You’ve Got Mail: Titanic Era

A Pile of 1910 era letters. I have 300 of them.

The more things change, the more things stay the same. Cliche, no kidding. True? You bet.

Right now I am trying to publicize my ebook Threshold Girl, a story about my husband’s great Aunt Flora and her year at college in 1911/1912.

No vampires, no lesbians. Just Presbyterian teachers in the Edwardian Era. All corseted up to keep their morals from spilling out at the seams. See the problem?

(The newswires were abuzz  (ancient metaphor) with a story about X Files actress Gillian Anderson. Apparently she had a lesbian affair in high school or something. “Boy is her career that much in the toilet?” I wondered.” Actually, I like her a lot and she’s been working in Britain. And she starred in a fine production of the House of Mirth by Edith Wharton.

Anyway, it’s coming up to the 100th anniversary of the Titanic Era,so I’m using that angle to get attention, to try to get some publicity.

But I’m not living in the past,  my pitch is more about trying to promote an ebook. Ebooks are “IN” right now, and even if Amazon and a few others are trying to get control of the whole ebook thing, it’s still pretty much up in the air, I think. At least, I HOPE.

So I’m pitching my Threshold Girl as both an ebook story AND a Titanic Story.

The trouble is, who do I pitch too?

Arianna Huffington posted an interesting article last week on her Huffington Post. She worries that the  ’traditional’ news media was caught up in a dubious habit of playing second hand rose to Facebook and Twitter by covering little but  ’top trending’ stories on these social media, as if  ’top trending’ means IMPORTANT.

Of course it doesn’t, it likely means just the opposite.

That or Crime Stories. That seems to be all the traditional press is covering these day. It’s cheap: it draws readers through titillation. It’s tabloid. It’s lowest common denominator, but it seems to be all we’ve got lately.

My Threshold Girl story IS NOT a top trending topic on Twitter. (And there’s no Dead-Young-Women in story for titillation. No the women it in are all very alive.) The book popular in a few classrooms in Canada and the US, that’s all. (The follow up to Threshold Girl about Flora’s sister Edith, Diary of a Confirmed Spinster, does have a love-and-murder theme. So I’m learning.)

The question is? How to make a story about teachers in 1910, Presbyterians at that, ‘sexy.’

A headline I read (somewhere online) last week claimed that ebooks are making reading “sexy” again.

(I don’t think it was ever considered sexy. I know. I read a lot in my teens and twenties.)

Another article, I scanned quickly, says that ebooks are changing how we read: while texting, uploading, watching videos. Sexy because it’s so chaotic, I guess, so unpredictable.

Reading is no longer this ‘sit by yourself under an old oak tree by a bubbling stream’ type of activity.

Yes, we’re going through a period of exponential change, similar to the 1910 era, when the motion pictures (and they’d only been around for a few years)  were becoming more popular each day, and when telephones were becoming widely used- although LONG DISTANCE was still very expensive.

The Nicholsons of Richmond Quebec wrote a LOT of letters in the 1910 era, because they couldn’t afford to use the telephone for long distance. (That’s why I could write Threshold Girl, I have hundreds of their letters from the Titanic Era.)

The Nicholson women wore off a lot of calories walking to and from the mail in their town, Richmond, Quebec. About a mile each way.It was a favorite thing to do, after going to church. (Radio wasn’t yet around, although wireless technology was, so sermons were their only daily entertainment. ) They got mail twice  day! Even on Saturday.

I am guessing that for a couple of centuries now walking to the mail has been the highlight of many a person’s day. (Or even just getting the mail at the home.)

I’m not guessing. I KNOW it has been.

And even if the mailman mostly brought bills, junk mail and bad news, the hope always was that on THIS DAY, it would bring something better!  Amazing News! Or merely good news. Or just an entertaining letter, a happy letter, from an old friend maybe. A long lost friend, perhaps. A letter to lift our spirits, to make us feel valued, loved and less alone in the world.

