Goth(ic) horror

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897, and reading it more than a century later, I wish I could step back in time to experience the story fresh and unique, as it was then. I struggle to keep an objective reader’s eye when images of Bela Lugosi or the Count from Sesame Street pop into my head.

Vampires existed in legend before Stoker brought them to life in his book, but the details today no longer have quite the power to impress: driving a stake through the vampire’s heart to “kill” it; holding a crucifix as a protective shield; watching a bat transform into a human form. All these things are part of everyday knowledge in a culture that has made Buffy a household name.

I am fascinated by the way that Stoker chose to tell his tale, in diaries and letters. I just finished the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a much lighter and more contemporary story, also told in letters. Writing in the epistolary form gives you the ability to shift POV without having to set the scene for your readers – the salutation or the diary entry is enough to clue readers to the switch. But it also requires careful consideration of how much each character should reveal in order to move the plot forward. Whatever happens must be told after the fact, so the drawback is a certain distancing from the action. But perhaps that was Stoker’s intent. The circumstances of the vampire story in the 1890s were so diabolical and gruesome that they needed the perspective of distance.

It's evident where J.K. Rowling drew some of the inspiration for her series. Dracula De Ville reminds me an awful lot of Harry Potter's arch nemesis, Voldemort, with his red eyes and soul of evil. His ability to shape-shift into animals – a bat, a dog – is similar to the Animagus transformations that some of Rowling’s wizards can effect. And Mina’s link to Dracula – that she can, under hypnosis, sense what the vampire is hearing or seeing – is quite like Potter’s uncanny link to the One Who Must Not Be Named. Not to mention, Voldemort hung out in the woods of Romania for a while after the Sorcerer's Stone (can you tell I've read Rowling's books a few times?).

Next up, I hope to reread Interview with a Vampire, a book I haven’t touched in 20 years. I’m curious to see how much vampire lore in that tale is linked to Stoker’s story and how much Anne Rice created.

(The image this with post is courtesy of Harry Boardman and his blog, 365 Monsters. Thanks, Harry!)

Carried away

War, sang Edwin Starr all those years ago, what is it good for? The song's answer: Absolutely nothing. And Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried makes that absolutely clear. How I missed O'Brien's book for so long – he wrote it in 1990 – I don't know, but it is astonishing.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. ...
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't,
because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe
the truly incredible craziness.

The crystal clear images continue to reverberate days after I finished the last page. The young VC he killed. The pieces of a fellow soldier he had to remove from a tree after a land mine exploded. The death of his best buddy in a field of human waste. Chapter after chapter, incident after incident, O'Brien drew me – a person who has never been closer to battle than riding on a training flight with a KC-135 refueling plane – into the paddies and jungle paths of Vietnam. I was there with him as he tried to stay calm on a pitch-black patrol shift or waited impatiently for the medic to treat him after he was shot in the buttocks. Today's soldiers are all volunteers, people who choose to enlist. O'Brien almost left for Canada when he got his draft notice – he fled north to within a canoe ride from the border – but ultimately he obeyed the summons from Uncle Sam, then spent the next 20 years trying to exorcise the painful memories by writing about them.

Purely by chance, two days after I finished O'Brien's book I saw the film The Beautiful Country, which begins in Vietnam. It is a postwar tale about a young Vietnamese man's quest to find his father, who had been an American soldier stationed there. I marveled at the contrast between the grim reality of the war depicted in O'Brien's book and the serene beauty of the land itself. Binh's mixed-race background makes him a pariah in his home country, but the journey he sets out on seems one he can't possibly complete.

Skin deep

No pain, no gain. Philosophically, I guess that's true. You hold dear what you've had to work for, struggle for. Things that are given to you without effort (or money) are easy come, easy go. I spent a total of four hours – two hours each session – enduring an odd discomfort verging on pain so that I could gain a gorgeous, full-color feather wrapped around my right arm. The buzzy whine of the ink applicator morphed from background noise to grating annoyance by the end, and my arm burned, as though branded. One wall of Sink the Ink studio is covered with a giant National Geographic map of the world; after spending all that time staring at the South Pacific – the area of the globe nearest where I was seated - I think I have memorized the name of every island in Polynesia. Rikitea? Suwarrow? Serendipity led me to gentle Ben Harris, the ink artist who loves nature. He liked the challenge of creating a peacock feather armband even though his true passion is insects: He has a centipede crawling around one shoulder and a black widow spider on one arm, plus a gnarly raven and a kneecap skull, among other, visible tattoos. When I was vocal about the discomfort, Ben was amused. Yes, he acknowledged, the inner arm is a tender place, but the chest, he said, "hurts like hell." I can think of other body parts that would also make me wince when the needles dig in. For my next bit of ink, I just might go with an insect. How about a scarab beetle? I'm thinking of the bug in the Poe tale, the golden beetle that looked remarkably like a human skull...

