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bookchronicle — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:38:37 +0000

Bride of Frankenstein
The fact that “bride of frankenstein” has somewhat regularly appeared on my list of search engine terms (77 times at least!) can only mean one thing: there is not nearly enough material out there on her! My Frankenstein information is limited to Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s Frankenstein: A Cultural History. However, for you film buffs there is some interesting tidbits from the 1935 filming of The Bride of Frankenstein: the actress Elsa Lanchester played both Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the monster bride. It’s also entirely her hair combed over a metal cage.

Rococo Art
“Rococo” has appeared roughly 1,000 times, which is pretty sweet. Rococo art is one of my favorite periods of art though it’s often looked over as being over decorative and certainly careless of the political and social stresses of the period it developed in. One commonly discussed painting from the period is Fragonard’s The Swing.

Madame Bovary
I read Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert a few months ago and it was phenomenal. It’s a beautifully written novel and one I greatly enjoyed.

Bibeau and Hitchcock coming to Richmond June 16

Elizabeth McCullough — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:17:40 +0000

Paul Bibeau writes to tell CvilleWords fans of an upcoming event:

Mid June marks the birth of two of your favorite monsters. Its the anniversary of the famous weekend at Lake Geneva which saw the birth of both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, which launched the Victorian vampire tradition. We will celebrate this weird date with a joint Frankenstein-Dracula mashup at the Fountain Bookstore at June 16, 2008 at 6:30 p.m.

Paul Bibeau, author of funny vamp book Sundays with Vlad, and Susan Tyler Hitchcock, author of Frankenstein: A Cultural History will have a funny, freewheeling discussion on fame, creativity, monsters, and myth-making.

Fountain is located at 1312 E. Cary St., Richmond. Hitchcock and Bibeau have both appeared there, and are excited to be back. For more info contact the bookstore, or email paulbibeau@gmail.com.

You might remember Bibeau and Hitchcock from this year’s Festival of the Book. This should be a presentation well worth traveling for.

Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock

bookchronicle — Sun, 18 May 2008 12:52:27 +0000

“‘He would have an enormous schwanzstucker!’”

While I do enjoy non-fiction, I have never been an avid reader and much of my blog will testify to my preference for fiction. However, trying to break my recent reading slump I turned to non-fiction and borrowed a copy of Frankenstein: A Cultural History by Susan Tyler Hitchcock. I have read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein only once in high school and found it dreadful though I am fascinated by early horror movies portraying Frankenstein’s monster. Hitchcock’s book is an illuminating history from page to screen to iconic archetype that will please any Frankenstein fan.

Hitchcock begins with the birth of Frankenstein by exploring the relationship of Mary and Percy Shelley as well as Lord Byron. These three people’s biographies are extraordinarily fascinating and outrageous. This was also my first opportunity to realize that the commonly sold Frankenstein is actually a revised version and I am now on a mission to borrow a version of the original 1818 story. I had given up on the idea of ever returning to Shelley’s work but the first third of this book has given me a great deal of motivation.

In the coming of age section, Hitchcock primarily focuses on the many, many film adaptations and spin-offs based on (some only in name) Shelley’s book. It goes a long way in explaining why Frankenstein is relatively such common nomenclature but so few people really have a grasp on the literary aspect of it. The movies (and censors) continued to reinvent Vincent and the monster for the modern audience.

The third part of the book, our monster, takes a particular look at the Frankenstein mania of the 70s ranging from Rocky Horror to Young Frankenstein to Dean Koontz’s recent Frankenstein series (the third book in this trilogy still with an unknown release date). If nothing else, Hitchcock’s wealth of information substantiates that the Frankenstein myth remains strong.

Hitchcock, a thorough writer and researcher, has provided an enticing portrayal of the evolution of Frankenstein. Frankenstein: A Cultural History that looks at the multiple interpretations that plagued Shelley’s creation over the years. A tale of moral ambiguity used to represent Hitler to comic book appearances has become an icon almost any small child within America can describe. My only warning: Hitchcock’s Frankenstein is not exactly light reading and has an academic taste to it, but excepting this word of caution it was an enjoyable read that has got my finger’s itching to try Mary Shelley’s prodigy once more.

www.susantylerhitchcock.com

Book Festival Science Panel podcast available

Elizabeth McCullough — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:10:02 +0000

From the Charlottesville Podcasting Network:

In this podcast, we join Jennifer Ackerman (Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink, Dream), Michael Sims (Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination), and Susan Freinkel (American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree) as they discuss natural history, science, and the interlocking life cycles of humans, other organisms, and the Earth itself.

The discussion was a presentation of the Virginia Festival of the Book on Friday, March 28, 2008, in the City Council Chambers. Susan Tyler Hitchcock is the moderator.

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Q & A with Michael Sims, author of Apollo's Fire

Elizabeth McCullough — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:51:05 +0000

We live on a rotating planet: This fact is so fundamental to human existence that our earliest stories were created to explain the journey of the sun, moon, and stars through the sky. According to Michael Sims, author of Apollo’s Fire: A Day on Earth in Nature and Imagination, language itself reveals this central metaphor of our consciousness:

…the very word journey preserves the importance of this daily rhythm. Digging back through Middle English and Old French, we find it deriving from the Latin diurnata, for “a day’s work.” … The Latin dies, “day,” begat diurnus, “daily,” and the Latin diurnalis. From the last word we get journal, which surely as diary refers to a record that is kept on a daily basis.

