Month: January 2012

The Modern Lady’s Guide to Fancy Hats, or OMG Hats! by Dasia

Dear readers, you have been enduring my single voice writing on Yearning for Wonderland for the better part of a year. But no more! Today, you are freed from the constraints of Anna writing, only to be plummeted to the delightful depths of Dasia’s wickedness.
For the first time ever, please welcome Dasia of Dasia Has a Blog (@awkwardoptimist) and comment with many bouquets of violets and kittens!

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I’m so thrilled to be writing for Yearning For Wonderland! I hope to cast off the crass exterior of my Dasia Has A Blog voice to show my more sensitive, fancy side.

Warning: this post is more pictures than words. This is me practicing being demure and soft-spoken, and is in no way because I spent the whole afternoon googling fancy hats instead of actually writing stuff about them.
Oh hey guys you know what I yearn for? FANCY HATS OMG.
Ahem.
Right, I’m being demure now. Oh, how exquisitely charming I do find decorative headdresses! But as a modern lady, I get in such a huff about the … erm… torrid* problems I encounter with them!
They’re either too pokey…
Or keep triggering metal detectors…
Or get me stuck in doorways!
So to save myself and my fellow bitches (erm, excuse me, my ladyfolk-comrades!), kindly take to heart these Five Fancy Guidelines for Hexcellent** Hattery Practices:
  1. Your hat may be overly embellished if every picnic is interrupted by the sharp-beaked attacks of magpies and crows.

  1. Your hat may be too complicated if it could double as a wedding centerpiece, or if it compels you to join it in couple’s counseling.

  1. Your hat may be ahead of its time if it requires batteries or comes with a fog machine to instantly create romantic moments on deserted moors.

  1. Your hat may be a tad old-fashioned if it tells stories of walking to school barefoot through the snow.

  1. Your hat might possibly be too large if smaller hats begin to orbit your hat.
And now, for your viewing pleasure, (and also because I meant to make one Polyvore set for this post and got caught up and forgot to write anything else) have some illustrations of torrid haberdashery (that’s how they used to say fashion!porn, right?)
Every proper lady needs a statement hat…

Oh so fancy

But that statement hat needn’t change your centre of gravity. In fact, it could be both fuzzy and delicious.
Oh so comfy

And here we have the epitome of a modern lady’s love affair with hats: simple, classy and with just a touch of fanciful whimsy…
Oh so classy

So go forth, modern ladies, and hattify yourselves! And remember, while vintage hats are both quirky and thrifty, heed this bonus tip that ladies have been following since the Regency Era:
If your hat has a possum living in it, it may be time to invest in a new hat. ***
* Still not entirely sure what this word means.
** Not really a word.
*** Have some extra fun with this post by starting it again and taking a shot of tequila every time you read the word HAT!

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Matthias Malzieu


What if falling in love cost you your life? Would you be able to resist?

The story opens in Edinburgh, in the late 1800s, during the greatest freeze the city has known. In this introduction, the cold and snow almost become a character on their own. You meet the protagonist, Jack, as a frail infant abandoned by his mother to the idiosyncratic and brilliant Dr. Madeleine.
To save his life, Madeleine grafts a cuckoo clock to his heart, but this alteration requires rules that cannot be broken:
“FIRSTLY: DON’T TOUCH THE HANDS OF YOUR CUCKOO-CLOCK HEART. SECONDLY: MASTER YOUR ANGER. THIRDLY: NEVER EVER FALL IN LOVE. FOR IF YOU DO, THE HOUR HAND WILL POKE THROUGH YOUR SKIN, YOUR BONES WILL SHATTER, AND YOUR HEART WILL BREAK ONCE MORE.”

Jack is tortured by the continual presence of his clock heart, which ticks and whirrs and cuckoos at the least convenient moment. He is bullied and mocked at school and it embarrasses him in public. 
The cast of characters that surrounds Jack as he grows is colorful and eclectic, a peg-leg prostitute and a Scotsman with a musical spine, all overseen by the protective and loving Dr. Madeleine, who has adopted her boy with the cuckoo clock heart.
The heart of the story is Jack’s doomed love for the coquettish, mercurial and short-sighted Miss Acacia, a street singer turned cabaret performer. For Jack, the perils of love are very real and shape all of his choices throughout the book. It’s not only love he has to control, but jealousy and anger ground through the gears of love, as his rival Big Joe vies for the hand of Miss Acacia. 
Jack later teams up with the famous film pioneer and illusionist Géorges Melies, who becomes enamored of his condition and its ramifications. The theme of illusions figures strongly, for nothing is quite as it seems in this little fable.
Malzieu seamlessly integrates the elements of steampunk with literary fiction, allowing this novella to transcend the usually cursed designation of “genre fiction”. It should, for this is really literary steampunk and you need neither to be really very literary or steampunk to enjoy it.
Melzieu’s prose has a dreamy, cinematic elegance, distinctly European. The pacing ticks along steadily – it is a quick read at 172 pages – and the action winds tighter and tighter until you cannot wait any longer for the denouement. The vivid characters stay with you long after you close this slim volume. There is a twist at the end, which cuts sharp as the second hand of a clock.

