“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
The Diaries of Roland Barthes
At the Book Bench, slides of Roland Barthes’ diaries from 1977 in their original, hand-written form: “His brilliance, which indelibly influenced literary theory, semiotics, social theory, and post-structuralism, can make him seem as distant as he is renowned. Yet the diary entries… reveal Barthes to be extraordinarily sensitive and relatable.” (via The Rumpus)
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Origin Story
Over at JSTOR Daily, Tara Isabella Burton writes on historical interpretations of the Book of Genesis and literal readings of a text that had been interpreted as allegory for centuries.
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An Irish Books Mule
Anne Enright remarks on Irish censorship, and she recalls the time her own mother was used “as a books mule.”
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Show and Tell
In theory, the author of a great novel is invisible to the reader, letting her stories and characters speak for themselves. In practice, however, it can help for an author to make herself known, as explained by Tim Parks in this essay. Sample quote: “We have the impression that if someone ever did find the full story of his life, we would immediately recognize the person we had in mind.”
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Rejoice, Ye Antiquarians
This one is for all you antiquarians out there. The oldest known draft of the most widely read work in all of English literature, the King James Bible, has been discovered in the archives at Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge. William Shakespeare’s books have also sold a ton of copies, and here’s an essay from The Millions that imagines him as a kind of God, Himself.
Social Graces
Some people go by alphabet, others by subject, and still others arrange their books as they “would seat guests at a dinner party.”
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!