Vampirology (2)

[Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)]

In 1993, engineering professor Andrew Keane ... tackled the problem of designing a better space-station girder for American astronauts. He devised strings of numbers expressing the girder's thickness, material, angle of attachment, and other requirements. The numbers were analogous to genes, with each string of numbers representing a chromosome.

Keane coped this "genome" until he had produced a diverse founding population, then ran his evolution program on eleven networked computers. According to U.S. News and World Report (July 27, 1988): "For several days the truss designs had cybersex - they swapped digital genes with random abandon ... Those designs that suppressed vibration best yet remained lightweight and strong were rewarded with greater fertility. Generation by generation, the fittest got fitter. The program threw occasional random mutations among the competing genomes to provide a little extra variety."

Fifteen generations and 4,500 different designs later, an optimal truss emerged, looking vastly different from the ones conceived of by NASA's human engineers. According to Keane, the lumpy, knob-ended result looked somewhat like a leg bone. Tests on the evolved models proved them superior to those designed by humans.

- Richard Milner. Darwin's Universe: Evolution from A to Z (Berkeley & LA: University of California Press, 2009): 164.

"Why isn't everyone a vampire?"

It sounds like a bit of a silly question. But then I guess that anyone who's ever read Dracula has done a few calculations in their head about the sheer exponential speed with which the vampire scourge will spread if everyone who's bitten becomes a bloodsucking fiend in their turn.

[John Sutherland: The Literary Detective (2000)]

That painstaking sleuth into everything literary (and trivial?), John Sutherland, discusses the subject in detail in his essay of the same name, included in The Literary Detective: 100 Puzzles in Classic Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000):

Let us assume that each vampire infects one victim a year, and that this victim dies during the course of the year to become, in turn, a vampire. Since they are immortal, each vampire will form the centre of an annually expanding circle, each of which will become the centre of his or her own circle. The circle will widen at the rate of 2 x n-1. In year one (say, 1500) there is one new vampire; in 1501, two, in 1502, 4; in 1503, 8; and so, by the simple process of exponential increase, there will be 1,024 new vampires in 1510. ... Within thirty-one years the vampire population will have reached 2 billion. By 1897, the presumable date of Stoker's novel, the numbers are incalculably vast. In fact so vast that they will probably have collapsed to nil. Long since everyone will have been vampirized; there will be no more food-supply ... Dracula and his kind will die out. And with them the human race. [pp. 711-12]

It's a worry. It's almost the worry, in fact, for any writers (or filmmakers) aspiring to make an original contribution to the vampire genre. Sutherland gets round it in two ways: First, by postulating the "selective infection" idea:

There is, one deduces, an inner elite of "super-vampires" who circulate Dracula's sacramental blood among themselves - true communicants in the horrible sect ... it is only this small coterie which is immortal, we may speculate. The bulk of their victims are disposable nourishment - a kind of human blood-bank to be discarded when exhausted. [p.714]

In his footnote to this passage, Sutherland mentions that "This seems to be the line adopted in Anne Rice's very successful series of modern vampire stories" [p.749]. "Unfortunately," he goes on to say, "Stoker does not give us any clear warrant for this speculation, nor does he (as far as I can see) work it plausibly into his narrative." [p.714]

His second attempt at a solution is more ingenious, though admittedly more speculative:

The Dracula paradox touches on what was, for the nineteenth century, a strange mystery about actual epidemics. How and why did they die out? Cholera, for instance, smallpox, and venereal disease infected large tracts of the population, often very quickly. Why did their infectious spread ever stop? ... Why did not every epidemic become, literally (as no disease ever truly has been) a pandemic?

He goes on to cite a number of explanations proposed by nineteenth century theorists; "For the faithful, the hand of God ...was the remote reason for the starting, cresting, and stopping of diseases."

Darwinists, by contrast, believed that disease was a mechanism for separating the weak from the strong, building up 'resistance'. Epidemiologists, finally, drew on the same image of Van Helsing - that of the widening ripples of a pebble thrown in a pond. With the dispersion of energy, as the ripple enlarges it becomes weaker. So, it was believed, did the virus ... lose its virulence and through exposure the host population might become stronger, develop strategies of resistance.

Whichever way you read it, then, Nature appears to operate its own version of the Eleatic paradox: the one which explains why Achilles can never beat the tortoise in a running race. First he travels half the distance the tortoise (who had a head start) has already covered, then half the remaining distance, then half of that distance, and so on and so on ad infinitum. There will always be another tiny fraction of the distance left to cover. Ergo, Achilles will never overtake the tortoise.

•
[Vamp]

It's perhaps a slightly far-fetched comparison, but if we see that "truss-creating" computer programme cited above as analogous to all the ingenious and less-ingenious creators who've turned their minds to concocting vampire tales in the century or so since Bram Stoker let the cat out of the bag, perhaps we can see the the "lumpy, knob-ended" set of doctrines (rather like Asimov's three laws of Robotics) which have resulted as, in their turn, "superior to those designed by humans" - by any particular human, that is.

In a strange sense, that appears to be how pop culture works.

Let's run through our vampire catechism, then:

Can vampires go out in the daylight?

Dracula is frequently seen out in the daylight (though he admittedly looks a bit shaky there). It isn't really till Nosferatu (1922), Murnau's (unauthorised) film adaptation of the novel, that sunlight becomes immediately fatal to vampires. It's how Count Orlock is finally killed in the movie. It's remained a favourite convention of film-makers ever since. In Joss Whedon's TV series Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), any old tarpaulin slung round your shoulders seems to suffice to keep away danger, though full exposure is still deadly. In the more recent film Daybreakers (2009), graduated exposure to sunlight is the only way of curing the vampire "virus", as demonstrated by Willem Dafoe to the still-infected Ethan Hawke.

Does everyone bitten by a vampire become one in their turn?

So it would appear - in folklore, at any rate, and thus, accordingly, in Stoker's folklore-saturated novel. The mathematical difficulties caused by this contention became apparent very soon, though. Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu remake has a haunting scene showing the vampire (and rat) infested streets of "Jonathan Harker's" hometown, full of coffins and mourning processions. Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975) imagines a whole town which is irreparably infected by them and effectively uninhabitable by human beings. It isn't still Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles got underway with Interview with the Vampire (1976) that the idea of having to drink the vampire's own blood to accomplish infection became entrenched (though it had been hazily evident before that). Since then, it's become the faute de mieux solution to the dilemma: in Buffy as well as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2005) and its successors.