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart has already been lauded as an adult fairytale, but it seems even more than that. The story concerns the lies we tell ourselves and others in our pursuit of love and our fear of love’s loss. It’s a magical journey that ends too soon, but makes the re-reading all too pleasurable.
Mathias Melzieu is also known as the lead singer of the French band, Dionysos. I have included the peculiarly wonderful book trailer, set to the music of Dionysos. The book is currently in production to become a full-length animated film, La Mécanique du Coeur, directed by the author and Stéphane Berla. In short, Malzieu proves steampunk offers stories with a beating heart.
Article first published as Book Review:The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu on Blogcritics.

Dratted Downton Abbey

This is dire.

I needed another costume drama addiction like I needed a Tim Tebow bobblehead…which is to say, I didn’t.

In case you did, Merry Christmas

I certainly didn’t want an addiction to a show currently airing. I have the peculiar habit of refusing to watch a show while it airs. I purchase it on DVD and then I can glut myself all at once without having to wait that pesky week in-between, gnashing my teeth. This works well except when it doesn’t and someone spoils a plotline at the water cooler.

And then came this Christmas…

My mother, the source of all delightful period temptations, gifted me with Season 1 of Downton Abbey. This is the one show I have been avoiding precisely because I knew it would be like catnip for costume lovers.

I did not open it for several weeks. And then Season 2, episode 1 was due to air. I told my mother I wasn’t going to watch it, that I needed to watch Season 1 first and then I could buy Season 2, as per my usual plan. She parried this lame and useless objection and sternly told me to sit down and watch Season 2, episode 1.

“But…but, it’s all backwards and besides then I’ll know what happens and it will spoil season 1,” said I, feebly.

With inexorable Mother Logic, she brushed that protest aside and told me to watch it. So I did. And now I’m hooked. I watched Season 2, Episode 1 (all TWO HOURS) twice. And then I watched it again when it re-aired before Episode 2. For those counting, that is SIX HOURS of Episode 1. Dratted Mother. Dratted Downton Abbey.

First, I’ve always been a huge Edwardian era fan. One of my very favorite movies of all time is “A Room With a View.”

When I was younger, I wanted to grow up to be like Lucy Honeychurch. That daydream likely consisted of wandering around Italian meadows in white muslin gowns, reading letters and pining. After watching Downton Abbey, I took the official personality quiz to find out which character I was like. Apparently, I am now like Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery), the witty and nefarious heartbreaking one. It seems to be a short leap from Lucy to Mary, or eleven years.

At least she has exquisite taste

There have been other blog posts which have much more eloquently and succinctly dealt with the virtues of Downton. Ah, the acting! the costumes! the setting! the storylines! the dialogue!

Lady Mary actually had me at this droll exchange from Season 2, Episode 1:

Matthew: Edith seems jolly tonight.
Mary: She’s found her metier: farm labouring.

Metier? Who uses that word? Other than me, that is. I can hear the distant bells of addiction tolling – DOOOOM!

My favorite relationship in the show is actually not Lady Mary and Matthew, nor is it the popular charm of Anna and Mr. Bates. No, my favorite relationship in the series is Lord and Lady Grantham.

The hats!

Backstory explains that Lord Grantham married Cora, an American, for her money, but their relationship has grown into one of such nuanced tenderness and relative equability for the time…how could you not love them? The chemistry between Hugh Bonneville and Elizabeth McGovern reminds me of my own parents…too bad we didn’t grow up in Highclere Castle. Sigh.

So, to sum up, all my substantial to do list has been shelved and you will find me curled up in my blanket, probably eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching, oh yes, watching Downton Abbey.

And then I will likely pull out my copy of “A Room With a View”, which also features the indomitable Dame Maggie Smith.

The Divine Miss M

Coincidence? I THINK NOT. If anyone finds a Maggie Smith bobblehead, that is what I want next Christmas. Also, Season 2. Thanks, Mum.