{"id":1342,"date":"2009-02-01T09:25:12","date_gmt":"2009-02-01T16:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/02\/international-bright-young-things\/"},"modified":"2009-02-01T09:25:12","modified_gmt":"2009-02-01T16:25:12","slug":"international-bright-young-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/02\/01\/international-bright-young-things\/","title":{"rendered":"International Bright Young Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the NY Observer<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Vile Bodies<\/a><\/h2>\n

BY<\/span>\u00a0DAMIAN DA COSTA<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0|\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London\u2019s Jazz Age<\/strong>
By D.J. Taylor
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 361 pages, $27<\/em><\/p>\n

British tabloids of the 1920s bestowed the sobriquet \u201cBright Young People\u201d on the generation born near the turn of the century, a generation alienated from older siblings traumatized and decimated by the Great War, and even more alienated from parents whose pre-War mind-set stranded them on the far side of a moral chasm. Their isolation led the Bright Young People to create a new kind of social life\u2014less formal, more sensation-seeking, essentially communal in character. \"vile.png\"They invented \u201cgatecrashing,\u201d popularized late-night scavenger hunts, and threw the wild dress-up parties that have come down to us in Evelyn Waugh\u2019s\u00a0Vile Bodies<\/em>\u00a0(1930): \u201cMasked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John\u2019s, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs. …\u201d<\/p>\n

The legend of the core group is well known: A clique of literary aesthetes bound by ties to Eton and Oxford\u2014some, like Waugh and Anthony Powell, with an edge of seriousness; others, like the Mitfords and Brian Howard, for whom \u201cidiosyncratic\u201d is too mild\u2014took up residence in Mayfair and presided over a revolution in decorum. Then as now, it was a matter of time before the scene they started was co-opted, packaged and sold back to the public as society gossip. By 1931, their heyday had passed and only a few, creatively speaking, survived.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London\u2019s Jazz Age<\/em>, D. J. Taylor, author of a first-rate life of George Orwell, shows the sharp instincts of an expert biographer in his approach to 1920s English youth culture. He knows, for example, that the essence of a social scene is most faithfully preserved in the lives of its failures\u2014those who, unlike Waugh, never managed to transcend the group identity that first brought them notice.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at Observer.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the NY Observer Vile Bodies BY\u00a0DAMIAN DA COSTA\u00a0\u00a0|\u00a0 Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London\u2019s Jazz AgeBy D.J. TaylorFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 361 pages, $27 British tabloids of the 1920s bestowed the sobriquet \u201cBright Young People\u201d on the generation born near the turn of the century, a generation alienated from older siblings traumatized […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}