Category Archives: vampires

>The Twilight Zone

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>As you may have noticed by now, I am slightly pre-occupied with vampire fiction. As such, the Twilight phenomenon has utterly fascinated me. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I’ve read the books. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve blogged. Repeatedly. And I’m still not certain that I entirely grasp it.

My midterm for Jack’s Gothic class was a piece connecting Twilight with the vampire genre as a whole and attempting to fasten it to the greater issues at stake within vampire fiction. My attempt was only slightly successful, mostly due to the fact that I was juggling the impending MA exam at the time, but also because there seems to be a dearth of serious scholarship on the matter. I would say “you can’t really blame them”, except for the fact that I’ve unearthed a plethora of Buffy scholarship. Why should Twilight be so different? Same genre, similar demographic, granted Buffy has been around a bit longer so it’s had longer to be kicked around by the requisite minds… but eight years isn’t all that long. Something about the situation didn’t sit right with me, and it took me some time to realize why.

I never really thought about the major difference that a good, solid piece of literature makes to a paper as opposed to shallow drivel. Because really, let’s face it folks, Twilight ain’t Finnegan’s Wake. It wasn’t until I was deep within my paper’s crafting that I realized how difficult it was for me to write anything truly meaningful, insightful or original about it… even though it wasn’t a scholarly village horse like Frankenstein or the Shakespeare stuff that I’m used to working with upon which everyone’s had a go and thereby much less likely to be shocked, awed, or otherwise affected by your own turn with it.

What I’m really getting down to is a simple fact: Joss Whedon can write. Stephenie Meyer can’t. Whedon makes something deep and engaging, Meyer makes brain bubblegum that will do nothing but rot your proverbial mental teeth. It may taste good, but trust me, it has no caloric or nutritive value whatsoever.

Anyway, I cranked my midterm out, thoughts of publication only vaguely floating through my mind. Yes, there was a place for the scholarship but A) did I really want to be that Twilight girl and B) the paper itself wasn’t really up to my usual par. I blame the literature. Wait, no, not literature… book. It’s just a book.

Suffice to say that Stephenie Meyer and I haven’t really been on speaking terms since that midterm paper. Imagine, then, my surprise when I walked into Jack’s office before Gothic this week and saw, sitting proudly upon his desk, a paperback copy of Twilight. I arched my eyebrow at him, trying to formulate a suitably smart-ass remark.

Flash back to earlier in the semester when Jack had been poking around for suggestions for the last week of class; a time he wished to devote to the “modern Gothic”. I believe the first thing out of my mouth when he suggested that perhaps Twilght would be a great option was “Please don’t willingly subject people to this.”

Wavy lines and funny music bring us back to Jack’s office, present-day. He looked at me slightly sheepishly, “Yea, I decided that it’s the most popular example of Gothic out there these days so… I’m assigning a chapter.”

I sighed, “I want it on record that this was against my advisement.”

“Duly noted.” He said, and we began talking about much more consequent things.

Flash forward again to the last ten minutes of class. Jack reaches over to the ubiquitous stack of copying that has been lurking on the table in front of him for the entire class period as he launches into an explanation of the class for next week. “So, there are some songs on blackboard and we will be watching some film clips, and Danielle told me that you should all be reading a chapter from her favorite book so… here you go!”

He passed the dreaded pages down and my colleagues groaned as they saw the title. “Jack!” I said, “What are you doing!? I’m going to get beat up in the alley after class!” … I didn’t remind him (or them) that this was the second time the syllabus suffered at my hand. The first, of course, was a fight to the end for the inclusion of The Mysteries of Udolpho which (by the by) is the foundational text of modern Gothic… it’s also a six-hundred-page-slow-moving-book-from-hell. I think my colleagues have finally forgotten about my role in their being forced to read this thing so far be it from me to freshen their memories.

That didn’t stop them from being upset about the Twilight thing. “Hey, Danielle, I hear there’s a dumpster out behind Robeson…”

It’s a good thing that I do a lot of cardio.

In any case, I’m sitting here now attempting to read this chapter and, for the first time, I’m actually having trouble getting through it. I am pleasantly surprised by this fact, and would be more happy about it if I didn’t have to get through said chapter for class next week.

This is the first time that I’ve returned to any of the Twilight books since the midterm debacle. I would like to say that demystifying their allure has helped to break their uncanny spell upon me, but I’m pretty sure that it’s mostly due to end-of-semester mental gridlock.