Are crosses, garlic and holy water effective against vampires?

Not particularly - onscreen, at any rate. Powerful vampires seem to be able to sweep them outside without much difficulty. A "king" vampire even manages to consume food full of garlic in The Lost Boys (9187) as a consequence of having been invited into the house earlier. Even in popular fiction, it's a little difficult to see the power of the cross as physically inherent in the design, without any reference to its liturgical significance. Filmmakers therefore prefer to rely on the "natural" properties of daylight.

Can vampires enter private dwellings without being specifically invited in?

No, but gullible mothers and flatmates tend to let them in anyway, however specifically they've been told not to. So this isn't as valuable a safeguard as it might seem. Once they've been in, they can return anytime they choose.

Where and when did vampires begin?

In ancient Egypt, accordingly to Anne Rice. In medieval Wallachia, according to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) - though the identification of the fictional Count Dracula with the historical Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476) is far more equivocal in the novel, as Leslie Klinger demonstrates in his New Annotated Dracula (2008). Outside the walls of Antioch during the First Crusade, according to J. S. Cardone's less well-known indie-vampire classic The Forsaken: Desert Vampires (2001). Whichever "origin myth" you choose, it tends to be associated with an act of extreme bloodthirsty greed on the part of some living person.

Could a world inhabited solely by vampires actually sustain itself?

Daybreakers, with its towers of living people hooked up (Matrix-style) to blood-vats is probably the most extensive canvassing of the issue to date. No, in short. Richard Matheson's book I am Legend (1954) is less pessimistic, though certain critics have observed that his infected, blood-drinking hordes really resemble zombies more than they do classical vampires. The various film treatments of the book (with Charlton Heston in 1971; with Will Smith in 2007) have tended to be more successful in portraying a world empty of humanity than in solving the difficulties and inconsistencies in Matheson's original plot.

Is there any cure for vampirism once it's been contracted?

Mina Harker is cured (allegedly) when her "infector", Count Dracula, is killed and burned at the end of the book. Angel, in the Buffy series, is not cured so much as incapacitated when some gypsies curse him with the return of his soul. Spike, in the same TV series, has a computer chip planted in his head which prevents from attacking or killing anyone "good" (though demons and human malefactors still appear to be fair play). Daybreakers is the first story (so far as I'm aware) to toy with the idea of a complete cure through graduated doses of sunshine (combined with large amounts of water to counter the burning).

How do you kill a vampire?

Simple - stick a stake through their heart. In Buffy, this makes them disappear at once in a puff of dust. In the novel Dracula, decapitation appears to be required also. Lucy Westenra has her severed head stuffed full of garlic to make doubly sure. Burning the body also seems to have a certain efficacy. It's unclear if this is sufficient in itself, though, or requires the staking and slashing to have taken place first.

All in all, as most juvenile students of the genre are well aware, vampire-hunting appears to be one of the safest sports in existence. All you have to do to succeed at it is:

• Not wait till almost dusk - when vampires arise - to explore the creepy old mansion on the outskirts of town.
• Not forget to bring along your little kit of stakes, hammers, holy water, garlic, machetes, matches, lighters and lighter-fluid.
• Not fall in love with exceptionally fine-looking vampires as they lie in their coffins, and sit there watching them till the sun sinks in the west.
• Not bring along the erstwhile girlfriend or boyfriend of same, and have to persuade them of the necessity for this little operation over the open grave in question.
• Not wildly underestimate your opponent, and just give them a bit of a ding rather than actually making sure they're done for (obviously the term "dead" becomes a little ambiguous in this context).

Observe these simple rules, and you can look forward to a long and prosperous career as a vampire slayer without any need for the constant physical training and supernaturally developed senses of Buffy and her crew.

•
[Charles Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)]

For the typologist the type (eidos) is real and the variation an illusion, while for the populationist, the type (average) is an abstraction and only the variation is real. No two ways of looking at nature could be more different.

- Ernst Mayr, "Darwin and the Evolutionary Theory in Biology" (1959)

I'm afraid that the same basic dichotomy applies to vampire fiction (as it does to lit crit in general, I guess). You can spend your time trying to deduce the essential features of the ideal type, or delight in the peculiarities and divagations of the population of such stories.

A very wise professor I once met compared it to acting like Gulliver in Lilliput and Gulliver in Brobdingnag. Critics can regard themselves as giant lawgivers, whose function is to observe the ways of the puny ants crawling at their feet, or they can see themselves as dwarfs crouching at the feet of giants, whose job is to learn from the ways of their betters.

Arrogance or humility - you take your pick.

I couldn't write a believable vampire story to save my life, which is why I suspect a healthy dose of the second attitude might suit me better in the long run. As long as you're not too pompous about it, though, I think a little bit of looking down on them from above won't hurt all that much.

So, as some small tribute to all those loons who've spent their time entertaining me by writing such stories (and elaborating their basic conventions), I'll leave you with a small listing of the texts [the population] I've used in my attempt to construct this portrait of the true, eidetic vampire as we know him-or-her (or it) today:

The Vampire Canon:
An Introduction

1. John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819):
   
   
   
   • Bleiler, E. F., ed. Three Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole; Vathek, by William Beckford; The Vampyre, by John Polidori; and a Fragment of a Novel by Lord Byron. 1764, 1786, & 1819. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966.


2. Varney the Vampire (1845):
   
   
   
   • Rymer, James Malcolm [or Thomas Peckett Prest]. Varney the Vampyre or The Feast of Blood. 1847. 2 vols. Introduction by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover Publications, 1972.


3. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872):
   
   
   
   • Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly: Stories. 1872. Introduction by V. S. Pritchett. London: John Lehmann, 1947.


4. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897):
   
   
   
   • Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. London: Arrow Books, 1973.
   • Stoker, Bram. Dracula’s Guest. 1914. London: Arrow Books, 1966.
   • Ludlam, Harry. A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker. London: The Quality Book Club, 1962.
   • McNally, Raymond T. & Radu Florescu. In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires. 1972. London: Robson Books, 1997.
   • Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Annotated Dracula: Dracula by Bram Stoker. 1897. Art by Sätty. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. / Publisher, 1975.
   • McNally, Raymond & Radu Florescu, ed. The Essential Dracula: A Completely Illustrated & Annotated Edition of Bram Stoker’s Classic Novel. 1897. New York: Mayflower Books, 1979.
   • Haining, Peter, ed. Shades of Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Uncollected Stories. London: William Kimber, 1982.
   • McNally, Raymond T. Dracula was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania. 1983. London: Book Club Associates, 1984.
   • Wolf, Leonard, ed. The Essential Dracula: Including the Complete Novel by Bram Stoker. 1897. Ed. Leonard Wolf. 1975. Notes, Bibliography and Filmography Revised in Collaboration with Roxana Stuart. Illustrations by Christopher Bing. A Byron Preiss Book. New York: Plume, 1993.
   • Stoker, Bram. The New Annotated Dracula. 1897. Edited by Leslie S. Klinger. Additional Research by Janet Byrne. Introduction by Neil Gaiman. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Inc., 2008.


