First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.

One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist, Laura, corresponds roughly to Stoker’s Mina; both are afflicted young women whose souls come depend upon their families’ efforts to unravel the vampire mystery.

Carmilla is told in the first person, from Laura’s point of view. She is a lonely Englishwoman who lives with her father and governesses in an ancient scholss in Styria (southeast Austria). After receiving word of the sudden death of a would-be guest, Bertha Reinfeldt, Laura and company gather on the castle drawbridge to admire a calm, full-moon night when an out-of-control carriage crashes in upon the scene. A weak, unconscious Carmilla is thrown from the compartment in the accident that ensues. Her “mother,” a mysterious noblewomen, professes to be on an urgent, secret mission, but reluctantly consents to leave Carmilla to recover in the family’s care.

Laura quickly recognizes Carmilla from a dream she had as a child; a dream of being visited in bed at night, and bitten on the shoulder. Carmilla, too, professes to remember Laura from a corresponding dream, wherein she awoke to find herself in an unfamiliar bed chamber, and Laura there. Quickly, they develop an intimate friendship, characterized pressings of hands, kissing of cheeks, and plenty of blushing.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

Lately David Foster Wallace seems to be in the air: Is his style still influencing bloggers? Is Jeffrey Eugenides’ bandana-wearing depressed character in The Marriage Plot based on him? My own reasons for thinking about him are less high-flown. Like lots of other professors, I am just now sitting down to write the syllabus for a class next semester, and the extraordinary syllabuses of David Foster Wallace are in my head.

I am not generally into the reverential hush that seems to surround any mention of David Foster Wallace’s name by most writers of my generation or remotely proximate to it; I am not enchanted by some fundamental childlike innocence people seem to find in him. I am suspicious generally of those sorts of hushes and enchantments, and yet I do feel in the presence of his careful crazy syllabuses something like reverence.

Wallace doesn’t accept the silent social contract between students and professors: He takes apart and analyzes and makes explicit, in a way that is almost painful, all of the tiny conventional unspoken agreements usually made between professors and their students. “Even in a seminar class,” his syllabus states, “it seems a little silly to require participation. Some students who are cripplingly shy, or who can’t always formulate their best thoughts and questions in the rapid back-and-forth of a group discussion, are nevertheless good and serious students. On the other hand, as Prof — points out supra, our class can’t really function if there isn’t student participation—it will become just me giving a half-assed ad-lib lecture for 90 minutes, which (trust me) will be horrible in all kinds of ways.”

One of the reasons I find his syllabuses so fascinating is that they are not polished pieces of writing. They are relatively devoid of his stylistic rococo, and while obviously not devoid of his astonishing level of self-consciousness, do provide some slight glimpse into the person, without the baffling ingenious mediation of his art…

[continues at Slate]

In fiction and in reality, medicine is designed and set up to operate with the best of intentions, to eliminate pain and disease and the things that push us toward mortality. In theory. In practice, we know that there are holes in this theory. But for all the problems in the reality of medicine, at least we don’t have to worry about these 6 fictional drugs, which were designed to make the world a better place, but failed in all types of spectacular ways.

1. Altruizine from “Altruizine” by Stanislaw Lem

Unintended Side Effect: It makes people too altruistic.

Lem, one of the most widely-read sci-fi writers in the world, wrote a short story within his collection The Cyberiad about Altruizine, a metapsychotropic drug that causes the user to feel the pains and emotions of others within a radius of fifty yards.

According to its discoverer, Altruizine

“will ensure the untrammeled reign of Brotherhood, Cooperation and Compassion in any society, since the neighbors of a happy man must share his happiness, and the happier he, the happier perforce they, so it is entirely in their own interest that they wish him nothing but the best. Should he suffer any hurt, they will rush so help at once, so as to spare themselves the pain induced by his. Neither walls, fences, hedges, nor any other obstacle will weaken the altruizing influence… We assume no responsibility for results at variance with the discoverer’s claims.”

The story, which has a full title of “Altruizine, Or a True Account of How Bonhomius the Hermetic Hermit Tried to Bring About Happiness, and What Came of It,” is about a robotic engineer who creates the drug and sends Bonhomius the Hermit (who is eager to help others) into society to try it out. What happens is people start experiencing things like the birthing pains of a cow, while others run into a newlyweds’ house to experience their new pleasures vicariously…

[continues at Publishers Weekly]

For those of you with a big appetite, we’ve got a special sweet hidden away. Check out this great little recitation of Poe’s “The Red Death” — also read by William S. Burroughs — at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

Read and watch more at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia

Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities.

Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer’s Twilight or JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to read. The study’s authors, Dr. Shira Gabriel and Ariana Young, then applied what they dubbed the Twilight/Harry Potter Narrative Collective Assimilation Scale, which saw the students asked questions designed to measure their identification with the worlds they had been reading about.

Published by the journal Psychological Science, the study found that participants who read the Harry Potter chapters self-identified as wizards, whereas participants who read the Twilight chapter self-identified as vampires. And “belonging” to these fictional communities actually provided the same mood and life satisfaction people get from affiliations with real-life groups.

The psychology of fiction is a small but growing area of research, according to Keith Oatley, a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto and a published novelist himself, who details the latest findings in the area in his online magazine, OnFiction.

One of his own studies, carried out in 2008, gave 166 participants either the Chekhov short story, The Lady with the Little Dog, or a version of the story rewritten in documentary form. The subjects’ personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading, with those who were given the Chekhov story in its unadulterated form found to have gone through greater changes in personality – empathizing with the characters and thus becoming a little more like them.

