Sucking Blood
Current Music: Poe: Haunted A'ight, the blog has now gone blogger, which should save me some time coding. Shortly I hope to post a report of my visit to Germany, replete with links to the places I visted and some of the photos I took. It will take some time to chose the photographs.
The reading group started Larry Rickel's The Vampire Lectures, which Catherine Liu has a nice write-up about in case you are interested. The book is thick with puns and, as I read along, I'm fairly positive I am missing 70% of them (and oblique references to, say, dildos . . . "holes and poles," "holes and poles," that's right folks--The Hokey Pokey had it only partially right). Anyway, Laura is an expert in Haraway, and is helping to point out some of the conceptual binaries underlying the first few "lectures" (reproduction vs. replication, for example). Michelle and Jim are both experts in psychoanalysis, so they're helping point out important concepts (including, for example, "life is foreplay, and after that, you're dead meat"). I'm afraid I bring nothing to the table for getting through this but a morbid fascination in morbidity . . . but that hopefully is enough .
Learned Kaja Silverman has a book on the disembodied voice, The Acoustic Mirror, and while I was hunting for that I discovered Chion has something on disembodied voices/talk-overs in cinema. Both, of course, are must-reads. The pile of "must-reads" is now quite immense . . . when I'll get to it all is beyond me. I hear CRANK really does wonders . . . .
Laura also loaned me Poe's Haunting CD, which is an interesting listen. I'm gearing up to start on the new book this summer, and I think the Poe album will work nicely as a way to get into the final chapter, which I had planned to be on the answering machine. The answering machine has always been a source of terror for me . . . .
Speaking of terror, The Haunted Mansion came out on DVD today; after the warnings, I worry about its subtextual message. But I am also anxious to see how the ghosts figure and dunno if it will make mention in the new project (not unless hearing voices are a part of the text).