5. Richard Matheson's I am Legend (1954):
   
   
   
   • The Last Man on Earth, dir. Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow - starring Vincent Price - (Italy, 1964).
   • The Omega Man, dir. Boris Sagal, writ. John William Corrington & Joyce H. Corrington - starring Charlton Heston - (UK, 1971).
   • I am Legend, dir. Francis Lawrence, writ. Akiva Goldsman & Mark Protosevich - starring Will Smith & Alice Braga - (USA, 2007).


6. Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975):
   
   
   
   • King, Stephen. 'Salem's Lot. 1975. London: New English Library, 1976.
   • Salem's Lot: TV Miniseries, dir. Tobe Hooper, writ. Paul Monash - starring David Soul & James Mason - (USA, 1979).
   • 'Salem's Lot: TV Miniseries, dir. Mikael Salomon, writ. Peter Filardi - starring Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer & James Cromwell - (USA, 2004).
   • King, Stephen. 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition. Photographs by Jerry Uelsmann. 2005. New York: Doubleday, 2005.


7. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles: 15 vols (1976-2003):
   
   
   
   • Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. 1976. The Vampire Chronicles, 1. London: Futura, 1994.
   • Rice, Anne. The Vampire Lestat. 1985. The Vampire Chronicles, 2. London: Futura, 1986.
   • Rice, Anne. Queen of the Damned. 1988. The Vampire Chronicles, 3. London: Futura, 1990.
   • Rice, Anne. The Witching Hour: A Novel. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 1. 1990. London: Chatto & Windus, 1991.
   • Rice, Anne. The Tale of the Body Thief. The Vampire Chronicles, 4. 1992. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.
   • Rice, Anne. Lasher: A Novel. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 2. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993.
   • Rice, Anne. Taltos: Lives of the Mayfair Witches. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 3. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.
   • Rice, Anne. Memnoch the Devil. The Vampire Chronicles, 5. London: Chatto & Windus, 1995.
   • Rice, Anne. The Vampire Armand. The Vampire Chronicles, 6 (1998)
   • Rice, Anne. Pandora. New Tales of the Vampires, 1 (1998)
   • Rice, Anne. Vittorio the Vampire. New Tales of the Vampires, 2 (1999)
   • Rice, Anne. Merrick. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 4 (2000)
   • Rice, Anne. Blood and Gold. The Vampire Chronicles, 7 (2001)
   • Rice, Anne. Blackwood Farm. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 5 (2002)
   • Rice, Anne. Blood Canticle. The Lives of the Mayfair Witches, 6 (2003)


8. Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 1 feature film (1992) / 7 TV Series (1997-2003).


9. J. S. Cardone's The Forsaken (2001):
   
   
   
   • The Forsaken: Desert Vampires, writ. & dir. J. S. Cardone, prod. Carol Kottenbrook & Scott Enbinder – starring Kerr Smith, Brendan Fehr, Izabella Miko & Johnathon Schaech - (USA, 2001).


10. John Ajvide Lindqvist's Låt Den Rätte Komma In (2004):
    
    
    
    • Let the Right One In, dir. Tomas Alfredson, writ. John Ajvide Lindqvist, prod. Carl Molinder & John Nordling – starring Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson & Per Ragnar - (Sweden, 2008).


11. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga: 4 novels (2005-8) / 3 feature films (2008-10).

Not to mention John Carpenter's Vampires (1998), with James Woods as the leader of a church-sanctioned Western-style posse of rootin'-tootin', pistol-packing vampire-hunters; the Underworld trilogy (2006-9), with Kate Beckinsale in tight leather combatting werewolves (until she falls in love with one); Van Helsing (2004), with Kate Beckinsale in a frilly peasant blouse assisting Hugh Jackaman as the eponymous hero; and so on and so on and so on ...

Add flame to blue touchpaper and retire.

[Kate Beckinsale in Underworld (2003)]

Marginalising Dracula:

The Strange World of the Annotated Editions

[Leonard Wolf: The Annotated Dracula (1975)]

So I sent in an abstract for a projected anthology to be entitled Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations. Strangely enough, they didn't take me up on my offer to contribute an essay on The Annotated Dracula (or, rather, all the editions of Bram Stoker's novel which have come out under that title or slight variations on same) - too frivolous-sounding, I guess.

In a way I'm not sorry, though. Spinning out my views into 7,000 words of ponderous Academic prose always did sound a bit too much like hard work. Instead, I thought I'd just post the main points here.

•

[Sätty: Illustration for The Annotated Dracula (1975)]

"With Stoker's novel serving as the backbone, this one-volume Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to the world's most famous vampire looks at its author, its psychological and sociological implications, the stage plays, the movies, television versions, the actors, and, of course, the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler."

- Ad for Mark Dawzidiak's Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Dracula. London: The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 2008.

I mean, what's next? The Home Shopper's Guide to Dracula? Dracula Does Dallas? Tuesdays with Dracula? - Coming Soon to a Bloodbank Near You ... Is nothing sacred anymore? It would appear not.

A certain amount of the fangs - get it? "Fangs" - for this avalanche of drivel has to go to Leonard Wolf (no, not the one who used to be married to Virginia Woolf).

Born in Vulcan, Romania (Transylvania), Leonard was originally named 'Ludovic', changed upon his arrival in the United States in 1930 with his mother, Rose-ita [Cool name, don't you think? Even a little prophetic, perhaps ...]

- Wikipedia

Among his numerous other literary accomplishments, in 1972 he published A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead, a book which has some claims to have started the modern Dracula revival.

In 1975, Wolf followed it up with The Annotated Dracula, an obsessively detailed and beautifully illustrated edition of Bram Stoker's novel.

There's something almost pure and spiritual (in retrospect) about the annotated editions of famous books produced by New York publisher Clarkson N. Potter and his various rivals and collaborators in the mid-sixties and seventies.

