Jean Zimmerman

Category: Culture

  • Hudson River Haunts and Hustlings

    For my whole life I’ve lived up and down the Hudson River, in Hastings, in Ulster Park, in Ossining. New York City crouches on its shoreline, and I lived there for twenty years. The Hudson happens to be my favorite river in the world – although to be precise it is an estuary. I’ve written…

  • Mandela’s Stitch in Time

    Nelson Mandela – we think of him as superman, an inspirational leader. Surrounded by packs of admirers. A global icon, larger than life. After all, he changed the world. What I find affecting is another Mandela, the one sewing prison clothes in 1966 in a prison yard. Yes, sewing. The picture was taken at Robben…

  • Witch-Healers and Bonesetters

    Returning home with my foot in a plaster cast–yes, the time arrived for further surgery, the other foot dropped, so to speak, but now I’m an old pro–all I could think was what if I injured that limb a couple of hundred years ago? What if I didn’t have Dr. Voellmicke, the finest doctor in…

  • The Spirit of Sinterklass

    The Orphanmaster offers a glimpse into Christmas on Manhattan,1660s-style. Or, since the preponderance of colonists hail from the Netherlands, a glimpse into Sinterklass, the Dutch festival of St. Nicholas, which arrives on December 6th. Because we’re talking about The Orphanmaster, everything in this particular holiday season is not all sugar cookies. Here is a passage…

  • The Spirit of Electricity

    I finally saw “The Spirit of Electricity,” the costume worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at an outrageous fancy dress party she gave with her railroad tycoon husband that was one of the highlights of the Gilded Age in New York City. Textiles perish, and you don’t often get to see the famous gowns of…

  • Making Book

    Frank Stella’s splashy, enormous constructions line the walls of the lobby where my book publisher has its offices. Three collages, to be precise, of mixed media on a base of etched magnesium. Standing in front of one, you have to crane your neck to see the top of the piece. Standing there, I try to…

  • Victorians Striking a Maternal Pose

    The photos published in The Guardian today haunt me. A series of Victorian babies, each one posed against a fabric-draped… mother. They’re from a new book called The Hidden Mother by Linda Fregni Nagler, which archives 1,002 photographs, daguerreotypes and tintypes, cartes de visite and cabinet cards. As a reporter describes it, the requirements of…

  • Happy as Pie

    I wanted to make some pies. Five pies, because that’s what could fit in my oven plus the one I’m bringing for my family.The Presbyterian Church soup kitchen in Ossining was having a dinner. They said they could use some. Ingredients were cheap. Baking them was easy. Now there will be a few more pie-happy…

  • Thank You for Reading

    I am thankful. This is a post about this blog. At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken…

  • Starring Gertrude Stein

    “If you enjoy my work you understand it… if you don’t enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it? These were Gertrude Stein’s slightly sharp-elbowed words pronounced sixty-nine years ago to an interviewer at at New York’s Algonquin Hotel upon her arrival in America to record The Making of Americans and some of her…

  • Portrait of a Lady Descending a Staircase

    Visiting the exhibit of Gilded Age Portraits at the New-York Historical Society, I simply had to let myself go into a cloud of chiffon, of gleaming satins, of deep-pile velvet. And, on the masculine side, really good wool. I fortified myself beforehand, consuming a dish of pappardelle with duck ragu and chocolate shavings, the kind…

  • Savage Girl Music Mix

    What, I thought, would be a modern-day playlist to match a Victorian savage girl’s temperament? If that makes sense. Here are some ideas, and I welcome more if you’d care to leave a comment. I plan to pass out CD’s when Savage Girl comes out in March, for anyone who likes to blast tunes in…

  • Another Fine Dress You’ve Got Me Into

    I always wondered by what means people got up their getups for fancy dress balls during the Gilded Age. A fancy dress ball didn’t mean, as it sounds, elegant gowns for the ladies and stiff black tails for the gents. They were actually masquerades, opportunities for the well-heeled to escape their own trials and tribulations –…

  • A Goodreads Vote

    Sometimes I don’t know what I’ll do with myself waiting for Savage Girl to hit the stands March 6th. We’re finalizing flap copy, rounding up quotes from other fiction writers for the cover, talking about where I’ll go to spread the word about the book. Still, it seems like a long time away. If you’d…

  • The Things We Carry

    What heirloom would you bring? I’m reading about refugees and the things that they carry (remembering the Tim O’Brien tale The Things They Carried, about the impedimenta Vietnam soldiers take with them into battle.) BBC News Magazine profiles refugees during the Nazi menace of the 1940s, asking that question. Isabelle Rozenbaumas’s mother escaped  Nazi-overrun Lithuania, barely,…