On politics and Vampire Bunnies
Good opinion columns on the hurricane disaster here and here. I usually like to wait before I join everyone else in unequivocally calling the president a douchebag, because I think it's getting easier and easier for that to become a knee-jerk reaction (I mean, who could blame us?). I even gave Bush the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of last week. But even I have to throw my hands up and read the cards as I see them.
George W. Bush is a douchebag.
And the weird thing is, as bad as his polls have been all summer long, you'd think that we would have jumped on this puppy immediately last Monday and milked it for all it was worth just so he could look heroic and on-the-ball. Even if the storm had turned out to be a blow-out, I'd have expected him to be rolling through the French Quarter in a tank holding a V for victory sign before we even heard there was a hurricane. This would have been the perfect opportunity to turn his image around. Isn't that the least we've come to expect from our opportunist politicians?
And here I am, talking about politics again.
A few weeks ago my mom had me clean out all my old children's and young adult books and decide which ones I wanted to salvage and throw away. In addition to the entire Bruce Coville canon, I found a book called Shoebag. It's about a cockroach named Shoebag who one day wakes up to find himself as a pre-pubescent human being. In second grade, when I purchased this at a Scholastic Book Fair, I couldn't have possibly known that the book's premise was a big play on Kafka's Metamorphosis.
I started to wonder how many other children's novels had this sort of buried allusion to literature. Then I remembered James Howe's Nighty-Nightmare, one of the books in the Bunnicula series about a vegetable-sucking vampire bunny rabbit, and I realized that it was exactly like, not Bram Stoker, but Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first edition anyhow, was structured in such a way that the story is told by three different narrators all collapsed into each other. The novel begins with a series of letters written by a sea captain exploring the Arctic Ocean to his sister back on land. In the letters, he tells of a man named Victor Frankenstein they found wandering half-dead across the arctic. Frankenstein then proceeds to tell the sea captain his story, becoming the second narrator in the novel. Then, midway through the book, Frankenstein finally meets his rampaging Creature in the wilderness. The Creature, having learned how to speak really articulate high-society English by this time, tells his creator about how he escaped and killed his first human, etc.---becoming the third narrator in the novel. When the Creature finishes telling his story, Frankenstein resumes his narration, and when he brings the story up to meeting the sea captain, he dies and the sea captain finishes the book in his letter to his sister. If you "draw" the structure of the novel like my extremely Freudian fiction professor, you get something that looks like this:
Now, if you're familiar with the Bunnicula books, you'll know that every novel began with an "Editor's Note." Ostensibly it was written by the author, James Howe, who claimed that he had received the manuscript from the talking dog Harold. Harold is the narrator of the books, and in Nighty-Nightmare, Harold the dog and Chester the cat (who also talks) go camping with their owners. In the middle of the book, there is a long passage in which Chester the cat narrates a story about the "origins" of Bunnicula the Vampire Bunny.
If you're still with me, note that the structure of Night-Nightmare, a children's paperback recommended for ages 9-12 and sold at your local book fair, exactly mirrors Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein, which is roughly the same structure riffed on by the traditional gothic romantic novel (like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw which, as my Freudian professor illustrated, really does look like a screw if you draw the structure).
Suddenly, I know where all the English majors of the world go. (Apparently, to write books about Vampire Bunnies.)
Good opinion columns on the hurricane disaster here and here. I usually like to wait before I join everyone else in unequivocally calling the president a douchebag, because I think it's getting easier and easier for that to become a knee-jerk reaction (I mean, who could blame us?). I even gave Bush the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of last week. But even I have to throw my hands up and read the cards as I see them.
George W. Bush is a douchebag.
And the weird thing is, as bad as his polls have been all summer long, you'd think that we would have jumped on this puppy immediately last Monday and milked it for all it was worth just so he could look heroic and on-the-ball. Even if the storm had turned out to be a blow-out, I'd have expected him to be rolling through the French Quarter in a tank holding a V for victory sign before we even heard there was a hurricane. This would have been the perfect opportunity to turn his image around. Isn't that the least we've come to expect from our opportunist politicians?
And here I am, talking about politics again.
A few weeks ago my mom had me clean out all my old children's and young adult books and decide which ones I wanted to salvage and throw away. In addition to the entire Bruce Coville canon, I found a book called Shoebag. It's about a cockroach named Shoebag who one day wakes up to find himself as a pre-pubescent human being. In second grade, when I purchased this at a Scholastic Book Fair, I couldn't have possibly known that the book's premise was a big play on Kafka's Metamorphosis.
I started to wonder how many other children's novels had this sort of buried allusion to literature. Then I remembered James Howe's Nighty-Nightmare, one of the books in the Bunnicula series about a vegetable-sucking vampire bunny rabbit, and I realized that it was exactly like, not Bram Stoker, but Mary Shelley.
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the first edition anyhow, was structured in such a way that the story is told by three different narrators all collapsed into each other. The novel begins with a series of letters written by a sea captain exploring the Arctic Ocean to his sister back on land. In the letters, he tells of a man named Victor Frankenstein they found wandering half-dead across the arctic. Frankenstein then proceeds to tell the sea captain his story, becoming the second narrator in the novel. Then, midway through the book, Frankenstein finally meets his rampaging Creature in the wilderness. The Creature, having learned how to speak really articulate high-society English by this time, tells his creator about how he escaped and killed his first human, etc.---becoming the third narrator in the novel. When the Creature finishes telling his story, Frankenstein resumes his narration, and when he brings the story up to meeting the sea captain, he dies and the sea captain finishes the book in his letter to his sister. If you "draw" the structure of the novel like my extremely Freudian fiction professor, you get something that looks like this:
Now, if you're familiar with the Bunnicula books, you'll know that every novel began with an "Editor's Note." Ostensibly it was written by the author, James Howe, who claimed that he had received the manuscript from the talking dog Harold. Harold is the narrator of the books, and in Nighty-Nightmare, Harold the dog and Chester the cat (who also talks) go camping with their owners. In the middle of the book, there is a long passage in which Chester the cat narrates a story about the "origins" of Bunnicula the Vampire Bunny.
If you're still with me, note that the structure of Night-Nightmare, a children's paperback recommended for ages 9-12 and sold at your local book fair, exactly mirrors Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein, which is roughly the same structure riffed on by the traditional gothic romantic novel (like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw which, as my Freudian professor illustrated, really does look like a screw if you draw the structure).
Suddenly, I know where all the English majors of the world go. (Apparently, to write books about Vampire Bunnies.)
3 Comments:
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I read Bunnicula when I was in elementary school. And now all of a sudden you make me want to go read it again.
Yeah I remember it, a little. I don't know how they are at Chicago, but I know at least one professor at NYU who would be thrilled by a paper on what you've done here.
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