JASNA 2017: at a Huntington Beach hotel: the sky & ocean; costumes and art; a play & a poem

The one image of Jane by Cassandra that we have

From the shop: the theme this year was Austen’s “afterimage” and there were a number of talks on sequels, and many for sale

Dear friends and readers,

As those who go to the annual general meetings of the Jane Austen Society know, the conference “proper” (as I call this time) begins on Friday around 1’o’clock when the first of three “keynote” lectures is given to the whole assembly; depending on your definition, it ends late Saturday afternoon when the last of the sessions of papers is given, or sometime before noon on Sunday, when around 10 or so a sumptuous brunch is served and the last keynote lecture is given, usually home-y, with the accent on Jane Austen’s “countryside,” tales of what happened to the houses she lived in or visited, by those who have themselves lived in or written about the place, often a relation of Austen herself. Quite a number of people seem to come just a slice of time within this Friday and Sunday noon; others last from Monday to Monday.

Those who stay all week (imagine the stamina it must take) go to the increasing spread of “special” lectures or events (amateur plays), concerts, teas (with a lecture), which are increasingly Austen-related, plus several different tours to famous or historical or museum places in the vicinity. These begin on Tuesday morning and end the following Monday evening. Sometimes these “special” lectures or events named after the food or drink served, are as good or far better than the content of papers at the sessions. It used to be that the Fanny Burney society (whose members often belong to JASNA too) met on the Wednesday and into the Thursday and even Friday morning of JASNA’s week because nothing content-rich was going on at the same time — making a hat workshops, silhouette workshops, fun things with ribbons making up many of the “events” on Thursday and Friday morning. But now that the pre-conference time is becoming more serious, the Burney bunch experience serious conflicts. This year they linked themselves to the Aphra Behn Society and are meeting in November.

One of the pool areas

I thought I’d begin this year’s description of the JASNA at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach hotel with the pre-conference events and non-conference experiences Izzy and I went to or had. We arrived by plane, pacific time near 4:00 pm, on Tuesday night, had an early supper with a friend, and settled into, or got used to the hotel. We quickly saw we didn’t need two rooms and separate beds were available in one, so we cancelled one of our rooms and stayed together for the conference, cutting our cost in half immediately. The hotel was a large (vast) opulent place (we were given two different large maps), comfortable but everything beyond the room separately charged and expensive. Several pools, several eating places, alcoholic drinks flowing. Spas in several places, each one charging hugely for each activity you might want to do. Two very expensive restaurants. Another small place where you could buy small meals to take back to the room (breakfasts, lunches) and an Italian pizzeria where central staples for most people.

At the Bowers Museum

We went on the all-day tour on Wednesday to the Bowers Museum in the morning, and after a group lunch together, to the Heritage Museum where we were taken on a walking tour of a 19th century house built by Hiram Clay Kellogg. The Bowers Museum appeared to pride itself on the couple of rooms of native American art (much cruelty could not be hidden) and early white colonialist painting designed to delude people into coming west to experience a sort of “paradise.” One socialist realist painting of the hard working lives of hispanic people in the 1930s. Then there were modern rooms of eclectic art (from tribal communities around the globe). The most interesting exhibit in the museum was made up of real photographs and films of the (in)famous Shackleton expedition to Antartica where terrific suffering was endured by a group of men, to no purpose, but the satisfaction of grandiosely deluded man. The animals taken along were shot and eaten. We were conducted through the Kellogg house by a witty instructor who succeeded in giving us a feel of what life was like in that house for the very wealthy family and its household of servants who lived there at the turn of the century. Much of the older domestic technology catches one’s attention. I recognized things that were still around in the 1950s. Izzy and I did enjoy the museum and house tours and bought souvenirs to remember the day by, me a book of poems about cats and she a stuffed penguin.

Kellogg House

I might as well tell the other non-conference activities here we fitted in On Friday and Saturday afternoons too, I went swimming in a beautiful warm water pool twice, drank lots of whiskey and ginger ale and had two meals poolside; Izzy came once. There was a lavish breakfast on a terrace on Saturday morning. There was a wedding going on in one part of the hotel on Saturday night, and also a lavish costume dinner with a very loud band playing modern rock to late at night. The staff were so abjectly polite and so eager to serve us I wondered if they were whipped at night. More likely, they are badly underpaid since everywhere were signs reminding you the gratuity was not included in the bill. From the hotel (inside so artificial & ornate) the horizon at a distance was beautiful. Step outside concretely and you found yourself in a non-sidewalk world, malls far away from one another.

Over the evenings I also observed private parties of Janeites going on from the high terraces of some of the rooms. Quietly too other kinds of meetings of sub-groups of people, different hierarchies. I did meet at the sessions some new fellow lovers of Austen and we shared some reading experiences, renewed acquaintances on the Net and with people I hadn’t seen since the AGM at Portland. Myself I think that is central to why people go to conferences: to meet with others of their own “tribe.”

Arnie Perlstein, Diane Birchall and myself

I felt I was seeing a good deal of the Santa Ana while the bus was on the road and also in the one restaurant we went to — the literal landscape seemed to me flat, the houses architecturally dull, high commercialization and ugly. Huge amounts of slow-moving traffic on all the roads; the world a maze or labyrinth of such roads with cheap malls far apart. The place suffers from a lack of public transportation. Izzy and I took a long walk on the beach Thursday morning and looked at the other hotels, at communities of people in trailers and vans, fisherman, people surfing.

Izzy and I at the beach

On Wednesday and Thursday there were also three lectures, and Diana Birchall’s quietly charming two person play, “You are passionate, Jane.” The first potentially valuable lecture was given on Wednesday evening, 7 to 9, by a professor from Cal Tech, James Ashley.

