Vampires ... the feeding on the sickness in our souls.

The UN- Dead

Dracula's empathy with the "children of the night" rather than with humans released a dimension of fear: the fear, not of death and the dead, but of being alive (94).

"Dracula"'s original title, up to a month before its publication, was "The Un-Dead," which points toward the essential gift of Stoker's vampires to the 20th cent: a reminder, not of the dreadfulness of death, but of the innate horror of vitality. (95)

The blood is the life ... D. energizes his prey, reminding his victims -- and us -- that they have life in them ... the women he transforms come to apprehend the (sensory) vibrancy of their world. 

Stoker's Undead bestow vitality ... Rice uses this as "Vampire sight" (quasi angelic) ... Stoker associates it with animals.

Life engorges death ... lucy is not stilled ... she turns not to marble, but to blood.

Lucy is the first dead girl we have met who is in her heart alive. 

(I, of course, was an alive girl who in my heart was dead.)

Her kind has no love of death and no sympathy with stillness.

...

I think sometimes that if I don't exist, that it would be the way to get back at her, that hurting myself would hurt her ... like I have been the one all along who has not known that we are, in fact, two separate beings.

Is this what all this crap is here to teach me? I've been angrier the last few days since I finished my amends on the 4th (today has been the 8th, though now it's technically the 9th) than I have for a while ... it was so hard to be able to really see what I've had to deal with, and to never know which person it would be, the person on day #1 or on day #2, that no matter what I say, even how many times she asks me the same questions over and over, she does not hear me at all.

I've been thinking a lot today about how Alisa said that if it wasn't for me doing all those drugs in high school, I never would have made it out of my teens alive, and days like today, I can see why.  It is also becoming clearer why I have these "strange mental blank spots" about people being complete assholes, but only in certain situations -- allowing my landlady to call me names; allowing my boyfriend(s) to treat me so badly and not feel like either of these things are unusual or I'm undeserving because they both have to do with the "house" and my deepest emotional abilities. Now that this summer I've taken away the glamour of my job and have been forced to look at emotional stuff, there are huge gaps here for me to be conscious of and ask the Goddess for help with.

Now that my shield is gone, not from my life but from my physical space, I can really begin to have my own life and trust God. It just has to hurt for a little while for it to feel better. I guess.

Still, I don't want to talk to, um, Mom for a while and you know what? I don't have to. So there.

Love,

Rachel Alina. xxxxx

Dracula "is so suggestively amorphous in Stoker's novel that he is free to shift his shape with each new 20th century trend." In 1897, though, Dracula was, despite his occult powers, so comparatively docile a vampire, so amenable to others' definitions, that he stifled the tradition that preceded him (Auerbach 83).

Like Dracula, the 1890's were a decade shaped by medical experts ... particularly on the "homosexual." (Oscar Wilde's trials)

Dracula is silent, cannot love, cannot participate...

Dracula inhibits more taboos than he breaks...his existence is hedged by absolute of arbitrary rules vampires fear to break even now.

But he has the ability to shapeshift ... though this ability, in the novel, is downplayed (i think for creepiness effect ... "his changes are modestly presented compared to those of Lucy and Mina...once again, women perform of behalf of withheld males the extreme implications of vampirism" (87).

Sexually, Stoker's vampires are dutifully conventional; personally they lack flair, craving only power and possession -- they are striking only in their transformative potential.

In most vampire films, animalism is less metamorphosis than coded eroticism, but is late Victorian England, animals were not represented as notably sexual. Instead, they generated a lonely awe human  beings were too socialized to inspire (88).

• Also watch Kinski/Herzog's Nosferatu

NEW!

So now I'm thinking, after breaking up with that total -- wait, what's that? -- energy vampire -- that perhaps the best way to go about doing my project is to 

a.) not go overboard

and 

b.) think of a few themes that can be illustrated by various "visual texts," i.e., stealing scenes off of Youtube.

The vampire is much more complex than just a single metaphor, but can and has and will represent many different facets of blah blah blah.

Some possible ideas could be:

• Possession: "He belongs to me" -- Gary Oldman
• Addiction: Lili Taylor
• Consumerism: Lost Boys? Lestat?
• Old world vs. New world: Lestat? ironically, Dracula in London?
• Disease: Nosferatu? HIV?
• Psychic Vampires:
• Rebirth/Death -- Louie turning into a vampire; death and birth together ...