(In 1910 people often wrote letters to vent or to complain, (like Greg Smith at Goldman Sachs, yesterday) so many letters the Nicholsons received from friends and relatives were major downers. (And in those days they had things to complain about: typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever.)The Nicholson letters are written in a time of family turmoil, so they are not careful sometimes and write things they shouldn’t.) If one of them writes something nasty about a family member, BURN THIS LETTER is often written in large print at the bottom. I have a couple of those. )

So nothing much has changed in that regard. 100 years later. With email, and texting, and all the rest that is evolving so quickly whatever I write now will be obsolete before I finish typing the sentence. (Maybe TYPING is obsolete, I haven’t checked.)

No, little has changed, if considering the human heart, the human condition: We’ve just got so much more media to build our hopes and dreams on, that’s all.

What has changed dramatically, is how PRIVATIZED our lives have become.  Threshold Girl reveals how, in the days before media, people had to rely on each other much much more. Changes were abreast though.

In 1910 Richmond Quebec was losing citizens to the big city and the West. It was getting lonlier in small towns, especially for younger people.

A Respectable Nickelodeon 1909

There’s an advertorial piece in the 1909 Montreal Gazette on the Nickel, a moving picture show house that aspires to respectability.

Well, in a 1909 it is mentioned in the http://www.tighsolas.ca/ letters, that Marion goes to see Man in the Box at the Nickel. Man in the Box, ironically, included Mack Sennett, a Richmond Quebec native, in its cast.

I was wondering if I was going to add a scene about a Nickelodeon, and it won’t be hard now. The Nickel promoted itself as an upper class nickelodeon, with no questionable movies,and no questionable clients. It was also clean and orderly and claimed to be routinely inspected by the Board of Health. (This tells you what problems Nickelodeons had and were perceived to have.) Oh, and the Nickel had nice leather seats too. All this for the cost of a nickel. It was on Bleury and St. Catherine, near where Marion had a room.

Of course, the movies were considered low brow by many, even immoral by some and if the motion pictures themselves weren’t all that bad “I do not want to condem all motion pictures, says one clergyman in Montreal, “but we cannot be blind to the fact that the highest things are presented in a light and demoralizing fashion,” the buildings and rooms in which they were being shown were dodgy, what being fire-traps and public spaces where ANYONE of any class or background or age could commingle. The movie house was frighteningly democratic, and remains so to this day.

In 1909 the controvery around motion picture houses in Montreal was their staying open on Sundays, despite the newly minted Lord Day’s Act, a law both the Church and the trade unions liked. The problem is, if you give people the day off they need something to do. They need to get out of the house. And since most working people had little spending money, they needed their outing to be cheap. The Motion Picture House fit the bill, all right.

According to another 1909 article, one that listed some of the motion picture houses defying the Lord’s Day Act, (which included the spiffy Ouimetoscope and 24 others)there were 75 motion picture venues in Montreal, clustered on Notre Dame, St. Catherine and St. Lawrence (St Laurent today) that year. Only four or five closed on Sunday. (Although it must be remembered that these establishments were often also vaudeville houses and cabarets, etc. or could become one or the other at any time.)

Fire was a danger in these places. The film could burn up. (We’ve all witnessed that, if we are Boomers.) In 1927 a terrible fatal fire in a Montreal movie house caused a law to be enacted which had an impact on me and others born in the 50s. We weren’t allowed to go to movies until 10 years of age.

Anyway, the reason Mr. Ouiment gives for leaving his establishment open on Sundays: it’s his most popular day.

According to one article, there were 6000 nickels in the US in 1908, where in 1904 there were none and according to another era article, over 6 billion admissions were made to nickels in the US in one year, around that time.

We talk about the incredibly fast rate of change, today, especially with respect to entertainment technology, but REALLY, back then the motion picture changed everything. And with respect to middle class women like Marion, who couldn’t go to the low brow places, the honky tonks, or too often to the theatre or opera, it really opened up their lives. And it took away from Church which is where they traditionally went for inexpensive or free ‘public’ entertainment. No wonder clergymen railed agains the Nickel, it was taking away their job…

the Orpheum Vaudeville house was a favorite place for her to go, but only once she had a beau, Hugh Blair, whom she would marry in 1913. The Orpheum was part of a North American chain.

A group of businessmen was trying to raise public money to start a Montreal Motion Picture Chain, to cash in on the bonanza, but it didn’t happen, I think. American chains dominated all century.