“Charles Dickens had orphanages and workhouses, the Brontë sisters had the wild moors, and modern writers have high school.” So begins L.A. Times television critic Mary McNamara‘s take on The Vampire Diaries, the CW’s answer to Twilight (premiering tonight at 8). The show is loosely based on L.J. Smith‘s books of the same name and McNamara gives it a qualified thumbs up. She concludes that this latest addition to the vampire canon is “pure froth, but it is very welcome froth, especially in a genre that seems sometimes in danger of taking itself a little too seriously.”
The Vampire Diaries
Wild Possibilities
“Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away. And though hope can be an act of defiance, defiance isn’t enough reason to hope. But there are good reasons.” Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me, on maintaining hope and resisting defeatism.
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“The truth of poetry is not the truth of history”
Philip Levine is the current US Poet Laureate, and that’s great, but wouldn’t we all rather live in this alternate world fashioned by The Onion?
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Deep Disquiet
Jonathan Lee, whose novel High Dive was published this week, writes about the “deep disquiet” of finishing your book. “There are lots of books on how to write, and lots of books on how to publish, but I’ve spent the last few weeks looking for a book with a title like How To Get Through The Period Between Finishing A Book and Seeing It In A Bookstore Without Losing Your Entire Grip on Reality. I have failed to find it.”
Color Lines
At Bookforum, Alexander Benaim reads the latest novel by Jess Row, which I wrote about as part of our most recent book preview. The novel poses a charged, intriguing question: what would happen if it were possible to change your race? (It might also be a good time to read the author’s Year in Reading entry along with our own Mark O’Connell’s review of the novel at Slate.)
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Thursday Links
The Rake is at it again, taking The Believer down a peg.Adventures in niche publishing: A new Paris Review?Simon at Bloggasm considers Harriet Klausner, the widely reviled #1 reviewer at Amazon.And, finally, some spot-on humor at the New Yorker this week.
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“The image of a mountain in the viewer’s mind.”
The images in Yuji Hamada’s “Primal Mountain” series for Granta’s “Japan” issue have been made available online, and they’re gorgeous. (The rest of the magazine is well worth your time as well.)
Lolita Covered
The contest to design a new cover for Lolita that we noted in August has named some winners.
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Lost and Unpublished T.S. Eliot Prose to be Collected and Published
Scholars estimate that since T.S. Eliot’s death in 1965, “roughly 90 percent of his prose has been out of print and unavailable to literary scholars.” That will change this year with the publication of the first volume in Ronald Schuchard’s eight-volume work, The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot.
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Am I the only one that wants to take way too much Ambien over terrible vampire stories being compared to Dickens?
No. I’m with you. Though it is true that the site of suffering for young people in contemporary popular entertainment is high school (My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the loathesome Vampire Diaries), whereas Dickensian and Brontean child heroes usually did their suffering elsewhere–the streets of London, workhouses, remote bleak English landscapes, etc. (not always true though; in Nicholas Nickleby there’s that horrible Yorkshire school, Dotheboys Hall, and there’s Lowood in Jane Eyre).
Vampires Diaries, by the way, was godawful. Made me think better of Twilight–which I firmly believed impossible. Mary McNamara’s review was much more entertaining than the show itself. My apologies to any who might have taken a look.
Honestly, I liked this show. It stays very true to the novels yet includes the audience expectancies. One thing I know for sure: It’s way better than Twilight!