This should be in film, not tv, as I can't handle all that shit. 

This is a good working start. Stuff to watch/check out includes:

The Hunger

The Vampyr  (Dreiser)

The Vampire Lovers (Hammer, Baker, 1970)

Blood and Roses (Vadim, 1960)

Familiar movies to cull for scenes:

Both Interview movies

The Lost Boys

28 Days Later

• Please note, Miss Rachel, that this research is to be done on YouTube itself, as that is your main source of material.

Lots of love.

R. xx

Podcasting update/interesting article

So ...

The Cubs lost the second half of the Subway Series and Spain won the final in the European Cup.

My boss (I always like to have one of those I guess) sent me this awesome article about podcasting in the classroom: 

http://campustechnology.com/articles/64433/

More later.

R. x

Some Serious 19th Century Shit

Auerbach writes about how 19th century vampiric literature focused on the vampire as a close friend without the familiar litany of identifying marks that we identify with it today. 

Male vampires, especially Lord Byron/Polidori and Varney the Vampire, offer a close bond or oath in friendship with each other or their prey, whilst the female vampires -- especially Carmilla and Christabel -- center on physical and emotional intimacy.  

Both of these genders' actions and feelings are portrayed as what the succeeding centuries would describe as homosexual, especially the females' obsessive closeness.

Auerbach then goes on to remark of the 19th century, "a century of alluring vampire friends invade erotic sites, the shared reality of bodies, on behalf of an abstract bond and a purely surgical violence." 

BS' 1897 Dracula provided a "lexicon of vampirism for the 20th century. Predators were identifiable by their fangs, victims by two little holes in their neck. After Dracula, contact between vampire and victim is as external to the body as possible. Moving from the erotic to the clinical, from affinity to penetration, vampire iconography abandons bosoms, fastening with scientific precision on higher, cleaner wounds."

Living with the Undead

Notes from Auerbach's Introduction

"What vampires are in any given generation is a part of what I am and what my times have become."

She describes v.s as "popular confederates as mortals" whose folklore as parasites stretches back to the beginnings of recorded history, but they "began their significant literary life in 1816, with the self-creations of Lord Byron."

Comparing Lord Ruthven and Lestat, each..."feeds distinctively on his age because he embodies that age."

*********************************************************************

She explains the political climate between 1989 and 1992 -- w/out the USSR and Reagan, the USA "turned its fears on itself." 

FDR: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign: "Freedom from fear is the basic right of every American. We must restore it." -- "us" against "them" -- vague and unspecified, still used today by his party. (2)

Bush 1 campaign: "the president has gone from an exorcist of fear to its agent."

vampires and presidents both personify their age.

The title makes fear an ongoing cultural and personal presence, one no rational, Rooseveltian good will can dispel.

"No fear is only personal: it must steep itself in its political and ideological ambience, without which out solitary terrors have no contagious resonance." (3)

Vampires are too mutable to be allegories.

"The alacrity with which vampires shape themselves to personal and national moods is an adaptive trait their uniformity masks."

**************************************************************************

There is no such creature as "The Vampire," there are only vampires. Because they are immortal, they are free to change incessantly.

Eternally alive, they embody not fear of death, but fear of life: their power and their curse is their undying vitality... vampires long to die, at least in certain moods, infecting readers with fears of their own interminable lives.

"Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be."... they blend into the changing cultures they inhabit.

They inhere in our most intimate relationships; they are also hideous invaders of the normal... they can be everything we are, while at the same time, they are fearful reminders of the infinite things we are not."

"At the end of the century, B.S.'s Dracula -- animal rather than phantom, mesmerist rather than intimate, tyrant rather than friend -- safely quarantined vampires from their human prey, foreclosing friendship and opening the door to the power-hungry predators so congenial to the 20th century."

Vampires oscillate between aristocracy and democracy, at times taking command with elitist aplomb, at times embodying the predatory desires of the populace at large. In both England and America, vampires turn to women to perform the extreme implications of their monstrosity -- erotic friendship in England, social rebellion in America" (7).

Reaganesque vampires, increasingly ghettoized, wilt, dissipate, and even shed undeath when challenged by the paternal authorities they had mocked in the 60s and 70s.

