Edgar Allan Poe and Angela Carter

We have read three Edgar Allan Poe stories in class so far, and a reoccurring theme has seemed to appear. The narrator meets a woman. The woman is beautiful. The woman is intelligent. The narrator is enamored with her intelligence. The woman becomes sick and wastes away and dies. Weird stuff ensues. I don't really know much about Edgar Allan Poe, so when it was mentioned in class today that his cousinwife died slowly after a stroke, it made sense to me why this theme was so prominent in what we'd read of Poe's works so far. Still, it gets a little tedious to read about what is (almost) the same lady over and over again, reading essentially the same description with different words. I do enjoy the stories though -- the tooth removal in  Berenice was gruesome! I think I liked Ligeia most though.

And on to Angela Carter. I enjoyed her writing. I feels like it's one intellectual step above me, which exercises my brain (and sends me looking up words relatively frequently) in a nice way. That's opposed to some things we've tackled for this class which felt waaaaaay over my level. We also talked in class a little about how her work is very sexual and whether or not we liked that. I think it adds a sense of reality that is sometimes missing when sex is completely ignored in stories. However some parts seemed a little over-the-top ("At this hour, this very hour, far away in paris, France, in the appalling dungeons of the Bastille, old Sade is jerking off. Grunt, groan, grunt, on to the prison floor... aaaagh! he seeds dragons' teeth. Out of each ejaculation spring up a swarm of fully-armed, mad-eyed homunculi."). Yeah. Okay.

Actually, that quote reminds me of something: "old Sade" is referring, I assume, to the Marquis de Sade, a crazy French dude from the 1700's. To quote Wikipedia, 

"He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion or law. The words "sadism" and "sadist" are derived from his name."

So this guy liked sex and violence. And he wrote a book called The 120 Days of Sodom about some rich french dudes who trapped  a few dozen teenagers in one of their castles and raped/murdered them all for a few months. Well the reason I bring this crazy guy up is that when I read The Bloody Chamber, the evil guy was referred to as The Marquis. Which made me think of The Marquis de Sade -- both are sexually sadistic evil people with similar names (or at least titles). I wasn't aware of the Blue Beard fairytale/myth when I first read The Bloody Chamber, so I figured that Carter had got her inspiration for the story from The Marquis de Sade, but now it seems to me more inspired by Blue Beard and shaped a little by Monsieur Sade.

Sailor Moon

I watched a little bit of Sailor Moon way back when during my childhood. I thought it was kind of weird (plus it was too girly for little kid me, ick).

We watched it again in class. Waaaay weirder than I remembered.

One thing that struck me was how much time was spent on the girls transforming into their celestial-powerful-forms. Spinning naked silhouettes with colors flying about everywhere and all sorts of crazy junk... what the hell? Sometimes I wanted to just laugh at it. Who is the target audience for this stuff? I picture some greasy basement dweller eating Cheetos and getting off to the animated girls in short skirts.

Strange stuff.

When Tuxedo Mask came in and saved the day, I was thinking quite sarcastically, "oh thank goodness, here comes the manly man to rescue the day!" But then he got his ass kicked (see: castration) and I was satisfied. BUT THEN he and Sailor Moon made some crazy-ass love-scepter-moon-baby thing in some long sequence and, again... what the hell? Not really sure what was going on there. Maybe I need to watch more episodes to find out but I don't think that's going to happen. I'll put it at the bottom of my list of stuff to get around to watching, behind Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, 24, and now Buffy. Yeah, don't think I'm going to get around to it.

WHAT IS THIS 

Essay Numbah Two

Ah, it's that time again, everybody's favorite: essay writing time. I tend to be a bit of a procrastinator (though judging by the fact that just about everybody else gets their blogs done just before they're due each week, you all are too), and so at this point I'm just finished with planning out my essay. "Planning out" being a vague term here meaning writing a whole bunch of ideas on paper with some arrows, doodles, and incomprehensible squiggly things, plus a rough attempt at organizing them into a potential paper.

Now at this stage I would normally start actually writing my paper (and hey, I already got a (crappy) thesis statement done), but instead I thought I would put that off and instead put some of my ideas here. It's a win-win-win: I get to develop my concepts a bit further before transferring them into my essay, I get to fill up my blog post for the week, and you all get to read my lovely ideas and hopefully maybe please comment and help make them better. So here goes.

First thing I did was decide to write my paper about Dracula. Woooo, step one complete! After about 45 minutes (mostly consisting of staring at a blank page, flipping through class notes that look like they were taken by a schizophrenic, and trying to resist the ever-present pull of my computer), I decided that I wanted to write about the conflict between the New Woman and the Old Woman (should I be capitalizing that? I should probably figure out before I write an entire paper about it) in Mina.

