Saturday, February 6, 2016
I loved words
Anne is on an extended hiatus from the Page right now to recover. Since then, our man Becket has been keeping the Page busy with wonderful memes and articles and updates from Anne. Becket came up with an Anne On Writing series, and for the sake of posterity, I wish to re-post those priceless memes here. Here's the first.
And we have fallen into the joy of reading your words, Anne. You do make words sing. Your prose brings out the richness of melodies and harmonies, recalling Dickens and Shakespeare. People who say otherwise, like Terrence Rafferty, must be tone deaf.
Tuesday, February 2, 2016
2016, the year I will read Rice
This is a statement of recommitment to the purpose of this blog, which is to read Anne Rice's books in chronological order, meaning to begin from Interview with the Vampire up to Prince Lestat, and post my relationship to each book and each character along the way.
But I do need a framing device for this. What do I mean?
I am familiar with Rice's vampires and her lore and the rules of her mythology, that vampires have souls, that the sunlight destroys them. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight has made the vampire effeminate, making them sparkle like a pop boy band, paring their fangs blunt, dumbing them down so they repeat school over and over, taking the sex out of them and rendering them impotent. That's not the vampire I want, but that's the vampire that most millennials know. True Blood is fun, but it's cheeky fun, and it didn't help at all. Gone is the scare that even Stephen King was successful in injecting into vampire lore in Salem's Lot.
So I need to step back to a frame of mind before sparkly, impotent vampires, even before Louis and Lestat, and into the popular literature back then. So I take on a classic. Bram Stoker's Dracula. My questions are, is it possible that Dracula exists in the same universe as Louis and Lestat, meaning, our own world? Where do the lore rules disagree? Dracula is a pretty mean, scary creature, and was the vampire of vampires before Lestat stepped to the fore.
I got this idea from the Chicago Tribune where it said that "Anne Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off..." so here goes. I'm about sixty percent into Dracula, and as soon as I am done with that I shall post a review on my readers site, and then proceed with reading Interview again. I think I shall enjoy this.
But I do need a framing device for this. What do I mean?
I am familiar with Rice's vampires and her lore and the rules of her mythology, that vampires have souls, that the sunlight destroys them. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight has made the vampire effeminate, making them sparkle like a pop boy band, paring their fangs blunt, dumbing them down so they repeat school over and over, taking the sex out of them and rendering them impotent. That's not the vampire I want, but that's the vampire that most millennials know. True Blood is fun, but it's cheeky fun, and it didn't help at all. Gone is the scare that even Stephen King was successful in injecting into vampire lore in Salem's Lot.
So I need to step back to a frame of mind before sparkly, impotent vampires, even before Louis and Lestat, and into the popular literature back then. So I take on a classic. Bram Stoker's Dracula. My questions are, is it possible that Dracula exists in the same universe as Louis and Lestat, meaning, our own world? Where do the lore rules disagree? Dracula is a pretty mean, scary creature, and was the vampire of vampires before Lestat stepped to the fore.
I got this idea from the Chicago Tribune where it said that "Anne Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off..." so here goes. I'm about sixty percent into Dracula, and as soon as I am done with that I shall post a review on my readers site, and then proceed with reading Interview again. I think I shall enjoy this.
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