Time out

I’ve only been at this PhD thing for a few months so far, but based on the self-knowledge I gained through doing my MA and on advice from those wiser and more experienced than myself, I have learned that even in these early days it’s important to maintain a reasonably disciplined (though not exactly *strict*) work schedule. So, on my ‘work’ days, I try to spend seven or eight hours applying myself, either in reading/note-taking on secondary sources, freewriting on ideas and questions around my topic, or doing those annoying yet necessary admin tasks like keeping my working bibliography up to date (I’m using Zotero for this - so much better than crappy EndNote!).

I’m a bit off-kilter this week, having spent two days attending a postgraduate workshop on doing interdisciplinary research at the University of Otago – full-on but incredibly useful – and then a day on campus teaching. (I'll write more on this workshop soon, once I've had a chance to review my notes and fully digest it all.) These activities were extremely enjoyable but as a natural introvert, I find that after spending so much time talking to other people, I need to go into social hibernation for a bit to recharge. It’s not that I’m antisocial - quite the opposite, in fact. I loved getting the chance to talk to other postgrads about their projects and to find that even though our topics are incredibly varied, we are all sharing some of the same challenges. And while I’m pretty new to teaching, I enjoy the interactivity of the classroom. We spend a good chunk of time reading/discussing primary source documents, so it’s not just me talking at the poor students. It's more that some people need social interaction in order to become energised, whereas I am energised/re-energised by time spent on my own. (What can I say? I make great conversation with myself!)

Anyway, after all that excitement, Friday evening saw me retire to a bubble bath fortified with a glass of wine and Hilary Mantel's stunning follow-up to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies. This woman is such an incredible writer, I have to keep reminding myself I am not *actually* living inside Thomas Cromwell's head. She has a kind of spooky ability to invoke ghosts, and you really feel that after these oh-500-odd years, you are finally getting the inside story on Anne Boleyn’s unlikely rise and horrific fall. The visceral immediacy of Mantel’s writing is at times surprisingly terrifying. I leave you with this scene, capturing the moment when Anne knows things are about to go seriously pear-shaped for her, but she is still boldly preparing to display herself in the royal pageantry of the jousts at Greenwich (pp.287-8):

'

Now Anne Boleyn calls for her glass. She sees herself: her jaundiced skin, lean throat, collarbones like twin blades.


1 May 1536: this, surely, is the last day of knighthood. What happens after this - and such pageants will continue - will be no more than a dead parade with banners, a contest of corpses. The king will leave the field. The day will end, snapped like a shinbone, spat out like smashed teeth.'

Take that, cultural imperialists!

I’m relieved to see that Google has been forced to see sense on its Google Books digitisation project and concede to a fairer settlement with rights holders. Google promoted its plan to digitise the world’s books and make them freely available online as a magnanimous gesture to education the world over. Unfortunately, the original out-of-court Google Books Settlement disregarded the claims of non-US rights-holders, and had authors and publishers in New Zealand (and a lot of other countries) crying ‘cultural imperialism!’

The attitude that ‘if it’s not currently sold in the US it’s free for the taking’ really got Kiwi writers’ hackles up. (Though it was the pressure put on by the EU and its individual members - France and Germany made formal complaints - that probably made Google back down.)

As the NZ Press Association explained the original deal back in August -

“If a book is not generally available for sale in the US, even though it is widely available elsewhere, it is considered out of print and Google can display excerpts without consent…. It has digitised books by Janet Frame, Hone Tuwhare, Sir Edmund Hillary, Witi Ihimaera, Michael King, James K Baxter and Keri Hulme, all without any permission from anyone.”

These are best-selling, iconic New Zealand authors, whose books are all currently in print and widely available in this country. Just because mainstream US booksellers have not seen any value in stocking them does not make them ‘out of print’ and therefore freely available for Google to do with them what it likes.

Further, while authors and publishers could opt out, asking that their books not be included as part of the digitisation project, “Google was under no obligation to agree to that request. The rights-holder then had the right to take their chances and sue the multi-billion dollar company.”

