vampires
Apologies in advance for the following culture-babble (and in case I've posted something along these lines before... this is a topic that I keep coming back to in my own head).
I've noticed, of late, that vampires are everywhere. Seriously - you can't throw a dead weasel in a fiction section without hitting a book about a saucy female protagonist either shagging or possibly staking vampires. Harry Dresden is up to his armpits in them. Every teenager seems to want to fall for one... although they don't seem to want to shag them (and I'm not sure if I am more or less troubled by the vampire abstinence movement...).
I wonder why. There is a part of me that thinks that we're so obsessed with them because of the world that we live in. In the fifties, we had sci-fi that was full of grizzled men, who built spaceships, and whose personal relationships were poorly defined, because their authors were generally not good at talking to girls. The society that produced and consumed these tales was one that had a sense that things could be done - that we could master the universe, that we could do more, and achieve more. Earlier, scifi gave us Lovecraft and Howard, two fabulous responses to the crisis of modernity that started sometime around 1900, when people like Freud began pointing out that we were, in fact, stark raving nutters most of the time, and which was made more intense by the collective experience of WW I.
Why, then, vampires? We live in a world full of alluring beauty, most of it beyond our reach. We are lied to every day... we want to believe those lies, but we know, deep down, that they are lies... fox news is a lot like Tru Blood in that regard. (Huh... I unintentionally capitalized a fake brand of vampire blood substitute, and not a real news organization... well, I do have a horse in this race, clearly). We, as a nation, have largely lost the sense of power that we once had - the unselfconscious belief that we could do pretty much anything that we set our minds to. Instead, we're becoming more and more like the feeble stock characters - the strippers, loners, and drug addicts, on whom our fictional vampires prey. We're waiting for a giant shoe to drop. We're waiting for the next bad thing. We're hoping, collectively, to be eaten last.
I'm'a go sharpen up a stake.
I've noticed, of late, that vampires are everywhere. Seriously - you can't throw a dead weasel in a fiction section without hitting a book about a saucy female protagonist either shagging or possibly staking vampires. Harry Dresden is up to his armpits in them. Every teenager seems to want to fall for one... although they don't seem to want to shag them (and I'm not sure if I am more or less troubled by the vampire abstinence movement...).
I wonder why. There is a part of me that thinks that we're so obsessed with them because of the world that we live in. In the fifties, we had sci-fi that was full of grizzled men, who built spaceships, and whose personal relationships were poorly defined, because their authors were generally not good at talking to girls. The society that produced and consumed these tales was one that had a sense that things could be done - that we could master the universe, that we could do more, and achieve more. Earlier, scifi gave us Lovecraft and Howard, two fabulous responses to the crisis of modernity that started sometime around 1900, when people like Freud began pointing out that we were, in fact, stark raving nutters most of the time, and which was made more intense by the collective experience of WW I.
Why, then, vampires? We live in a world full of alluring beauty, most of it beyond our reach. We are lied to every day... we want to believe those lies, but we know, deep down, that they are lies... fox news is a lot like Tru Blood in that regard. (Huh... I unintentionally capitalized a fake brand of vampire blood substitute, and not a real news organization... well, I do have a horse in this race, clearly). We, as a nation, have largely lost the sense of power that we once had - the unselfconscious belief that we could do pretty much anything that we set our minds to. Instead, we're becoming more and more like the feeble stock characters - the strippers, loners, and drug addicts, on whom our fictional vampires prey. We're waiting for a giant shoe to drop. We're waiting for the next bad thing. We're hoping, collectively, to be eaten last.
I'm'a go sharpen up a stake.