>Fangs for the Incite

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I am mad.  No, not mad, angry.  No, not angry, seeing red, flames on the side of my face, steam coming out of my ears livid.  What, might you ask, is the cause of this anger?  The source of this towering inferno of rage?
Flash back to yesterday.  I made a trip to my local Barnes and Noble to pick up the next book in my current bedtime reading series (it’s nothing literary, just some awesome urban fantasy writing… I need a very specific kind of book to lull my brain into slumber at the end of a long day).  I rode the escalator up to the fiction section of the store, inhaling the wonderful scent of mass-market paperbacks and coffee (I love LOVE the smell of books).  My mind was idly tapping itself against the actual reading I was doing for the CRE that is creeping up on me faster and faster every day.  I was fairly zoned out of my surroundings, still warming up from my short walk from car to store, excited to peruse the shelves that I was headed for… maybe I would even go look at the Neil Gaimen books and thumb lovingly through them!  Maybe I would take a field trip to the Shakespeare shelf and glance over it to see if there were any new books! 
And that, my friends, is when it happened.  Staring me in the face on one of those “buy these books if you like that book” tables in a display of gothic teenage macabre were stacks and stacks of the Twilight series.  That wouldn’t bother me so much.  After all, they are best sellers (for more info as to why, head on over and read my assessment of the series as a whole).  What really bothered me was the sign on the table.  This sign, in mock-blood-dripping script, read “The books that started it all”.
Woah.  WOAH.  First of all, no.  Secondly, HELL NO.  “Started it all”?  What, the vampire genre?  Because that was John Polidori with The Vampyre in 1819.  Vampires as the subject of the novel?  Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897.  Vampire as a popular mass-market genre?  Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire,1976.  Vampire as a book-to-film dark fantasy extravaganza?  Also Anne Rice, Interview, 1994.  Made the vampire story something told in first person PoV by some mortal acquaintance who somehow magically is wrapped up in the otherworldliness of vampires?  Laurell K. Hamilton, Guilty Pleasures, 1993.  Made the vampire the equivalent of a modern rock star oozing sex indiscriminately and conquering mortal women as they have to struggle through their hum-drum lives without becoming a vampire?  Charlaine Harris, All Together Dead, 2001.  This is not even to bring into account the multitudes of vampire films, TV shows, and role playing games that did more for the genre than (arguably) some of these authors did. 
I will say the one thing that Meyer did add to the vampire: safety.  Her vampires may as well be unicorns or some other shiny mythical beast.  They are innately dangerous (as dangerous as any other carnivore) but, as I’ve contended previously, they have been de-fanged.  By being able to survive off of non-human blood (and actively pursuing this lifestyle), the complications of being a vampire are taken away from them.  They need not live with the guilt of death in exchange for their own mortal existences, they can go eat a cow like a normal person.  Not only may they walk in sunlight, but it makes them sparkly!  SPARKLY!  Half of them aren’t even dark and brooding characters!  They are not killers, they are not Satan’s minions, they are no longer creatures of the night. 
If Meyer’s vampires have been de-fanged, they have also been unsexed.  Sex is a vital piece to the vampire and the original vampire stories were no more than thinly veiled euphemisms for intercourse (come on, hard fangs puncturing soft flesh and an exchange of bodily fluids?  Sound familiar?).  Meyer has denied her vampires their very essence and, by doing so, made them into something that is undeniably inhuman, but simultaneously unvampire. 
So yes, she opened the “vampire” reading audience up to individuals who would otherwise never have cracked a vampire novel in their lives.  But what does this really mean?  It is difficult for me to imagine that a Twilight teeny-bopper would ever read and/or enjoy a real vampire story.  Reading Twilight is nothing more than a pale excuse to say “yes, I’m misunderstood and brooding!  Look at me, I’m suuuuch a vampire groupie!”  It’s like wearing black eyeliner and pale makeup because it’s cool; these actions say nothing about the individual and everything about their attentiveness to trends and fads.
Flash back further to a middle-school-aged Danielle.  She is socially trod upon, downcast, and geeky.  She clutches a book to her chest which she reads because it makes her feel better.  The title of the book is Interview with the Vampire.  As if the popular kids didn’t have enough to make fun of her about (she’s not skinny, she doesn’t wear makeup, she has big plastic-rimmed glasses, she doesn’t play sports, she would rather spend an afternoon with Magic cards than at the mall… need I go on?) they see this book.  It stands as a testament to why she will never fit in with the “cool” kids.  Anyone who reads “that vampire stuff” clearly is far too dark and weird to ever fit in.
So it’s not that I’m bitter that kids now-a-days can read a “vampire” novel and have it speak to their coolness as opposed to their awkwardness, but if they’re gonna read one, at least it could be a real one.  I’m not saying they should dive right in to Interview or Anita Blake stuff… but can’t there be some happy middle ground between not-a-vampire-vampire-novels and actual hard-core-blood-sucking?
And really, Barnes and Noble, I’m curious.  What did Meyer start?  Christmas bonuses for your CEOs?  Because surely whatever it was had nothing to do with the genre that she is only vaguely and begrudgingly associated with. 