Yeah, good luck with that, tiny NZ publishing house. New Zealand authors would fare even less well. The local market is so small that even best-selling authors sometimes need to do the odd bit of corporate huckstering to pay the mortgage. There are still some significant problems with the revised settlement (here’s a good analysis), but at least Google has been stopped in its book-plundering tracks and forced to recognise that the world of publishing does not begin and end at the US border.

Debating history-as-fiction and fiction-as-history

While I was busy contemplating the awfulness of Colin Farrell’s bleach job in the film Alexander, Magistra et Mater picked up on my post as the opportunity to ask some deeper questions about “the rising cultural importance of historical novels … [and] the uneasy relationship between the two genres of history and historical fiction.” What, she asks, “do authors or would-be authors of historical novels think that writing fiction allows them to do that more conventional historical forms don’t?”

Amongst the possible answers she poses is the ability to gain a much wider audience and therefore to sell more books than the lowly historian could ever dream was possible. The historical novelist may also have the ability to write more vividly than the historian, though I think this is debateable. Some best-selling 'historical' novelists write dreadfully clunky, lifeless prose (Dan Brown, I’m looking at you!), while some historians have the ability to sweep you along in stories that are more exciting than any fiction. Of course, the novelist also has the unique freedom to make things up when it suits them.

It seems to me that Magistra is also touching on some much bigger issues, such as those old unanswerable questions about the purpose of history and the historian’s role in society, and whether history is an art or a science. If we consider that the historian has some responsibility to reach out to the general public (and I do, because if historians don’t do this, then politicians have free reign to manipulate history to suit their own purposes), then we have to be concerned about developing the communication skills to engage a wider audience at least some of the time. I’m also of the school that believes that the way scholarly and academic history is written - the narrative approach used, the rhetorical constructs chosen and so on - is as much a part of the history itself as the research, the facts, the analysis and the scholarly apparatus.

I find it interesting that Magistra appears to make a very black-and-white distinction between being a writer of fiction and being an historian, as though one can be one or the other but not both. The creative writing that I do definitely enriches and improves my academic writing, and a number of the novelists I enjoy reading are qualified historians (have PhDs in history), so I see more overlap between the genres and skills than she perhaps does. To me, it’s a bit of a cop out to think conveying the facts in dull, workmanlike prose is enough just because the historian’s task is to write about ‘what really happened’. Yes, it’s true that most historians aren’t going to be able to come near what the best writers (of fiction or non-fiction) are capable of, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t take good writing as seriously as they do thorough research and well-supported analysis.

I also believe that novelists should not be the only ones aspiring to make us emotionally engage with the past. Historians like Marcus Rediker or Judith Walkowitz have the ability to tell what really happened with faultless attention to the scholarly apparatus, and to make us care about what happened and possibly use that knowledge of the past to help fuel change in the present. To my mind, that is an extremely important skill for historians to possess, particularly those who work on the histories of the marginal and the previously unconsidered (the poor, the mentally ill, migrants, slaves etc.). But it does open up the fraught question of whether academic history should also be serving the causes of social activism (as many historians believe - that was, after all, integral to the feminist history that emerged in the 1970s), or is indeed by its very nature political regardless of any claims to objectivity.

To write history that engages us on both the intellectual and emotional planes does not mean making things up. But it does require a more mindful approach and a commitment to honing one’s writing as a craft in and of itself that perhaps some (many?) academic historians either don’t have time for or don’t consider a core part of the job. In my experience, writing skills are often an under-rated, if not completely ignored, aspect of the teaching of history at university level. (For any history teachers/professors reading this, do you consider teaching the skill of writing in itself as part of your purview? Or is that something for the literature/composition teachers to worry about?)

Magistra is right in saying “Most of the books by academic medievalists/early modernists which do find a wider audience are either on conventional kings and battles topics or are lucky enough to have found sources/archives which contain a lot of information on a small group of people (such as the inquisition records for Montaillou)”. But in the case of Montaillou*, for example, it was not simply the unique nature of the evidence that made it such a popular work but Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s vigorous and accessible prose style, which is characteristic of the best of the Annales school. (It might also reflect a different and distinctly French view of the historian’s function in society, and therefore of what types of skills the profession requires.)

