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Binded for Glory

15 Sep

September 15, 2011

This may come as a surprise to longtime readers of this blog, but I am a professional writer.

I will wait a few seconds for the laughter to die down.

But it is true. It is in my official job description at The Company, which shall remain unnamed. And please, for security, it is central that you don’t use your intelligence and google the agency I work for.

Of course, I suppose the guy who makes the “out of order” signs for gas station rest rooms calls himself a writer too. But he doesn’t have to wear a suit and tie to work like I do. In fact, seeing as how he has to spend part of his day unclogging toilets he probably shouldn’t wear a suit and tie to work.

At any rate, as a professional writer and former English teacher, I tend to notice bad grammar, especially when I hear it coming at me out of the mouths of a couple of loudmouth illiterates at Staples.

I was on line at Staples the other day to have something faxed. Surprisingly, the place I was faxing some documents to would not accept scans sent to their email. They insisted on faxes. Faxing is increasingly becoming useless with everyone and their dog owning a scanner. And if someone does not own a scanner, I guess they should upgrade to a push-button phone first. BTW- I know an otherwise normal man who still has a beat-up rotary phone for no other reason than “it still works.” Not that it works very well when customer service tells him to push “1” for English.

Anyway, I was at Staples (who charged me over a dollar a page to send eight pages, plus tax. What a rip off.) waiting for my faxes to go through. The place was packed because I was there less than a week before school began and it was full of adults, but fuller of kids, buying school supplies. And surprisingly, a lot of kids seem to need Staples Easy Buttons.

While I was waiting at the business counter a couple of people needed an old book bound. I saw it, the thing was almost falling apart. They told the woman behind the counter to be very careful with it, it was very important. I judged the book to be about twenty years old, and when I got a glimpse of the cover I saw that it was more like forty.

The important book? Secrets of Success in the Modern Technological Office. And below the title? “New 1974 Edition.”

And not only was it being bound, they were having a copy made, which I am sure is a violation of copyright.

But had you seen the people you would not be surprised. I don’t think they were prepared to work in any office, certainly not the modern technological office of 1974. Let it be sufficient to say that they appeared almost, but not quite, totally unemployable.

However, what drove me nuts was that while they were technically having the book bound, they said they were having it “binded.” As in “my spell check keeps telling me that binded isn’t a word.” You’re on a computer, try it and see for yourself.

They must have used “binded” a thousand times in a ten minute span. And in a variety of ways, more ways than you’d expect a non-existent past tense verb to be used.

“I need this book binded.”
“The binded on here is bad.”
“I hope you do a strong bindeding on this shit.”
“I tried to get it bindeded a couple of months ago but they machine was broke.”

For the record:It is an easy mistake to make. I used to tell my students that when in doubt, the ear always knows. Which sounds right, “I runned to the store” or “I ran to the store?”

Say it out loud. “I swimmed at the beach” or “I swam at the beach”?

“I need this book binded” or “I need this book bound“?

Before you ask (not that I could hear you anyway) these people were not foreign. They sounded like they lived here all their lives, and they seemed to be from forty to fifty years old.

So I stood there a little while longer and listened to how their book was getting binded by the bindeder, and how the bindeding better be damn strong “or else there’s gonna be some shit at that.”

My fax had gone through but I was still waiting on the confirmation. Good thing too, or I would have missed the big debate about if red bindeding looks good on a blue book, and if they change their minds could they get it rebinded?

When I finally left they were looking at the receipt and one was asking the other “why the government was charging taxes on their personal books.”

Thank God I am educated.

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How Dark Shadows Ruined The Vampire.

5 Sep

September 5, 2011

I just finished a Dark Shadows marathon. I watched 1,225 episodes, two original cast movies, and the 12 episode 90’s revival in just about a year and a half. On top of that I also listened to four modern Dark Shadows audio dramas and read both a series guide and six novels published as the show ran in the late 1960’s. Throw in the collection of comics by Gold Key and it is fair to say that yes, I know a little bit about Dark Shadows.

For those not in the know, Dark Shadows is a soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971 on ABC. Unlike nearly every other daytime drama of the time, every episode exists, minus one, but that episode’s soundtrack survives so it is the most complete- by far- show of its type. Compare that to Doctor Who whose shows of that era have almost as many lost as there are still in existence.