Something to crow about

The faux rooster caught my eye – a bantam with coppery feathers and a tail that curved in a long arc toward his head. But he was the lure not the merchandise; he was NFS outside the Tinicum Arts Festival's White Elephant tent. I wasn't the only one smitten with him. Adults and kids alike stopped to stare at this lifelike bird before sauntering past tables laden with used curling irons, out-of-season ornaments, glass candle holders – and my favorite in tackiness, a 16x24 cross stitch of a paint-by-number rural landscape. Framed, even! But that rooster ... I wanted to take him home. I don't have any chickens, not even fake ones, although for about a year, I contemplated getting a flock of Rhode Island Reds for the back yard. Fresh eggs, I promised my husband. Too much work, he countered, adding that the red tail hawks and foxes would help themselves to chicken dinners and we would be out of eggs. During that year of fowl arguments, I met a Nockamixon woman who kept chickens and was also a talented nature photographer. A close-up Natalie took of a fuzzy-feathered hen won a ribbon at the arts festival this year. I don't have her eye for form and color and composition; my photographs are snapshots. But if I'd brought my camera to the festival I could have taken home that rooster – the NFS rooster – in pixels even if I couldn’t have him to hold.

O'er the ramparts ...

It is twilight on the flat expanse of grass at Tinicum Park in Erwinna. I am listening to a July 4 pops concert that would otherwise put me to sleep, but I'm having too much fun watching the crowd: the kids wearing glow sticks ... around their heads, their arms, their legs, or waving them for a strobe-like effect. The red-white-and-blue-ness in shirts, dresses, hats, and hair. The energy of the families spread out on this vast lawn is building, in anticipation of the 1812 Overture and the salute of fireworks that will provide the accompaniment.

Wispy clouds are stretched against a sky of deepening blue after days – weeks – of rain. The evening is just about perfect. (The cigar smoke is a minor dampener.) I am remembering that two years ago on this day I watched fireworks while perched on a curb in suburban Detroit, oohing and aahing as the starbursts rose above a golf course. It was three days before my best friend got married. Three years before that, I saw the bursts of flaming color in the distance, from a camp nestled in the Four Corners area of Colorado, where the night chilled to the upper 30s and I could see my breath. In July!

Growing up, I watched a much more modest display from a parking lot laid down over a former farm field once owned by Harry Truman. My father never liked fireworks – the crackles and blasts were reminders of a war he was lucky enough to return from. This year, I am celebrating a moment of peace amid the economic turmoil that is 2009.

Broad appeal

I just finished reading Broad Street by Christine Weiser. It left me nostalgic for Philadelphia – the endless rowhouses, the funky shops, the great restaurants. Not that I don't still visit, but I moved away in 1994, the same fateful year that wraps up Weiser's novel, the year of birth and death; the year my son was born and the year Kurt Cobain killed himself.

Weiser sets her novel in that time period of the early 1990s, when grunge and grrrl bands ruled. I loved her insider's look at indie rock, where talent is honed on the whetstone of weekly band practice and occasional bar gig. The insular world of local rock bands is no different from corporate business or Washington: Hard work can pay off, but it's who you know that gives you a boost up the ladder to power or fame. Weiser's Kit Greene keeps pushing toward her goal, despite bad boyfriends, disloyal drummers, and way too many hangovers.

I appreciated that Weiser used Cobain's death as a pivotal moment in her story. His passion spoke to me as few other musicians' have. He could inspire as much by his wall of sound as the intense beauty of his ballads. I reveled in the word play of his lyrics. He taught me that ugly can be much more profound than pretty and that shocking is sometimes the best way to get a point across.

It's been 15 years since Cobain died. The world has changed, and so has my life; my son will be a sophomore in high school and, although I still hold the pipe dream of starting a band – how about an all-girl Nirvana tribune band called Contagious? – it's probably not going to happen.

Weiser still plays in a band in Philadelphia, but she has moved on, as well, to co-publish the literary journal Philadelphia Stories.

Writing away

Trout Lake is spring-fed, dotted with tree-covered islands of granite, and thick with one of my favorite songbirds, the veery. It's also the summer home of a friend who opened her cabin for a four-day writers' retreat last week. No phones ringing, no dogs barking, no parakeets chirping. No work, no errands, no responsibilities. It was paradise.

My only task for those four days was to write, but when I needed to recharge or think through a challenging scene in my novel-in-progress, I hiked through the dense Adirondack woods or paddled around the islands in a borrowed kayak. Kathryn led the retreat, but she also did the cooking and cleanup, as well as putting in time on her own novel. The meals were delicious and healthy – but with a candy dish of Hershey chocolate always on hand for my sweet fix. My bed was on the sleeping porch, a wonderful, second-story room overlooking the endlessly moving water of the lake. The sunrise was my alarm clock.

I made some good friends last week – all splendid writers pursuing their own creative goals. We laughed and cried at each other's work during our evening sharing time. And I made some real progress on my manuscript.