly went through England, France (where she met Jules Verne in Amiens), Brindisi, the Suez Canal, Colombo (Ceylon), the Straits Settlements of Penang and Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The development of efficient submarine cable networks and the electric telegraph allowed Bly to send short progress reports, although longer dispatches had to travel by regular post and thus were often delayed by several weeks.

Bly travelled using steamships and the existing railroad systems, which caused occasional setbacks, particularly on the Asian leg of her race.^[27] During these stops, she visited a leper colony in China and, in Singapore, she bought a monkey.

As a result of rough weather on her Pacific crossing, she arrived in San Francisco on the White Star Line ship RMS Oceanic on January 21, two days behind schedule. However, after World owner Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her home, she arrived back in New Jersey on January 25, 1890, at 3:51 pm.

Just over seventy-two days after her departure from Hoboken, Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe, traveling alone for almost the entire journey. Bisland was, at the time, still crossing the Atlantic, only to arrive in New York four and a half days later. She also had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship (the Bothnia) in the place of a fast ship (Etruria). Bly's journey was a world record, although it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, whose first circumnavigation in 1870 possibly had been the inspiration for Verne's novel. Train completed the journey in 67 days, and on his third trip in 1892 in 60 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick, and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in fewer than 36 days.

Later work

Patent for an improved Milk-Can

In 1904 Iron Clad began manufacturing the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Although there have been spurious claims that Bly invented the barrel, the actual inventor is Henry Wehrhahn. (U.S. Patents 808,327 and 808,413).

Bly was, however, an inventor in her own right.

Personal life and death

In 1895, Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman. Bly was 31 and Seaman was 73 when they married. Due to her husband's failing health, she retired from journalism and succeeded her husband as head of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904, Seaman died.

Bly died of pneumonia at St. Mark's Hospital in New York City in 1922 at age 57. She was interred in a modest grave at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City.

Seven years later, Elizabeth Bisland, an American journalist and author, perhaps best known for her 1889–1890 race around the world against Nellie Bly, also died of pneumonia, and she was buried in the same cemetery.

Female Hysteria In Victorian Times...

— Due to the nature of this subject, it may be inappropriate for children.

Female hysteria was once a common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women. The history of the notion of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. Galen, a prominent physician from the second century, wrote that hysteria was a disease caused by deprivation in particularly passionate women: hysteria was quite often in virgins, nuns, widows and, rarely, in married women.

Treatment for Female Hysteria

The prescription to this disease in was intercourse. As a last resort, in the case of virgins or nuns, women considered to be suffering from hysteria would sometimes undergo “pelvic massage” manual stimulation of the genitals by the doctor until the patient experienced “hysterical paroxysm“.

Hysteria is widely discussed in the medical literature of the Victorian era. In 1859, a physician claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. He cataloged possible symptoms, which included faintness, nervousness, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and “a tendency to cause trouble.

With so many possible symptoms, hysteria was always a natural diagnosis when the ailment could not be identified. For instance, before the introduction of Electroencephalography (EEG), epilepsy was frequently confused with hysteria.

Physicians thought that the stresses associated with modern life caused women to be more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

3D Stereoscopic Photographs of Cats in the Victorian Era...

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

The Gibson Girl, --- Documentary...

The French Writer Colette, --- Author Of The Famous Story "Gigi"...

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on January 28, 1873, to war hero and tax collector Jules-Joseph Colette and his wife Adèle Eugénie Sidonie ("Sido"), née Landoy, in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the département of Yonne, Burgundy. The family was initially well off, but by the time she was of school age poor financial management had substantially reduced her father's income and she attended a public school from the ages of 6 to 17 — this was, nevertheless, a fairly extensive education for a girl of the period.

Early years, 1893–1912

In 1893 she married Henry Gauthier-Villars (1859–1931) or "Willy", his nom-de-plume, a well-known author and publisher, and her first four novels — the four Claudine stories, Claudine à l'école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s'en va (1903) — appeared under his name. They chart the coming of age of their heroine, Claudine, from an unconventional fifteen-year-old in a Burgundian village to the literary salons of turn-of-the-century Paris. (The four are published in English as Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married, and Claudine and Annie). The story they tell is semi-autobiographical, but not entirely — most strikingly, Claudine, unlike Colette, is motherless.

