A Life of Horror and Wonder

Repost from last year, but I like this, so...

214 years ago, at twenty minutes past 11 on the night of 30 August, 1797, a baby girl was born to a pair of intellectuals residing in Somers Town, London, England.  She was named Mary, after her mother.

In less than two weeks, the mother was dead.

A Life of Horror and Wonder

213 years ago, at twenty minutes past 11 on the night of 30 August, 1797, a baby girl was born to a pair of intellectuals residing in Somers Town, London, England.  She was named Mary, after her mother.

In less than two weeks, the mother was dead.

Little Mary grew up surrounded by the intellectual and literary figures who made up her father's social circle.  Except for difficulty in getting along with the woman her father married when she was four, Mary grew up fairly happy, close to her half-sister Frances and stepsister Clara (better known as Fanny and Claire).


And then, when Mary was a teenager, she met and fell in love with a radical poet, a young man from the landed gentry.  His name was Percy, and when he and Mary fell in love, he was already married.  To escape his wife and the scrutiny of society, the young couple ran off to the Continent, taking Claire with them.


Things only went downhill from there.

Why Vampires are OHMIGOD SOOO Romantic.

(This post started life as a set of comments on the blog of a friend who just doesn't understand why people so romanticize a bunch of walking corpses.  It was really an attempt to explain why they are romanticized when, face it...they're just dead people who drink blood.)

Vampires have long been romanticized.  However, if one reads up on some of the more ancient, classic vampire legends, particularly those from Eastern Europe, it quickly becomes clear that a vampire isn't a beautiful, romantic creature; it's a freaking WALKING CORPSE!  As one scholar put it, originally, being bitten by a vampire was about as romantic as being bitten by your dead Uncle Boris.

The concept of the vampire as more than just a walking corpse came about because, as well as being immortal, they were well-nigh invulnerable (fire was bad...and decapitation...but most other stuff was just a scratch. Oh, and staking wasn't originally to kill them...it was to pin them down so you COULD kill them...so you had to drive the stake ALL THE WAY THROUGH.) Invulnerability=you don't rot=you are eternally young/the way you were, which is a very attractive prospect to some.

Frankenstein, Marfan's Syndrome, and Everything

I've always been a fan of the actor Boris Karloff.  He had a haunting voice, a graceful style of movement, and some of the most expressive eyes I've ever seen.

Karloff's eyes in his classic role in The Mummy


Of course, Karloff will always be best remembered for his portrayal of Frankenstein's creature in three films throughout the 1930s.  It just so happens that I'm also a big fan of most anything to do with Frankenstein.  Boris gave the first portrayal of the creature in a style that was in step with the original novel.  Though his incarnation was incapable of much speech, the Karloff creature was sympathetic; a lost, sad being who never asked to be born and only wanted to be accepted by humanity.