Posing as revolutionaries, they are consummate turncoats... our lives are implicated in theirs and our times are inescapable.

We'll take a break for coffee, and come back for comments.

***************************************************************************

Nina has some great writing here, and I like here idea of grafting the Vampire on to the fears of the age. While I do not think I will use much directly from the first half of this book, which is about 19th century England, the second half will hopefully provide a good starting point.

My ideas will work around her general concept, of vampires-as-a-metaphor, and also include some of the rather startling innovations in the last 20 years, especially technology. 

I also like her personal slant.

Write soon....

Love, 

R. xoxo

Wake up call

I wake up and want to run.

I wake up and want to go to mom's house, disappear in the ether with the fairies, pretend some more.

I wake up and want to call Jodee and ask if I can follow her around all day, trying to make us feel better.

I wake up and want to merge with Adam, set up our own lab, work is the answer, no more feelings for me at all anymore , ever again.

I wake up and remember about what Wesley did to me.

The weekend is approaching, and shockingly, I don't want to do any more work...

My meeting at Columbia regarding this project went well, though it did make clear that I have A LOT of work to do ... I spoke with Rebecca and she said that Podcast 1 can be as academic as I'd like it to be (vampire-land, here I come) but that the Podcast 2 should be very nuts and bolts and not just for "English professors" -- although thinking about the average English professor's acquaintance with technology is not a bad starting point to work towards. She also said that I can/will/should be thinking of an additional, third piece of this project -- the conference presentation/paper on this research, but that's a little too much for me to handle now.

The Cubs just totally beat the Sox! Yay!

While at Columbia the other day, I acquired Auerbach's "Our Vampires, Ourselves," as well as an old school vampire bibliography (published 1983 -- quite a find really), and a "The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Female Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny."

I fucking love my job.

R.x 

Notes from Under the Floor

This post contains quotes from the preface and introduction book I've had for many years, Blood Read, ed. by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger (U of Penn Press, 1997). All quotes, unless specified, attributed to Gordon and Hollinger; my comments are in italics.

"Vampirism has become for post-modern writers a ready metaphor for the sickness of our society. Perhaps dealing with the subject should be considered a healthy sign ... sufficient to elevate us to a mythic, if dark realm ... we (are) all sick, 'desolate and sick of an old passion'" (Aldiss xi).

I think that this has always been the case, not just in "post-modern" art ... but "dealing with" this sickness is an interesting -- and modern take on this idea (versus the Victorian model of complete represseion).

"An ambiguously coded figure, a source of both erotic anxiety and corrupt desire, the literary vampire is one of the most powerful archetypes bequeathed to us from the imagination of the 19th century" (1).

Yeah, I just like that word "bequeathed" -- and obviously someone else does too -- not to mention "corrupt desire" !

Every age embraces the vampire it needs ... they are a "late 20th century cultural necessity" (1).

The first part of this quote is from Nina Auerbach's book Our Vampires, Ourselves -- that's a killer title -- which we have at the Columbia library and I am going to get tomorrow. I especially like her word choice of "embrace" here.

The impact of the shift from human to "other" perspective works to invite sympathy for the monstrous outsider at the same time it serves to diminish the terror generated by what remains outside our frame of the familiar and knowable ... (this can) usefully be interpreted for political and cultural significance (2).

So we can relate to vampires, and that makes them less scary ... then we can analyze them in academia and get paid for it! Hooray for "other perspective works inviting sympathy for the monstrous outsider!

Rosemary Jackson notes, the work of metaphor is crucial to the construction of all fantastic narratives, since the realm of the fantastic is precisely composed of "all that is not said, all that is unsayable, through realistic forms" (2)

This is the coolest fucking idea ever. 

The book that it's from is called Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Columbia doesn't have it, but Amazon does.

Here's some political shit:

Frederic Jameson writes in The Political Unconscious,  "the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal 'solutions' to unresolvable social contradictions" (2).

So stories are spaces within which we work through our societal and psychological issues...makes sense to me.

Currently, "the boundaries between 'human' and 'monstrous' (have) become increasingly problematized in contemporary vampire narratives ... one of the functions of monsters is to help us construct our own humanity, to provide guidelines against which we can define ourselves" (5).

...

In the nineteenth century, the vampire functioned as a natural metaphor for the symptoms of TB: consider its associations with "wasting, with paleness, with the flow of blood from the mouth, night restlessness, alternate burning and chills, even with the victim's rumored sexual energy" (6).