Having said all that, I confess I’m bothered when writers of historical fiction try to blur the boundaries and claim more for their creations than they merit. For example, this quote highlighted by Magistra really disturbs me: ‘As [novelist] Sarah Dunant puts it in History Today: ‘I want to sink the reader deep into the period, to say, “Have the confidence to follow me because I know what is true”'. My response to that is to say yes, Ms Dunant, you may have done in-depth historical research and ‘know what is true’, but when it comes to choosing between what is true and what is interesting or what best moves the story along, you’re going to pick the latter every time.

* This was a history of the lives and beliefs of peasants living in the village of Montaillou, in what is now southwest France, in the early 14th century. It was based primarily on the previously unexamined records of the Catholic inquisitor Jacques Fournier. Le Roy Ladurie's interpretation is profoundly flawed because he took Fournier's highly-mediated accounts as factual descriptions , but the book still stands as one of the first examples of 'history from below', which sought to expand academic history beyond the study of the lives of elites.

History and fiction: The good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain dull

Now that my university coursework is over for this year, I’m planning to spend some time over the summer doing some creative writing. Yes, I am one of those students of history who also harbours a secret longing to write historical fiction. Medieval mystery/crime fiction, to be exact. (I confess, I’m a walking cliché.) I have a few chapters written and a vague plot outline but I don’t really expect to produce anything as substantial as a complete first draft any time soon. For me, fiction writing is primarily a form of relaxation, a way of escaping the constraints and conventions of the academic and business writing that consumes so much of my time. (This blog is another such outlet, where the rules don’t apply.)

Having said that, I do take my fiction writing seriously in the sense that I’m aware of, and try to avoid, most of the dreadful clangers discussed so passionately here. Many historians find historical fiction hard to read (or watch) not necessarily because the authors may bend the facts a bit to suit their plot, but because of their tendency to have their 14th or 16th or 18th century characters act, think, and believe in thoroughly 21st century modes. Thus, you get 14th century serving wenches espousing the values of third-wave feminism and 16th century atheists who declare their rational faith in science instead of God. (The renowned French historian Lucien Febvre wrote a fascinating and very readable book, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, in which he argued that 16th century French language did not contain the words or constructs - as he put it, ‘l’outillage mentale’ - to even *think* an idea like atheism as we know it today.)

Personally, I don't mind a bit of anachronism in my historical fiction, whether literary or cinematic, provided it's well-written or well-acted and, as Maximus said, I am entertained. Topping my list of execrable historical films is Kingdom of Heaven. On paper (and barring Orlando Bloom), this film had all the elements to make for top-notch cinema. Ridley Scott, crusading knights, Saladin, a leprous king and dirty dynastic dealings over a disputed crown (Ha! I could have said ‘diadem’ there, but enough alliteration for one day)… even if you took no liberties at all with the historical record you’d have a rollicking story. I just don’t understand how it could turn out so absolutely lifeless. Poor old Jeremy Irons spent most of the movie looking like he wished he were anywhere else. Running a close second is Alexander, although it must be said that this film at least had some unintentional humour value. I laughed out loud at Colin Farrell’s appalling bleach job, which made him look like a regular at Hair Jude in Levin. And why on earth did everyone have fake Irish accents? It was like something out of Monty Python.

On the positive side of the ledger I put The Name of the Rose, which manages to pull off an almost impossible mélange of papal and royal intrigue, Aristotelian science versus ‘dark ages’ superstition, apocalyptic prophecies, witchcraft, heresy, demonic possession and a visit from celebrity Inquisitor Bernardo Gui. Oh, and there are a bunch of gruesome murders to be solved by Sean Connery, playing the kind of monk one perhaps wishes hadn’t taken a vow of celibacy. And from the land of the small screen comes my current Sunday night indulgence, The Tudors. I’m not sure how historically accurate this series is (any Tudor scholars out there care to weigh in on this?), but the extremely high production values and the quality of the writing and acting lift it out of the usual run of historico-romantic television schmaltz.