Willy, fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, introduced Colette into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles while engaging in sexual affairs and encouraging her own lesbianalliances. It was he who chose the titillating subject-matter of the Claudine novels, "the secondary myth of Sappho... the girls' school or convent ruled by a seductive female teacher" (Ladimer, p. 53). Colette later said that she would never have become a writer if it had not been for Willy. Nevertheless, when Colette wished to have her name associated with her work as it became widely known, Willy resisted and "locked her in her room until she produced enough pages to suit him."

Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although it was not until 1910 that the divorce became final. She had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books — the copyright belonged to Willy — and until 1912 she followed a stage career in music halls across France, sometimes playing Claudine in sketches from her own novels, earning barely enough to survive and often hungry and unwell. This period of her life is recalled in La Vagabonde (1910), which deals with women's independence in a male society, a theme to which she would regularly return in future works. During these years she embarked on a series of relationships with other women, notably with Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf ("Missy"), with whom she sometimes shared the stage. On January 3, 1907, an onstage kiss between Missy and Colette in a pantomime entitled Rêve d'Égypte caused a near-riot, and as a result they were no longer able to live together openly, although their relationship continued for another five years.

In 1912 she married Henry de Jouvenel, the editor of Le Matin. A daughter, Colette de Jouvenel, nicknamed Bel-Gazou, was born in 1913. During the war she devoted herself to journalism, but marriage allowed her to devote her time to writing.

Writing career, 1920–1954

Colette, painted c. 1896 by Jacques Humbert

In 1920 Colette published Chéri, portraying love between an older woman and a much younger man. Chéri is the lover of Léa, a wealthy courtesan; Léa is devastated when Chéri marries a girl his own age, and delighted when he returns to her, but after one final night together she sends him away again.

The marriage to Jouvenel ended in divorce in 1924, partly due to Jouvenel's infidelities and partly to Colette's own affair with her sixteen-year-old stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel. In 1925 she met Maurice Goudeket, who became her final husband (the couple stayed together until her death).

Already an established writer (The Vagabond had received three votes for the prestigious Prix Goncourt), the decades of the 1920s and 1930s were Colette's most productive and innovative period.^[16] Set mostly in Burgundy or Paris during the Belle Époque, her work treated married life and sexuality. It was frequently quasi-autobiographical: Chéri (1920) and Le Blé en herbe (1923) both deal with love between an aging woman and a very young man, a situation reflecting her relationship with Bertrand de Jouvenel and even Goudeket, who was sixteen years her junior.^[13]^[10] La Naissance du Jour (1928) is her explicit criticism of the conventional lives of women, expressed in a meditation on age and the renunciation of love through the character of her mother, Sido.

By this period Colette was frequently acclaimed as France's greatest woman writer. "It... has no plot, and yet tells of three lives all that should be known", wrote Janet Flanner of Sido. "Once again, and at greater length than usual, she has been hailed for her genius, humanities and perfect prose by those literary journals which years ago... lifted nothing at all in her direction except the finger of scorn."

Last years, 1940–1954

Colette was 67 years old at the fall of France, and remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais Royal. Her husband Maurice Goudeket, who was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released after a few months through the intervention of the French wife of the German ambassador, Colette lived through the rest of the war years with the anxiety of a possible second arrest.^[19]^[20] During the Occupation she produced two volumes of memoirs, Journal à rebours (1941) and De ma fenêtre (1942 — the two issued in English in 1975 as Looking Backwards).

In 1944 she published what became perhaps her most famous work, Gigi, telling the story of sixteen year old Gilberte ("Gigi") Alvar. Born into a family of demimondaines, Gigi is being trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover, but breaks with tradition by marrying him instead.^[21] In 1949 it was made into a French film starring Danièle Delorme and Gaby Morlay, then in 1951 adapted for the stage with the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn in the title role, picked by Colette personally; the 1958 Hollywood musical, starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan, with a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by Lerner and Frederick Loewe, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

In the postwar years, she became a famous public figure, crippled by arthritis and cared for by Goudeket, who supervised the preparation of her collected works, or Œuvres complètes (1948–1950). She continued to write during these years, bringing out L'Etoile vesper (1944) and Le Fanal bleu (1949), in which she reflected on the problems of a writer whose inspiration is primarily autobiographical. On her death on August 3, 1954, she was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic Church on account of her divorces, but was given a state funeral, the first French woman of letters to be granted this honour, and interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery.