New poem in the Lumberyard

The Lumberyard #4

My poem “Universal Monsters” is in the new issue of The Lumberyard, just out this week. I want you to go buy it–sure, because I’m in it, and because I’m really proud of the poem, but mainly because I think The Lumberyard is an amazing little magazine. It’s edited by Jen Woods, who I know from when we both lived in North Carolina, and produced and constructed by Eric Woods, who runs Firecracker Press in St. Louis and also happens to be Jen’s brother. Firecracker Press is a great little funky press–they print on old movable-type presses by hand, with hand-mixed ink. The result is as much a work of art as a literary magazine. And just check out the chest hair on the Disco cowboy on the cover!

You can read about the new issue here, and you can buy it here. You can hear Jen and Eric talk about their approach to creating The Lumberyard by clicking on the “Stream” button for the June 18th “Literature for the Halibut” show here.

Prophetic Frog-related Postings

Yesterday I was worried about a Rain of Frogs. I had no idea that it was really happening in Japan. I wonder what other prognostications I could make with the blog? Perhaps I should talk about the high incidence of English professors winning the lottery?

Rain of Frogs

It’s been raining hard here. Gwyn and I went into a restaurant at around 6:30 yesterday evening, and when we emerged at 8:30 the rain was so heavy that I couldn’t see across the parking lot, except during the brief and brilliant flashes of lightning. Last night, after we got something like four inches of rain in two hours, there was a calm period between thunderstorms. Standing at the patio door, we could hear a steady, throbbing noise coming from across the fields in the direction of the river. We realized it was frogs–dozens, maybe hundreds, singing into the wetness.

This morning it’s still raining, and the frogs are still croaking for all they’re worth. They must be down by the river, nearly a mile away, and that makes the sheer noise of them all the more remarkable. It wierds me out a little. I was first reminded of a creepy and violent little short story by Stephen King called “Rainy Season,” from his collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes. I first heard it read by Yeardley Smith on an audiobook. The rain in that story brings frogs with razor-sharp teeth to hunt and eviscerate the hapless protagonists.

But the better, though not much less disturbing, poem that has finally lodged in my head is by the great Seamus Heaney. He reads it for you here.

Stay dry. Avoid frogs.

(addendum: I have edited this post to correct my mistyping of “the great Seamus Heaney” as “the geat Seamus Heaney.” But, on reflection, the first way may have been an unconcious homage to Heaney’s masterful translation of Beowulf. Probably it was just a typo, though.)

Summer Gets Underway

So I’ve done with the lion’s share of official work (that is, university related work), and have begun settling into the summer. I’ve been rehearsing with Blind Mice (and have already played the first of several gigs–see Blind Mice’s website), and have been trying to establish a writing routine. this has been aided by converting the guest room into a writing room/study, where I am now happily ensconced. It is now a cozy, booklined retreat at the bottom of the house, with my Victorian phrenology head and old Dickens books overlooking the proceedings with their collective years of wisdom. Here’s how my webcam sees it:

My desk

 

I picked up the rather oddly-shaped desk at a thrift shop for thirty dollars, and it sits comfortably amidst the rest of my stuff. It’s warm and happy in here. I hope to do some good work here this summer and in the years to come.

Most immediate under the pen are the poetry collection, revisions to the London book before resubmitting to the most recent publisher (the one that so far has shown the most interest), and the Dickens project I talked about a couple of posts ago. That one is turning from a lecture/presentation on Dickens into a full-on theatre piece, with a plot and a fully developed character. That’s what I hope to make some good headway on through the weekend.

We’ve also been doing some work in the yard. Gwyn’s herb garden is looking quite fine, and there are plans to trick out the playhouse. We hung a hammock in the space underneath the playhouse (it’s on stilts) and tonight Eva swung in that before bed while I read her the nightly installment of The Hobbit. We’re up to Thorin’s capture by the Wood-Elves.

I’ll go write now. Talk to you soon.

Carol Ann Duffy

I’m very pleased that Carol Ann Duffy has been chosen as the new Poet Laureate of Great Britain. She is the first female Poet Laureate in 341 years of the post’s existence, and she is , as you would expect, a poet of considerable power. Her collection The World’s Wife is fabulous, and I regularly teach from it in both Brit Lit courses and Intro to the Profession of English. She’s funny and witty and smart and poignant, and well deserves the accolade. She talks about it here.

This weekend was taken up with UMary’s graduation and the ND State Chess Championship, in which Ian won three out of six rounds. Not bad for an eight-year-old playing against adults and teenagers, if I do say so myself. I’m back in the office today, and have just turned my grades in, thus clearing the path for the planning and meetings that will take up most of May. I do hope to begin working more regularly on writing projects of various kinds this month, before really setting to during the summer. And Blind Mice will begin rehearsals for our summer shows soon. If you’re interested in those, you can check out the band’s website. I hope to have the dates finalized and posted there in the next week or so.