“I think the reason fiction but not non-fiction has the effect of improving empathy is because fiction is primarily about selves interacting with other selves in the social world,” said Oatley. “The subject matter of fiction is constantly about why she did this, or if that’s the case what should he do now, and so on. With fiction we enter into a world in which this way of thinking predominates. We can think about it in terms of the psychological concept of expertise. If I read fiction, this kind of social thinking is what I get better at. If I read genetics or astronomy, I get more expert at genetics or astronomy. In fiction, also, we are able to understand characters’ actions from their interior point of view, by entering into their situations and minds, rather than the more exterior view of them that we usually have. And it turns out that psychologically there is a big difference between these two points of view. We usually take the exterior view of others, but that’s too limited.”

The findings could, Oatley believes, have significant implications, particularly in a climate where arts funding is under threat. “It is the first empirical finding, so far as I know, to show a clear psychological effect of reading fiction,” he said. “It’s a result that shows that reading fiction improves understanding of others, and this has a very basic importance in society, not just in the general way making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding, but in specific areas such as politics, business, and education. In an era when high-school and university subjects are evaluated economically, our results do have economic implications.”

“If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine.”

—William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Despite the fact that it’s readily apparent Mr. Casebeer has never tried cocaine, DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.

We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age. Now they’ve got their sites set on stories, and we can be assured that, in the near future, there will be some fatly funded scientific justification for what we already know. I mean, come on, Modern Mythology and Weaponized just published The Immanence of Myth exploring this very topic, and I assure you there’s more in there than a tiny hit to get you inspired.

And that’s the unfortunate thing about these scientific inquiries, they’re always years (usually centuries) behind the times. I seem to recall an author who spent his entire career developing this theory, and effectively influencing television, film and music with his ideas. Who was that? Something about word viruses? Oh, yes, William S. Burroughs. Who in turn got much of his inspiration from other thinkers like Brion Gysin, Alfred Korzybski, and really beyond all this name dropping, what true poet or writer doesn’t understand the fact that their writing takes on an effective reality?

More on Modern Mythology

An upcoming children’s book with the seemingly noninflammatory title “Maggie Goes on a Diet” is causing a firestorm of protest.

According to the book’s description on Amazon.com, “This inspiring story is about a 14-year-old who goes on a diet and is transformed from being overweight and insecure to a normal sized teen who becomes the school soccer star. Through time, exercise and hard work, Maggie becomes more and more confident and develops a positive self-image.”

You’d think that with one-third of American kids overweight or obese, and children experiencing unprecedented weight-related health problems including diabetes, a book about a girl losing weight and gaining self-esteem would be welcomed. Guess again.

Critics and reviewers are blasting the book, which has not been released and which almost no one (including myself or the experts quoted here) have fully read. It’s being called horrible, irresponsible, and dangerous.

[Continues at Discovery News]

Many books have been written about 9/11 but is there one that embodies the era that the attacks inaugurated?

When Changez, the Pakistani hero of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, watches the Twin Towers come crumbling down, he smiles.

Little Oskar Schell, the nine-year-old at the centre of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, grapples with his father’s death by creating a flip-book – 15 blurry stills, arranged in reverse order, of a man falling to his death from the World Trade Center. When he flicks through the pages, the flailing figure is restored to the top of the building – safe.

In Open City, writer Teju Cole describes Colonel Tassin – a (real) 19th Century figure – who kept count of the number of birds killed by flying into the Statue of Liberty, as many as 1,400 a night. The image is a reminder of another killing by collision, also in New York, two centuries later.

These are three books that have attempted to hew fiction from the fact of 9/11. According to Bowker’s Books in Print database, which tracks print and e-books published and distributed in the United States, 164 such works have been written so far – they either directly address the event or use it as a peg to hang greater literary concerns about love, life and loss…

[continues at the BBC]

Albert Camus, 1957

Did the Soviet foreign minister have a hand in the death of famed french writer Albert Camus? Via AFP:

Famous French author Albert Camus, who died in a car accident in 1960, may have been the victim of a Soviet plot, new research suggests.

Italian academic Giovanni Catelli, an eastern European specialist, put forward the theory in the pages of the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera. On Monday it was greeted with scepticism among other experts.

He noted that a passage in a diary written by Czech poet Jan Zabrana, published as a book, was absent from the Italian translation.

According to Catelli the missing paragraph concerns a meeting between Zabrana and and a Russian KGB contact.

“I heard something very strange from a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources,” Zabrana writes in the unexpurgated version.

“He said the road accident that cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a piece of equipment that blew out the tyre at a certain speed.”

[Continues at AFP]

Readers will likely be familiar with Aleister Crowley, the notorious English occultist, bisexual libertine, recreational drug user, founder of the Thelemic religion, leader of the Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), and all-around scary wicked person. Those familiar with Crowley strictly through his esoteric writings, however, may be interested to know that one the “Great Beast’s” first forays into publishing consisted of a perverse little volume of erotic poetry entitled White Stains.

It was issued in Amsterdam in 1898 by Leonard Smithers; a leading publisher of English pornography, but also of controversial literature. His clients included Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde. White Stains was published in a print run of one hundred copies which, according to rumors in the book world, Crowley is said to have white-stained himself. Most of these were destroyed in 1924 by British Customs; the surviving first editions currently sell for around $4,000 – $10,000.

