The only thing that throws me for a loop is the bit about the “sort of New England roll-up and put in your pocket flowerpot hat that you really can’t wear in Georgia.” Que?

Good weekend, Heidi

Okay, this seems like good clean viral fun, so I’ve joined in – take a look.

Unfortunately, I’m so new to the blogosphere that I don’t actually know eight people with blogs. Still I’ll do what I can.

“Can’t Stop the Signal” and all that…

Lord Matt – Great post! We’ve got a vampire thing going here… Let me know if you want outside eyes and/or a proofreader.

Darrell – I like Harris too – the characters more than anything. And she makes me laugh. I read roughly a book a night, and 2-3 per week are usually vampire books. Sometimes I get hold of a bunch at once – I got about 8 Laurell K. Hamilton books for fifty cents apiece about a year ago, and read them straight through from earliest to latest. I’ve been reading every vampire book I could get my hands on since I was a teenager.

I’ve been playing with all of the overdetermined meanings of the vampire figure for many, many years now. It’s really amazing to me how much variety there is on this one theme. One whole chapter of my dissertation was on vampires and communion, and a version of that was published a few years before the dissertation was finished. The viral theme runs through a lot of vampire fiction (in various ways).

Yeah, lots of speculation on blood, spirit, sex, death, immortality – and networks especially. Maybe I enjoy them so much because I was a jehovah’s witnessess (their blood theology is a bit unusual), or maybe it’s just me…

I’ve read all of Charlaine Harris’ books, Chelsae Quinn Yarbro, Laurell K. Hamilton, L. A. Banks, Kim Harrison, Kerri Arthur, Michael Romkey, Barbara Hambly, Sherrilyn Kenyon. Dan Simmons is pretty amazing (see Lovedeath in particular) but it may be an acquired taste. Of course Anne Rice, and lots of others, too. I like some of the cross-genre work where vampiric elements appear in other kinds of fiction. Strangely, I’ve never really enjoyed many vampire movies. It’s all in the imagining, not the seeing. And I’ve never dressed like a goth or participated in any “Masquerade” types of games, although I do favor a vampire for Halloween.

Even when I was working on my MA, and reading mostly philosophy, theology, and ethics, I was reading vampire stuff too.

I was having a really hard time forcing myself to read Karl Barth’s “Epistle to the Romans.” This important book is is much longer than the biblical book it was commenting on, and it is a truly tiresome read. I much prefer Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Buber. I could even get into reading Kant, which I’ve seen described as comparable to chewing broken glass – as a reading experience. I’ve struggled through Levinas, and Derrida – but Barth was too much for me.

So I made a deal with myself, and allowed myself to read so many pages of the latest Anne Rice book for every same so many pages I read of Barth. That way, I read two books faster than I could have read the one. Strange synchronicities emerged in the reading-together. The insights and questions that came to me then eventually led (in changed form) to the dissertation – years later, and in a completely different sort of program. Sometimes it pays to read the very thing you most resist reading.