Monthly Archives: July 2009

In the earliest beginnings of the vampire legend, back with Paladori and Stoker, the legend was a metaphor for rape.  The vampires were inevitably aristocratic and attractive, the better to lure in their victims.  The act of feeding was monstrous, just as monstrous as the rape it represented, and just as horrible for the victim.  The victims would either die or be turned into monsters,  just as a woman, in those times, once raped would be better off dead, for she would be seen as a monster in the eyes of society, something unclean and defiled.

Fast forward to the future, and Anne Rice gives us a new breed of vampire, one which is capable of remorse.  Louis, despite being the narrator and protagonist of Interview with the Vampire fell flat as a character partially because of his broodiness.  Lestat, monstrous and murderous and the constant trixter, was the more interesting character throughout the series.  I continued to get disgusted with Louis just as Lestat seemed to for his eternal pouting and refusal to accept that he’d taken a step up the food chain.

At this point, the victims were still very much victims.  The embrace of the vampire was such that it causes ecstasy in the victims to the point that they desire it rather than fighting it.  When Louis took mercy on a child, he only created a worse monster than that which had killed her.

Even then, the embrace is a metaphor for sex in which the vampire has all of the power, even when the victim is at least partially consenting.  The ecstasy of the embrace works like the date-rape drug, allowing the vampire to feed without worrying about the victim fighting back.

Move forward a bit further, and finally the victims of these monsters find a way to fight back, through Joss Whedon‘s Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  The victims have their own advocate in Buffy, who is exactly the thing the vampires like to eat best, a beautiful young woman. But along comes Angel, a vampire that I got just as disgusted with as I did Louis.  Brooding, pouting, and prone to heroics, he’s a vampire with a soul, but that soul and that inability to feed on anything more than sewer rats makes him toothless, and toothlessness in a vampire, following the old metaphor, is equivalent to impotence.  This is particularly true in the case of Angel, for it is sex that triggers the loss of his soul, turning him back into the monster.  I liked him better when he was Angelus.  At least then he wasn’t going around with a ten-ton sign around his neck saying:

“PITY ME! For I am hungry and surrounded by food, but cannot eat!”

The correlation between a vampire’s inability to bite and impotence continues throughout the series with the introduction and “de-fanging” of the vampire Spike through a behavior modification implant.  When he discovers that he cannot partake of the tasty morsel presented to him in Willow, they have a discussion not akin to what might follow when a man attempts to have sex and finds that he cannot perform, with similar anxieties on the part of both the victim and the monster.

However, this is not a universe where the victim is helpless, even those  without superpowers, and after consoling the impotent vampire, Willow breaks a lamp over his head and escapes.  Damsels in distress in Joss’s world don’t wait around helpless and hoping for rescue; they rescue themselves.

And I get disgusted and annoyed with these toothless, impotent, brooding vampire.  They can’t or won’t allow themselves to be what they are and instead try to be something resembling a nobler and more self-sacrificing version of human.  Even while de-fanged and souled, Spike of BtVS was much more attractive and much less annoying of a character because he never stopped being a vampire. Even with a soul, even when he was fighting on the side of good, he was a ruthless and unapologetic killer.

With the Twilight vampires, the victims are once again unable to fight for themselves as they had been throughout a brief period with Buffy.  Gone is the independent, strong, and back-talking heroine, the heroine in these novels is weak and dependent on super-powered and dangerous creatures to protect her from other super-powered and dangerous creatures.  The damsel in distress is back to waiting for her hero instead of saving herself, and this time the hero is the monster, the rapist, castrated.

The metaphor may still work as it always did, as a warning against pre-marital sex, but what exactly does it mean now that we are encouraging girls to put their  trust in monsters and be happy little damsels waiting for a protector to save them?  After all, not all of the monsters out there are defanged or celibate, no matter how attractive they might appear.

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I live on a very limited budget, in a rural area where the only cable TV is satellite TV.  So, when I moved out on my own I looked into ways I could cut out some costs.  I don’t watch a huge amount of TV (my leisure hours are generally spent reading or playing computer video games), but there are some shows that I definitely don’t want to miss, and living where I do I cannot be guaranteed even free network TV reception.