The authorship of White Stains was attributed to George Archibald Bishop, a “neuropath of the second empire;” Bishop being the family name of Crowley’s hated, fundamentalist uncle. A lyrical exploration of every sexual taboo from bestiality to pederasty to necrophilia, Crowley conceived it as a literary response to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. “The thesis of von Krafft-Ebing’s book was that sexual aberrations were the result of physiological disease,” says an essayist at lashtal.com, but Crowley…

“…was of the opinion that any such aberration were psychological in nature and turned to artistic expression to make his point. Crowley states [in his 1989 Confessions] “I therefore invented a poet who went wrong, who began with normal innocent enthusiasms, and gradually developed various vices. He ends by being stricken with disease and madness, culminating in murder. In his poems he describes his downfall, always explaining the psychology of each act.”

True to form, Crowley saw fit to invoke the blessing of the Virgin Mary in the prefatory sonnet to this work. Let’s look at some excerpts.

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

Hemingway’s depression and instability has been well-documented, but what is interesting is that the FBI’s monitoring of his phones, correspondence and activities contributed to his sense of fear and paranoia.

This could be the rare case of someone who’s paranoia about “being watched” is actually due to the fact that he/she is actually being monitored. A. E. Hotchner writes:

EARLY one morning, [on July 1st], while his wife, Mary, slept upstairs, Ernest Hemingway went into the vestibule of his Ketchum, Idaho, house, selected his favorite shotgun from the rack, inserted shells into its chambers and ended his life.

There were many differing explanations at the time: that he had terminal cancer or money problems, that it was an accident, that he’d quarreled with Mary. None were true. As his friends knew, he’d been suffering from depression and paranoia for the last year of his life.

Ernest and I were friends for 14 years. I dramatized many of his stories and novels for television specials and film, and we shared adventures in France, Italy, Cuba and Spain, where, as a pretend matador with Ernest as my manager, I participated in a Ciudad Real bullfight. Ernest’s zest for life was infectious.

Read More: NY Times

The man known by his clan name, Madiba, still evokes wonder and admiration and almost god-like reverence, with airport stores selling “We Love Mandela” posters and T-shirts. He is the one South African that most of South Africans take pride in, including the older generation that first knew him as an apartheid government designated terrorist.

He was so feared that his picture could not be shown in the media and his words could not be quoted for 27 years.

Ironically, all these years later he has released a book of authorized quotations (‘By himself”) that cull his thoughts from a life time of public and private utterances in letters, private papers, audio recordings and from generations of speechifying.

Mandela doesn’t really get out much anymore although a select few can still get in to see him especially if their name is Michelle Obama, whose comment on being given an advanced copy of the quotations was a not very quotable, “Wow!” (I have that on good authority from someone who was in the room).

The last big book of political quotations that went to the top of the sales charts that I remember was Mao’s, The Little Red Book. China’s Communist party assured it would be a global bestseller given the size of the population, their control over the country and penchant for disseminating propaganda. Mao’s idea appealed to Moammar Gadaffy who then released his own Little “Green Book” to thunderous yawns.

Mao used his book to fight his ill-fated cultural revolution. Now, Mandela’s collection that could be called a little book of struggle and solidarity is out to promote the fight for the democracy he led.

Its mission is spelled out in a letter he wrote from his prison cell to his daughter Zindzi back in 1980. That quotation explains:  “A good pen can also remind us of the happiest moments in our lives, bring noble ideas in our dens, our blood and our souls. It can turn tragedy into hope and victory.”

It wasn’t just his words that brought his victory, but they surely helped. This collection features more than 2,000 quotations over 60 years, organized into 300 categories including “character” “courage” and “reconciliation.” Many have never been published before and were archived by the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Memory Project. The editors, Sello Hatang and Sahm Venter, say their aim is to offer an accurate and extensive resource.

“In editing the book,” they write, “ we were struck as much by the gravitas of his words, as by their simplicity.”

I was fortunate to be at the book’s launch in the offices of the Foundation in Johannesburg.

It was an appropriate place for me to spend my June 27^th birthday reflecting on Mandela’s triumphs and my own small role in bringing some of them to public attention with six films documenting some of what happened after his release from prison—his election campaign in 1994 and two visits to America, among other memorable markers in his amazing life.

The event was typically low key with a few talks by people who knew him well, worked with him in the ANC and served alongside him in the cells on Robben Island. I knew some of the stalwarts who were there and they were very welcoming to have me back among them.

Doing what I could as a journalist and TV producer to help free South Africa is work that I am very proud of. In the end, I received far more than I gave. It was a great privilege.

In the formal program, his daughter from his first marriage told of visiting her father in prison and being asked if she had had a pap smear. Despite his reputation as a Victorian patrician, he was open about personal matters, and shocked her by talking about intimate subjects, even urging her not to have unprotected sex.

Ahead of his time, that orientation led him years later to become a global leader in the fight against AIDS, a pandemic that also claimed one of his sons.

A former ANC leader described him as someone who was open to, and welcomed, disagreement and debate to correct him when he was “wrong.” She read quotes that showed Mandela’s openness to criticism and self-criticism, qualities we don’t see in many world leaders better known for arrogance and elitism.

Two quotes in the book offer insight to his approach and humility. This comes from a speech he gave in September 1953:

“Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.”