They include Isaac Asimov's - somewhat po-faced - annotated versions of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Byron's Don Juan, Milton's Paradise Lost, along with his Guide to the Bible and Guide to Shakespeare (not to mention Familiar Poems, Annotated). There were also beautiful editions of Thoreau's Walden (ed. Philip van Doren Stern, 1970) and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (ed. Walter James Miller, 1976).

Two bona fide classics emerged from the process: Martin Gardner's Annotated Alice (1960 - now available in the 2000 "definitive edition"), which he followed up with the Annotated Snark (1962), and annotated versions of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1965) and Chesterton's The Man Who Was Friday (1999); and William S. Baring-Gould's 2-volume Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1967), a mad compendium of everything then known about the detective and his several identities, morganatic wives, triple-headed assistant Dr John H. (or "James", as his - second? - wife addressed him on one occasion) Watson, with illustrations, chronological tables along with the full text of the canonical Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories ...

[W. S. Baring Gould: The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (1967)]

Baring-Gould's book apart, the aims of this motley group of annotated texts, by a variety of editors (under a variety of imprints) were remarkably consistent. They consisted of informative contextual - and textual - notes on various matters designed to improve understanding and appreciation of great works of literature. Their status - and the value of the information they provided - depended very much on the scholarly standing of their respective editors.

Isaac Asimov's claims as an interpreter of poetry might have seemed (to anyone but himself) a little on the flimsy side, but then the works he chose to adorn (Swift, Milton - a shame he didn't get to do Dante, really) tended to have a strong science-fictional element which gave full scope to his delight in calculation and scientific patter. Martin Gardner's love of puzzles and paradoxes made him almost the ideal companion to Lewis Carroll (whose mathematical side he was able to do justice to almost for the first time).

The one striking exception was Baring-Gould. It's not that he wasn't an expert on Holmes. His 1962 book Sherlock Holmes: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective was actually the first - though not, alas, the last - biography of the famous sleuth. It's the approach he chose to take to the "canon" which was unusual and striking.

I mentioned in a previous post on J. R. R. Tolkien's posthumous creativity the phenomenon of Holmesian (or "Sherlockian", if you happen to be American) "Higher Criticism". This consists of:

writing essays about the Holmes canon which assume as a basic convention the actual existence of its central characters, and the subordinate role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as Dr. Watson's literary agent.

Its inventor, Monsignor Ronald Knox, outlined the main lines of the method in one of the pieces in his 1928 book Essays in Satire, and the idea spread like wildfire - presumably because it appealed to the same kinds of people who enjoy crossword puzzles, acrostics, the Baconian theory of Shakespeare, the rehabilitation of Richard III, and other even more recondite parlour games.

Of course the main gag behind the "Higher Criticism" was nineteenth-century Biblical scholarship, which - especially in the hands of the more ponderous German textual critics - had produced a bewildering forest of double (and triple) "Isaiahs" and "Ezekiels", not to mention the immense number of people who had collaborated in, edited, revised, added to, garbled, and otherwise served to transmit the gospels and the first chapter of Genesis. Biblical criticism had the disadvantage of demanding a pretty good knowledge of Hebrew and Greek (not to mention Aramaic, Latin, German and a number of other dauntingly difficult tongues), though. The good thing about it was that the invention of a really juicy new hypothesis virtually guaranteed instant notoriety; the bad thing was that there was a good chance of losing your cushy academic job and being run out of town on a rail ...

Holmesian higher criticism, by contrast, was basically as safe as houses. It offended no-one and pleased almost everyone (except, one suspects, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his heirs). The only real risk was passing out from drinking too much at one of the annual dinners of the Baker Street Irregulars (whose inhouse magazine published most of the crucial articles in this increasingly intricate war of words).

Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes, then, is as much of a memorial as it is a contribution to 40-odd years of footling speculation about Holmes's shoe-size, his Tibetan explorations, the vast number of pseudonyms under which he published scientific and other forms of research, his connections with Jack the Ripper and the Royal Families of Europe, etc. etc. etc. If you have no sense of humour, or - more to the point - no sense of the absurd, it's unlikely to strike you as a particularly profitable way of spending your time. If, however, you do, it might well qualify as a friend for life.

So what does all this have to do with Dracula, the ostensible subject of this post? Well, Wolf's Annotated Dracula is a very respectable contribution to the first generation of annotated tomes listed above. It's spectacular both in its size and the strange beatuy of its illustrations, and very informative on Stoker's sources for the first, "foreign" section of the novel (basically all cribbed from a variety of travel guides and histories, above all Emily Gerard's The Land Beyond the Forest (1888)). There's a good bibliography, a useful calendar of events in the novel, along with a rudimentary filmography and guide to the stage versions of the novel. There's no attempt to pretend that Dracula is real, or to treat it as anything but the classic Gothic novel it is.

Wolf followed it up two years later with an edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reprinting the original, 1818, text of the novel, though with full notes on her subsequent rewritings and revisions of this first, most direct (and arguably best) version of the story.

And there, presumably, the story should have ended. How much more information about Dracula do you actually need?

•

[Raymond McNally & Radu Florescu: The Essential Dracula (1979)]

Well, as it turns out, quite a bit.

In 1979, Raymond McNally and his colleague, the Romanian scholar Radu Florescu, collaborated on their own attempt at a comprehensive annotated edition, The Essential Dracula, which drew both on the Eastern European local detail outlined in their 1972 book In Search of Dracula, but also on the recent rediscovery of the manuscript notes for Stoker's novel.

There's no doubt that their book had a good deal to add to Wolf's basically humanist view of Dracula. Their research was thorough (and thoroughly up-to-date). The solid and unfanciful way in which they presented it had the effect of making Wolf look, at best, like a unspecialised enthusiast; at worst, like a bit of an amateur.

Don't get me wrong, when it came to the essentials, they were every bit as crazy as he was (one of McNally's subsequent books, about the so-called "Blood-Countess of Transylvania", was entitled Dracula was a Woman), but they somehow carried it off better.

It would be interesting to know more precise details about the relations between the two rival schools of Vampirology represented by McNally / Florescu and Wolf. Suffice it to say that when the latter was offered the chance to revise and update his 1975 book for a paperback edition in 1993, he called it (somewhat confusingly) The Essential Dracula, rather than some variation on the Annotated title of his original version.