Speaking of schmaltz, I’ve had a kind of hankering lately to watch Shogun again, although I suspect my present self would probably be aghast at it’s mixture of Anglo-centric superiority and rampant orientalism. Whereas my past self was too busy being dazzled by Richard Chamberlain’s samurai swashbuckling. Ah, the early 80s, when Richard Chamberlain reigned as indisputable king of the historical mini-series. Actually, that must have been a pretty new television genre back then. Anyone know what the first historical mini-series was? My memories reach back as far as the mid-70s television phenomenon that was Roots, but was there anything before that?

Anyway, back to my obsession with The Tudors. I'm watching the third series and I’m liking the way the writers have managed to incorporate the complexities of European politics and religious upheaval during this period, instead of just doing the standard romanticised 'six wives' story. They’re not shying away from showing Henry VIII's sociopathic bullying and his anxieties about failing to measure up to François Ier in the Renaissance prince stakes, either. Also, without suddenly making Henry wear a fat suit or start dribbling, the director has managed to convey his increasing dissipation and hint at the horrors to come (which can't be easy for the crew, given Henry is played by the rather dishy Jonathan Rhys Meyers).

Incidentally, I’m no fan of the psychohistory (that is, seeking the answers to questions about complex historical change in the personality quirks of so-called ‘great men’), but out of curiosity I looked up ‘sociopath’ and found these amongst the signs listed in the DSM. If the shoe fits, Henry…

1. Inability to make or keep friends, or maintain relationships such as marriage - check. (In no small part because he keeps having his nearest and dearest executed.)
2. Apparent lack of remorse or empathy; inability to care about hurting others - check. (See under 1, above.)
3. Impulsivity and/or recklessness - check. (“Have you got me my divorce yet? Screw the pope, let’s make ME head of the Church of England!”)
4. Poor behavioural controls — expressions of irritability, annoyance, impatience, threats, aggression, and verbal abuse; inadequate control of anger and temper - Uh, check, check, check, check and check.
5. Narcissism, elevated self-appraisal or a sense of extreme entitlement -check. (But I’m inclined to give him a pass on this one. He is King of England, after all…)
6. Tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others - check. (See under 1, above. See also, ‘Dissolution of the Monasteries’.)

Could 'Wolf Hall' be historical fiction that works?

I’m chuffed Hilary Mantel won the Man Booker prize for her latest novel Wolf Hall. The book is described as a “Tudor corridors-of-power saga” that “turns the historical figure of Thomas Cromwell — Henry VIII's shadowy political fixer — into a compelling, complex literary hero.” It comes hard on the heels of the saucy television series The Tudors, high on of my list of must-watch television indulgences. In this show, everyone is gorgeous (and clean!), and even pious saint-to-be Sir Thomas More is a brooding hottie in a hair shirt and velvet breeches.

I haven’t read Wolf Hall yet, but it’s on my pile of books for the summer holidays. I know many historians find it painful to read historical novels, probably because the mantras we’ve learned about reliability of evidence and avoiding anachronism at all costs are so deeply ingrained. I’ve been interested in history since I was a child, and I’ve always enjoyed reading historical whodunits by the likes of Paul Doherty and Ellis Peters, but even I find I’m much more critical of historical fiction than I used to be.

That said, if anyone can make this work, Mantel can. She has long been one of my favourite authors, with an incredible ability to really get inside your head and make you experience being her characters. In my opinion, Beyond Black is her best book It’s about a psychic who is stalked by abusive ghosts from her childhood as she works the seedy pubs and halls of a bleakly suburban post-Thatcher England, and it manages to be poignant, funny and terrifying all at the same time. Beyond Black is one of those rare stories that linger and haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page.

But much as I love Mantel’s writing, I was more than a bit peeved by this weird opinion piece, in which she sets up a false comparison between historians and historical novelists. She obviously has little respect for and less understanding of what historians actually do and how they work, saying:

“The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it.”

This makes the historical profession sound like it’s nothing more than the idiosyncratic pursuit of personal follies and academic rivalries. The way Mantel puts it, writing history is basically the same as writing fiction, though perhaps with a bit more focus on the collection of dull old ‘facts’ and less conjecture about people’s personal feelings.