Although he often looks stern he also values a good sense of humor, explaining in 2005:

“You sharpen your ideas by reducing yourself to the level of the people you are with and a sense of humor and a complete relaxation, even when you are discussing serious things does help to mobilize friends around you. And I love that.”

Next was Ahmed “Kathy” Kathrada, one of the eight convicted activists including Mandela assigned to a special section in the draconian Robben Island prison. The apartheid government practiced its racism there openly, giving Kathrada, an Indian, more privileges than his black comrades. He joined Mandela in protesting discriminatory practices.

Mandela always “led from the front,” he explained, taking principled stands and refusing any special treatment unless it was also given to his colleagues. Kathrada’s description of their life together on the inside for decades was vivid and matter of fact, even if his words brought tears to the eyes of people who have heard his stories before. These prisoners had nothing but contempt for the court’s verdict because they knew it was made on a political basis, not a legal one.

Mandela himself embraces the notion of the role of people in the front. He puts it simply in this quotation:  “Good Leaders Lead.” And leading he still is with several foundations, one for children, one focused on AIDs, and the principal one encouraging community dialogues to fight xenophobia and violence.

Sitting in the front row and listening was one of the lawyers who represented Kathrada and Mandela in their famous treason trial. He is a legal legend by the name of George Bizos who came to South Africa from Greece, the cradle of democracy.

It was Bizos who convinced Mandela to add three small words to his most famous quotation, the one in which he told his Judges he was prepared to die for his ideals.

Bizos persuaded him not to be so categorical by, in effect, challenging the state to kill him. Before the phrase vowing he was ready to die, his lawyer interjected the words, “If needs be” to the statement of defiance giving Mandela some political wriggle room. In the end, he was not sentenced to death and lived to outlast his warders and go from prison to the presidency.

Mandela is right: words and ideas matter, but he also insists they must lead to action. The movement he led was admired for its moral stance. Today, that movement is in power. Known for the progress it brought, but also for a pervasive corruption that threatens the legacy of his beloved African National Congress (ANC).

Cry, The Beloved Country was one of South Africa’s greatest novels. Today, many of those who fought for its freedom are crying about its many self-inflicted crises. That’s an issue I will return to.

News Dissector Danny Schechter produced the globally broadcast TV series South Africa Now and was a director six documentary films about Nelson Mandela. Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

The mad scientist can be usefully defined as an individual who conducts scientific experiments, invents something scientific, or does original scientific research, all while suffering from both psychological and moral insanity.

Historically the mad scientist has fallen into one of two modes. The first, what literary critics have variously labelled as “Promethean” or “utopian,” roughly follows the model of the figure of Prometheus from Greek mythology: the scientist is not inherently evil, and in fact is usually portrayed as either a self-sacrificing idealist or a deluded comic figure. The scientist’s mad science is morally ambivalent and ultimately degrades the moral sensibilities of the humans it comes in contact with. The Promethean/utopian mad scientist has noble goals but fails through human weakness, both his/her own and others’.

The second mode of mad scientist, and the more common of the two, is what literary critics call the “Faustian” or “gothic.” In this mode, both the scientist and her knowledge are morally flawed, and the act of discovery — the research and experimentation — is as wicked and damning as the possession of the evil knowledge itself.

Figures like Faustus, in possession of dangerous religious knowledge, were common in Western popular culture for several centuries, but became less so after the 10th century and were replaced by figures in possession of dangerous magical knowledge. In the 12th century the figure of Merlin begin appearing in his modern form. As Irish scholar Padraig O’Riain showed in “A Study of the Irish Legend of the Wild Man” (1972), the standard version of Merlin was heavily influenced by the Wild Man figure of early Welsh poetry. Both the Wild Man and Merlin gave several things to the figure of the mad scientist. One of the most important was the notion of mental instability being inexorably wedded to special, dangerous knowledge–in the case of the Wild Man, possession by rather than of magical knowledge inevitably leading to schizophrenia or madness.

Read the rest at io9.

Hand drawing of Bloom by Joyce

June 16th is the annual celebration of Leopold Bloom’s doomed wanderings through Dublin in 1904, as chronicled in James Joyce’s classic novel “Ulysses”.  And in the 21st century, reality finally catches up with and overtakes fiction.

In 1921 a U.S. court banned Ulysses on the grounds that some of its graphic depictions of nudity and sexuality constituted pornography under the Postal Code. And while that decision was reversed in 1933 by a judge who could only have failed today’s more rigorous selection processes for illiteracy and cretinism, the private sector came to the rescue of public morals when Apple banned an online illustrated version from its iStore last year.

However, that victory had an even shorter half-life. A couple months later, presumably realizing that it would lose it’s investment completely if it maintained the ban, and that nobody would likely access anything remotely smacking of literary merit anyway, Apple decided to give it a go after all.

Still, Ulysses can still claim numerous triumphs. We were reminded recently that the real-life tribulations of one Henry Kahn, great-grandfather of actress Dervla Kirwan, may have inspired the nightmare courtroom episode in the book. Kahn was forbidden by the notorious Sir Frederick Falkiner from testifying on his own behalf due to Kahn’s blatent, obstinate and willful Judaism.

While the “Double Castration” sentence handed down in the clearly Ulysses-inspired digression within Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” stands as a worthy literary heir (IMHO), the book’s actual legacy in the field of (juris)prudence is even greater.  Aside the from the miscarriage of justice in the conduct of the Bradley Manning affair, Wisconsin’s miraculously “re-elected” supreme court justice David Prosser handed down an opinion on the controversial collective bargaining bill which, according to 50% of his colleagues, was riddled with error and faulty analysis.