[Leonard Wolf: The Essential Dracula (1993)]

An attempt to gazump his competitors? Who knows? That "definitive" subtitle is presumably meant as some kind of a dig at them. In any case, Wolf's Essential Dracula may lack the imposing dimensions (and sumptuous illustrations) of its predecessor, but it makes up for that in the detail of its information on (especially) the explosion of interest in all things vampire and Dracula-related in pop culture since the 1970s. It was the first of these books I actually owned, so I do owe it a debt for bringing me up to speed on Stoker and his methods (though of course it lacks the specific information about his working notes contained in Mcnally and Florescu's Essential Dracula).

And there, one is tempted to say, the saga really needed to come to an end. It was not to be, however.

•

[Leslie Klinger: The New Annotated Dracula (2008)]

In 2008 Leslie S. Klinger (no relation, I assume, to the cross-dressing malingerer in M*A*S*H*), fresh from his immense (self-appointed) task of re-annotating Sherlock Holmes – three fat volumes in place of Baring-Gould's two – published The New Annotated Dracula.

Klinger’s sequel to Baring-Gould apes the latter's attempt to operate solely within the bounds of Holmesian Higher Criticism, but in a curiously half-hearted and unconvincing way. The freshness and daring of acting on this set of (basically fatuous) assumptions has turned into a kind of ponderous lip-service to the appearances, combined with an immense piling-up of often (alas) trivial period detail. Much of this would have been considered unnecessary for previous generations of readers, and there's an element of padding which would surely once have been ruthlessly edited out.

[Leslie Klinger: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2005-6)]

In this Klinger follows the example of other "second generation" annotated texts, notably those published by W. W. Norton & Company of New York. Some of these (the various editions of fairy tales edited by Maria Tatar spring to mind) are sound enough, if - at times - a trifle underwhelming. Some, however - notably the editions of Huckleberry Finn and The Wizard of Oz by Michael Patrick Hearn - also display the interesting property of drowning their originals in ill-considered trivia. This doesn't matter so much with L. Frank Baum, whose writing is loose enough to start with, but when one finds oneself yawning over Mark Twain, then clearly something has gone wrong.

Holmesian parlour-games can be played well or poorly, but there's nothing particularly shocking about them after approximately eighty years of such horseplay. Klinger's attempts to apply the same technique to Stoker's Dracula are, however, nothing short of disastrous. Bram Stoker has been relegated to the role of editor of the “Harker Papers”, and various hints are thrown out in the notes and introduction to suggest that the Count himself (who apparently survived the - staged? - death-scene at the end of the narrative) might have been instrumental in shaping the manuscript into its present form.

All of this seems harmless enough. It’s certainly in line with the many, many attempts which have already been made to write books (Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005) being one prominent example) which supplement or intersect with the incidents and characters in Stoker’s story. The interesting thing is what a trivialising effect it ends up having on the book itself.

It's not that I mind the concept of inserting one's own silly notions into "classic" texts - especially one so eccentrically written as Dracula, with its elaborate epistolary framework of transcribed journals, newspaper articles, and even primitive audio recordings. It's just that the suspension of disbelief necessary for a ghost story tends to get lost in the process.

To give just one example, Klinger's rather far-fetched theory that the abridged version of his novel which Stoker produced shortly after its publication in 1897 somehow embodies "clues" about what is and is not integral to the narrative has resulted in a seemingly endless series of notes recording every variation between the two. He also records every misprint, down to the most trivial misspellings, in the original edition (which acts as his copytext). After one has added to this a number of notes explaining the concept of a "hansom cab", giving information on contemporary railway timetables and real estate values, the tone of almost hysterical fear and excitement which characterised Stoker's novel in its original form is, to say the least, somewhat diluted.

By all means use Stoker's text to illustrate some crazy notions of your own (a la Nabokov's insane narrator in Pale Fire (1962) - coincidentally (?), also the date of Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes), but to do so as confusingly as this does the original book no favours.

Yes, I read it to the end. Yes, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there (including some very pretty illustrations of contemporary equipment for dealing with "madmen" such as Renfield), but I have to say that my main feeling was disappointment. Do we really need four or five competing chronologies for Dracula? Wolf's original one may well need a little revision, after 35 years of increasingly recondite theorising, but it does have the advantage of being clear and serviceable. And at least he doesn't have to pretend to believe in vampires - or, rather, the vampire - all the time ...

I think it's time to call a moratorium on some of this extracurricular activity. Mind you, I suspect even Klinger's massive tome makes more exciting reading than Vampires and Zombies: Transnational Transformations will when it eventually appears ...

[Francis Ford Coppola: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)]

A Visit to Colville

The Colville General Store
(August 5th, 2001)

"Colville" is one of Kendrick Smithyman's most iconic small-town New Zealand lyrics. (And, yes, I know - I hate that word "iconic," too, and agree that it's overused. It's difficult to find a good alternative in this instance, though).

Here's the poem in its entirety, from his online Collected Poems.

The editors, Margaret Edgcumbe and Peter Simpson, comment:

Colville: first published in Westerly 3 (October 1968), 33; also in Earthquake Weather [1972] and Selected Poems [1989]; a town on the Coromandel Peninsula

Succinct and accurate, but somehow not the full story. For one thing, on his Stout Centre recording of the poem, Kendrick remarks that the poem caused quite a lot of fuss when it first appeared, and that people kept on assuring him that "it's not like that now." As a result (presumably), when it was included in Ian Wedde & Harvey McQueen's 1985 Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse, the title had been changed to "Colville 1964". Subsequently he seems to have gone back on that decision, though, and the title reverted to its original form.

So is it still "like that"? "That sort of place where you stop / long enough to fill the tank, buy plums, / perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick / while somebody local comes / in, leans on the counter, takes a good look / but does not like what he sees of you"? Is it still "intangible as menace, / a monotone with a name, / ... an aspect of human spirit / ... mean, wind-worn"? It's not exactly a pretty picture he paints.

Anyway, in the winter of 2001 I decided to find out. I'd been discussing and poring over the poem for years in class, so I felt it was high time to go and check it out for myself.

[Simon & camera]

I went with my friend Simon Creasey, which may not (in retrospect) have been such a good idea - but then he couldn't be said to have stuffed up any worse than I did, so I guess I'd better just stop blaming others for my own shortcomings.

Colville Store (interior)

The trouble began shortly after we first got into town, about mid-morning. I'd been snapping away with my camera, and just naturally lifted it up and took a picture as we walked into the store. There it is above, in fact.

