Happy Hallowe'en - it's Dracula

Dracula, by Bram Stoker

This immortality 

Is tombed in airless parlours.

And his blood is dust.

It's Hallowe'en today. In celebration, droves of children will be dressed as undead revenants and go from door to door demanding processed sugar from householders at knifepoint.

(Forgive me my paranoia, I'm going to a fancy dress party in Brixton this evening. I'm planning on going as a stab victim in the hope that if the party is crashed, I can play dead in the hope that the marauders will think I've already been 'taken care' of.)

And since it is the 'Day of the Dead', what other book can we microblog other than, Dracula. The novel, written by Henry Irving's (the Laurence Olivier of his day) agent, Bram Stoker that has spawned an entire genre of gothic fiction that wraps bloodsucking around the familiar themes of sex and death.

Such a pity it's a bit shit.

Dracula's a loaded term now. Most readers come to it (or him, as the 'Count' as a character is a cultural colossus far bigger than the actual book) through its depiction in films, TV series, computer games or even Sesame Street. All of which piques the anticipation of a first-time reader. "This must be a classic. This is where it began."

Instead we are served up a second-rate epistolary novel with muddled themes, leaden prose and a titanic villain pushed to the sidelines of the action by cackhanded use of form. It's also hilarious to read from a feminist perspective: libertine bloodsucking lesbians, pretty girls turned to sensuous revenants, and the 'anti-feminist' heroine saved by her own stiffnecked piousness.

No wonder Francis Ford Coppola felt compelled to sex it up in his own interpretation of the book, which sadly suffered from a cast of 'mortals' whose acting styles seem a little bit undead anyway. Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Sadie Frost anyone?

So, bringing Hallowe'en week to a close, here's one of the best creepy-themed novelty songs of all time. The Monster Mash.

The Lady is a Vamp

Carmilla - Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Her lusciousness

Is dust, but does Carmilla’s

Light step haunt the stair?

Predating Dracula by a good twenty years, Carmilla is a vampire novella with a titular vamp and a fine line in stifled, bosom heaving Victorian eroticism. It's also a much better novel than its more famous successor (which is being microblogged tomorrow), evoking the quasi-erotic relationship between vampire and victim through prose that is neither lumpen nor leaden.

It's also an entertaining read if you like stories about attractive women in big skirts basically lezzing off with one another. For an insight into the 'horrific' power of deviant sexual attraction, there are few better places to go than a Victorian ghost story. All that (menstrual?) blood, white flesh and swooning - it's Freud's theory of sublimation in action. And a whole lot of Jung's anima/animus theory too, if you can be bothered unpicking that.

Le Fanu was an enormously successful writer of high-class schlocky fiction in his day (a bit of a Stephen King). Quite why he's faded into comparative obscurity while Stoker's yawnfest, Dracula, has become an unchallenged classic is beyond me, but that's luck for you.

And just because we couldn't resist it, here's Grace Jones vamping it up as an, erm, vampire (or should that be camp-ire?)

Hallowe'en - Part One

The second part of a our Hallowe'en special. Creepy classics condensed into seventeen syllables. This time around, "The Master's" attempt at writing an M.R. James-style spine chiller.

The Turn of the Screw - by Henry James

She sees corruption

Haunt what should be innocence.

But does she? Does she?

I'll be honest here: Henry James and I have never got on. It has something to do with his prose style, which has always struck me as being soporific and prissy. It often feels as though he's holding his prose at arm's length, faintly disgusted by the desires and ideas it contains. 

Naturally there's little in the way of action, though plenty if you're content with knowing looks and value judgments on the characters of minor noblewomen.

Still, The Turn of the Screw is genuinely creepy in a slow build way. And James wasn't the brother of William James, one of the 19th century's most eminent psychologists, for nothing. He understood that suggestion is much more frightening than any number of fangs dripping gore. Even better, it brought us an undisputable classic: The Innocents.

The Innocents - starring Deborah Kerr

Starting early for Hallowe'en

There's a nip in the air, pumpkins in the shops, the terrifying thought of another Republican administration in the White House...

You can tell it's October.

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

Animating cold clay

Churns life and death together.

Father, child, monster.

And because you can never have enough Kate Bush, here's her take on getting those autumnal creeps in Hammer Horror.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

‘Does no mean no, Tess?’
Said Alec in the Chase that
Brought both sides to blows.

Was Tess raped, or did she submit willingly? Does it matter at all, if we consider that one of Hardy's greatest achievements as a novelist was to create characters who could lead sensual and moral lives at the same time. Tess is a fleshy character - her body is more important than her mind, because that's what life expects from her. Berating her (or Hardy) for her being so passive is like criticising a Roman doctor for not knowing about antibiotics. Is it truthful, in the terms of the novel, to expect a milkmaid to be assertive?

No.

She's not a Destiny's Child, she's a child of destiny. Ho ho ho. Her fate lies not so much in her own character as in her inability to step outside her role within society.

Hardy's later work (notably The Mayor of Casterbridge or The Woodlanders) deals with this more effectively by making the novel's tragedy come from within rather than without the main characters. Sensuality v Victorian conformity = tragedy, with society winning out over the individual. 

A bit like Hardy's own career really.

It also explains why, a few chocolate box adaptations aside, we seem to have brushed Hardy under the same carpet as DH Lawrence. We just can't imagine why sex causes his characters so much pain. 

Sex kills though.  Just take Joni's word for it.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

"Let me in, Heathcliff.

I died, and you stopped living

But let my Cathy go."

And seeing as it's Friday, let's take a sideways look at Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, which she wrote when she was just 15 years old. And, by the sounds of things, having only read the first 15 pages, but who cares.

Of course EVERYTHING sounds better performed in the style of a Northern working men's club singer. With ukuleles. It's an acknowledged fact.

The Three Sisters

The Three Sisters, by Anton Chekhov

Dreaming of Moscow

Makes life pass by unnoticed.

Did you hear the gun? 

Not a novel, nor a doorstop, but certainly a classic.  One which I didn't get the first time round though. My first experience of Chekhov was a pained student production directed by an old lag with too many ideas and actors with too little experience. 

Needless to say I didn't see the point of it and said so to a lecturer in the drama department.  A very grand, poised former opera singer who replied with one of the wisest things I've ever heard about literature.  "Ah yes," she said, "I think you can only appreciate Checkhov once you're old enough to have something to regret."

That's the thing about universities.  They get you in young and attempt to stuff your head with older people's thoughts.  Sometimes they don't fit.  But that doesn't mean they won't in time.

Nico

Nico

Frozen borderlines

Wrap a tourniquet round all

Tomorrow's parties.

Temporarily interrupting normal service to post this



The incomparable, beautiful and inscrutable Nico singing Frozen Borderline at the Library Theatre in Manchester. She'd come a long way from The Factory by the 1980s, at which point she was living a smack addicted half-life in North Manchester. Years before the IRA performed open heart surgery on the city, of course.

She came to a sad, early end, did Nico. James Young, a musician who fell into being her tour pianist, again sometime in the 80s has written a witty, moving memoir, Songs They Never Play On The Radio, about her last years.

Mind you, this seemed to be the way with Warhol's muses. He picked them for their glamour and unpicked and flattened it, just like he turned Marilyn Monroe into two dimensional blocks of colour. Beautiful girls and boys made vague and ugly by drugs or overexposure

The Andy Warhol retrospective, Other Voices Other Rooms, at the Hayward has an oddly similar effect. It spreads a scant talent too thinly over a sizable exhibition. His main contribution to 20th century art may have been to remove overt emotion from art, but that doesn't mean his work lacks jealousy. The many photographs of him in drag, or makeup, or both, scream with envy.

What was Nico to Andy? A mini-Edie Sedgwick? Perhaps, but she, unlike the poor little rich girl, at least managed to escape him with something of herself in tact. Incidentally, if you must see Factory Girl, a biopic so hackneyed that it's almost a masterpiece of kitsch, they get her totally wrong. She may have been a model but she was no Heidi Klum.

Madame Bovary

Madame Bovary, by Gustav Flaubert

Poor Emma. So bored,
Except for sex and shopping,
While the bills mount up.

I read Madame Bovary for the first time this year. It was an odd experience.  Instead of the tragedy fans of the novel that led me to expect, I got cool observation of materialistic stupidity. Telling reading in a 'credit crunch'.

And what a difference 150 years make.  In 1856 Emma Bovary's search for self-fulfilment in men and pretty clothes made her a dupe for the loansharks and a suicide.

Now she'd be Carrie Bradshaw.  

Starting easy

Hell, no.

Seven books, more than a thousand pages long, French and, above all, dense. 

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time), by Marcel Proust

Lime tea and biscuits

Bid Marcel's past to blossom

Time regained, elided.

Is reading the new snacking?

You'd think so if you went to Borders on Oxford Street.

Thousands of books, and not one of them was Anna Karenina.  One copy of Crime and Punishment and the Penguin classics looked like they'd been put through the Shredder.

What's with the new Penguin Poular Classics cover design anyway?  Chartreuse was last year's colour.

Anyhow, irritation can be inspirational.  If we can only speak in soundbites, why can't books do it too?  Especially the big, scary ones people claim they're too busy and tired to read, even if there's always time for shredding your nerves on X-Factor.  And small can be beautiful.  The haiku is just as beautiful a form as the epic.

So we're smashing the two together in this blog.  The great classics of world literature turned into haikus.  Not necessarily to tell their stories (War and Peace in 17 syllables anyone?) but more to evoke something of their spirit.  The bits that might actually make you want to read them.

See what you think...