>symBIOtically

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With my heart skipping beats for fear of typos and my hands trembling for fear of writing some unknown academic faux pas in the cover e-mail, I have finally taken the leap.
I just submitted my first abstract for publication.
The volume is a book which will be published in 2012 and is set to be the foundational text for the new MA program in Vampire Literature at the University of Hertfordshire.  The papers selected are mostly being pulled from the 2010 conference (“Open Graves, Open Minds”) at which I was supposed to present, but was rudely prevented from leaving the country by an errant volcanic eruption.  Seriously.  You can’t make this stuff up, people.
The CFP requested an 800-900-word abstract of the paper (yay for already having written it! Abstracts are so much easier when the paper actually exists!) along with a 200 word bio.
I hate writing bios almost as much as I hate writing personal statements.  The only thing that mitigates the bio from being the most detested form of personal writing is the fact that by the time the bio is requested, one has usually already been accepted into conference, panel, etc. of the requester.  While I do have to impress with my bio, nothing hinges on it.  The people reading it are already stuck with me (or about to be stuck with me if it’s going to be read aloud somewhere).
As you may have noticed by now, I do things slightly differently.  I’m not the most reverent of conference presenters (though my papers are meticulous and utterly professional).  I bring slideshows.  I am energetic.  I don’t read straight from a sheet of paper.  In short, I perform.  In the bio, I have no chance to do that.  It’s like asking me to take myself and cram it into two hundred words.  There’s no room for personality in two hundred words!  More importantly, if you’re asking to look at a bio, you want to see how professional I can be, not how charming.  I can be professional, I assure you, but I’d much rather be charming.  It comes more naturally to me and (frankly) I think I’m better at it.
Part of me hesitated briefly and wondered if the British academes wouldn’t be thrilled by an utterly irreverent bio.  I mean, they are British after all!  Their country birthed Monty Python and Red Dwarf!  They must have senses of humor! 
….but if they didn’t, then I’d be really up the creek without a paddle.  I’m already at a disadvantage for being a mere lowly graduate student, I really shouldn’t discredit myself any further with witticisms over content.  Even if they were going to be spectacular witticisms. 
So I sent them a serious bio.  But I just couldn’t help myself… I had to write the silly one.  It called to me with its siren song, longing to be birthed into the world.  Since I didn’t send it to them (and since I figure if you’re still reading this blog I haven’t offended you with my offbeat points of view), I’m sticking it here for you to read and enjoy.
Danielle Rosvally is a recovering actor who earned a BA in legos from New York University.  After realizing that she had neither the patience, diligence nor social anxiety to qualify as a real computer scientist, she shifted her focus and instead set to studying something her parents (and good senses) told her she would never make into a viable career: Elizabethan Theatre.
In addition to her University education, she has also studied both the theory and practice of classical theatre at the American Globe Theatre, The Actor’s Institute, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, The Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare & Company.  None of these institutions knew quite what to make of her, so she turned to Rutgers for an MA in English.  They don’t know what to make of her either.
Her primary research interests are in the practical application of theatrical scholarship as well as theatricality in traditionally non-canonical texts (whatever that means).  She is a TA in the Rutgers Newark performing and visual arts department where she works with minions towards her greater purpose of world domination via Shakespeare in the classroom.  She also works as an independent educator in Shakespeare scholarship, acting and stage combat.  It’s a lot easier to bend the masses towards world domination when she doesn’t have a neurotic professor breathing down her neck.  She hopes to be a mostly benevolent dictator, but firmly believes that poor grammar is a high crime worthy of being striped down, placed in the town square, tarred, feathered, then stoned to death.  Unless it’s her own grammar, of course, that she will blame on the poor graduate student who edits her papers.
You may follow her exploits via her blog at http://blackswanditty.blogspot.com
…so if you’ve got one of your own, I’d love to read it.  I really think one can tell more about a person by their sense of humor than their accomplishments.  It shows how willing he is to throw it all away and talk like a regular human rather than recitational parrot.  And anyone who can dispense with the traps of formality can easily prove that he actually knows the material in his heart rather than just in his head.  More importantly, it shows that a person isn’t too proud to laugh at himself.  And, my friends, I don’t care how many degrees I have.  If I ever lose that ability, please take me out to pasture with a none-too-friendly literary smack-down and bludgeon me to death with a Complete Works.  It will be well past my time to go.

