Too bad I couldn’t find the custom canines, but I think the fangs are clearly implied.

I am so very happy that I can celebrate such things. Jehovah’s Witnesses and other groups who can’t find the spirit in Hallowe’en are really missing out.

As the photos de-monstrate, I embraced my shadow and it was as thrilling and as unnerving as always. Found a few more worthy bits to reposition, save and integrate. Such exploration is palpably good for the soul (despite appearances).

I call attention to the construction of the word “demonstrate” with a hyphen. Why?

Latin dēmōnstrāre, dēmōnstrāt- : dē-, completely; see de– + mōnstrāre, to show (from mōnstrum, divine portent, from monēre, to warn).

To divinely portend, to call out a warning, to make manifest or apparent, display, evidence, evince, exhibit, manifest, proclaim, reveal, show, authenticate, bear out, confirm, corroborate, endorse, establish, evidence, prove, substantiate, validate, verify.

To demonstrate is thus also to un-conceal, to dis-cover.

Truth as endorsed warning and as authentic manifestation of such warning AS truth – but also holding a warning about that very act. A complete showing that warns about itself, like an Angel of Annunciation. But do not fear.

Oh, it’s a lovely emblematic truthing, but with a warning about that truth, too. The truth will set you free, but it’s not always easy.

The word “demonstrate” also suggests something to the ear – “demon-straight.”

Damned straight! Straight to hell! It shows what we most demonize, but what we demonize is also sacred to us because there is an attraction at the heart of the repulsion. It’s inherently unstable with regard to anything but its power.

Such signage can be archetypal and playful identifications can de-”monster” – precisely by letting the demon-monster live for a little while, so that one can pick up some of the good monster traits while letting go of elements that have been recognized (but no longer denied or forgotten).

I am not free of the vampire. Where is that body? Where is that blood? Gimme communion. Gimme carnality and spirit. Gimme unrepressed gratification of my desires. I would love to swoon. I would love to take a walk on the dark side. Of course, I pass out at the sight of blood, but I do love vampire novels. It’s all a dream, and to pick out the parts that really can be integrated into me, into my life, into my own sense of ethics and my own spiritual journey, is always enlightening. It reminds me a lot of the way I used to collect rocks.

I think McCain and some of the Republican Party are vampires, and that is what I despise about them. I do love to despise their bloodthirstiness, their preying upon the sub-millionaires among us, their cynical manipulations of the public, their disregard of what it takes for people and countries to thrive. And it’s true – so true – that they are vampires in these ways.

But Barack Obama is right, I think, not to manifest and feed that set of truths because it can’t be taken playfully or dissipated with court-jester humor that speaks truth. It’s too real, and the consequences are too important. The alternative is to recognize, but to lead with an different vision, one that refuses to demonize others. We are all Americans, after all, and a President should think of just as many of the people as he or she can.

I think it is wise to have elections a few days after Hallowe’en, and it is especially important this year. It works the same way as a picture of Cheney as the Evil Emperor with George W as Darth Vader; the fear that is inspired by the recognition of a deep truth in it is – at the same time – dissipated through its very manifestation. They really ARE those characters, and thank goodness they really aren’t.

I have been fearing that what (at least a subset of) the Republicans are trying to catalyze will work, and that hatred and violence will escalate. I am hoping that projections of evil otherness must at some point become so obvious, so de-monstrable even to the far-right wing, that they will just fall down and implode. It looks a little better now for the latter scenario than it did even a week ago.

After such playful shadow-work as seems inherent in the celebrations and rituals of Hallowe’en, I am less angry, and much more hopeful.

Found a new viral quiz center. The creators and users seem very young, and I sincerely hope that explains the rampant mis-spellings. Not to quibble, but even granting leeway for the slang, it’s depressingly sub-literate.

Educators -> fail.

Love this cat image, though.

Personality Type Quiz

Intellectual Personality Type

You’re really smart, obviously, but you’re more book smart than street smart. You like reading, watch the news, and love discussing whatever is going on in the world. You enjoy being around people who challenge you intellectually.

Twilight: Are you a Vampire or Werewolf
Vampire

You are a attractive, strong, and immortal vampire. You are stubborn and protective. You do not let most things cross you and walk away in one piece. Though you know your limits on things.

Your Vampire Name (Girls)

Maeve "intoxicating"

You enjoy anything that deals with the arts or history. Your intelligent, wise, and you have the rare gift of balancing your emotions and your mind. You are a very aloof and secretive person and you have a hard time trusting others. Those who are lucky enough to be your friend are considered worthy of your trust and they are very few. But once you do open up you are a self-sacrificing friend. Men adore you for your originality, intellegence & independence and they love a good mystery.

What do the hogwarts students say about you? Girls only!

Ravenclaw

Harry: She's really smart! and she's pretty! (I think she's smarter than Hermione!)
Ron: That hot chick who's a brainiac?? she's awesome! (and hot)
Hermione: HARRY!!!! I heard that!!!
Neville: she helps me out with school work. She's pretty too!
Weasley twins: She never falls into the pranks! she's too smart!
Luna: She's a believer of the crumplehorned snorckacks!
Malfoy: The hot nerd? She'd be best in my house if she wasn't so dang nice.
Pansy: Gross! what a nerd!
Voldemort: If she was a slytherin like me, she'd be sooooo awesome. But since she's not, she's like soooo nerdy and geeky! that's right. I went there.

I’ve been reading vampire books since I was a kid. I have a pretty extensive collection of all kinds of vampire novels and short stories. For a while I was a member of the Lord Ruthven Society (Raymond McNally told me that “Vee neeeed new bloooood” – how could I resist? May he rest in peace.).

