Alter Egos

Danny Boyle of Slumdog Millionaire fame is creating a much anticipated production of Frankenstein for the London stage, to open in February.

Sneak peek: the play will star Benedict Cumberbatch (from Atonement and The Other Boleyn Girl) and Jonny Lee Miller (from, among other things, the BBC TV movie Byron, in which he played our favorite libertine). Cumberbatch and Miller will share the leading roles. One will play creator and the other creation on a given night, then they will swap parts for the next, back and forth, according to notes in a recent Variety.

One can understand how that might mess with the minds of the actors, evoking the sort of mingled identity at the heart of the novel. How will it affect the experience of an audience, who sees the play on just one of those nights?

Interesting.

Dance of the Evening

What ever happened to the graveyard twist indeed?

More a Frankenstein Story

A movie on apes might be a Frankenstein story? Not according to any theory of evolution.

Hear James Franco relate Rise of the Apes, his upcoming prequel to Planet of the Apes, to our favorite monster.

So Easy, It's Scary

"Make me!"

"Now eat me!"

Better than Peeps.

SPARK OF BEING Trailer - Dave Douglas & Keystone, and Bill Morrison

Close your eyes and just listen

New tunes to which the monster arises. A film with jazz score, creation by Dave Douglas and Keystone, first performed last April. Yes I see it, yes I hear it.

Spark of Being: It is testament to how deep and human the myth of the monster is that this story continues to be retold in image, sound, and word.

Reappearing

It's not as if the monster only looms in my imagination as the days get shorter and the nights get cold. It's just that everyone else starts thinking about him more at this time of year. Candy displays, greeting card racks, costume shops. The familiar face leers back at me. Hello, old friend.

The Time Has Come

There isn't a sense of fear or guilt or doubt, but rather responsibility of the kind his contemporaries might have hoped Victor Frankenstein had. AI scientists gathered recently to talk about the prospects of machines becoming autonomous and smarter than humans. Significantly, they met at Asilomar, California—the place where geneticists met and agreed on a moratorium on research, concerned for the anti-human implications of their work.

Truth more interesting than theory

The publication of Charles Robinson's interesting The Original Frankenstein has given more people the opportunity to discuss the niggling claim that Percy Bysshe Shelley is more the creator of the monster and the myth than his wife-to-be. I appreciate the comment in today's Independent online review, in which James Grande says that “the theories that deny Mary Shelley's authorship are much less interesting than the true story behind Frankenstein.” Grande imagines the two of them passing a manuscript back and forth in bed. I like the image.

Continuing the row over authorship

Charles Robinson's new volume, The Original Frankenstein, published by Cambridge's Bodleian Press and noted here about a month ago, has sparked new discussions about who wrote Frankenstein. It is a debate not quite as interesting as those over Shakespeare or Homer, since there is only one alternative answer to Mary Shelley, and that's Percy Bysshe. It is also a debate that conjures up the same voices, in particular that of independent scholar John Lauritsen, who is PBS‘s unending champion and one of the few, if not the only, person who outright claims that Mary's husband wrote -- not helped her with -- the novel. Both Lynda Pratt in The Times and Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education took the opportunity to explore the issue again.

Vote green in the coming election

It has been an amusing intersection, the Halloween season and the U.S. election, spawning wonders like this one: JibJab - Frankenstein for President!


A special thank you to Pierre Fournier of Frankensteinia for finding this gem.

Speaking of the monster

I had a great afternoon last Friday, meeting with a few graduate students at the University of Virginia (mostly in English, one in Spanish) and showing them the high points of the Dome Room exhibit that features my collection of Frankensteiniana, hosted by the University of Virginia's Rare Book School and titled “The Monster Among Us.”

A University representative greeted us and said that after years of Rare Book School exhibits in the Dome Room, this is the first time that visitors have come to her to ask, “What is this and what is it doing in Mr. Jefferson's Rotunda?” We laughed, and talked about whether Thomas Jefferson might have read Frankenstein -- it's highly likely, but no evidence -- and I voiced my opinion of why it belongs: Because Mr. Jefferson was always an advocate of pushing the limits of knowledge, and that is what the myth of Frankenstein is all about. The official answer is that Rare Book School mounts Dome Room exhibition about the history of books, and this exhibit shows how one book has infused the culture of the world, influencing millions over almost 200 years.

