To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good

Wow. Was Pipe-Wrench Fight really the last thing I posted here? That's just sad. I'm trying to remember where the rest of October, November, December and January went. It's all one big hazy ball of holidays and cross-country moves.

Thanks for the pokey reminder about LJ, jules1278 . Sorry it took a few weeks to sink in :).

Random Fandom Things Currently Rocking My World:

I don't usually like cross-posting, but this one is kind of relevant to both sites and I want these two collections to be recommended everywhere because they're so much fun. So here goes...

Let's kick off this Halloween season, shall we? Alas, no Halloween Movie Fest for me this year, as I don't happen to be living with T & SA anymore. But I've modified the October ritual to my personal liking, having decided to focus on a wide range of vampire stories from all different literary eras. Aiding me in this endeavor are two volumes of surprising merit (I say surprising because I haphazardly picked them up from the entrance display at B&N), both of which compliment one another in ways I failed to notice until coming home. More on that in a second, but I have to say that it reminded me that there are people who know and love books working at B&N--probably former English majors practicing daily guerrilla warfare on an unsuspecting public in the fight to make people actually think about what they read--and it's one such person who put these two volumes next to one another.

Volume #1: Vampires, Wine, and Roses: Chilling Tales of Immortal Pleasure
I know, I know. It sounds like a schlocky romance novel, right? It's really, really not. It's just an incredibly cheesy title for an otherwise impressive collection. Edited by John Richard Stephens, this book has vampire stories from expected and very unexpected sources: Ann Rice, Voltaire, H.G. Wells, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Baudelaire, T.S. Elliot, Edith Wharton, Stephen King, Lord Byron, Ray Bradbury, Robert Louis Stevenson, and more. If you're anything like me, you're probably looking at this list and thinking "but _____ didn't write about vampires!" Yes, he/she did! This volume contains poetry, prose, song lyrics, and excerpts from longer novels. It's also--get this!--fully illustrated by Vince Locke. Check out the cover: V, W, & R Cover.

Volume #2: Women of the Night
To be perfectly honest, I bought this volume based solely on the fact that it included Neil Gaiman's "Snow, Glass, Apples" in a vampire compilation. Because that's exactly where it should be. The only thing that would be even better were if it showed up in a collection that included some Angela Carter stories as well. Anyway, WotN focuses specifically on female vampires. As John Helfers points out in the Introduction, many scholars treat the vampire myth as something that sprung up in the 18th/19th century with the rise of Gothic Revival. Certainly, Dracula made a huge impact on the literary world. But female vampires have been featured in texts for a couple thousand years and have developed different mythic characteristics than their male counterparts. This collection features contemporary authors telling female vampire stories--Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick, Nancy Holder, Jane Yolen, etc.

What I didn't realize until reading the introduction of Women of the Night was that many of the stories referenced by Helfers and the writers featured in this book are included in Vampires, Wine, and Roses. So when he claims that an author's story borrows from Keats' Lamia, I can simply grab VW&R and--presto!--there's the poem (instead of having to drag out the book boxes and dig for my Norton Anthology, or try to track down what may or may not be a complete copy of the text on Google).

So the opening story in VW&R is a 1984 story by Ann Rice called "The Master of Rampling Gate." And it's everything a neo-gothic 20th century vampire story should be--sensual, melodramatic, a little bit ridiculous, and very, very sexy. You know...gothic. Here's an excerpt:


I leave you with a macro made by someone far cooler than myself after a particularly fun viewing of Interview with the Vampire: 



Happy Halloween!

Dark Shadows is quite possibly the most addictive kind of TV crack around. I think it has to do with a combination of :

1. 18 minute episodes (of course we can watch another one...and another...and another)
2. Soap Opera Time, which runs at a rate of about an eighth of real time
3. Prolonging the inevitable realization that Barnabas is eeevilll

Last night, he seriously macked on Maggie the Waitress and busted out some rather impressive sexy eye rays over coffee. Something tells me she's about to become the Lucy of DS.

Watching DS is kind of like watching Sailor Moon, except without all the pink. It makes you giddy :).

Started watching Dark Shadows last night. Three words: Gothic Soap Opera. Well, let's add three more: From the 60's.



Best Wikipedia quote: "As a child Johnny Depp was so obsessed with Barnabas Collins that he wanted to be him^[1]."