19th Century

TWO MOONS A Novel by Thomas Mallon Pantheon $24, 320 pages * Washington, D.C., has always found an open artery in the heart of the excellent critic and novelist Thomas Mallon. Mallon, in fact, has made a partial career out of writing a historical fiction that shines a candle of tallow, or a headlamp of Studebaker, on the secondary characters of political history.

Jae Carmichael, an eclectic artist, writer and independent filmmaker who updated a 19th century cemetery and served as founding director of Pasadena's Pacific Asia Museum, has died. She was 80. Carmichael died Nov. 5 at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena after a long illness, said her cousin, Caitlin Mullin. A painter, sculptor and photographer, Carmichael staged more than 200 solo exhibitions in galleries in Los Angeles, Japan and Europe.

Vintage kitchenware--from jelly molds and rolling pins to cher ry pitters and butter churns--constitutes one of the hottest fields in antiques. These collectibles owe their popularity to their availability and a nostalgic desire to personalize modern kitchens. Kitchenware collectors tend to fall into two categories. At the grass-roots level there are casual collectors more concerned with the look of a gadget than with its patent date, manufacturer or problems posed by reproductions.

One could easily say that Jeanette Winterson's novels defy classification, that there is no such thing as a typical Winterson novel. Yet, on closer examination, what one finds throughout her work is a strongly personal, often autobiographical strain (the essence of her arresting first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit") and an unusual imaginative sensitivity to the literary and historical past (yielding such treasures as "The Passion" and "Sexing the Cherry."

The last four decades of the 20th century have been a turbulent period for classical ballet, with all manner of staging fads reordering the traditional repertory to emphasize radical concepts of production design, psychosexual symbolism, interpolated bravura and more.

The great French critic André Bazin said of director Luchino Visconti that he filmed the Sicilian fishermen in "La Terra Trema" as if they were "tragic princes." In the 1963 epic "The Leopard," rapturously presented on a new Criterion Blu-ray, Visconti reverses the equation, pulling a family of 19th century aristocrats down to earth. Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento, the period that marked the end of Sicily's existence as an independent monarchy and the emergence of an Italian state, the movie exults in the last gasps of the nobility's opulence, even as it acknowledges and — ambivalently — endorses the necessity of its end. Perhaps the most overtly dialectical of Visconti's movies, "The Leopard" embodies the contradictions inherent in his identity.

On a recent weekday, dozens of children sit up straight as boards, on hard wooden benches, as a schoolmarm hits her open palm with a hickory stick. In the 19th century, "if you got a rapping at school, your parents found out and you got a whupping at home," she says, her voice as sharp as her boot heels. Jaws drop. Backs stiffen. In the 19th century, schoolmarm Stephanie Runckles continues, "discipline was not a problem."

Not much can match the beauty of a properly restored Victorian home. Whether you're lucky enough to own one or merely dream of someday buying a Victorian, there's lots to learn about these romantic old houses. Mention the word Victorian and many folks think of Queen Anne or Italian-styled structures. Although these are two of the more plentiful Victorian designs, many different styles fall into this sweeping period--a time span that covers the better part of the 19th Century.

The century that began with Napoleon's thrust across the Alps in 1800 and ended with the publication of Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" hasn't been fertile ground for the Hollywood blockbuster. Only two pictures set in the tumultuous Age of Revolution are among the 100 top-ranked films at the U.S.

Lawrence Lefferts and Sillerton Jackson ought to be having a field day with the new film of Edith Wharton's novel "The Age of Innocence" instead of wandering through it without seeming to notice that anything is wrong. True, these two insufferable gentlemen are only minor characters in the movie, as in the book. But in the circles in which the major characters move, they are the self-appointed guardians of what is done and what is simply not done.