The Allure of Vampires

Why do vampires occupy such recurring and enduring place in our popular culture?

The Sunday Times takes on that question in its review of another vamp pop cult hit, True Blood:

"Vampires are different. Vampire movies transcend their blood-soaked genre in ways that werewolves, mummies and even the misunderstood progeny of Dr Frankenstein can only dream of. Each generation plunders the bloodsuckers’ coffin, pulling out symbols and stories to retell in urgent contemporary narratives that draw in politics, culture and — of course — sexuality.

“Vampire stories were created when it was impossible to write about sex openly, so they arrived laden with sexual metaphors,” says the psychologist Andrew Bates. “At the same time, I think they deal with more existential themes: what happens when you die and how it feels to be the outsider. That’s why they’ve survived the opening up of sexuality in art — although they’ve had to face some pretty grim ironic retelling along the way. Today, there’s a huge mainstream interest in the romanticism of longing and losing they represent.”

Except Twighlight is really all about sex (or at least not having it in high school...).

If Stephanie Meyers doesn't strike you as the Emily Bronte of our age, you might return to the literary fountainhead of vampire stories: Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Twighlight

What do the new kid in school, smoldering romance, vampire orphans, chaste teenagers, and supernatural danger have in common? They are the themes explored in Stephanie Meyer's wildly successful debut novel Twighlight.

Why is the Alexandria Campus Book club reading a runaway teen-age/ young-adult romance? Twighlight's wild popularity among NOVA students means that this is what our students are reading. Think of it as competitive intelligence.

Also now a major motion picture. Surely no one would watch the film instead of reading the book -- teen idol cast notwithstanding.

The Book Club meets to discuss Twighlight on 25 Sept 2009.

It's Aliens!

The Alexandria Campus Book Club wrapped up the year with something new: science fiction short stories by James Tiptree. Tiptree, who was actually McLean resident Alice B Sheldon (she adapted the name from a jam jar:

wrote acclaimed short stories in the 1960s and 70s dealing with issues of gender, society, consciousness and (usually) death, generally in dystopic present or future settings.

A die-hard few Book Group members met on Friday 24 April to discuss the remarkable and strange stories, the remarkable and strange life of the author, and the (to some of us at least) remarkable and strange genre of science fiction.

As the Book Club looks forward to another interesting year of reading and discussion -- we want to hear from YOU, the Alexandria Campus faculty and staff. Please send suggestions for Book Club titles to Sylvia Rortvedt.

When you're not sure how to end a story after an all-nighter on amphetimine high, try aliens!

Was Gertrude Stein a Fascist?

Alexandria Campus faculty came to grips with that question after reading Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Although author Janet Malcolm doesn't exhaustively explore Gertrude Stein's political life, she does inform us that Stein was an opponent of Roosevelt, deplored the New Deal, felt that people should take responsibility for their own economic well-being, and was a vocal supporter of Franco in the Spanish Civil War.

Right-wing politics were the way to go among the literary avant garde in mid-century. Stein's near contemporary TS Eliot once described himself as an "Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a monarchist in politics." Ezra Pound moved to Italy in the 1930s and was an outspoken supporter of Mussolini. Evelyn Waugh converted to the Catholicism and staunchly supported conservative social and political positions throughout his life (Waugh was convinced, for instance, that Picasso was a hoakster who was taking people in).

Was Stein a fascist? Despite being Jewish, and living in a straightforwardly lesbian relationship with Alice B Toklas, she managed to survive (and indeed prosper) in occupied France throughout WWII.

A Superior Form of Authenticity

The Alexandria Campus Book Club read Margaret Atwood's collection of short stories-cum-novella.

Several of the stories/ chapters might call to mind previous Book Club selections.

'My last Duchess', for instance, in which the teenage protagonist reads and critiques Browning's poem in light of her own experience, is reminscent of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

'Moral Disorder' , 'Monopoly' and 'White Horse' find the principal characters decamped to a bohemian rural paradise trying their amateur hands at farming, recalling the (again) fashionable back-to-nature organic movement at the heart of Omnivores Dilema.

Atwood says of her work that it is "not autobiography. If it was, people would say I was lying. It's the paradox of our times. If you put fiction on the front, they say, 'Ah, but we know it's really about you,' and if you put autobiography, they say, 'Well, of course she's trying to make herself look good and she has left this out and left that out.'" A tension between autobiography and fiction, the real and the contrived confronted previously in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.

Family relationships pervade the stories. Relationships between parents (present and absent) and children bring to mind both A Hole In The Earth as well as The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. Those between siblings recall Atonement.

Harold Bloom once said all literature profited or suffered from an "anxiety of influence". he probably didn't think of his criticism in the conext of the Alex Book Club reading list, but it's true nevertheless.

Disordered, Morally Speaking

The Alexandria Campus Book Club turns to short stories for the second selection of the Fall Term, reading Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder.



AS Byatt reviewed the book in the Washington Post and said, in part:

"Moral Disorder is a perfect title -- apparently one from a novel abandoned by Atwood's husband, which fits. And the work, with its isolated tales, some in the first person, some in the third, is a perfect shape for contemplating life and death. It is like our memories: There are things that persist in refusing to be forgotten, are as clear as the day they happened, whereas all sorts of more apparently significant things vanish into dust or persist only in old newspapers and fashion magazines. A life, unlike a biography, does not unfold in a neat progression. Nor is it entirely incoherent. Each of these stories coheres round a defined patch of Nell's life, and each has its own cluster of brilliantly described and unforgettable things, which are as important as the people...

This tale, like all these tales, is both grim and delightful, because it is triumphantly understood and excellently written."

Check out a copy from the Library or visit your local book-shop.

More on Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengetsu, author of the Book Club's fall selection The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, is interviewed on NPR and also on the Penguin Book site. Learn more about the author and his inspiration for this story of African immigrants set in Logan Circle.