The problem with this one was he was at once too abstract and too eager to be accessible. So if you wanted to learn about how to calculate longitude at sea (his topic) and how finally the problem was solved, you’d have done much better to read Dava Sobel’s little book. Using a power-point presentation, he showed us the oceans and the constellations invented by people using stars and said how we could all go out and determine latitude by using arms, fists, and the pole star. He didn’t connect his discourse to Austen, which was disappointing. I expected he might have said something about her brothers’ lives aboard their ships, the travels using older methods, how they were educated but no. There was no serious research on Austen, no attempt to explain for real what he was talking about. The imagined audience might be high schoolers/undergraduates, suitable for many conferences. The weather was lovely and a few people followed him out the door.

Muslin dress

During or just after a mass tea and cake event in a ballroom, two museum women gave excellent talks on costume and art on Thursday afternoon. clarissa M. Esguerra from the LA County Museum gave a detailed account of the changes in fashion from the 1770s to the 1830s for men and women. She seemed to have dozens of slides, attached each of the fashions to some ideal in the other arts at the time (say what passed for Greek and Roman dress), new political norms (egalitarism, following more natural or body-fitting fashions in lieu of a stiff formality) but showed also that quickly extremes emerged in which individuals were clearly trying to show their wealth, status, sexuality or masculine or feminine attractiveness (as these were seen). She went over the kinds of materials used, all the layers of clothes, undergarments, shoes, hats, hairstyles, bags carried. I had not realized how male styles evolved in a similar trajectory. In each era there were fossilized holdovers. Men’s styles by the 1830s begin to resemble the way men dress today. Bridal outfits hark back to this era for both genders. Towards the end of her lecture she connected what she had described to characters in Austen’s books, how they dress and how Austen expects us to judge and evaluate them. This part was all too brief.

An image by just one of the many artists Zohn described: Ana Teresa Barboza

Kristin Miller Zohn provided a fascinating series of images demonstrating (she felt) that very contemporary art today has its roots in Regency fashion. What was most intriguing were close parallels between pictures and statues, plates, decorative arts, cooking equipment, hunting implements, jewelry, silhouettes, facial masks, china, pottery, of the later 18th century and post-1990 post-modern art. Like just about everyone who publicly speaks at these conferences she made no critical statement whatsoever about the celebrity culture she said began to flourish in the later 18th century, and its analogues in exotic esoteric imagery today. Greed is in, with only the very occasional contemporary artist (Kara Walker) providing some intelligent humane remembering or critique of some of the sources and workers providing allusions (to slavery, to massacres in the highlands and colonies outside England). There were grieving figures, and some moving narrations accompanied some of what she showed us. I took down names of artists and works but as my sten is so weak I will not try to transcribe as I would make errors. She sped through some 30 artists at least inside 45 minutes or so. I was impressed by how many women and non-European, non-white artists she included. She didn’t neglect the development of photography. It connected to Austen’s world because the modern artists sharply exposed the underbelly of her capitalist military establishment but there was little directly connected to her.

You did have to pay extra for the three lectures.

Diana as Charlotte, Syrie as Jane

I’ll conclude on Diana’s play, which I read years ago and probably have a pdf of somewhere in my computer files, but an hour’s search defeated me. Syrie James played Jane Austen already in heaven, and Diana was Charlotte Bronte. The conceit is that a select group of appropriate people, apparently mostly novelists, who have just died, have to answer a series of questions Miss Austen puts to them to her satisfaction before they too can pass by the gate. Syrie must have some acting in her background because she delivered the wry lines very well: Austen came out as very full of herself, set in her ways, and aware of how Bronte had written of her to Southey. Bronte is longing to join her two sisters and is the more emotional role. Allusions to other women authors connected to these two were amusing: Jane has read “Mrs Gaskell’s” Life of Charlotte Bronte, and is in the know in ways Charlotte cannot yet be. There was good feeling towards the end as the two grew together despite their (supposed) characteristic personalities.

I doubt I chose the best papers to listen to in the next day and a half and I know I missed a number I would have liked to hear. I did hear a few very worth while papers, found two of the key lectures fascinating, and will try to give the gist of the lectures in the next two blogs. The thing to keep your eye on will be how little connects us to what Austen was herself. She was lost in the aftermath of her reputation and how it’s used. (Next time, for us Williamsburg, Va., and “Northanger Abbey after 200 years,” I will try to go for more “close reading” lectures if I can be sure they are that.)

For me going to this was accompanying my daughter who loves the Austen books, writes fan-fiction herself. I was glad most people smiled at me, a few talked to me (one interesting one with an author of a sequel I’ll review soon, Kathleen Flynn’s The Jane Austen Project, another with a scholar I’ve long admired), but would have been saddened by the end, but that I love the dancing on the last evening. I was so glad Izzy finally danced for a couple of hours too — this is her third JASNA AGM.

For now I end on a poem, one I’ve never read before or shared on this blog:

Rereading Jane Austen’s Novels

This time round, they didn’t seem so comic.
Mama is foolish, dim or dead. Papa’s
a sort of genial, pampered lunatic.
No one thinks of anything but class.

Talk about rural idiocy! Imagine
a life of teas with Mrs. and Miss Bates,
of fancywork and Mr. Elton’s sermons!
No wonder lively girls get into states —

No school! no friends! A man might dash to town
just to have his hair cut in the fashion,
while she can’t walk five miles on her own.
Past twenty, she conceives a modest crush on

some local stuffed shirt in a riding cloak
who’s twice her age and maybe half as bright.
At least he’s got some land and gets a joke —
but will her jokes survive the wedding night?

The happy end ends all. Beneath the blotter
the author slides her page, and shakes her head,
and goes to supper — Sunday’s joint warmed over,
followed by whist, and family prayers, and bed.

— Katha Pollitt

Ellen