>Society for the Promotion of Ethical Treatment of Vampires

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In my last entry, I briefly tackled the warm fuzziness which marks Meyers’ vampires as utterly distinct from the vampiric genre.  I would like to take some time to unpack this notion at greater length, so for today’s Twilight-themed essay we’re going to continue the discussion of sparkly vampires.
Picking up from where we left off, the sparkly vampire introduces a newer, softer vampire into the literary world.  A more socially acceptable vampire.  A vampire you can take home to mom and pop.  The Meyers vampire is a Mormon vampire, and this is reflected in many aspects of the Twilight story.
Sparkly vampires come in packs; families.  Large families.  The Cullens, for instance, are a family of eight by the end of the series.  Sparkly vampires also seem to be pre-destined to find one eternal soul mate.  This individual is a person the sparkly vampire cannot live without, a partner.  The sparkly vampire is incomplete without this partner, tragically flawed in some way until this partner arrives to complete him (or her).   In the case of all mentioned partnerships within the Twilight universe, this partner is a member of the opposite sex.  No Gay Mormon Vampires.  These vampires have values, they recognize the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family despite their inability to bear children, a factor that comes into play greatly in Eclipse as well as Breaking Dawn.
As a semi-related notion, I would like to add that the incessantly strong anti-abortion message present in Breaking Dawn really offends my sensibilities as a reader as well as a member of society.  By the time Breaking Dawn was released, the world (and one would presume the author) had some inkling of the scope of the Twilight phenomenon.  This was a series widely popular amongst impressionable age groups.  Including political messages in such a series is bad form and simply distasteful.  We have already established that Twilight is popular in part due to its appeal as a role-playing fantasy.  Suddenly, the title character of the series (the individual from whose mind the reader experiences almost all action of the story) begins spouting extreme views about highly controversial political matter garbed in the guise of storytelling.  Against the counsel of her doctor, husband, friends and family, Bella refuses to abort a fetus which is killing her.  To make matters worse, once the baby is born she is the pride and joy of everyone she meets.  Take that, all of you who told me to abort it.  Look what you would have been missing out on!  I’m not going to argue either side of the abortion debate here (this isn’t the time or place for it), but I am going to say that propaganda has no place in a children’s book.  Especially a children’s book as widely read as Twilight is.  /end public service announcement.
And now we return to our discussion of the sparkly vampire.  The sparkly vampire is a vampire who wears his heart on his sleeve, or more specifically in his eyes.  In Meyers’ world, the type of blood which a vampire drinks (human or animal) determines the color of his eyes.  There are no gray areas for the sparkly vampire; evil vamps have red eyes, good vamps have amber eyes.  A vampire has either made the choice to be “ethical” (and thereby good), or is a blood-sucking lunatic.  It is not until late in the series that we are introduced to red-eyed vampires who have any semblance of sanity.  By removing gray areas, the vampiric genre becomes simplified.  Part of what makes vampires so unique as literary figures is their innate grayness.  A vampire cannot be entirely good simply due to his cardinal attribute: he drinks blood.  He kills things to survive.  The sparkly vampire defies this convention, as really one of Meyers’ vegetarian vamps is no worse than a human who eats meat.  Kill an animal; lead the ethical life.  The sparkly vampire’s ability to walk entirely in the light (both literally and metaphorically) lends to his overall acceptability.  He is hardly different from you or I.
The sparkly vampire is not a creature of blood.  Never in the Twilight series are we actually presented with a vampire in the act of feeding.  It is something taken care of off-screen, something unsightly and thereby hidden.  In the vampire mythos, blood is generally a stand-in for sexual acts.  An interchange of body fluids combined with the vampiric act of appearing before a victim when she is alone in her bed at night constitutes a literary euphemism.  In Twilight, the actual sexual acts (as well as the euphemistic ones) are kept entirely away from the eyes of the reader.  Even the euphemism is euphemized; more frequently is the vampiric imbibing of blood referred to as “hunting” over “feeding”.  Moreover, this cardinal unpleasantness of vampiric nature is made palatable by its absence.  We know the vampires drink blood, but as the adage goes, “out of sight, out of mind”.  Have you ever seen fan art of Edward Cullen bent over the jugular of a profusely bleeding antelope?
In fact, most of the violence of the Twilight saga is kept offscreen.  One of the largest fights in the series, the great culminating battle of Eclipse involving the Cullens, the La Push werewolf pack and Victoria’s newborn army, is only vaguely described to the reader second-hand via Edward’s mind-reading abilities.  Violence, like sex, is too unsightly for the sparkly vampire.
The sparkly vampire has also been defanged.  Among all the wonders that Bella notices about her eternal “family”, she never once describes their teeth.  The sparkly vampire, a beautiful creature undoubtedly, has thus lost his bite.
Perhaps this distancing from common vampiric mythos is part of what has enraged hard-core vampire fans so much about the Twilight series.  Teenaged girls may go gaga over Edward, but Edward isn’t a traditional vampire.  He is a popular icon, an idealized and softened version of a beast created from the shadows.  

>Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend

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Alright, that’s it, I’ve had it.
After years of reading, watching, and being utterly horrified at the current popular trends in literature, after wondering what had gotten into the minds of young people and middle-aged-soccer moms, after enough time grumbling and mulling from the shadows; I have made a decision.
I am weighing in on the Twilight debate.
This is going to take more than one blog entry.  I’m sorry, I really am, but I just cannot allow this to continue without putting my two cents into the universe.  I can promise you a few things: this will be as unbiased as I can possibly make it, as interesting as I can possibly make it, and as entertaining as I can possibly make it.
Before I begin, let me clear up a few cardinal facts and set a few rules about this exploit.  Yes, I have read the Twilight series.  Yes, I have seen the movies.  No, I don’t pay any attention to the tabloids and I have no idea what Robert Pattinson does in his spare time (be that Kristin Stewart or Taylor Lautner…).  I am going to try my best to write this as much as possible without giving you my direct opinion about the franchise in hopes that perhaps the arguments will be more academically persuasive (you know, as academically persuasive as you can be about Mormon vampires).
On that somber note, let us begin.
How about we start with the big question that has been plaguing troubled minds of the vampirically inclined: why is it that people like this series so bloody much?  You can’t deny it, people either love Twilight or hate Twilight.  There is no in between.  I would argue that Twilight apathy is simply a lack of exposure; find someone who says that they could take or leave Twilight and then sit him down and make him read it and/or watch it.  Then ask him again.  I nearly guarantee that his answer will prove different.
First and foremost, I would like to say this.  I think that little video is a good base point for this conversation.  Yes, it’s true, horribly true, horribly and vividly true.  But what this guy says is true of a great deal of other stories as well.  Any escapist reality written for women pretty much follows this same formula, especially if the story is written in first person PoV.  Honestly, the best example I have (and the closest to the Twilight style) is a romance novel.  Take Karen Marie Moning’s The Immortal Highlander (yes, her name is Moning… she writes romance novels… this is hilarious).  Same PoV, same he-man + superman + Jesus = male lead formula, same story of frustrating and semi-requited lust/love between gawky mundane and perfect immortal.  Bing, bang, boom, you have a female fantasy.
So what makes Twilight different?
Well, vampires.  Vampires are the epitome of all things teenager.  I mean really, a creature that is beautiful, powerful, emotastically different from everyone else, secret, self-loathing, utterly sexual, and eternal.  Anyone who has ever thought “nobody will ever understand me”, anyone who has ever wished bloody revenge upon her enemies, anyone who has ever wanted something more than the mundane humdrum life of a normal person is prey (literally and metaphorically) to the vampire.  The world of the vampire is the world of intrigue, darkness, passion, lust and extremes.  It is a world of misunderstood good guys and hauntingly lovely bad guys.  It is a world of creatures who have a concrete reason to hate themselves, despite any good they may do.
When you become a vampire, your gangly awkwardness is transformed into perfect beauty and primal ferocity.  Your financial troubles vanish, your boundaries disappear.  So what if a small case of sunlight or stake-through-the-heart kills you?
Never before Meyers have vampires been so accessible.  Read Anne Rice or Laurell K. Hamilton and you are a black-eyeliner-wearing goth freak.  There is an edge to these other vampires, and the stories surrounding them are darker, more violent, more intensely sexual.  Meyers’ vampires are… well… Mormon.  They are still dangerous, but for the most part their hard edges become soft.  In Meyers’ world there are no mangled corpses, no people going crazy, anything too intense for polite company is kept almost entirely offscreen.  Yes, there is the requisite blood and sex, but it’s more alluded to than directly addressed.
Meyers’ vampires are fuzzy vampires.  They civilized, more human than monster (even the evil ones).  I mean ferchrissakes they SPARKLE.  No longer are they banished to the night, the darkness of dungeons and crypts, but they become even more beautiful and perfect in the daylight.  Their stories may be slightly disturbing, but never freakish.  If anything, the disturbing back-stories go towards highlighting human traits over monstrous ones.  This creates a vampire story that is accessible to younger audiences, and moreover is acceptable to the parents of said younger audiences.
The Urban Fantasy genre is seductive.  It allows stories to enter the mundane world, causing lines between what is real and what is imagined to blur nearly past any visible recognition.  Rather than a mirror up to nature, the fantasy becomes nature.  Meyers’ use of this genre to tell her stories contributes to its nature as a role-playing fantasy.  These stories become possible because they are so deeply rooted in a world that we already know and live in.  Rather than take us through history, as Rice does, or take us to a slightly tweaked contemporary world, as Hamilton does, Meyers sets her stories in the all-too-mundane world.  Aforementioned teenager, already feeling awkward and out of place, is able to believe herself into Meyers’ story because it so closely mirrors her own life. 
Moreover, the Cinderella story, time and again, is a magic vacuum.  I don’t care what the feminists say; every individual of the female persuasion is (to some extent) waiting for her prince charming.  An extra dimension of allure is added to the Prince Charming when he sparkles (literally). 
Everyone wants to be desired.  How many industries make millions of dollars trying to augment a person’s desirability, especially to the opposite sex?  Here is a story of a girl (or “shell” as my friends at The Oatmeal and Epipheo Studios so aptly contend) who is so desirable that supernatural creatures start wars over her.  This seemingly average person, someone who anyone could be, is the epitome of desire.  As a result, the readers want to be her.  Since the readers want to be her, they will buy her.  In any form they can.
So that’s my addition to the popularity debate.  Tune in next time for another Twilight-themed discussion, though I promise it will be as painless as this one was.