Apollo’s Fire, the journal of a day in the life of Planet Earth, is so densely packed and yet so deftly written that comparisons to the writings of Lewis Thomas, who set a new standard for science and nature writing with Lives of a Cell, come to mind. It was the sort of book that I had to absorb in small doses; every page brought some new fact or insight to ponder.

After finishing Apollo’s Fire I had a few questions for the author, mostly to do with the writing of the book itself. If Sims’ answers are a taste of the upcoming Science Writing panel discussion at the Book Festival, then we’re in for a good session indeed.

CvilleWords: My first question is sparked by this quote from page 113: “The English word firmament boxes up the tradition of the sky as a sphere so tidily that it invites an etymological unpacking.” The book as a whole seems an almost endless unpacking of words, stories, myths, taken-for-granted experiences — did you ever find yourself overwhelmed by your material? As I read I imagined you at your desk surrounded by teetering stacks of index cards. What were your methods for researching and organizing so much material from so many diverse sources?

Michael Sims: Some of my favorite books “close read” (as academics say) a topic or scene; I think especially of Alberto Manguel’s delicious Reading Pictures. I wanted to close read the story that’s so close it’s invisible: a day. It’s common as a penny and just as undervalued, counted mostly by sevens and thirties but occurring one a time, parceled out like an allowance. What day could possibly be more valuable, more ancient and immediate, than today?I had been moving toward this topic for years if not decades, as I made notes, read about light and air and astronomical rhythms, jotted down interesting points from museum trips, children’s books, old movies. I own many books because a library can’t do all I want; I have to live with books and read and re-read, making notes over years, breathing them in as part of my life. That’s how The Phantom Tollbooth and The Time Machine became part of the story of the day for me, along with Darwin’s plant experiments and Galileo’s telescope aimed at the moon, and found their way into my own little book.So I wrote and wrote, threw away a lot, consulted articles and books for detailed explanations of phenomena, and then ran pieces of the manuscript by astronomers, climatologists, photographers. Then I tried to distill everything down to images and specifics and join them in what I hoped would be resonant juxtaposition.

CvilleWords: Other books of science or natural history retain an aspect of memoir — for instance, The Anatomist by Bill Hayes tells the story of the publication of Gray’s Anatomy, but is organized around Hayes’ experiences in anatomy classes, his personal reflections, and the loss of his partner. In contrast, the “I” who opens Apollo’s Fire with reminiscences of childhood quickly steps aside and lets Phaethon take over. Did you ever consider making the book more personal?

Michael Sims: I’ve thought a good bit about this point, because a gratifying number of readers (which for me means five or six) have said that they would have enjoyed my remaining onstage, as if hosting the book on-camera rather than in the invisible voice-over I chose.

I write little in autobiographical mode, partly because I always doubt that I have anything useful to add, but partly also because I feel like I can range further, be less predictable, if I’m not anchored to my own point-of-view. For this book, I felt that a first-person voice would not only limit my options but would also risk immediate fictionalizing. To bring together all the topics I had in mind, I would have to construct an ideal, “typical” day; to do so in first-person felt like turning a nonfiction narrative into a novel. Nicholson Baker could do that, but I’m no Nicholson Baker.

CvilleWords: Near the end of Apollo’s Fire you express some regret that Galileo’s great treatises are relegated to “the dusty shelves of mere science.” I’m sure “mere science” is meant ironically, but what do you see as your book’s genre? Are you comfortable with the “science writing” label for a book that incorporates so much literature, poetry, and history?

Michael Sims: Well, yes, I mean that particular adjective ironically; and an astronomer I know pointed out that science classics are now being read more and more as historical and cultural artifacts as well as milestones in our attempt to see the real world more clearly.

I try to resist adjectives appended to the simple term “writer.” But when I must, I use that lovely old term “nature writer.” My books all circle around our imaginative response to nature. When I’m writing about evolution, King Kong, air pollution, Arbor Day, or the Virgin Mary’s incarnation as sky goddess, I’m simply writing about nature. How our imagination responds to nature is just as much a part of the story, from our point of view, as what existed before we evolved an imagination to aim.

So for me, aside from taxonomic decisions by publishers and bookstores and the Library of Congress, my book’s genre is “nature writing.”

CvilleWords: You begin the book with the question, “Why is the sky blue?” and end it with “Why is the sky dark at night?” I was surprised to learn that Edgar Allan Poe had a hand in answering the latter question. I’m curious — Will you be combining your interests in science and monsters by visiting Poe’s former living quarters at the University of Virginia while you’re in Charlottesville?

Michael Sims: I like your phrase very much: “science and monsters.” Great book title there.

I have to confess that when I received the Charlottesville festival’s invitation to attend, I didn’t think of Poe’s connection with the university. But now it’s firmly on our list, thanks to you. Poe is a fascinating character, and I enjoyed looking at him from a different angle in order to write about his little-known contributions to astronomy. On our sole previous visit to Charlottesville, my wife and I concentrated on Thomas Jefferson (another splendid character who comes up in the book) and used book stores.

The most important part of this festival-oriented visit, for me, is the opportunity to meet three writers I admire, all of whom are associated with the science panel — Jennifer Ackerman, whom I’ve been reading for more than a decade because I consider her one of the finest science writers alive; and two recent discoveries, science writer Susan Freinkel and cultural historian Susan Tyler Hitchcock. I know I’m going to learn a lot and have a great time.

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