a hair-raising afternoon adventure ~

brigadier general thomas w. sherman wins the derring-"do" award for march with this coiff that just doesn't quit.

by today's standards if a man had such rowdy hair, he would have probably at least put a hat on it.

but this was a style in that era. yeah. people combed their hair like this on purpose. one day i'd like to see a Civil War movie in which people actually wear the hair of the period: high receding lines, wild comb-overs, the whole nine yards. and men didn't part their hair in the middle until very late in the century. in this era that was considered sissy.

i'm as guilty as anybody else in this matter. of my characters only Beasely is bald and everyone else is awfully long-haired (even Lewis's hair has been brushing his collar lately and he has always been the cleanest cropped of the lot of them). i also chickened out of giving James a more radical hairdo even though i wanted to because even though i've always considered him a dandy, i've never really been able to dress him for the part in my mind.



and get a load of those cuffs!
is it fetishy to think velvet on an
army uniform is hot?
anyway, it's a funny picture, but i guess no different than going through your 80s yearbook in which the class portraits are just tiny faces framed by a field of teased hair.

: D

okay, back to writing.

a roll a roll a roll in ze hay ~

today's scene is sorta half-baked, but i'll set the timer and let it keep cooking a while.

From Slaughter Mountain: take 187 (this scene: "Do Fathers Never Know").

4,000 / 10,000,000,000 (0.0%)

scene synop: it's the 4th of july (a sunday in 1862 ~ edit: turns out i can't even read my own notes. this is not a sunday, it's a friday. oops) and Lewis and Morse are at Morse's house on furlough. Lewis has a strange run-in with Morse's father, a retired sea captain in his dotage who is not as senile as he appears.

darling: it needs some tightening, but i like Lewis's impression of Morse's bedroom best of all. the mysterious wardrobe reveals strange things about Morse much later on when Lewis does finally open it (one of the things i've always loved about this story is how "normal" Lewis thinks Morse is and how that appearance of normalcy crumbles throughout their relationship. Morse's strange bedroom and the way his father talks about him are early clues that something's "off" about him).

Lewis resisted the terrible urge to open the wardrobe and see what was inside. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but decided against it. Something about the austerity of the arrangement and the lack of personal affects unnerved him. Morse had always struck him as someone who might hold onto his childhood toys, so Lewis had built in his head a room full of fancy notions. Instead, it was starkly monastic: no fancy wallpapers, no tasseled drapes, no gaily bedecked rocking horse or painted puppets or a pair of lovingly preserved rolling skates set aside by the hearth. And for all of Morse’s learnedness there was not so much as a book of colored pictures. It was as though he had never really lived there at all.

mean things: Captain Morse says a lot of unflattering things about his son (even calls him "stupid"). the irony, of course, is that Captain Morse knows his son better than we think.

random fun fact: roller skates were invented around 1760ish by a belgian mechanical genius musician named john joseph merlin (just like the wizard!). the "petitbled" he patented in 1819 was a three-wheel inline contraption (see picture below) incapable of turning corners (that wouldn't come until 1863). merlin wore a pair of his new skates to a masquerade party in london and although he was great inventor, he was apparently a lousy skater. he couldn't control his speed or direction and crashed into a large mirror, injuring himself severely.




doesn't merlin look like a nice bright fella?