>”But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, all losses are returned and sorrows end.”

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>Have you ever returned to a favorite author after a long foray into other literature? Picked up a favorite book after having left it gathering dust on the shelf for far too long?

It’s like running into a dear old friend on the subway. Someone you knew would always be in your life but things had gotten too busy to call contact this person for whatever reason. There is a relief in seeing someone like that, a comfort in knowing that all is right in the world. Conversation with them brings easy familiarity and you wonder why it is you ever let your job get in the way of you seeing this person. Picking things up again is simple, like you never left them, because in your heart you never did.

I got to read and analyze Sonnet 18 this week for a class and felt the same way. There was something so very comforting in seeing those words in print and knowing I would be held accountable for them. Being introduced to all this wonderful (and not so wonderful) literature is important for me as a person and a scholar, but Sweet William (Shakespeare not Faulkner) will always be my home. I can do Shakespeare, Bakhtin is another story.

There are several sonnets that, over the course of the years, I have committed to memory. Sonnet 18 happens to be one of them (I mean really, how can I call myself a “Shakespeare scholar” and not be able to rattle off “Shall I compare thee to a summers’ day?…”). I have found that knowing them does not prevent me from making further discoveries within them. In fact, quite the opposite. Because I do know them so well I am more free to stretch the language, discover more, read deeper.

And boy let me tell you what this reading drudged up.

This Spring I will be speaking at several conferences, one of them the New Jersey Writers’ Alliance in a panel headed by Dr. Nira Gupta-Casale on Vampires and Zombies. My essay is a product of my obsessive love for a man dead 500 years (Shakespeare guys, not Lestat) combined with a genre that has led to one too many of my personal teenaged fantasies. Meld these together and you get my paper entitled Staking them Out: Shakespeare’s Vampires.

I can almost hear the critics groaning, but hey, the paper’s already been accepted to one conference and I have another hot on its tail. Yes, I do find founding and reason for the paper beyond “tee hee tee hee let’s see what I can dress up in academic mumbo-jumbo and sell to a conference!” I am slightly loathe to publish “inside scoop” on the paper before it’s been formally presented or published (this is the internet after all, and IP rights are sketchy at best especially among academics). However, suffice to say that this new lens brought a more than interesting reading to sonnets 18 and, more importantly, 19.

For your reading pleasure, take a look and see if you can’t see at least a tidbit of what I see:

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breath or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 19

Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,
O carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do they worst, old Time, despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

…far from vampires that sparkle in the sunlight, huh?