Victor Frankenstein, Absentee God

So the Week 4 reading assignment for my online class on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World was Mary Wollstonecraft’s Frankenstein, or The New Prometheus.

I really got cranking on the reading notes this week; I had 17 letter-size pages!  (For everyone but Americans: that’s about A4 format.)  While I don’t consider the book to be entertainment reading, it certainly packs a lot of ideas and symbols, so much that we take away from it different parts.

I have trouble with the notion that it falls in the science fiction genre.  There is so little effort at giving any scientific explanation for the reanimation, and few other allusions to science (though many to Knowledge) that it constitutes more trappings than substance.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, but I think focusing on the knowledge-Man-was-not-ready-for is missing a lot of the picture.

Then again, the picture contains so many elements that it’s hard to do otherwise.  Here is my 300-word essay on Frankenstein as a sly exploration of theodicy. 

Pop Culture Hawthorne and Poe

To go with my online class Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I started a series of posts listing companion materials in pop culture, preferably ones that are a little forgotten, have not received the attention I think they deserve, or take an unusual angle.  All the better if they are available online, double-plus for free.

These are the ones I propose to accompany this week’s readings: Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s short stories “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,”  and “The Artist of the Beautiful,” found in Mosses from an Old Manse, and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” found in Twice-Told Tales; and Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Oval Portrait,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Bells,” “The Raven,” and “Annabel Lee,” found in The Portable Poe.

Hawthorne

I’ll be honest, I’ve never enjoyed Hawthorne; he worries way too much about sin for my taste.  Besides, I like the writings of Poe, Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and all three were critical of Hawthorne’s writings.  Nowadays, there just aren’t many references about Hawthorne in pop culture; in fact he was rather, uh, prophylactic to pop culture.

• Thankfully, Kate Beaton of the webcomic Hark, A Vagrant has us covered (“The Scarlet Letter”, middle of the page.)
• There is also a Tumblr tag with Hawthorne pop references.
• Here is Edgar Allan Poe himself, giving Hawthorne mixed praise in a review in Godey’s Lady’s Book, November 1847.
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings and related articles on Unz.org.

Poe

There is, on the contrary, a lot of Poe pop references to comic books.

• The Atlantic has an interesting article on the topic, “Pop Culture’s Undying Obsession with Edgar Allan Poe.”
• Tumblr tag for Edgar Allan Poe
• Poe also appears on Kate Beaton’s Hark, A Vagrant, with Jules Verne.
• Poe’s poem “The Raven” was featured in The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror on the show’s second season (and the Treehouse of Horror would become an annual feature.)
• Wikipedia has pages on pop culture, on television and movies, and even on music that were influenced by, or based on, Poe’s writings.
• Vincent, a Poe-inspired short animation by Tim Burton, with narration read by, who else, Vincent Price (1982).
• Musical interlude: several of Poe’s poems have been set to music.  Here are “Annabel Lee” as sung by James Johnston and by Joan Baez; Phil Och’s version of “The Bells”; and Basil Rathbone reciting “The Raven” to music by Olivier Messian.
• Christopher Walken reads “The Raven.”
• There are two opera versions of “The Fall of the House of Usher”: one in French by Claude Debussy, “La Chute de la maison Usher”, unfortunately left unfinished (ignore the spelling on the YouTube, the poster obviously doesn’t speak French), and one in English by Philip Glass — here is an excerpt.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s writings and related works on Unz.org, including short films.

By the way, Poe died in mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.  Given that he was a pedophile (hey, he even married his 13-year-old cousin when he was 29), I don’t care how good a writer he was — I don’t mourn his early death.

Take that, Hast’yr!

We hadn’t played Arkham Horror, the cooperative board game from Fantastic Flight Games, in over four years.  We played the basic game, without any of the expansions.

Arkham Horror pits all the players against the horrors from beyond that are opening gates into the town and letting loose monsters to haunt the streets.  The players each play an investigator with different skills, gear, knowledge, and resilience, trying to prevent an Ancient One from breaking through into our world; there are 16 investigators to pick from. There is a neat wiki with tons of information on the game, and of course the official support page from Fantasy Flight Games offers lots of free resources.

We drew three investigator cards each at random and picked from those; in play at the start were Gloria Goldberg the writer, who is hell on wheels at exploring other dimensions; Michael McGlen, a big tough gangster with a tommy gun, and I played Darrell Simmons, a photographer at the Arkham newspaper.  As our Ancient One opponent, we drew Hast’yr.