And so it goes. The more things change, they more they stay the same.  Although a court in 1921 may have affected offense by the onanistic happenings in Chapter 13 of Ulysses, “Nausicca”, in fact, courts invented public masturbation.

Another outrage against Onan from the Dystopia Diaries

NFL legend Mike Ditka was giving a news conference one day after being fired as the coach of the Chicago Bears when he decided to quote the Bible.

“Scripture tells you that all things shall pass,” a choked-up Ditka said after leading his team to only five wins during the previous season. “This, too, shall pass.”

Ditka fumbled his biblical citation, though. The phrase “This, too, shall pass” doesn’t appear in the Bible. Ditka was quoting a phantom scripture that sounds like it belongs in the Bible, but look closer and it’s not there.

Ditka’s biblical blunder is as common as preachers delivering long-winded public prayers. The Bible may be the most revered book in America, but it’s also one of the most misquoted. Politicians, motivational speakers, coaches – all types of people – quote passages that actually have no place in the Bible, religious scholars say.

These phantom passages include:

“God helps those who help themselves.”

“Spare the rod, spoil the child.”

And there is this often-cited paraphrase: Satan tempted Eve to eat the forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.

None of those passages appear in the Bible, and one is actually anti-biblical, scholars say.

But people rarely challenge them because biblical ignorance is so pervasive that it even reaches groups of people who should know better, says Steve Bouma-Prediger, a religion professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan…

[continues at CNN]

A political writer for a second rate, online news magazine, Michael Cobb is assigned by his editor to cover a sci-fi and fantasy convention in a bid to humiliate him.

Since Cobb can’t afford to turn down the job, he heads to Georgia and dives head first into the world of Griffin*Con, renowned the world over as the Mardis Gras of geek conventions. In Atlanta he finds a place that takes geeky debauchery to new heights: science fiction and fantasy, cosplay, booze, sex, comic books, drugs, slash fiction, and more.

This scene takes place on Cobb’s first day at the con:

My heart sank, killing the warmth of the drugs.  The urge for locomotion finally returned to my legs and I continued my sojourn to the elevator.

That feeling of flying high without a safety net returned as the elevator doors I’d finally reached opened with a sharp DING.

And there before me was a Darth Vader.

He was all in black, save the lights twinkling on his chest plate.  He had his laser sword swinging at his side and a boom box straight out of 1985 slung on his shoulder.

Jesus Christ almighty, I was in hell.

Run DMC was blaring, but Vader, with a thick, gloved hand, pressed pause on the tape player ceasing the music.  All was silent but for his asthmatic voice, “Party Vader ‘Vater.”

I had no idea what he said, but what else could I do? I stepped into the elevator with this evil, evil man and his entourage, dressed in costumes from half a different film fantasies.  Squeezing into the back, I thought I might just zone them out, staring out at the floors below.

As soon as the elevator doors closed, Vader once more resumed his assault on decency, filling the airwaves once more with the mingent sounds of early eighties hip-hop.  Then the rest of them joined in on the merriment.  It was as though I’d stepped into a cage for a dozen go-go dancers.

We made it up five floors before the doors opened and I wanted to scream out to those getting on, “Run!  Flee for your insignificant lives!”

But before I could say a word Vader beat me to the punch.  “Party Vader ‘Vater,” he would say, just after stopping the music.  I rolled those words back and forth in my head trying to make sense of them to no avail.

The doors closed, he restarted the music and the dance party began all over again.

By the time we finally reached the ninth floor, it was apparent to me that my heart might explode.  When the door opened I was clamoring to get out, but there was an entire boarding party of people standing in my way, expecting to get on.

They were all dressed in khaki jumpsuits, each of them had hexagonal white patches with rows of solid black lines embroidered along the inside.

It  was a shock to everyone, me most of all, when I shoved the Vader down to his knees, all while I was screaming like a madman. “Get out!  Run for your lives!  Get out while you still can!”

I made it out and hit the front most khaki clad bastard as with my shoulder as and it was as though I’d struck their ten-pin.  They all toppled over, sprawling across the floor.

That’s when my blood ran cold, as though ice was flowing through my veins, stopping me in my tracks.

He was there.

Looking at me, staring at the commotion I’d caused.

Who else but a jet-packed Abraham Lincoln?

He was coming out of a room some thirty feet away and with all of my hollering he had to notice me.  His copper-plated goggles whirred into focus, almost certainly narrowing in on me.  I wondered if his eyewear contained some sort of heads up display that had targeted me, painting a giant bulls eye on my forehead.

I didn’t have much time to actually count the different ways he could crush me with his augmented hands because I was already on my way back in to the elevator.  Clawing my way inside, I prayed that his stovepipe hat wasn’t brimmed with a steel blade, perfect for throwing like a discus and beheading me like some half-assed Bond villain from the sixties.

The Vader turned to me and, in his belabored voice, asked me, “What the fuck?”

Ignoring him, I made my way to the back of the elevator, hurrying my way past the dancers.  I went as far as I could and hit a glass wall, looking out over the lobby and turned to see if the steam powered Lincoln was still on my trail.

Lincoln seemed to have forgotten about me. He was using his meaty bionic arms to help up the guys dressed like janitors that I’d knocked over like brick houses in a hurricane.