I've decided that Mina isn't a New Woman or and Old Woman. She doesn't represent the transition from Old Woman to New Woman. She has qualities of both and gets along just fine that way (besides, you know, the whole getting-turned-into-a-vampire thingy  but I don't really think we can blame that on HER). She is the Newish Woman. [Terminology is a work in progress]

The Newish Woman is, like the New Woman, strong, skilled, and even potentially independent. But she doesn't leave behind things like family, love, and some of women's traditional roles in society. Mina is skilled and independent -- she has organizational skills, can work her way around a typewriter, and was easily able to hop a train to Transylvania to help her husband Johnathan in his time of need. But she also lets herself be told what to do by men, is a bit ditsy when it comes to her husband ("oooh I just looooove him sooooo muuuuuuuuch <3<3"), and plays up to a womanly image.

One thing that I think exemplifies the Newish Woman duality is Mina's hypnotic communication with Dracula. On the one hand, it is her idea to spy on him through herself, making herself essential to the group, and she is quite brave about it as well. On the other hand, though, she is incapable of doing it herself: she has to rely on Van Helsing to hypnotize her and hear what she says -- she can't remember any of it. So while she is being helpful and intelligent in finding Dracula, she is still not quite independent and has to rely on men to be fully useful.

Mina is somewhere between the two extremes of Lucy, the Old Woman who is a girly-girl with all the boys chasing after her, and the New Woman version of Wilhelmina from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, who is cold-hearted, a leader, and, well, kind of a bitch.

Well, that's it for now. I've still got a lot to go, but I wrote plenty enough here. If I was more devious, I would probably cut this blog post in half and post one now, the other on Friday. Ah well. Good luck to you all in your essay-writing endeavors.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

I knew very little about the background of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before I started reading it. I had seen the movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311429/) a very long time ago and had some vague memories: Invisible Guy, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and some kind of chase scene in Venice. Or something like that. Also, I knew that I was going to be reading a graphic novel. That was about it.

Well, I really enjoyed this one. Maybe that's just because it's a graphic novel; I've yet to read one that I hate (or even outright dislike). I find that with graphic novels you get out what you put in to them. What I mean by that is the more time you spend on each panel, the more rich your reading experience becomes. It's possible, and sometimes tempting, to quickly read each panel, briefly glancing at the images before moving on to the next. And I'll admit that I'm prone to doing this more often than not, but when you slow down and really stop to look at each panel, appreciating the art and details, the novel becomes a lot more interesting. I really tried to do this as I read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and it definitely increased my enjoyment level. Sometimes I would just stop for a minute to stare at all the things put into the images, all the minutiae, the people in the background, the building facades, everything was carefully crafted to go along with the text. It's just as important, if not more. When you stop to take it all in, you submerge yourself a level deeper into story. This was the first graphic novel I read where I really made an effort to do this, and I though it really increased my appreciation of the story.

Dracula!

Random thoughts about Dracula:

Money is really helpful! As the story progressed, I found myself thinking to myself a few times that, geeze, it's really useful to be fabulously wealthy (I'm looking at you, Lord Godalming). Throughout the book our group of BFF's/vampire hunters uses their wealth and status to their advantage quite a bit. When, at one point, Mina remarks in her diary how fortunate they are to be wealthy to fund their activities (buying a freaking steam boat and half a dozen horses, in this instance), I was happy that Bram Stoker mentioned it. If the vampire hunters were a bunch of poor people, there is no way they could have been successful against Dracula. So, uh, thank god for rich people because only they can kill vampires.

Another thing that I kept thinking about now and then as I read was: what if Van Helsing was an insane guy who was draining peoples' blood and fooling everybody all along. My tinfoil hat theory kind of fell apart when the finally found Dracula and killed him (and, I guess, vampire-Lucy), but before that it was semi-plausible-ish and kept me entertained.

Van Helsing would come in during the night drain the women's blood via two needles in the neck. He makes up the stories of vampires and convinces first Dr. Seward, and then the rest of the group, that it is the doing of vampires. He plants fake evidence pointing to Dracula. Johnathan's bad fever that he suffered after leaving Dracual's castle -- all his memories were actually results of those feverish nightmares -- The Count was just an innocent weirdo, not actually a Vampire. When Van Helsing says he's going back to Amsterdam for a day or two, he's actually just leaving to continue his plot and set evidence and distractions.

