Today the quads of Oriel College are brimming with modern day dandies, oozing sophistication and extravagance. Little do they know that the original father of dandyism actually attended Oriel in 1793. George Bryan Brummell, or ‘Beau’, was at the forefront of Regency fashion and one of the most talked-about men in town. Dictator of taste and etiquette, Beau was an adamant socialite and dinner party wit. Despite lacking aristocratic blood, Beau climbed the social ladder with the aid of his flawless appearance and silver tongue. He helped to transform the way men dress today and initiated the British enthusiasm for tailoring.

Before Beau entered the scene, men would parade around in powdered wigs and buckle shoes. Today, these pompous peacocks doused with perfume, powder and paint are considered effeminate and eccentric. Beau was unusual in washing daily and his sombre, fitted attire set him apart from his contemporaries. In Brummell’s season bright colours and wigs were out whilst dark suits and cravats were in. Formal was the word of the moment. His belief was, ‘If people turn to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed.’

Yet his immaculate appearance was said to take five hours to perfect. His shoes were cleaned with champagne and three hairdressers attended his Roman coiffure. When asked how much it would cost to dress a man he supposedly said, ‘Why, with tolerable economy, I think it might be done with £800.’ The average craftsman received £1 per week.

Brummell’s famous white cravats were starched and worn so high up his neck that his nose pointed up in the air and he couldn’t turn his head. Attempting to follow suit, someone allegedly stiffened his cravat so hard that it cut his ear. Beau kept his starching a secret for some time, leaving society on tenterhooks as to his marvellous neck wear.

Whilst his dress was impeccable, his behaviour certainly wasn’t. Beau was notoriously badly behaved at Eton, and continued to be so at Oriel. His friendship with the Prince Regent ended abruptly at a ball. Upon entering, the Prince snubbed Brummell and, in a Sarkozy-Cameron moment, refused to shake his hand. Beau responded coyly with, ‘Alvanley, who’s your fat friend?’

Attempts were made to move beyond his profession as a full time fashionista when Beau entered for the Newdegate writing Prize. Unfortunately, due to his failure to win he quickly left Oriel and the literary world was never graced with his creations.

Beau was possibly the first ‘it-guy’ to walk the streets of London. A Regency Katie Price, this self-made dandy was more famous for being famous than anything else. Yet he made his way in aristocratic society without a title, little wealth, and no profession to speak of. He also achieved great fame and enduring influence over British fashion for centuries to come.

Christina Drollas, the director of Dangerous Liaisons, talks about the upcoming production which is being performed at the Oxford Playhouse from the 2nd to the 5th of May.

A SOLO search for A Series of Unfortunate Events produces articles with names like ‘What, Then, Does Beatrice Mean?: Hermaphroditic Gender, Predatory Sexuality, and Promiscuous Allusion in Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events’. Snicket’s beloved Beatrice is mentioned by name almost solely in the books’ one-line dedications; this gives some idea of the amount of critical attention directed at the series.

These children’s books, and their author, do to some degree provoke the kind of earnest analysis which some science students roll their eyes at. The first sentence of The Bad Beginning tries to deter the reader – ‘If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book’ – and so sets the tone for thirteen instalments of constant (and to some readers, annoying) self-referential and exaggeratedly reluctant narration. Along the way, the questions of three orphaned children chasing the secret organisation VFD are perpetually thwarted, and their ideas of truth and morality undermined. These are children’s books which allude to Dante, Shakespeare and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.  It is all very meta.

So what? Daniel Handler makes it clear that smug postmodern box-ticking means very little in terms of good writing, and makes a point of saying that the qualities I list above ‘can be found in our most ancient examples of literature – they are quite literally the oldest tricks in the book’. Postmodernism is ‘quite the wrong word’ for what he does. 

He bristles less at the accusation of having a ‘materialistic imagination’, which is how I tried to express his inclination towards catalogues of objects – in some Unfortunate Events novels these lists take up three pages at a time. The series ends on an island on which detritus from the previous books has washed up, and one of the Baudelaires’ long-running quests is to find and ensure the safety of a mysterious sugar bowl (the significance of which is never explained). Handler’s latest book Why We Broke Up is structured around a series of meaningful items in a shoe box which show the trajectory of the relationship between Min Green and Ed Slaterton. ‘I like a story, and every object has one, often invisible to most of us.  That’s intriguing to me.  In the case of the Baudelaires, they become interested in what happened before they were born, only to learn that they can never really learn such things.  In the case of Min Green, she’s constructing a narrative herself, made from objects she collected while the story was going on.  I suppose I like the unknowable-ness of things.’

On the surface, pedantic lists and slippery definitions don’t seem to have much to do with children’s literature, but Handler insists he ‘doesn’t write for specific audiences, really’, and, given his books’ popularity,  something in his formula must appeal to children and adults alike. Possibly it indulges a universal urge, particularly pronounced in children, to collect, hoard and examine. 

That said, Handler’s tendency to collect bits of other texts seems destined to escape most of his young audience’s notice; for example, The End’s island society is gradually revealed to be a Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, Genesis 1-3 mash-up. Handler reflects, ‘I like conversation, and to me a book is always in conversation with others’. His ‘Why We Broke Up’ project is testament to that; visitors to the website are encouraged to record their own short break-up story, which range from quite moving explorations of loss to ‘her hair smelled’. Occasionally Handler will offer some words of consolation in response, like ‘I had to look up the term ‘pillock’, and learned it comes from the Scandinavian, meaning “penis.”  I offer this because it may be of interest.’