Our eyes locked, Lincoln’s and mine.  This was a battle of titans and I was determined to stay as far away from the battlefield as possible.  Our eyes remained fixed until the doors slid shut and the dance party continued upwards.

The rap hits of the eighties began again and the walls shook from the shifting weight of the merrymakers.

The elevator shot upwards.

As I watched the dots on the floor below get smaller and smaller I was left in my own thoughts, considering the ever-expanding nature of the universe.  My brain hurt contemplating the idea that telescopes in space could see the edge of the big bang and that seeing light at immense distances was tantamount to time travel.  Perceiving the vastness of the universe while rising higher and higher into the upper bowels of the hotel made my head swim.

The intoxicating effects of the MDMA in my system were only exacerbating the ethereal pain throbbing in my head.  The people in the lobby below were shrinking, getting smaller and smaller, their lives more and more insignificant.  They were just like me.  Even though I was moving higher and higher, I was matching their insectoid size, contracting into my own original fetal state.  The galaxy was drifting further and further into the far reaches of space and our space telescopes were looking deeper and deeper into the depths of time and I could feel that swirl of emotional discomfort, like that first walk into a strange girl’s bedroom.

And there he was.

There in the void was the head of Lincoln, floating in the ectoplasm of the universe.  His mouth opened and consumed my small, floating, infantile form until I was what Vonnegut would call a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness.

And there was blackness.

And then after the blackness, there was nothing.

Bryan Young is a man of many talents and has worked across many different mediums. As a film producer, his last two films (This Divided State and Killer at Large) were released by The Disinformation Company and were called “filmmaking gold” by The New York Times. He’s also published comic books with Slave Labor Graphics and Image Comics. He’s a contributor for the Huffington Post and the founder and editor in chief of the geek news and review site Big Shiny Robot!

Philip Meadows Taylor’s 1839 novel Confessions of a Thug captured the imagination of 19th-century Britain with its chilling depiction of an organized death cult preying upon the hapless travelers of India’s wild and desolate roads. Based upon real accounts Taylor gathered during his work suppressing the Thuggee cult for the Nizam of Hyderabad, the book is ominously introduced as an authoritative exposé in which true events have been faithfully woven into a fictionalized narrative.

Group of Thugs c. 1864.

As portrayed by Taylor, the Thugs are the votaries of Bhowanee (Kali); the destructive aspect of the Supreme Being. Endowed with superior intelligence and cunning, they are sent forth to make “sacrifices” on her behalf. The reward for their piety is the plunder they gather from their victims. In so far as they observe her omens and obey her taboos, Bhowanee grants them protection from earthly authorities.

Their modus operandi is to inveigle wealthy marks into joining their camp, or to merge with travelling caravans who seek protection in numbers while making treacherous journeys through foreign lands. “Thug” being the Hindi word for “conman,” they proceed to charm and manipulate their travelling companions into lowering their guards. Then, at some remote, well chosen-spot, a signal is given and each Thug simultaneously strangles his assigned victim with a roomál (hankerchief). The bodies are quickly stripped and deposited in preprepared graves, which are then skillfully disguised, as by building fire pits over them to explain the disturbance of the earth. In order to quietly and routinely commit mass murder, the Thugs must operate with military efficiency. Each man is trained to perform a repertoire of specialized roles, including those of strangler (bhuttóte), grave-digger (bélha), inveigler (sótha) and those who bury the dead (lugháees).

The anti-hero protagonist of Confessions of a Thug is Ameer Ali (based upon Syeed Amir Ali, a prolific Thug who turned King’s evidence). As a small child his parents are murdered by Thugs, but one, Ismail, chooses to spare him and raise him as his son. After Ameer forgets his parents and learns his stepfather’s vocation, he is initiated into the cult. The ensuing narrative reads much like a conventional adventure story of a boy heading off to sea, or running away with a band of gypsies, except for the stark fact that the protagonist is repeatedly committing acts of cold-blooded murder…

[Full Article at Victoriangothic.org]

Gore Vidal on Terry Southern, courtesy TS Literary Trust

Terry Southern was credited by Tom Wolfe as having invented “New Journalism” with the publication of “Twirling at Ole Miss” in Esquire in 1962, and his gift for writing memorable film dialogue was evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid, Easy Rider and The Magic Christian. [1].

As his popularity faded, Southern became a favorite of the kind of hipster for whom the more obscure and clever the author, the cooler he was. Now, however, a broad Terry Southern revival is in full swing. This month saw the inaugural Terry Southern Prize for Humor awarded at the Paris Review Spring Revel; The New York Observer reports on presenter Fran Lebowitz’s comment:

“I wonder if Terry Southern would have won a Terry Southern award for humor. The answer, of course, is no.”

Most recently, Publishers Weekly reports that Southern’s son, Nile, is working with Jane Friedman’s Open Road Media to publish ebook editions of Candy (written with Mason Hoffenberg); Flash and Filigree; The Magic Christian; Blue Movie; Texas Summer; and Red-Dirt Marijuana:

The e-books will each include new covers and an illustrated biography of Southern that will feature photos and documents from his life. Open Road is also offering a selection of commentary and video content on Southern on the Open Road Media Web site that will feature interviews with Nile Southern, author Fran Lebowitz and author John Jeremiah Sullivan. In addition, Open Road’s e-book program follows a declaration by the city of Dallas, Texas that May 1, Southern’s birthday, will be declared Terry Southern Day in Dallas, the city where Southern spent much of his early life and where he set some of his novels.