Well, the way the guy glared it me, I realised at once that this went far beyond any conventional faux pas. And fair enough, too! I hadn't actually realised until them just how much people resent flash photography, when they haven't been asked permission (which I suspect he would have refused, in any case).

It was a supremely vulgar, touristy act, and the fact that I was desperate to get a shot of the counter to illustrate those first lines of the poem was neither here nor there. Mea culpa, that's for sure.

What's more, when I looked at the postcards he had on sale (one of which I bought - you can see it there below), it became obvious that the picturesque nature of his shop was part of his stock in trade. Basically, what I'd done was the touristic equivalent of robbing him at gunpoint.

Colville: the sunny side of the street

How do you recover from a thing like that? The obvious answer would have been to get the hell out of Dodge, but it was a misty, moisty morning, we were both pretty frozen, and since the general store doubled as a café, we decided that forking over some cold hard cash for a coffee and a muffin might help restore matters to an even keel.

Simon in the café

Lo and behold, it seemed to work! The coffee was good, the muffins were tasty, and we even found ourselves getting into conversation with some locals at an adjacent table, which almost never happens - to me, at any rate. Everything was going swimmingly, but then ...

The conversation had been cycling generally around Colville, the people who lived there, tall tales of the bush and the communes, and then Simon asked:

"Has Colville always been this small? I mean, you read about it as one of the big trading ports on the Coromandel ... has there ever been more to it than this?" (with a lofty sweep of the hand, indicating the four or five buildings in sight).

Man, you could almost hear those people stiffen! You treat a couple of random Auckland tourists as if they were human beings, and the next thing you know they're taking liberties. I hastily ushered him out of the café and into the car before he could say anything else, and tromped on the gas pedal.

"What's wrong?" persisted Simon. "What did I say? Is there a problem?"

I'm not sure he got it even when I stopped on the outskirts of town to read him a brief lecture on small town etiquette ("Rule 1. Never look around with a sneer and then comment on how small things are here; Rule 2. Never reveal that you hail from Auckland and that your beverage of choice is latte in a bowl; oh, and of course Rule 3. Never take photos of locals without their permission, especially if you have to walk right inside their dwellings to do so ...")

But maybe I'm just paranoid - perhaps they were just a bit surprised by the question, or genuinely didn't know the answer. One mustn't overreact (after all). We'd almost persuaded ourselves to believe that by the time we roared back into town, many hours later, after having been up to the tip of the peninsula and even taken a dip in the icy cold water.

To give you a slightly better idea of the context, here's a panorama of pictures I took just a bit out of town, with suitable captions from Kendrick's poem:

[Thames Estuary Panorama (1-10)]

Face outwards, over the saltings

the bay, wise as contrition

shallow as their hold on small repute,

good for dragging nets

which men are doing through channels

disproportionate in the blaze

of hot afternoon’s down-going

to a far fire-hard tide’s rise

upon the vague where time is distance?

I don't remember too much about our return to town. We were starving by then, and had (as I mentioned above) persuaded ourselves that there was nothing to worry about. So we went back into the café ...

The coffee was lousy this time round. That can happen anywhere, of course, but it had been quite good on the way up. I couldn't help thinking that something had been done to it. One thing's for certain: that latte wasn't made with love ...

these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial Hall

the store, neighbourhood of salt and hills

The road goes through to somewhere else.

That last line rather sums it up, I'm afraid: "Bleenk and you missed it," as the Australians say. But, then, someone has to live there, maintain the petrol pump and the dairy, organise the dances at the War Memorial Hall.

The poem ends rather equivocally:

Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

How is that sentence to be construed? Is "scars" to be taken as a verb? "It's not only geological faultlines which scar you - creating textures of experience"? Or is "scars" a noun: one of the items in a list (with commas omitted)? "Not a geologic faultline only, scars, textures of experience" ...?

One thing's for certain, he's positing a close link between the character of the inhabitants and the nature of their surroundings - or, at any rate, speculating (as an urban/e outsider) that such might be the case. I can't help feeling that he was onto something there, or is that just me being crass again?

COLVILLE

That sort of place where you stop
long enough to fill the tank, buy plums,
perhaps, and an icecream thing on a stick
while somebody local comes
in, leans on the counter, takes a good look
but does not like what he sees of you,

intangible as menace,
a monotone with a name, as place
it is an aspect of human spirit
(by which shaped), mean, wind-worn. Face
outwards, over the saltings: with what merit
the bay, wise as contrition, shallow

as their hold on small repute,
good for dragging nets which men are doing
through channels, disproportionate in the blaze
of hot afternoon’s down-going
to a far fire-hard tide’s rise
upon the vague where time is distance?

It could be plainly simple
pleasure, but these have another tone
or quality, something aboriginal,
reductive as soil itself – bone
must get close here, final
yet unrefined at all. They endure.

A school, a War Memorial
Hall, the store, neighbourhood of salt
and hills. The road goes through to somewhere else.
Not a geologic fault
line only scars textures of experience.
Defined, plotted; which maps do not speak.

11. 1. 68

[No wonder they gave me a bit of a hard time ...]

Children Of Earth

[Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009)]

I suppose like most nerds brought up on hard sci-fi - that trinity of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, shading off into new wave: Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem - I've always regarded film and TV as the poor cousins of "real" science fiction.

Star Wars on the big screen and Star Trek on the small screen set the tone: fatuous space-opera with spectacular (but mindless) special effects in the former, self-serving imperialist hogwash in the latter. There were exceptions, of course: the psychedelic insanity of Kubrick's 2001, the noir ambiguities of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but for the most part the real action in speculative fiction seemed to lie elsewhere: mostly in those anthologies of "Best Sf stories" I devoured all through my youth.

Of late, though, I've had to revise this attitude. Far from being the impecunious relative, filmed SF is beginning to assume a more dominant role. I put up a post a while ago about how surprisingly impressive the remake of Battlestar Galactica was turning out to be, but I guess I still saw that as a bit of flash in the pan. Now I'm starting to wonder. The main reason for that is Torchwood.

[Doctors to Date:
Query: How can there have been 10 Doctors already
when Gallifreyans are only supposed to go through
9 cycles of metamorphosis?]

Now I've been a Doctor Who fan for as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest TV memories consist of crouching over a black-and-white set where an old white-haired sage was combatting strange monsters in a set which seemed smaller than the average broom-closet. After that came the fey, Chaplinesque Patrick Troughton, the mod Dandy Jon Pertwee, the sublime Tom Baker, and so on and so forth. There were some pretty fine ideas in some of the stories - some exciting moments - but one has to confess that they were never really good in any objective, demonstrable way. There was always an element of camp about the show, a need to suspend judgment in order to enjoy them. That's been as true of the latest, Welsh-based series as of any of its predecessors. David Tennant was a good Doctor, to be sure - even a very good Doctor - but there's only a limited amount that can actually be done with the role.