As usually happens in such a game, we had a mix of incredibly bad luck and bad rolls, and phenomenal good luck on other aspects.  On the lucky side: through luck of the draw, I started the game with an Elder Sign, which allows you to seal an interdimensional portal without having to make a skill roll or spend clue tokens.  In fact, we would go on to find all four Elder Signs in the deck! Getting Gloria among the investigators was also good luck, she was crucial.

On the unlucky side, Darrell was the victim of a curse early on and couldn’t shake it for a long time, so the opening phase of the game, which should have relatively easier, was a mess.  We had long strings when we rolled big handfuls of dice and couldn’t get a success, even without the curse.  (Or maybe the players were cursed.)  Eventually, I had to sacrifice Darrell to seal a gate, spending his last points of sanity and stamina; then I drew another character at random and finished the game with Jenny Barnes the two-fisted dilettante.

We spent most of the game staring our doom in the face, with five or six gates open (when a seventh gate opens, you enter the end game and things get even more difficult.)  We really, really thought we were going to lose horribly, and in fairly short order, but somehow through luck, strategy and cooperation, we managed to seal the required six gates and prevent Hast’yr from breaking through.  It was a long game, and a nail-biter ending.  All in all, the best Arkham Horror episode I’d ever played.

Best of all, I think, gangster Mike McGlen somehow ended up as Deputy of Arkham.  I guess when enough monsters have terrorized the town and law and order are breaking down, they’ll take anyone!

Immersion and Verisimilitude in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

The Week 3 reading assignment for my online class on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World was Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I read this book about 20 years ago, right after the Francis Ford Coppola movie of the same name came out because friends told me the movie did in fact make lots of changes to the story.  I confess, I’m not a devoted fan of the vampire sub-genre and I had not much enjoyed the book.  Re-reading for this class, I made an effort to look at it with news eyes; I still didn’t enjoy it much for its own sake, but I was interested in seeing in which ways and by which means it had so marked the genre.

Here is my 300-word essay on a small aspect.

Dinner in 25 minutes

Last night, I made pan-fried wild-caught Alaska pink salmon with shawarma spice rub, steamed spinach, basil basmati rice, and lemon-garlic drizzle sauce.  All in less than half an hour, but for the first time since the holidays, I used all four stove burners at once.  Here is how!  This is the version for 2 persons, easily modified to suit. 

Pop Culture Frankenstein

To go with my online class Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I started a series of posts listing companion materials in pop culture, preferably ones that are a little forgotten, have not received the attention I think they deserve, or take an unusual angle.  All the better if they are available online, double-plus for free.

These are the ones I propose to accompany Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or: The New Prometheus.

• I  was nagged by the parallel with George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (My Fair Lady on the stage and in a movie).  Turns out I was not the only one: John H. Lienhard has some related thoughts in his paper Frankenstein, Faust and Pygmalion, as did Jamie S. Rich in a review of the 1938 movie “Pygmalion”.
• The first Frankenstein movie ever made, the 1910 silent 16-minute production by Edison Studios.
• The 1931 classic movie with Boris Karloff, directed by James Whale, on Vimeo (with Spanish subtitles).
• This YouTube playlist has 37 Frankenstein clips including the 13-part audiobook, the 1910 silent movie, the 1932 (13 episodes), 1947 (2 episodes) and 1955 (2 episodes) radio drama versions, and more.
• Librivox offers five audiobook versions, all free, of Frankenstein.
• Here is a fun one: the National Institute of Health, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has an online exhibit and lesson plans on Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature as part of its higher education section on the history of medicine.
• There’s an app for that: Frankenstein for iPad, from Inkle.
• Kate Beaton’s webcomic Hark, a Vagrant on Mary Shelley.
• Less pop culture, mostly scholarly: over 200 articles on the topic of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein!  Some are written by science fiction authors, like Brian Aldiss.
• Works from and on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley on Unz.org.

Aldini, Giovanni. Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvanisme; avec une série d’expériences faites en présence des commissaires de l’Institut national de France, et en divers amphithéatres anatomiques de Londres. Vol. 1, plate 4. Paris, Fournier, 1804.