Open Road ’s digital publishing program comes in conjunction with The Terry Southern Project, a program launched at SXSW by the University of Colorado’s Boulder Digital Works, to revive interest in Southern’s life and in his reputation for literary and cultural subversiveness. Under the direction of former advertising professional David Slayden, BDW’s real world and online viral-style promotions included flash mobs and eccentric posters placed around Austin, Texas that included QR codes linked to additional online content. BDW has launched a website on Southern called reddirtcollective.com, named after his novel, Red Dirt Marijuana…

For fans of Southern, this is great news. For those who’ve not sampled his rare brand of humor, now would be a good time to sample some!

David Foster Wallace. Photo: Steve Rhodes (CC)

There’s no doubt that The Pale King, the new, posthumous novel by David Foster Wallace about the lives of workers at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, has generated more interest from reviewers than almost anything else of recent vintage. There are reviews in almost every publication that’s ever run a book review.

Foster Wallace’s publishers timed the publication to coincide with the American tax filing date of April 15th, and certainly it’s a good hook for many reviewers. In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section there are three separate pieces devoted to the book, but the review that’s attracted the most attention from the media, if not necessarily with readers, is Jonathan Franzen’s for The New Yorker.

For some reason it has royally p*ssed off other lit mags and blogs that The New Yorker decided to make the review available only to people who “like” its Facebook fan page.

Of course I decided to “like” The New Yorker to gain access to Franzen’s essay (you can unlike it later). It’s a pretty good read, and not just about Wallace, but as you can see from the following sample, Franken does reveal something of the personal dynamic between the two of them:

David and I had a friendship of compare and contrast and (in a brotherly way) compete. A few years before he died, he signed my hardcover copies of his two most recent books. On the title page of one of them, I found the traced outline of his hand; on the title page of the other was an outline of an erection so huge that it ran off the page, annotated with a little arrow and the remark “scale 100%.” I once heard him enthusiastically describe, in the presence of a girl he was dating, someone else’s girlfriend as his “paragon of womanhood.” David’s girl did a wonderfully slow double take and said, “What?” Whereupon David, whose vocabulary was as large as anybody’s in the Western Hemisphere, took a deep breath and, letting it out, said, “I’m suddenly realizing that I’ve never actually known what the word ‘paragon’ means.”

He was lovable the way a child is lovable, and he was capable of returning love with a childlike purity. If love is nevertheless excluded from his work, it’s because he never quite felt that he deserved to receive it. He was a lifelong prisoner on the island of himself. What looked like gentle contours from a distance were in fact sheer cliffs. Sometimes only a little of him was crazy, sometimes nearly all of him, but, as an adult, he was never entirely not crazy. What he’d seen of his id while trying to escape his island prison by way of drugs and alcohol, only to find himself even more imprisoned by addiction, seems never to have ceased to be corrosive of his belief in his lovability. Even after he got clean, even decades after his late-adolescent suicide attempt, even after his slow and heroic construction of a life for himself, he felt undeserving. And this feeling was intertwined, ultimately to the point of indistinguishability, with the thought of suicide, which was the one sure way out of his imprisonment; surer than addiction, surer than fiction, and surer, finally, than love…

As someone who inhaled every one of the 1,100 pages or so of Infinite Jest, I fully expect to read and enjoy The Pale King, footnotes and all. It might take a while, but it’s only about half as long so it’ll seem like a breeze, even if it is about the Internal Revenue Service!

On the Ides of March, a farewell from Arthur Magazine:

After years of service, Arthur departed the material plane today.

He died as he lived — free, high and a-dreaming of love, ‘neath vultures’ terrible gaze.

Thank you, and love to all.

arthur store * archives coming soon * email

Riz Khan interviews writers Ahdaf Soueif of Egypt, Hisham Matar of Libya, and Ariel Dorfman of Chile about the roles of artists and intellectuals in revolutions.

Ha! Good post from Joe on Forbidden Planet

Ben Kemper, 19, plans to wear a frock coat with cuffs to the annual Jane Austen birthday tea in Boise, Idaho, on Saturday.

The outfit will be “the whole shebang,” says Mr. Kemper, who hopes to scare up some yard work so he can pay for the new threads. He says his costume may include riding boots, a cane, gloves and a buttoned vest.

Mr. Kemper is among an unlikely set of fans of the long-dead Ms. Austen—young people. The English novelist best known for “Pride and Prejudice” and “Sense and Sensibility” has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as “Janeites” who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen’s tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA.

Other renowned English authors aren’t so posthumously popular—at least among the Web set. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen’s work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of “Jane Austen for Dummies.” They may be “trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right,” says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. “You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines.”…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

The secret marriage between minor man of letters Arthur Munby and his servant Hannah Cullwick has become one of the great set pieces of 19th-century social history. Whenever a case study is needed to show the sheer weirdness of Victorian men in the bedroom, the story of how the gentlemanly Munby stalked, caught and loved the huge, dirty Cullwick over a period of 40 years is pressed into play … At Munby’s direction, Cullwick produced thousands of pages of letters and memoir which told the strange story of how she came to spend 40 years in a sado-masochistic relationship where her greatest treat was to be allowed to lick her husband’s dirty boots (horse shit was her favourite relish).

Cullwick’s private name for Munby was “massa”, an uneasy term that looked back to her native Shropshire dialect and elided it with that of the negro slave whose blackness she replicated with soot, as much for her own pleasure as for his. Packed into those two syllables were all the social, sexual and racial inflections that made their connection so forbidden and so binding.