The weather has turned glorious. May is the best month to be in North Dakota, and it’s already begun.

Poems about Facial Hair

As I forewarned you earlier, my poem “Whiskers” is now up at Strange Horizons. I’m really proud to be featured there, and am happy that it’s this poem that got there. You can go read it for yourself here.

Otherwise I’m ending the semester. Finals this week, though I’m only giving one actual final (presentations and papers in the other two classes). Grading most of the week and then graduation on Saturday, which is the one time a year I get to break out the old regalia and look like an Oxford don. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to teach in the regalia all the time–it would lend an often-lacking prestige to the job, and on warm days I wouldn’t need pants. But these are progressive times, and thus I conform, pedestrian and trousered. For the best, really.

I’ve been hatching three schemes with my friend Brenna, in her guise as Executive Director of the North Dakota Humanities Council. I like Brenna because when I say something like “Why don’t I do a one-man show presenting Dickens’ life and works?” she often replies “That sounds great, we’ll pay you to prepare it and buy the costumes.” Which is the answer I’m usually interested in hearing. So, it looks like over the next two or three years, I’ll be leading a group of Humanities Council members on a trip to London, presenting a one-man show on the life and works of Dickens, and spearheading a film festival featuring the work of Terry Gilliam. I’ll let you know more as I do, but right now it looks like all three of these are a go. Hoo-ray.

I’ve also started moving ahead with plans to turn my goblin poem “Cornerboys” into a short film with illustrations by Ali LaRock and music by Kevin Smith. Ali’s been talked about in this blog before–she’s an amazing artist who does lovely, emotionally complex work. Kevin Smith (not that Kevin Smith) is a guitarist, composer, and producer who I’ve known since we were in the fourth grade together (some time after the Beatles broke up but, significantly, while Keith Moon was still alive). He produced both of my albums, and is a great composer and musician. I’m excited about having both of them involved in this project. I’m hoping that we have a finished product by October, so that I can do some live readings/presentations of the poem for Halloween. I’ll keep you updated on that as well.

And while we’re talking about Kevin, you should go vote for him in the finals of the international guitar competition he’s currently competing in. Find him and his song “9 Dollars” here. You’ll have to register to vote, but it’s quick and so far I haven’t been deluged by spam because of it.

Food and Blood

First off, I’ve been meaning to link over to my friend Jenni’s amazing blog. Jenni’s a pastry chef, and her blog is one of the most enjoyable ways to kill a diet I’ve seen. As an added bonus, she’s a really good and funny writer. “Thou shalt not read the Bible for its prose,” perhaps, but with Jenni you can have your cake and eat it too, as it were.

I also wanted to rave about a film. I realize I’ve been talking about vampires a lot lately, but frankly it’s one of the themes I work with, and I love it. So I won’t feel guilty, and you’ll just have to deal.

I’ve seen a lot of vampire movies, and frankly many of them are extremely bad, or at least laughable. I did like Twilight the movie better than the book, but it didn’t take much. And overall Twilight’s sanitizing of familiar vampire tropes coupled with its insidious undercurrent of domestic violence and weak main character (I can’t think of a worse role model for our young girls) doesn’t really go away in the movie. We are just spared the excruciating tedium of being in Bella’s head for hundreds of pages. But to call anything about Twilight “horror” (other than Robert Pattison’s hair or the gaspingly dramatic reaction Bella has near the end when Edward suggests going away from her) is silly. Meyers’ vampires have been stripped of any threat, and thus have lost all the power the tenacious monster held for hundreds of years. Twilight is Wuthering Heights with fangs, and mightily blunted fangs at that.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. This week I finally saw last year’s acclaimed Swedish vampire coming-of-age film Let the Right One In. This film does something I didn’t think was still possible–it balances the attraction/repulsion concept at the heart of the vampire myth without sacrificing either. That is, we are given a relationship between twelve-year-old Oskar, a lonely outcast from a broken home, and twelve-year-old Eli, a lonely vampire who moves in next door, that completely captures the essence of the vampire. As an audience, we sympathize with Eli and like her nearly as much as Oskar does, but we are also privy to the reality of being a vampire, which is that vampires are serial killers whose existence depends on humans dying. There is no “vegetarian vampire” cop-out here. Eli, although quiet and serious, is a likable twelve-year-old girl, and Oskar is understandably drawn to her. But Eli also kills with bloody grace and ease, and this fact is not hidden from Oskar, who is put off at first but gradually overcomes it.

