So, my epistemology seminar is Tuesday mornings at 10. On my current degenerate grad school schedule, that's the only day a week I have to set an alarm (i.e. that I have class or other regular committments before noon.) In consequence of this, I tend to form bad habits the other six days of the week when I can sleep in until pretty much whenever and it is, shall we say, less than fun to wake up. This morning, after the usual jihad*-like struggle with the "snooze" button, I managed to roll out of bed, check my e-mail**, shower, dress and generally make myself fit for interaction with other human beings. So, despite the four hours or so of sleep that I'd had, I was actually awake and wired and incapable of going back to sleep if I wanted to....

....when my housemate Aaron (who's taking the same class) knocked on my door to tell me that he just got a call from our friend Kristen saying that the prof called in sick and cancelled class.

Wired, tired and befuddled, I putter around for a while, realize that there's no milk to use for cereal or coffee, and, seeing that the stars have aligned to command me to do so, walk down to Denny's, where I have one of the most relaxing mornings I've had in recent memory, eating pancakes and reading Octavia Butler's wonderful last novel, "Fledgling," which is thus far one of the more interesting and certainly one of the more disturbing vampire things I can remember reading in quite some time.

Anyway, Fledgling is both lots of fun in parts and genuinely disturbing in others (already in the first several chapters, there were a couple of points where I saw something coming and thought, "there's no way she's going there, right?" and proceeded to watch Butler smash through the hedges of good taste to excellent literary effect) and a perfect way to wile away a sunny Miami morning.

I remembered, then, doing the same thing summer before last when I was working as a camp counselor up at Interlochen, sitting in the Flapjack Shack in Traverse City on my day off, reading Charlaine Harris.

Pancakes and vampires, man, it's a winning combination.









*"Jihad" in the original, technical Koranic sense of an internal spiritual struggle against oneself, not in the secondary "kill the unbelivers" sense.
**What, is it weird that I do this the second I get up as a matter of course? Sometime even between hitting the snooze button and falling back asleep?

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Its interesting too, at the risk of getting off into a tangential writing rant, that one of the most frequently complaints about stories and novels based on the vampire mythos is "generic"-ness, but I'd submit that one element of the pleasure of reading them is precisely the thrill of recognition underlying Butler's or whoever's specific conceptual twists. Like that moment in Kostova's "The Historian" when our heroine sees the picture in Oxford of the founder of one of the colleges holding a wooden stake. That moment is fun to read in large part because it taps into the well-established patterns of coolness, and wouldn't be if it were less "generic," if it didn't tap into the pre-established patterns immediately recognized by the reader. Of course, none of this is to say that there isn't a large and important kernel of truth in the standard complaint--too little original contribution and what's the point?--just pointing out that, in terms of an honest assessment of what makes for reader-happiness, the standard complaint overdoes the point. I'd argue that when writing certain sorts of tropes, like vampires, the ideal is a delicate balance of originality and genericness, without so much of the former that the conceit becomes unrecognizable or only technically present or so much of the latter that someone who's widely read will be bored by it.


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Oh, and on a completely different note, for people who like to follow odd news items: Uwe Boll, director of various widely-despised B-movies, recently tricked several bloggers who'd dissed his movies into letting him beat them up in public. One of them, asked how he felt by a reporter after the boxing match said, "I feel like a very angry German man just punched me repeatedly in the head."