The show was a dark and spooky half-hour drama (done on a tiny budget) that regularly featured ghosts, werewolves, time travel, witches, spiritual possession, mad scientists, Frankenstein-like creatures, parallel worlds, immortal Phoenixes, and vampires. And if you know the show there is one name that leapt to mind as soon as you saw “vampires,” Barnabas Collins. 

And he was not just any vampire. Dark Shadows is widely credited with the creation of the modern conflicted vampire. Barnabas Collins was turned into a vampire by a witch’s curse, and instead of destroying him, his father chained him in a coffin. 200 years later he was freed and met a doctor, Julia Hoffman, who cured him. Barnabas would revert back to vampirism a few times over the course of the series, but he was usually a tragic figure, hating what he had become, longing to be human again, and generally becoming the romantic hero of Dark Shadows.

And that is why I hate him.

Until Barnabas vampires were universally characterized as evil. Though Bram Stoker’s Dracula defined the modern vampire, with some help from a few Gothic forebears, the contemporary Twilight vampire and others of that immature ilk all descend from Barnabas Collins.

Take the classic vampire. To be concise I’ll skip the ancient creatures of mythology and proto-religion and move to the 18th Century.

The OED dates the first appearance of the word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen. However, the word itself has roots going back to Eastern Europe as early as the 11th Century.

Vampires were usually reported as bloated in appearance, and ruddy, purplish, or dark in color; these characteristics were often attributed to the recent drinking of blood. Indeed, blood was often seen seeping from the mouth and nose when one was seen in its shroud or coffin, and vampires of the Balkans and Eastern Europe had a wide range of appearance ranging from nearly human to bloated rotting corpses.

None of them sparkled.

Gothic writers like Sheridan Le Fanu added beauty and sexuality, and Bram Stoker added class and refinement, but one thing remained constant: The vampire was a creature of unrepentant evil. And more importantly, he was always an animated corpse. Vampires are classically feared as revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can also be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Vampires are distinctly creatures of the supernatural or demonic realm.

Dark Shadows was also one of the early (though not the first, Richard Matheson explored this theme too) depictions of vampires being cured through scientific methods, which is totally at odds with the “black magic” or demonic origins of the vampire. It was never really clear, nor did it really make sense, how a series of blood transfusions cured Barnabas Collins’ witch’s curse.

Teenage fiction is full of nobly conflicted vampires, utterly handsome, all needing the love of that one girl to turn him around. They are the rebellious bad boys who really aren’t that bad at all, deep down. Dark both in personality and looks (despite somehow also being pale) and brooding, they are the property now of the teen and adolescent.

And that is a damn shame because the vampire should be the boogey man in your closet who comes out not to whisk you into a fantasy world of delight but to rip your throat open and gorge himself on your blood as it sprays gristly crimson ichor across his face. And that face shouldn’t inspire love or lust, the vampire’s face should inspire extreme fear, panic, and revulsion, but most of all, it should be the last thing you see before you pass out or die.

Vampires are not handsome. They are repulsive and loathsome creatures whose breath reeks of the grave. They have moldy dirt under their fingernails from crawling out of the earth and their skin is more than pale and pasty, it is almost translucent, stretched over their body too tightly and their teeth seem long only because their gums have receded and withered. They are animated corpses.

Vampires are not charismatic. They are cunning like animals, like wolves. They do not throw elegant dinner parties. Like rats, a vampire may crawl on the ground through the mud to bite your ankle and in centuries past anyone asleep in a field kept his shoes on at night lest a vampire suck the blood out of their heels. No romantic embraces for them, for a vampire is past the point of love or romance. They are malevolent killers.

 

One of the great ironies of Dracula, and one of the great bits of Stoker’s writing (of which I otherwise have many faults) is that Count Dracula arrived in England on a ship called the Demeter. Demeter was the Greek goddess of the harvest, a life-bringer. Dracula brings only death.

I loved every minute of Dark Shadows, even the early episodes where there was little supernatural and the drama revolved around the threat to the Collins family shipyards. And I loved Barnabas Collins, even if he did single-handedly ruin the vampire genre for decades to come.

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