I can understand that Mantel is probably fed up to the back teeth with pedantic critics pointing out errors or distortions of fact in her novels. But seriously folks, there's a whole lot more to writing history than this!

Riffling through Margaret of York's library

I’m not much of a social butterfly. I tend to quickly run short on patience when I’m stuck talking to people who don’t have much of interest to say. I find one way to predict the potential boredom factor of pending conversations is to stealthily scope out what people like to read. I do this all the time when I visit people’s houses. If they have a shelf full of Mills & Boons – or, even worse horrors, NO BOOKS AT ALL! – chances are our social intercourse is probably going to be pretty brief and unfulfilling. If, on the other hand, the shelves reveal some classic fiction or a sprinkling of lovely, gory whodunits, well then, things are looking up for our relationship. And if there’s some history and philosophy there as well, it’s possible I may be your new best, ear-bending friend.

So I wonder, how would I have got on with Margaret of York (1446 – 1503), whose personal library has been catalogued as part of LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books project? Margaret, whose library represents the oldest collection so far catalogued, was the Duchess of Burgundy by marriage, and sister of Edward the IV and Richard III. Like many noblewomen of her period, she was an intelligent and skilled politician, using marriage alliances to manoeuvre her way through the byzantine politics that marked fifteenth century relations between the ruling houses of Europe. (Not least of her problems, of course, were the Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York.)

It’s no surprise to find titles like Les faits d'Alexandre le Grand by Quintus Curtius Rufus or Les chroniques des comtes de Flandre amongst Margaret’s books of history and philosophy, and the classical authors Seneca and Justinus are also represented. For lighter reading, there is courtly romance in the form of Raoul Le Fevre’s The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. This was the first book printed in English and Margaret’s copy is the only one that survives. A well-educated and cultivated woman, Margaret’s patronage supported numerous artists and writers including the printer William Caxton. The title page of this book features an engraving of Caxton presenting it to her.

By far the bulk of Margaret’s library comprises religious and meditational works. Her lifetime was a period of great religious turmoil in Europe, marked by fierce debates over the authority of the papacy, the corruption of the Catholic Church, and the emergence of heretical sects like the Lollards. Literacy was increasing as the development of printing was making books cheaper and more accessible, and the trade was partly fuelled by demand for works of devotion and meditation written in English and designed for a lay readership. Such books promoted an interior, personal relationship with the divine, thus helping lay the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. One of the central tenets of Lollardy, for example, was that the faithful should come to know God by reading scripture for themselves. The Oxford Doctor John Wycliffe, who is usually considered the sect's founder, translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into vernacular English in 1382. Like many proto-Protestant sects, the Lollards rejected the validity of the Catholic hierarchy of priesthood and Pope mediating between the people and God, and also denounced many of the ritualistic elements of Catholicism, such as saints and pilgrimage.

Amongst Margaret’s books are some texts that are characteristic of this new form of literate lay devotion, including The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis and The Mirror of Sinners (both medieval bestsellers, and The Imitation of Christ is still in print today). But from what we know of her, Margaret remained conventionally Catholic, and this is reflected in her collection of saints’ lives and her Guide to the pilgrimage churches of Rome. Like all good English nobles, she had a Life of St. Edmund the Martyr, and she also had several works by Jean de Gerson, theologian, chancellor of the University of Paris, and rabid persecutor of heretics.

Medieval women and the myth of illiteracy

An intriguing manuscript recently surfaced in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples that sheds new light on the reading abilities and habits of women in late medieval England. The manuscript, which was serendipitously unearthed by Canadian scholar James Weldon while he was looking for something else entirely, has attracted some attention from the mainstream media*. This article rather flippantly describes the manuscript as a ‘medieval women’s magazine’, composed as it is of a varied collection of ‘articles’ (if you will) on topics of supposed feminine interest – as the subhead puts it, ‘Canadian researcher discovers historic document filled with romance and recipes’. The anthology is written in Middle English and includes extracts from a variety of different sources, including medicinal recipes, household tips, romances and a saint's life.