At one point in Let the Right One In, Eli tells Oskar that she’s twelve, but that she’s “been twelve for a long time.” The film inadvertently overlaps here with Edward’s similar statement in Twilight about how long he’s been seventeen. And it’s here that the two films are most sharply contrasted–whereas Edward’s line is a self-conscious “what a clever writer I am” moment, delivered in the embarrassingly melodramatic tone that characterizes everything Twilight, Eli’s line carries a weight of sadness and self-awareness (as opposed to self-consciousness) that says worlds about her long existence and her understanding of her place in it. This is partially because twelve-year-old Lina Leandersson is twice the actor Robert Pattison is, but mostly because writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel to screenplay) has constructed a narrative that works on every level. The weight of what comes before gives Eli’s statement its emotional heft, just as lack of weight robs Twilight’s counterpart line of anything beyond soap opera schmaltz.

I don’t want to say too much about this film, because I want you to see it. It’s a hauntingly conveyed story that needs to be experienced. It is difficult to do something new with the vampire genre–in the twelve years since Buffy no one really has–but this is at least the freshest presentation of the old tropes that I’ve seen in many a year. It is also difficult to make a film as beautiful in its imagery and storytelling as this one and keep it a horror film, but Let the Right One In does it. There is blood (quite a lot of blood), and there is at least one special-effects set piece. In places it is scary and in other places distinctly uncomfortable, both of which are necessary for a successful horror film. But at its heart is a friendless boy on the edge of adolescence and the bloodthirsty little girl who loves him. It’s that narrative, recounted through perfectly constructed scenes and just-right dialogue, that makes this not only the single best vampire movie I’ve ever seen, but one the best films of any kind I’ve seen in the past ten years.

Ogden, Chabon, and the Doctor

I’m in Ogden, Utah with three students for the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. We flew in today, drove here from Salt Lake City, and then went to the opening banquet. My students (Kayla, Scott, and Rachel) present at evenly spaced times over Friday and Saturday. So far, it’s been a smooth trip. I regret not bringing my camera, because the Rocky Mountains are truly glorious.
One big bonus for me is that the keynote speaker for this conference is one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon. He spoke tonight–or rather read. He read an essay on geekdom and family and fear of failure that was funny and profound in the spirit of most of his writing, particularly the recent essay collection Maps and Legends. Part of the talk had to do with raising a family of geeks–he and his four kids are all lovers of the new Dr. Who. Gwyn and I are embarassingly obessed fans of the show as well. So, during the book signing I asked Chabon, who was busily signing my copy of Maps and Legends, what he thought about the way they brought Rose back onto the show at the end of season 4. He instantly began talking about the merits of Russell T. Davies as a writer and we talked about our mutual excitement that Stephen Moffat will be taking over the show starting in the new season. He agrees with me that storylines seem to be getting recycled, and I agreed that Davies’ strengths are depicting characters and relationships, while Moffat is much more adept at plotting.

Five minutes of talking about Dr. Who with Michael Chabon. That’s the happiest geek moment of my year so far.

Vampires in the News

As a sort of corollary to Carmilla, here’s an article about the discovery of a corpse in a Venice plague pit that had been treated as a vampire several hundred years ago. In the Introduction to Carmilla, I talk about European vampire superstitions, drawing heavily from the information in Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death. I thought it fascinating to read about this additional evidence of the way plagues fostered belief in vampires. It’s particularly interesting (at least to me) that this is in Venice. I tend to generalize vampire superstitions as being a rural phenomenon, but Venice was a sophisticated urban area during the 16th century. That residents of the city were worried about vampires makes me rethink that.

More publishing news…

I hate to post again so soon, because it’s fun having “Vampire Lesbians of the Amazon” as the first post title on the blog. But we move on…

It seems like things are going well on the publishing front (after 39 years of waiting). My poem “Universal Monsters” will be published in the summer issue of The Lumberyard, a beautiful letterpress poetry magazine edited by Jen and Eric Woods. Lumberyard is a really unique looking mag, done in gorgeous letterpress with quirky art and inventive fonts. They’re relatively new, but have already published Matthew Lippman and Eleanor Lerman, among quite a few others. Matthew Dickman, I’m told, will be appearing in the same issue as I. I’m proud to be there among such company.

I’m also proud of the poem. “Universal Monsters” is part of my poetry project inspired by the old Universal horror films and my memories of watching those movies with my mom when I was a lad. It’s the first one of those published and may be the title poem from the series once they’re done. I’ve been rewatching the old movies to remember and to be inspired, and I’m loving going back there. Gwyn’s been a good sport about watching them with me. So far we’ve done The Mummy, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And of course I’ve watched Dracula, Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein multiple times. Dracula’s Daughter is great, too. I’ve got Universal’s first werewolf picture, Werewolf of London, in my Netflix queue. I haven’t seen that one before, so I’m looking forward to it. We’ll see if all of them yield poetic inspiration.

I hope my publishing streak keeps up.