Eye candy

What a Halloween treat! Feast your eyes on one monster portrait after another posted on the Gum or Mints blog -- who needs Snickers?

Aussies still asking

Our man man John Lauritsen, joined by Charles Robinson -- editor of the fascinating Frankenstein Notebooks, and advocate for Mary as author in her own write (as John Lennon would have put it) -- and Neil Fraistat, Percy Bysshe Shelley scholar -- appeared on Australian radio today, talking about the question that seems destined to upstage that about Shakespeare: ”Who Wrote Frankenstein?” You can listen to the entire half hour conversation here.

Send it across the pond, mates

A week before Halloween, last Wednesday night, the Brits thrilled to the chill of a new Frankenstein, this one brought to today and beyond with stem cell science and a female Frankenstein. The details sound vaguely familiar: Victoria Frankenstein stands, prepared to grieve, over the dying body of her son named -- what else? -- William. Only stem-cell biology will save him. The reviews of this ITV1 special are a bit blasé, to say the least. Liverpool's Peter Grant called the show “the latest re-make from the ‘why on earth did you bother’ school of desperate drama” in his Liverpool Echo review; Aidan Smith of the Scotsman found himself asking, “My God, what's happened to the nose?”
And not a one of the reviewers can resist linking the new monster movie with the show playing in the next hour: Michael Jackson: What Really Happened.
In the comparison, our monster shines. And what did happen to the nose?

Posted

Proud to share Louis Bayard's comments on my new book, published in the Washington Post's Book World on Sunday, October 28.

It’s that time of year

It happens every year at this time . . . new and unusual interpretations of the monster's tale find their way to stages across the country. Here‘s my candidate for most interesting this year: Frankenstein Incarnate, a production gracing the late October evenings in St. Paul, part of the feminist theatrical offering that calls itself “Theatre Unbound.” Online publicity promises that the play will show how “the life of novelist Mary Shelley overlaps and intertwines with the story that made her famous, illuminating the creator and creature within us all.” Sounds like the kind of song we like to sing.

Shelley clatter

Inflammatory prose gets people thinking. That’s what has happened in the cultural studies world as ripples still spread from the plunk into the pond of John Lauritsen's polemical book claiming that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote Frankenstein. (No woman, no teenager, could possibly create such a work, he argues, etc.)

A clear-headed and broad-viewed discussion of the background, the book, and the consequences of it in the intellectual landscape has been posted on the web in the Fall 2007 issue of The Common Review.

Author Jonathon Gross wisely directs our attention away from the Lauritsen book and over to the momentous two-volume Frankenstein Notebooks, the work of Charles Robinson, which photoreproduce the monster manuscript and chronicle the novel's writing practically day by day.

Gross ends his piece with a lyrical passage from Robinson, recalling the days that he spent at work in the Oxford University library, where the Shelleys and the fictional Victor Frankenstein all spent time as well. Here, he quotes Robinson as saying, “the historical and the fictional pasts were intertwined.”

From such a place, such a moment, such an attitude, emanates heartfelt and longlasting writing.

Fire play

Glad to see that someone is reviving one of my favorite stage adaptations of the myth of the monster, Barbara Field's Playing with Fire. Those of you in Syracuse can see a church performance [gods and monsters, what a combination] of this interesting interpretation.

Barbara Field herself told me that she didn't really like the novel when she read it. Encouraged by her friend, the director of Minneapolis's Guthrie Theater, she let her mind wander -- and saw an old man sitting in a Regency era chair on an iceberg. From that vision sprang her play, which pits two pairs, man and monster, old and young, together.

See more of her thoughts on the monster myth in my book, FRANKENSTEIN: A CULTURAL HISTORY.