I mean, honestly Van Helsing is pretty weird. Everybody he meets he professes his undying faithfulness, friendship, and love for. Where is he getting all this vampire knowledge? He's making it up!

Well, I could probably find some better examples to support my conspiracy theory given time and if I had my book handy, but it's just a silly theory that I entertained myself with as I was reading.

Essay Response: Identify the similarities and differences between Victor Frankenstein and his monster and Rick and Carl

Just as Rick is Carl's father in The Walking Dead, Frankenstein is the father of the monster in Frankenstein. The relationship between Rick and Carl and the relationship between Frankenstein and his monster have some interesting similarities that highlight the father/son dynamic, but also display clear differences. By comparing and analyzing both, they reveal aspects of one another that are not necessarily obvious individually.

Frankenstein is the father of the monster as he is its creator, and of course Rick is Carl's father. We can see that they both want their father's approval: the monster has a twisted sense of gratitude to Frankenstein, trying to show him how he is intelligent and almost human; meanwhile, Carl practices with his gun until his dad deems him worth to carry one. Both "children" are looking up to their fathers. However, Carl looks up to Rick with the innocence and devotion of a young child. While the monster respects, and even tries to prove himself to Frankenstein, he still harbors a hatred and an anger that drive him.

Both fathers, in turn, are proud of their creations. Rick obviously loves and wants to protect his son. "But wait," you may say, "Frankenstein hates his monster!" Well, that may be so, but I argue that deep down, below the hate and rage, he never stops being proud of the fact that he, unlike any before him, created life -- he is a scientific pioneer. Here, though, a difference appears between Rick and Frankenstein: Rick is proud of his son, but Victor more so of himself and his own scientific prowess, which just reflects a bit back onto the monster.

The child that each father creates is willing to commit acts of violence when they feel it is necessary/just. Carl acts by shooting Shane in his confrontation with Rick, and the monster kills on multiple occasions, justifying it in his own mind each time. Each is able to kill for a cause. But, their causes differ significantly. Carl acts almost out of desperation, trying to save his father. The monster kills out of self defense or in order to get to Frankenstein. However, does it really matter what causes one has for killing? Murder is murder, justified or not, and both Rick and the monster have done it.

Finally, both Carl and the monster ultimately protect their fathers, and not the other way around. Obviously, Carl saves his dad from being potentially killed by Shane. However this might not be as clear-cut in Frankenstein -- after all, the monster makes Frankenstein's life hell. However, the monster never actually lays a malicious hand on Frankenstein. He kills his family, out of rage, but Frankenstein himself, the monster preserves. Frankenstein was ready to die, but the monster gave him purpose. And the monster, while Frankenstein was making the female monster, looked over Frankenstein to make sure he wasn't disturbed. So while the affection isn't clear, we can see that the monster, in a strange way, does actually protect Frankenstein, albeit not as obviously as Carl does Rick.

Carl and Rick appear to have a more straightforward -- if still strange -- father/son relationship than Frankenstein and his monster. In both cases, some of the norms are reversed, such as sons protecting fathers, and sons being more less innocent in that both have killed. In the end, though, both have very strong and very odd relationships.

The Walking Dead

I really enjoyed reading this. Actually, I was pretty excited and disappointed when I finished it so quickly and was left with that cliffhanger! Damn. I'll say that I haven't seen the TV show (except for the first episode), though I heard that Shane lives a lot longer in the show than he does in the book, which is interesting. I may have to start watching the show now (it's on Netflix, right?).

Well now that I've thoroughly sidetracked myself with Netflix, I wanted to talk more about zombies this week, in The Walking Dead and The Zombie Survival Guide, this time. We can see how little they've changed from Night of the Living Dead: they like to snack on people; they're slow; they're not particularly intelligent; they tend form big groups; they make moaning sounds; and they like to snack on people. Despite being further described and expanded upon, zombies are pretty much the same as they were in their first movie appearance.

I really liked the point in The Walking Dead where Glenn and Rick go into the city to find guns and rub zombie goo all over themselves to mask their scent. This reveals to us that zombies sense humans by scent rather than sight (makes sense what with their dead-looking eyes and whatnot). That scene where they were walking with a shopping cart through the horde of zombies freaked me out -- I was just waiting for something to happen that made the zombies to realize they were humans and for all hell to break loose, and of course it did. Had me on the edge of my seat. Bed. Whatever. Anyway, I think it's interesting how there are inconsistencies between sources -- The Walking Dead establishes that zombies hunt by scent, while The Zombie Survival Guide says they do it through all of their senses, or they're not really sure. Of course, these differences are because there's no actual official Zombie, just everybody's individual take and spin on the stereotypical zombie.