So the idea of watching a mere spin-off from Doctor Who never really attracted me much. There've been spin-offs before: the dreadful K-9 and Company comes to mind. Infantile was scarcely the word.

[K-9 and Company]

But then we were in the video shop the other day, and there was Children of Earth on the shelf, and I remembered having been assured by another hardcore Doctor Who fan that Torchwood was the bee's knees, so we succumbed to temptation and took it out.

Many hours later, tousle-haired and sleepless, we looked at each other and concluded that we'd have to persevere to the end - that there was no way we were going to get any sleep until we'd got to the end of this particular story.

It's not that the characters are particularly lovable. On the contrary, Gwen, the female star, is quite irritatingly self-satisfied and bossy (in my humble opinion), and I even find Captain Jack rather less than charismatic. There's a certain frisson in the homosexual subplot: boys kissing boys on prime-time TV! But that's not it. The star of this show is the writing.

It's exciting, action-based stuff, to be sure, but what really grabbed me about it - and reminded me strongly of the new look Galactica - was the disenchanted timeliness of its message. You might call it cynical, but I prefer just to see it as terrifyingly credible ...

[The Kiss]

[WARNING: plot spoiler!]

I don't want to wreck the show for those who haven't seen it, but I do have to specify that an alien power has come to earth and is demanding a tribute of children: 10% of the world's population of children, in fact. "Absurd!", you say. Well, of course. But mark how the writers deal with this somewhat improbable premise.

First of all, it turns out that these particular aliens have been here before. That time - in 1965 - they only demanded a ransom of twelve children, in exchange for a promise not to release a virus which would kill an estimated quarter of the world's population. Twelve lives against over a billion? Pretty good deal. The children (orphans, whose absence wouldn't be noted) were duly handed over by Captain Jack Harkness of the Torchwood institute himself.

Now they've come back - with a vengeance. What's the reaction of the British government? To try and cover up that earlier transaction by ordering the judicial murder of everyone involved in the 1965 operation. Then, to try and persuade the aliens to play along by not mentioning the reason why they've returned to the UK, rather than anywhere else on earth. Lies, prevarication, covering their own arses precede by far any instinct to try and actually combat this invasion.

But what do the aliens need the children for? Well, it turns out that they secrete a chemical which makes them "feel good." In short, this alien embassy is here to ensure that their supply of drugs is secure. The children, we're assured, "feel no pain" - they're simply strapped to a pump so they can give out the alien equivalent of crack cocaine. And, best of all, they can survive for decades like that! Hmmm.

Of course the government's first thought is to keep this secret. What would be the point of causing a panic? And how could you persuade people to hand over ten percent of their children if they know what their fate is going to be? This time the aliens say they'll destroy the entire population of earth if their demands are not met - pour encourager les autres, one supposes: to make sure that no other subservient species get too uppity in the future.

This is dark stuff. But it gets darker. There's a long - and fascinating - conversation around the cabinet table. How to choose the ten percent? Which children should go? A lottery is clearly the only fair way of selecting them ... but of course the children (or, rather, grandchildren) of cabinet ministers must be exempted from taking part!

"But what about nephews and nieces?" shouts one of them.

"Don't try your luck," growls the Prime Minister.

"If you think I'm going to try and explain to my brother what happened to his kids ..." she replies.

The meeting dissolves into bedlam.

But then it turns out that the nephew-and-niece question was meant solely as a debating ploy. Actually her point was that all of them are ready to make exceptions for children they know personally - but that's because these are good, worthwhile children: "the kind who become doctors and teachers and lawyers - who run our schools and our hospitals." What would be the point of wasting children like that? We all know, she goes on, that there's another kind of child: the yobbo, the dole-bludger. Children who'll grow up to be a burden on the state, worthless mouths to feed. Everyone is nodding solemnly by this point. They know the kind of kids she's talking about.

But how could one make sure that it's only this kind of untermensch kids who get handed over to the aliens? Simple. You exempt all the posh schools sight unseen, and just send the army round to the poorer schools, the slum schools - collect all of their kids for an "inoculation" programme.

Does this sound implausible, melodramatic? I really wish it did. I could hear behind them, all the time, the cringing, cowardly voices of those French cabinet ministers at Vichy, explaining how the alternative to rounding up Jews to be handed over to their neighbouring Nazi overlords would be far, far worse: "If we don't do it somebody else will."

And, as the aliens made their pitiless, disgusting demands, I could hear distant echoes of the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when Britain declared war on China to ensure the maintenance of its drug-trade with the celestial Empire. How dare the Chinese government attempt to stem the growth of commerce (meaning, in this case, the creation of vast armies of opium addicts in all their major trading ports)!

Then, at the end of it all, after our heroes had pulled out their somewhat unlikely deus ex machina solution to the alien menace, how implausible that the politicians' first order of business was to decide who to blame it on in order to avoid suffering electorally for having literally rounded up ten percent of the nation's children to be sacrificed to Moloch. How unlike Blair and Bush and their disgusting, lying toadies! I don't where people come up with such strange, unwholesome ideas! By waking up and looking around them, I guess.

[END of plot spoiler]

[Lynley Hood: A City Possessed (2001)]

I don't know. The other thing I've been reading lately is Lynley Hood's terrifying book A City Possessed, about the Christchurch creche debacle in the 1990s, and I couldn't help but see the analogies:

• The immediate instinct, on the part of those in authority, to shut up dissent, to ignore inconvenient truths, to look for a powerless, vulnerable scapegoat.
• The incredible effrontery of the establishment (legal as well as political, in this case), who concluded, at the end of one of the various whitewashing "inquiries" into the whole affair, that if it could be proved that there were a large number of miscarriages of justice in New Zealand, then there might be a need to overhaul a system which virtually never reverses a vedict once arrived at. But since the Arthur Allan Thomas case was such an "aberration", according to this looking-glass logic, there's clearly no necessity for such radical steps to be taken. Justice? schmustice ...
• The instinctive, unquestioning closing of ranks by the ruling class who know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the maintenance of order in society - i.e. the continuation of their own peculiar privileges - requires a few sacrifices to be made from time to time. Because the alternative (we're constantly assured) would be far worse.