Some conversation is less appealing to Handler, such as that involved in the creative nightmare of working on a film. After writing two screenplays (Rick and Kill the Poor) and working on the film adaption of A Series of Unfortunate Events he remarks ‘the writing itself is easier, but then there are all these other people with whom one must argue.’ Developing Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events was particularly difficult. ‘The work on the film was so very long, with so much joy and heartbreak, that I remember only the process and not really the finished result.  I’m more interested in what other people think of it, if they do.’

The experience of everyday social trials is nonetheless a source of great humour to Handler, and it is the moments of mundanity and tiny detail in his work which work to create the comic scenes, particularly when set against the mock-gothic characterisations and escapades of Unfortunate Events. 

Handler is stubbornly humdrum when asked what his working process is like: ‘It’s like a man at a desk frowning over a legal pad, with a glass of water next to him, tapping unsharpened pencils in time to the music playing.’ Asked about the writer’s notepad he carries at all times, he comments only ‘not in the bath’. And when pressed over what’s he’s most excited about in terms of his various projects, past, present and future, he is resolutely concentrated on the present. ‘Whatever I’m working on at any given moment. After I write this sentence I will be looking at the final cover for the first volume in the new series, so I’m excited about that’. 

The new series in question is Lemony Snicket’s four-part prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events, named All The Wrong Questions. The first volume, Who Could That Be at This Hour? is set for release on October 23rd, 2012. Described as a series for ‘older children’, it is sure to exceed that appeal, and SOLO will doubtless see a few more enthusiastic dissections of Snicket’s woeful tales. 

Female Origins

Bram Stoker’s infamous creation has haunted the imagination of storytellers for centuries. All recognise the Transylvanian tyrant draped in black, coffin bound by day but emerging to bite guests at night. Yet the inspirations for Stoker’s icon are far removed from the Dracula we know and, well, fear.

Vampire legends had been circulating Europe long before Stoker wrote his masterpiece in 1897. In 1885 Emily Gerard described the ‘vampire, or nosferatu’, as a walking undead ‘more decidedly evil’ than its benign counterparts, ‘in whom every Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does heaven or hell’. 

A female figure that spurred Stoker’s imagination is that of Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary. Supposedly the most prolific female serial killer of all time, she is rumoured to have killed around 650 women. According to hearsay, she bathed in the blood of young virgins to restore her youth and it’s no coincidence Stoker’s Dracula also appears younger after drinking blood. 

Stoker is equally thought to have been inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire thriller Carmilla. This tells of a lesbian vampire who creeps into the bedchamber of her victims in the form of a black cat, leaving them with mysterious chest wounds and unsettling dreams.

The characters of Carmilla and Lucy (from Dracula) bear resemblances in their unusual concoction of feminine fragility and sexual prowess. Stoker used Le Fanu’s sexually progressive vampire to voice Victorian society’s growing concern about the virility of young women. Whilst Stoker may have been aided by historical and literary sources, it was his amalgamation of these ideas into Dracula which resurrected the iconic literary demon whose presence in popular culture remains alive to this very day.

Charlotte Hart

Gothic Tunes

If Dracula were roaming the hinterlands of Eastern Europe today what would he be listening to? Aside from the screams from his victims, obviously, the vast and prolific genre of Gothic rock undoubtedly provides an (entirely bloodless) feast for the ears for any self-confessed incubus, fictional or otherwise.

Typically tackling morbid themes through introspective lyrics, the Gothic rock genre splintered from punk rock in the late 1970s. Artists including The Cure, Joy Division, Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, with their darker take on punk’s angry, nihilistic drive, were the forerunners; but what remains perhaps most striking is the diversity of the Gothic rock movement. 

Influenced by everything from The Doors, The Velvet Underground, and Bowie’s Berlin albums, to J.G. Ballard and 1930s horror films, the cold metallic overtones of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the lugubrious, elongated vocals of Joy Division provide the most recognisable signposts of the Gothic rock trajectory, but it’s possible to see the genre’s scope extend further still.

Deservedly considered a Gothic tour de force, The Cure’s fourth album Pornography (full of portentous, darkly psychedelic opening bass lines) not only encapsulates the mood of Gothic rock; it also sounds uncannily like music Interpol and The Killers would produce more than two decades later.

So less a hard and fast music genre, Gothic rock might better be viewed as an intangible musical ‘state of mind’, which from its nascence in the 80s, has come to permeate large swathes of the contemporary music landscape. 

Ever sensitive to the aphotic side of the human soul, Dracula would surely approve.

Olivia Arighio-Stiles

Haunting Meldodies

One of my biggest cinematic shocks in recent years came upon hearing Radiohead’s ‘15 Step’ set to the closing credits of the first Twilight film. What had possessed Yorke to sell one of the best tracks from In Rainbows, an album famously released online for whatever price the downloader wanted to pay, to one of the most commercially successful films of all time? 

I’m no Twilight-basher, I enjoyed the awkwardly boring love triangle, Jacob’s pecs, and even Edward performing a caesarean section with his teeth just as much as the next fangirl, but – not to be snob about it – Radiohead just seemed too good for it. 

I spent years questioning why Thom Yorke sold out; it’s just too cynical to think that perhaps they regretted releasing an album for free and needed, to quote Alec, a dollah. 

It has finally come to me. Thom must have seen in Edward a kindred spirit, someone destined like him to walk the earth only understood by those in the know; in Radiohead’s case, Pitchfork and post-emo angsters, and in Edward’s, his blood-sucking kin and Bella. 

I don’t know why I didn’t realise it sooner: ‘I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here, I don’t belong here. I don’t belong here’, the melancholic refrain of one of alt-rock’s most famous outcasts would certainly not feel out of place issuing  forth from the smouldering yet sullen lips of Monsieur Cullen.

Carmella Crinnion