...

Vampire themes suggest our current (1997) anxieties about "the dissolution of boundaries ... between hegemony and disenfranchisement, economy and ecology, socialization and separation. The vampire reflects such border anxieties since it penetrates boundaries by its very nature -- between life and death, love and fear, power and persecution" (7).

How apt that "it thrives in this postmodern milieu of dissolving borders between the virtual and the real, between private and public personae, in the breaking down of cultural and national boundaries, while a plague transmitted by the penetration of bodily boundaries -- and often through blood -- sweeps the world" (7).

Vampires are on the edge/boundaries of something, all the time (no wonder I can relate so much), the Industrial/Sexual/Corporate revolutions ... as always, there is a psychological bent here and a socio-political emphasis ... time will tell which will lend itself the most clearly to my project and what I'm trying to do here. 

Sweet dreams.

R.x

 

Stop! Buffy Time!

...the Cubs lost.

Other "metaphorical" ideas to work with, vampire-wise: in symbolizing the aristocracy/old guard, they represent the ultimate in bourgeois society -- those who live off the poor and the land and feel they have a divine right to do so. 

This can also represent free will, unchecked, the ultimate in selfishness ... Lestat, especially in Interview with the Vampire, is a great example of this idea of the Old World ... heartless, cruel, based on class and outmoded assumptions about the world. The premise that these "ways" do not or should not exist any more very American way of seeing the world, symbolized by Louie -- open, communicative, feeling, willing to move with the world, etc.

BUT are the vampires in any of these stories the protagonist or the antagonist?

Oftentimes, they are the anti-hero, whose complexity lends itself so much to the story and the longevity of these archetypes.  Of course, we can relate to and with them, or else we would not be so fascinated...

1.) Straight up evil doers. like Stoker's Dracula and Murnau's Nosferatu, are strictly to be feared and reviled.

2.) Bela Lugosi infused some glamour into the role (I need to watch this movie from start to finish).

3.) Coppolla/Oldman's Dracula is indisputably the star of the film -- the audience is made to sympathize with him and his plight/story arc from the first frame.

How did this happen? What changed in art and society and politics that this "same" text could be reworked in such a radical way?

From what I can tell, there are a few major Vampire phases in the 20th century.

1.) Dracula (1900's - 1940's)

2.) Hammer Horror (of which I know nothing) (1950's - 1960's)

3.) Anne Rice's the Vampire Chronicles (1970's - 1980's)

4.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (1990's +)

Where Rice took the trend towards identification with the vampire and wrote from the vampires' perspective directly , Joss Whedon and the Buffy team took the story back to its traditional roots and made vampires faceless horrors yet again.

Except Spike, but more about that later.

So much of the richness of Rice's work lies in its moral ambiguity and relativism; that's some deep -- though still exploitative -- shit going on under those glamorous veneers. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, is very much a teen drama, and serves that purpose exceedingly well, looking at the world through the adolescent perspective of good versus evil.  The characters have real-world struggles at school, with the family, in relationships, and often times the horror plots are used as illustrations of these situations -- working as a team is better than fighting alone, keeping secrets hurts everyone, discipline and hard work will allow you to achieve your goals -- which I know I found very encouraging as a college student watching Buffy.

This series, however, is a different animal from the majority of other works we will be exploring -- and in large part as well because of its very nature as a television program. The WB network aired 144 episodes of Buffy, which at 45 minutes of actual "show" is ... um ... 6480 minutes of Buffy! That's 108 solid hours of writing and plot development...

This does bring up the idea that the ol' podcasting medium is perfect to use as a tool for exploration ... how can different formats (television, novels, films, especially) affect our response to these texts.

That's a loaded question.

Coffee break time.

Love,

R.x

Soccer is Boring / Vampires are Metaphors.

Despite Vlad's best efforts from beyond the grave, Roumania lost today, so the Dutch and the Italians will go on to the quarter-finals of the 2008 UEFA Cup, along with the Germans, the Portugese, and, um, some others who have yet to be determined.

I lived in England for four years -- during the last Euro Cup (2004) and World Cup (2006) -- and football does seem, as ever, quite foreign and tribalistic.

Go Cubs.