I guess Torchwood and Galactica still have to be classified as light entertainment. But I have to say that what the public will tolerate in their TV dramas has certainly changed a lot of late. It's clear that nobody was expected to feel surprised at watching these venal, slimy British politicans paying with their children's lives for their own political futures.

Galactica had a rather more brutally functionalist agenda. "Every woman adores a fascist / The boot in the face" as Sylvia Plath famously asserted. Perhaps one could rephrase that to say that the American system of governance has always had a sneaking sympathy for - and uncomfortable resemblance to - fascism: the insistence on social conformity, the profusion of emotive flag-waving and symbolic reenactments of nationhood ... Galactica was interesting because it examined such attitudes - at length, with pellucid, dispassionate logic - rather than simply embodying them (unlike Star Trek and its innumerable sequels).

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that we've entered some kind of golden age of TV SF - that everything on that medium is now worthy of serious attention. What I am saying is that a few select TV shows have somehow managed to creep under the radar and say some very hard-hitting things about the nature of our civilization: the way we live now. For every Torchwood, there are still a number of fatuous, pointless miniseries like V and its ilk, but at least now the word is out. Where pulp fiction - in the hands of masters such as J. G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick - once led the charge, now it's the TV writers: mostly, to be sure, the Balzacian creators of such sprawling realist epics as The Wire or Deadwood, but also the humble, ill-funded script-writers of science-fiction TV.

[The Wire (2002-2009):
R.I.P.]

Wildes Licht / Wild Light

[Dieter Riemenschneider: Wildes Licht (2010)]

It's weird seeing yourself in a foreign language. Last night I was at the booklaunch of Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland, a bilingual English / German anthology of New Zealand poetry, translated and edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, and available from Tranzlit publishers (or from a bookseller near you).

The title comes from Michele Leggott's poem "Wild Light", and you'll find a really fascinating assortment of poems old and new in there. Why I'm in there is a little harder to say (you'll have to ask Dieter), but I have to say that I certainly value the opportunity to see my words through the transverse lense of his careful translation:

Situations ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

NO VACANCIES
at the “City of Sails” motel.
It’s hard to convey how strange that is:
dark, skid-marked streets; day after day
of grey …
Who the fuck’s there?

Two loonies
standing by the road
(blue parka, beige kagoul)
not waiting for anything
– just waiting.
By a roundabout.

It’s ten at night.


Rain-slick streets are cool.

has become:

Ortsverhalte ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

BELEGT
das “City of Sails” Motel.
's ist schwer zu sagen wie merkwürdig das ist:
dunkle Schleuderspurenstraßen; tagelanges
Grau …
Wer verdammt ist da?

Zwei Verrückte
stehen am Straßenrand
(blauer Parka, beiger Anorak)
warten auf nichts
– warten nur.
An einem Verkehrskreisel.

’s ist zehn am Abend.


Die regenglatten Straßen sind kühl.

The title (in the unlikely event you hadn't noticed) makes reference to Max Ernst's apocalyptic "Europe after the Rain" paintings from the 1940s - which seemed very appropriate to me in 1998, when this poem was written, as the whole city was blacked-out and diesel generators were chugging away in every shop door in the CBD.

[Max Ernst: Europa nach dem Regen II (1940-42)]

Beyond that, I particularly like the way that my loonies have become Zwei Verrückte [two crazies], and my "Who the fuck’s there?" has been transformed into the equally-heartfelt: Wer verdammt ist da?

Oh, there are joys innumerable to be found in this anthology. You owe it to yourself to read Allen Curnow's "Das Skelett des Großen Moa in Canterburymuseum, Christchurch":

Nicht ich, ein Kind kommt wunderbar zur Welt
und lernt den Trick, wie man sich aufrecht stellt.

(Pretty clever, getting it to rhyme as well), or Hone Tuwhare's "Keine gewöhnliche Sonne" [No Ordinary Sun], or Apirana Taylor's "Trauriger Witz auf einem Marae" [Sad Joke on a Marae] ...

Why is it so appealing to see these familiar poems in such a new guise? I have to say that I hope this is the first of many such anthologies. There was a bilingual French selection of New Zealand poets included in the journal Europe a few years ago: No 931 (Novembre 2006) – Écrivains de Nouvelle-Zélande, but that doesn't really compare with the epic breadth of Dieter's fascinatingly various sampling of historic and contemporary New Zealand poetry to date.

Anyway, check it out if you get the chance. The initial booklaunch in Auckland will be followed by a road-trip during which Dieter and Jan will launch the book at various venues in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. I'll put up more exact dates and details as soon as they come to hand.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourite Curnow poems, "Man wird es wissen wenn man dort ist" [You Will Know When You Get There]:

Hinab geht mann allein, so spät, in den wogenschwarzen Bodenriss.

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Isn't that word wogenschwarzen wonderful? "Fissure" still wins out over Bodenriss, though, I think: such a weight of implication in just the sound of those last few words ...

Stokes Point

[Stokes Point, Northcote]

I'm co-editing a book on Auckland for our Massey University monograph series. The working title is A Super City: Views of Auckland, and it will consist of a series of essays by members of the School of Social and Cultural Studies, where I work, on various aspects of the city seen through the lenses of our diverse disciplines. You can find further details here.

Since our school happens to include Anthropologists, Historians, Linguists, Literary & Media specialists, Political Scientists and Sociologists, we're hoping the results will be pretty interesting. It's intended for a general audience as well as the students in our "Auckland: A Social and Cultural Study" summer-school course.

My co-editor Grant Duncan has already posted the abstract for his essay online, and you can request a draft of the whole piece from him here.

[Felton Mathews: Map of the Harbour of Waitemata (1841)]

My own essay is about Stokes Point, in Northcote (originally called Pt. Rough), which is the little reserve right under the Harbour Bridge, the spit of land from which it launches itself out towards the city. The particular angle I take on it might be seen as somewhat controversial, so I won't say any more about that here except to say that the working title is "The Stokes Point Pillars." If you want to know more, you'll have to read the book (due out in October).

What I thought I'd post here instead is a kind of suite of views of Stokes Point, from my visit there last Saturday with Bronwyn's digital camera.

•

[The View from the Shore]

[The Avenue of Pillars]

[Pohutukawas in Plastic]

[Car Park]

[Barriers]

[War of the Worlds]

[Plaque]

[Signage]

[Graffiti]

[Karnak]

[The Convergence of the Twain]