Ever since the Munby-Cullwick papers were opened in 1950 (Munby had bequeathed them to his alma mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, with strict instructions that they should be opened on the 77th anniversary of his marriage), they have been a source of fascination for social historians. Instead of experiencing their class difference as a problem to be solved, Munby and Cullwick made it the pearl around which their love coalesced and wrapped extra layers of meaning.

In the 19th century there must have been plenty of middle-class men who married servants (the evidence, naturally, is hard to find). But a few elocution lessons, a move to a new town and the determination to pass as a lady meant that plenty of Cinderellas were able to make the transformation (this, indeed, formed the plot of many a bad novel). The difference with Hannah Cullwick was that she did not have the slightest desire to rise in the world. On the rare occasions that she tried a position as a higher servant — as a parlourmaid or cook — she could hardly wait to get back to the cellar and have a really good scrub.

[Full Article at guardian.co.uk]

The authors Graham Greene, Arthur Ransome, Somerset Maugham, Compton Mackenzie and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the philosopher AJ “Freddie” Ayer, all worked for MI6, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service admitted for the first time today . They are among the many exotic characters who agreed to spy for Britain, mainly during wartime, who appear in a the first authorized history of MI6.

Greene, Mackenzie, Muggeridge and others who have written about their secret work make it clear they were reluctant spies approached by MI6 because of their access and knowledge of exotic parts of the world.

How much do you buy the fringe ideas that have influenced the The American Book of the Dead novels? For example, do you really think the world is in need of a mass die-off to curb over population?

Baum: It’s a disturbing concept and one I’m still exploring. I look at the recent mosque controversy and wonder, for instance, what would happen if there was UFO disclosure. If people think Obama’s a socialist Hitler terrorist now, they might be turned into David Ickean conspiracy theorists at that point – he’s a reptilian. There’s just so much volatility that seems like it could end in violence. People are crazy – how do we introduce new radical ideas into the culture if a centrist like Obama is seen as a radical? I’m not advocating genocide of any kind – but metaphorically at least, many different types of thought need to die, especially different aspects of fundamentalism. And now it seems fundamentalism is getting a louder and louder voice in the mainstream. It’s like the culture is primed to create mass conflict. So while it’s not something I desire, it does seem inevitable.

It can suck to be prescient sometimes, huh? You started the novel, what, 8 yeas ago? Those seemed like dark times then, but fundamentalist rhetoric just seems to be getting worse and worse.

Baum: Sarah Palin didn’t even exist when I started this book. I was fearing the Bush/Cheney cabal and what they were capable. Sarah Palin makes Bush look like, I don’t know, Bill Clinton.

[continues at Technoccult]

Franz Kafka

Elif Batuman relates a tale of eccentric heirs, Zionist claims and a court fight that Franz Kafka himself would have understood all too well, in the New York Times Magazine:

During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.

The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. While about two-thirds of the Kafka estate eventually found its way to Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the remainder — believed to comprise drawings, travel diaries, letters and drafts — stayed in Brod’s possession until his death in Israel in 1968, when it passed to his secretary and presumed lover, Esther Hoffe. After Hoffe’s death in late 2007, at age 101, the National Library of Israel challenged the legality of her will, which bequeaths the materials to her two septuagenarian daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler. The library is claiming a right to the papers under the terms of Brod’s will. The case has dragged on for more than two years. If the court finds in the sisters’ favor, they will be free to follow Eva’s stated plan to sell some or all of the papers to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. They will also be free to keep whatever they don’t sell in their multiple Swiss and Israeli bank vaults and in the Tel Aviv apartment that Eva shares with an untold number of cats.

The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?

In May, I attended a session at the Tel Aviv district courthouse, dealing with the fate of the papers…

[continues in the New York Times Magazine]

The crown jewel  is an almost-too-good-to-be-true comic/zine starring buff icons Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig – as gay lovers.

When we first saw this book among Microcosm’s up-coming releases, we anticipated a kind of tongue-in-cheek fan-fiction romance in which the macho-rockers put their tongues in one another’s cheeks – oral or otherwise.

While Henry and Glenn’ wasn’t what we’d expected, we’ve fallen in love with this warm wonder of sweet insanity.

Henry and Glenn’ consists of a number of barely connected cartoons, comic strips and journal entries created by the Igloo Tornado art collective. Rollins is clearly “The Man” in their relationship and some of the book’s best bits find Danzig decked out in various accoutrements, inquiring whether a given get-up makes “my butt look fat?”.

While the book certainly has a blast with too-easy-gay-jokes and plenty of raunchy humor, it also does a great job of keeping a straight face in a cartoon that finds Henry and Glenn watching a flock of birds circling in the sky while Rollins observes “When angels get tired they sit and rest on soft pillows of clouds…” It’s the little details that make this book more than just a clever joke. The photocopied images of handwritten journal entries bring an unexpected level of tangible reality to the crazy cartoons and a drawing of a message on a postcard from one of Henry’s spoken-word tours is so sincere you almost forget to laugh.

Read More at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

Have you ever wondered what The Call of Cthulhu was all about but didn’t want to go to the bother of reading the H.P. Lovecraft story?

Wonder no more. This is a cute and concise summary that anyone can understand:

[Image at right: An interpretation of Cthulhu in the sunken city of R’lyeh. By Dominique Signoret via Wikimedia Commons.]