“The Monster Among Us” will be in the University of Virginia's Rotunda Dome Room through the calendar year. Come see it if you can.

Move over, Santa

When I ask my mother, who edges in and out of aging dementia these days, what Halloween was like during my childhood, she talks about razors in apples. "I never got one," say I, eternal optimist and lover of the monster holiday. "Did anyone in our neighbhorhood ever get one?" She has to admit no. One scaremonger newspaper story 25 years ago and she's sure it was happening next door.

But all that is to say that times have changed and sadly children do not as often go out in costumed gangs on their own to trick or treat. I loved that evening. We did get to travel door to door -- saw inside neighbors' houses that we always wondered about from the sidewalk -- and got to walk through the darkness by ourselves, no adult watching over us. Thrills beyond treats.

New conventions are developing to assuage the fears of razor blade believers. Here is one from my homeland of Michigan: A monstrous grown-up takes children on his knee, asks them what they want to be for Halloween, and gives them a hug and a bag of candy. Might have possibilities -- although it's a little too mall-defined to satisfy my need for the fear that comes with chaos and the darkness of night.

Female gothic

In the 1970s, when Mary Shelley's novel was just peeking its head over the horizon and peering into the Ivory Tower -- or, in other words, when scholars were only just beginning to pay it respectful attention -- scholar Ellen Moers published an essay called "Female Gothic." In it she used the little-respected Frankenstein as a central example of the phenomenon of gothic horror, at its core feminine, because it is at its core a visceral, body experience -- scaring by getting down "to the body itself," "quickly arousing and quickly allaying the physiological reactions to fear." The frisson -- the little shiver of fear that we love to feel. That's at the heart of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

This seems to be the point made in this weekend's New York Times Book Review by Terrence Rafferty, who appropriately calls his round-up of female-written horror novels “Shelley's Daughters.”

You too can rise from the dead

Here's the scoop from Young Frankenstein makeup designer Angelina Avallone on how to turn monstrous for the coming evening of thrills and chills.

Poster child for . . .

A friend in England tipped me off to a monstrously engaging poster for a public forum on "How the Media Promote Public Misunderstanding of Science" at Cambridge's Babbage Lecture Theatre.

And whose lovely visage do you think was chosen to symbolize said misunderstanding? One of the more misunderstood monsters around.

Never too young to love the monster

Time to get the baby teeth chattering with the best of children's Halloween read-alouds. Diane Petryk Bloom in Norfolk, Virginia, mentions two of my favorites, Maurice Sendak's creepy pop-up, Mommy?, (mentioned, by the way, by pop-up artist Robert Sabuda, whom we featured in our last post) and Adam Rex's humongously delicious Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich.

But don't forget the best of the recent bunch, Keith Graves's Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted Dance, with a cheery, singsong ending that reminds me of my favorite kids' joke punchline, something like, "Franky! Pull yourself together!"

You can get a look at this wonderful book here.

Shadow puppet

In light of the many mentions of our favorite monster these days, seen again and again and again and again in commentaries on the financial debacles of the times (as pointed out recently on another blog, The Teeming Brain), we followed the lead of Haunt Style blogger to the wonderful pop-up site of paper engineer Robert Sabuda to learn how to make a pop-up monster.

With a few snips and clips, you can animate your daily read of financial disaster with a paper monster that rails and raises his arms in horror.

Have fun.

Props for sale

Now I know where to go if I'm shopping for the best that Hollywood has to offer in hand-me-down electrophysical props -- the van de graaf generators and the oversized switches that go whizz and buzz in the night of every B-grade monster movie: Jadis, a shop in Santa Monica, California, featured on today's Weekend America. Since it's across the continent, I won't be dropping in soon. But I loved the visit by radio. Thanks, Claes Andreasson. You can read a transcript and see a few more pictures on the show's website.

One day in the sun

Publication of Charles Robinson's Original Frankenstein by Cambridge University Press presented an opportunity for Cambridge's Bodleian Library to display -- for one day only -- their recently acquired manuscript of Mary Shelley's novel. Cambridge's Frankenstein Day highlighted not only Robinson, visiting from his Delaware home, but also Brian Aldiss, the English novelist who wrote Frankenstein Unbound (inspiration for the Roger Corman film). Hear BBC Radio interview Robinson and Aldiss, who publicly pronounces our favorite monster's stepfather, Percy Bysshe Shelley, a creep.