But I determined fairly quickly that I could do without satellite or cable TV.  I would have high-speed internet anyway for my gaming, and most of the shows I want to watch are easily available online legally (no pirates here!) through the network websites or through services like Hulu.  Add on a cheap but handy service like Netflix, and there’s very little that I can’t find, somewhere, streaming on the web, and what’s best is that I can watch it on my own time, according to my own schedule.

And I don’t have to watch it on my computer monitor, either.  I can stream it straight to my TV, thanks to things like MediaFox (a version of Firefox built to look good while streaming videos) or Boxee (A wonderful program which helps with streaming content to a TV/entertainment system that aggregates  content from Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, and a ton of other providers).

So I can get the shows I want to watch for free (or at least very, very cheap via  Netflix) over the internet with no or very few commercials, or I can pay through the nose for a cable/satellite subscription.  Really, it’s a no-brainer.

Oh, and there are ways for folks outside the US to access services like Hulu or Pandora using proxy services, but I tend to hesitate to give out information on the proxy services willy-nilly, lest they get blocked too!

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Finally got to see Half-blood Prince this weekend, and it was extremely good.  I’ve said before that HBP is my favorite of the Harry Potter novels, and this movie has a really good chance of being my favorite of the movies.

Like the books, the movies are growing progressively darker and more mature as the characters grow older and the situation more dire. This is not and cannot be an uplifting family film, simply because of its place in the extended storyline.  B made the comment that this is the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter franchise, and I have to agree.  This is also the coming-of-age book and movie of the series, where Harry the child steps up and becomes Harry the man and Harry the soldier.  This is the first time we hear him say “I am the chosen one” with the full knowledge of what that could mean for himself and those he loves.

For those of you who have not read the book or seen the movie yet, I will warn that the following will contain spoilers:

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There’s a tiny little elderly man that rides around town on an equally tiny little old motorcycle with an almost spherical white helmet on that gives him the appearance of wearing a cue-ball on his head.  The motorcycle doesn’t go very fast, and makes a quiet putt-putt-putt sound.

This man always looks anywhere from cheerful to joyous as he rides down the road, and I can’t help but smile with him when I see him, wondering what it is that has resulted in such a happy and cheerful attitude.  It also makes me think of how rare it is to come across anyone else who seems so genuinely happy.

It’s probably no great secret, most likely, it’s just that he just enjoys riding his motorcycle, but it still makes you think.  When I’m his age, will I be as happy as he is?

I like to think that I will be.  And who knows, maybe I’ll have a motorcycle too!

There seems to be a good many self-publishing services cropping up over the web, but I have to take them with a grain of salt. Regardless of how you do it, self-publishing is rarely a good way to get your book seen if you want it to hit mainstream audiences.

There are, however, a few good things that you can do with self-publishing.  My grandfather has a book that he treasures which lists our family genealogy back 500 years, with a history of the family researched and written up by a cousin who is a genealogy hobbyist. He’s also the one who went to the trouble of having hardcover editions of this book printed.  The book can mean little to nothing to anyone outside our family, will never be sold at a bookstore, and will never have much more than a few dozen issues printed.

That is one of the areas where self-publishing is useful and works well.   In these days of the E-Book, it is entirely possible for an author to self-publish without much cost whatsoever (as I plan to do, publishing my first novel as an e-book under creative commons).  However, this is more of a good way to get exposure in the publishing community than to actually…make a living off of your writing.

Unfortunately, to do that, you’ve still got to do it the hard way.  There may be a lucky few who self-publish and make it to the big leagues . . . but they are just that, lucky.  Especially without the assistance of a professional, experienced editor,even if you self-publish through a service that places your book at Amazon, it is unlikely that it will sell more than a few copies, much less gain the notice of critics.

I tend to take the same tack as Stephen King when it comes to editing: “To write is human, to edit is divine.”  Many times, it is the editor who can take what might be a mediocre, or just moderately good, piece of work and turn it into a great piece of writing.  Authors, myself included, have a tendency to treat our work as a sacred child, and sometimes it is necessary to cut out even your best loved passages to make a story work.

For what they provide, these self-publishing services do what they do well and offer a convenience that was hard to come by before, however a writer should not go to them expecting to be the next New York Times bestseller or to make a million dollars off of it.

After all, if you’ve come to writing in the first place expecting to be a millionaire….you’re probably writing for the wrong reasons anyway.

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