Maybe I should renew my membership. It’s a subgroup of the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (IAFA), and they always have a very fun conference. My first paper was presented there. I can’t find their site anymore though. Comment if you know anything.

No doubt the Jehovah’s Witnesses doctrine of refusing blood transfusions – even to save a life – figured in to my curiosity from a very young age. I also couldn’t help noticing that most JWs do not partake of the emblems of communion at the “Memorial Dinner.” I always thought that their interpretations of the scriptures that talk about abstaining from blood (the blood being the life) were somehow off-kilter. I mean, it’s not like they eat their meat kosher. I remember that for a while we weren’t allowed to eat Milky Way bars because there was a rumor that they used blood products as an emulsifier. I still don’t know if that’s true or not.

It was while I was alternately reading Anne Rice and Karl Barth that I got my first inkling of what a large part of my dissertation would involve. My favorite chapter is the one I wrote about the viral as it appears in fictional narratives of vampirism/communion. I am even (very painfully) working on a vampire novel.

Still, for all this, I’m not a “goth” and I look terrible in black lipstick anyway. The only vampires I’ve ever met were of the psychic-draining variety – people who just exhaust you. I’ve never participated in any of the games or groups. However, I did recently get “turned” at Facebook and am using the Facebook application of vampires, zombies and werewolves. (Join me if you’re on.)

I only attack my friends… it’s a love bite! Share your soul, but only if you wish it. I won’t drain you dry…

(rolling villainous laughter – ah – hahahahah – haha – ahahahahahahaha – ah-hahaha – ha- hah ack-snort…. ~cough~).

The allure of vampires for me is still somewhat mysterious.

Vampires are overdetermined in meaning. So many possible interpretations intersect at the figure of the vampire that – no matter how trivialized they become – there is always a hint of the numinous about them, too.

So – would I really like being a vampire?

Maybe, if it were like the Chelsea Quinn Yarbro vampire that needs only enough to fill a wineglass, and gives back love – and lust, and respect, and generosity – for this bit of life.

On the other hand, you just can’t get away from the blood. Raw blood. Ick.

It’s why I’ve always preferred vampire books to movies; in the imaginary realm, it’s less tactile. You don’t really have to visualize the actual “thing in itself.” Films make it too real, too bloody and cannibalistic.

A blood-drinking thing is like an ancient god living on sacrifices – it’s a power trip. To me, that can never truly be sexy.

Also, the current crop of (literary) vampires is far too group/sect oriented, like political poppets. What good is eternal life if you’re always squabbling about territory or ethnicity or some such?

When I saw this quiz in my inbox, I went to take it right away. The results are about what I’d expect – I could if I had to…

You Could Be a Vampire… If You Had To

Like most people, the thought of being a vampire has crossed your mind. But you’re not sure if you’d do it, even if you could. Living forever doesn’t sound half bad, if you could live forever with the people you love the most. But do vampires even love? And would the vampire version of you even be you? It’s all too much to contemplate. Luckily, the chances of you ever becoming a vampire are astronomically low. What you would like best about being a vampire: Living forever What you would like least about being a vampire: Blood stained teeth

I was looking at my dissertation today, wondering if I can yet make a readable book out of it. Now that I’ve got a little distance from what was an agonizing process (at least until the last bit, when I actually started enjoying it), it seems better than I thought at the time. Today I’m posting a very select few of the quotations I used as a kind of shorthand that helps me remember the train of thought that’s at the back of a novel I’m writing. Between mommy-brain and constant distractions, it might be helpful to keep this here – as a touchstone of sorts.

My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.
- William Burroughs

This Snow Crash thing–is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?”
Juanita shrugs. “What’s the difference?
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

How does Gemüt, the mind, speak, how does the heart speak, how does the voice of the blood speak in the time of AIDS? Does the virus expose this voice to a cacophony, a cacophony that does not even form a negative unity within which it still resonates? How is such exposure possible? Can the voice of the blood recognize itself in the cacophony caused by the virus?
– Alexander Garcia Duttman

About all, we need to resist, at all costs, the luxury of listening to the thousands of language tapes playing in our heads, laden with prior discourse, that tell us with compelling certainty and dizzying contradiction what AIDS really means.
– Paula Treichler

Discourse, alas, is the only defense with which we can counteract discourse, and there is no available discourse on AIDS that is not itself diseased.
– Lee Edelman

If Amanda had cancer or a brain tumor, they’d be bringing her casseroles and cakes.
– Alice Hoffman

Sh*t, do you realize that only about a tenth of infected Americans can get these new drugs? It kind of makes you wonder about the other thirty million people on this planet with HIV. I mean, how many people in Africa or Asia do you think are able to get any of these cocktails?
- R.D. Zimmerman, Hostage

The brain works like a collection of viruses, the Consensus said one hundred and fifty years later, when viruses were difficult to avoid.
- Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.
- Marcel Proust

The life of the flesh is in the blood.
– Leviticus 17:11

But you must strictly refrain from eating the blood, because the blood is the life; you must not eat the life with the flesh.
– Deuteronomy 12:23

Drink from it, all of you. For this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, shed for many for the forgiveness of sins.
– Matthew 26:28-29

Think on the nature of this great invisible thing which animates each one of us, and every blood drinker who has ever walked. We are as receptors for the energy of this being; as radios are receptors for the invisible waves that bring sound. Our bodies are no more than shells for this energy.
- Anne Rice, Queen of the Damned

It is along the frontier of blood – on the red line between pure and impure – that the inexhaustible drama between the sacred and the profane is played out: between the history of the divine, and the history of the human element that would struggle free of the human.
- Piero Camporesi

Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart
. . .
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby don’t cry
Don’t cry
- Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble, 1986