More Pop Culture Vampires

To go with my online class Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I started a series of posts listing companion materials in pop culture; I’ve already given some to go with the Week 3 reading, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I wanted to add the two vampire stories I’ve liked best, and they are not Stoker’s.

Although I’m not a big fan of the genre, I do still like Barbara Hambly’s Those Who Hunt the Night.  It has a plucky, non-submissive heroine with a science background, a Spanish don vampire, and a scientifc approach to vampirism. Best of all, it tackles the idea of otherness more honestly than many books in the genre.  Plus I just think that Hambly is very good at characterization, at writing protagonists who are flawed and human, and at depicting romances that are made more poignant for their seemingly prosaic nature.  I love all her books, be they fantasy, science fiction or mysteries.

Second, one of the more unusual examples of vampire in literature, guaranteed to really, really be Science Fiction (TM): Canadian author and scientist Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Watts’ short stories and novels can all be downloaded free under Creative Common license if you poke around his site. Blindsight features vampires as the by-product of gene therapy (this is not a spoiler, it’s mentioned in the first chapter). Here is a darkly funny prequel presented by Peter Watts himself in the form of a conference talk on Vampire Domestication — if you appreciate very tongue-in-cheek humour.

Familiarity breeds… all sorts of things

The online classes I’m taking are supported by discussion forums.  I’m observing the well-known phenomenon of Internet discussion spiralling down into bickering and nastiness.  The single most misused tool is the option to keep a comment anonymous; while I don’t want to take away the option, I wish people didn’t cloak themselves in anonymity to be jerks online.

There’s also that real family feeling, you know: you may like your siblings or cousins, but if you see too much of them, they start driving you crazy.  Any small community, including online community, seems to display at least a little bit of this.

Right now, I’m pulling out of most discussions and I’m trying to refrain from engaging in most new ones, unless it’s to provide something helpful, positive, chipper and upbeat.  I’m quick to anger by nature, and I need to hold back on my reflex to pound perceived offenders into the ground — that doesn’t contribute to improvement, satisfying as it might be.  But this pulling out also leaves me feeling superficial and flighty.  😦

Lewis Carroll’s Alice

The second week’s reading assignment for my online class on Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World was Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865: University of Adelaide, with Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations; Project Gutenberg, with Arthur Rackham’s illustrations) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872: University of Adelaide, with Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations; Project Gutenberg, no illustrations).

I first read these books as a kid, in a well annotated edition featuring, I believe, the translation by Henri Parisot.  At any rate, I still remember the first verse of Jabberwocky:

Il était grilheure; les slictueux toves
Gyraient sur l’alloinde et vriblaient
Tout flivoreux vaguaint les borogoves
Les verchons fourgus bourniflaient.

This is the first work that made me realise how complex an enterprise translating from one language to another can be.  Until then, I assumed that words were objective entities, there was a correct label for everything, and translating merely meant grabbing the proper label from another shelf — German, English or Chinese.  Alice gave me a glimpse into the complexities of language.  I was particularly surprised and delighted by Humpty Dumpty’s relationship with words.  My love of language is still untarnished decades later!

Anyhow, here is my 300-word essay, with the numbered references listed below.  I also added hyperlinks to relevant illustrations, for your enjoyment.

Pop Culture Dracula

To go with my online class Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World, I started a series of posts listing companion materials in pop culture, preferably ones that are a little forgotten, have not received the attention I think they deserve, or take an unusual angle.  All the better if they are available online, double-plus for free.

These are the ones I propose to accompany Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  (Note that I’m trying to concentrate on characters from Stoker’s book, not vampires in general, otherwise we would drown in references.)

• Mina Murray’s portrayal in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not the disappointing movie based on the series). I enjoyed volumes 1 and 2 of the collected issues, though not the subsequent books.
• The 1922 movie Nosferatu, a cult classic available free online; it was an unauthorized version of Dracula so the characters were renamed.
• The 1931 authorized movie version, Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, also available free online.
• The 1938 radio play Dracula, which was the inaugural episode of Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air, also available free online.
• The 1958 Hammer Films version with the suave Peter Cushing, titled Horror of Dracula to distinguish it from Bela Lugosi’s landmark performance; free, on DailyMotion.
• Kate Beaton’s take in her webcomic Hark, a Vagrant: Dracula.
• There’s an app for that: PadWorx’ Dracula for iPad, an interactive version of the story.
• Bram Stoker’s works online on Unz.org.