***********************************************************************

My project's basic premise is that the Vampire archetype can be read as a metaphor for a myriad of different "sicknesses" on the societal and individual levels.

The first things that I have thought of, roughly, have been, metaphors for:

1.) Straight-up diseases, particularly consumption/tuberculosis in the late 19th century and HIV in the late 20th century -- Sheridan le Fanu's short story "Carmilla" (first pub. 1872).

2.) Addiction/other mental disorders -- Ferrerra's The Addiction (1995)

3.) Over-consumption/capitalism/"corporate" greed also in the current era -- Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002); Scott's The Hunger (1983)

Vampires, of course, also very firmly linked with sexuality, often"deviant" in eras where sexuality is shunned-- homosexuality, highly sexed women, especially in the Victorian era, -- and highly hypermasculine/idealized in the late 20th century, such as Lestat.

My students always associate vampires with sexuality, especially given their (the vampires', not my students') accoutrements and associations: night-time, glamour, blood, puncturing, dancing, fancy outfits, death, castles, foreign accents, pain and pleasure together...

Also, the Dracula story itself, as maifested in (at least):

-Stoker's novel

-Murnau's Nosferatu (1922)

-Browning's film (1931)

expresses a certain xenophobia that the English/Western Europe felt for Eastern Europe (and one certainly still felt today, with the debate about Turkey "really" being a part of Europe being a glaring example).

Much of the fear of this story comes from the idea that this foreigner has arrived on London shores and is using mysterious powers that the "civilized" British do not understand.  The "peasantry" and ignorance of Dracula's brethren in Transylvania are established immediately in the story when the townsfolk try to give Harker charms and amulets to protect him on his way up to the castle. 

Western Europeans were, in the late 19th century, both envious of Easter Europe's growing wealth and power, yet scornful of its "backwards" ways -- a model which Count Dracula fit perfectly. 

A threat to London, and "all that is holy," indeed.

Next post: some actual notes. 

Love,

 R.x

Spring Recap

Here's what I have so far.

My initial work began to question comparisons between the historical figure of Vlad Dracula, the Romanian prince of the 1400's, to the character created by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel "Dracula." 

This idea -- that Stoker based his Dracula on this historical figure -- did not exist until the 1970's (in a book by McNally -- citation needed), and is now a mainstream idea taken for granted by many; the Coppolla "Dracula" film being the first Hollywood work to draw the parallel directly.

However, my own (brief) research from a few months ago has lead me to disagree with this theory, and I especially credit the work of Dr. Elizabeth Miller, who has written that Stoker was not familiar with Vlad the Impaler at all, except having once come across his name, Dracula, but not any details of his life or legend.

 http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/

This is definitely a site/author I am going to spend more time with.

So the connection between the two "men"/"figures"/"characters"/"legends" is tenuous and vague. Vlad Dracula is a really interesting (and terrifying figure), but I am not an historian ... as 

I have been thinking about how this historical subset of my general research would probably benefit more from a traditionally-sourced approach, i.e., writing, than the one that I/we have chosen for this project, the glorious, multi-faceted medium of podcasting.

I think my next idea will be a better fit for the mode and topic of communication here.

So long Vlad ... I wonder if your team will be asking for your help tonight to beat the Nederlands in the Euro 2008 quarterfinals....I'm sure you could give them a few hints about, you know, impalement, nailing people's turban's to their heads, peeling off people's skin and making them run around town,  that killer d-formation...

R.x

In the beginning...

Good morning.

Apparently tomorrow is the 18th of June, already, the day that I am, um, going to have all of this work done for my Tech Fellowship podcasting project.

No problem!! 

I've been doing tons of work on it during the last few weeks since I've seen everyone -- thinking about it counts, right? And talking about it? And showing off to my gainfully employed friends that I, like, totally have this research grant for the summer?

Crap.

It's not that my project isn't amazing -- Columbia is actually paying me (or they will, at some point, upon receipt of some actual work, whatever that means) to make more podcasts about Dracula, and to make a podcast about how I've been making a podcast about my podcast about Dracula. 

Life never ceases to amaze me, at least not lately.

So this little bloggie will serve two functions, clearly delineated by titles in the posts:

1.) To document my research/creative process!

2.) To help facilitate my own understanding and analysis of this process.

Sounds pretty wicked... I'll be posting soon.

R. x