The Naples manuscript is a rare example of vernacular literature that appears to be aimed at a secular female readership, and as such is a pretty interesting find in itself. But what also interests me are the reader comments at the end of the newspaper article. Overall, they reflect the popular belief that most people in the Middle Ages were illiterate, and that literacy was a privilege almost exclusive to male secular and clerical elites. This assumption has led some scholars astray when it comes to considering the contribution women – especially non-aristocratic women – could have made to the literary culture of late medieval England, and it has produced interpretations that dismiss works purportedly by women as the work of men writing under pseudonyms.

Such has been the case with The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s), which many a scholar has argued was entirely the creative production of male scribes (I talked a bit about their varying interpretations in a previous post). At the start of her book, Margery describes herself as illiterate and thus entirely reliant on her priestly collaborators, but this statement cannot be read as transparent. On one level, it operates to place her within an orthodox tradition of women’s mystical experience recorded and transmitted by male clerics. In this respect, Margery’s ‘illiteracy’ serves an important strategic function by shielding her from charges of heresy, which at this time was strongly associated with women’s ability to read the Bible in vernacular English.

When I started doing some research on the Book, I discovered another interesting angle around the concept of 'literacy' (which incidentally gave me a good reminder about not applying modern categories and definitions to analysis of the past). I'd approached the problem of Margery’s authorship by first asking the question, ‘given Margery’s social background and family history (as she tells it herself and from what we know based on other records), how probable is it that she would have truly been functionally illiterate?’. To answer this question, I was initially thinking broadly in terms of a 21st century standard of illiteracy – roughly, the inability to read and write at a basic level that allows one to function in society.

However, with a bit more research, I discovered that this definition becomes quite misleading when applied to the later Middle Ages. To be ‘literate’ during this period meant to be ‘Latinate’ – to have the skills to read and write in Latin. These were skills almost exclusively reserved to men, particularly as the developing university system excluded women and tied Latinity to a clerical education. But at the same time, English culture was undergoing a transition to the vernacular. Strong growth in lay piety was creating demand for works of devotion and meditation written in English and this drove a corresponding expansion in the ability to read in English. Alongside this trend, technological advances like the replacement of parchment with paper and the development of methods for bulk book production were making books cheaper and more accessible to the urban merchant and trading classes.

The women of these classes were generally capable of at least the basics of reading and writing in English – enough to enable them to pursue their religious devotions (and possibly educate their children and servants), run households, and work in family businesses. Far from being illiterate, by the 14th century they had emerged as a distinctive group of book owners, something we know by the number of books accounted for in their wills. The discovery of the Naples manuscript is a timely reminder that we need to leave behind old-fashioned assumptions about just how 'dark' the 'dark ages' really were, and instead look more deeply into the many ways women of all classes – not just the aristocratic elite – were participating in cultural production and reproduction during this period.

Image: The gisant of Alienor d'Aquitaine at the Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud. She is depicted reading rather than in the more usual pose of hands piously folded in prayer.

* Props to jliedl for the original link.

'Twilight'? No fangs!

Well, that’s two hours of my life I’ll never get back.

How can the undead be so unutterably dull? Perhaps hanging around in the Pacific Northwest for a couple of hundred years bleaches you of all personality, as well as of skin colour. But it wasn’t the execrable acting, the lousy pacing or the goofy special effects that bugged me the most about this film. In fact, the cheapo effects actually made for some pretty funny moments, including lead vampire dude speed-running on the end of a cable that made him look like a puppet escapee from Team America.

What bothered me most was a barely hidden subtext about the dangers of female sexuality, although I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me as the author is apparently a big-time God-botherer. For what feels like hours, the two protagonists brood at each other and force themselves to resist temptation. Naturally, the human female is weaker and is all ‘damn the torpedoes, let’s go for it’, and vampire-bloke proves his superiority by manfully resisting her. The wages of sin in this case is not just death, but un-death (and losing your mortal soul along with your purity ring). This subtext is even less subtle on the book, which has cover art depicting a woman’s hands hold a shiny red apple. Yes, Eve, we all know what that means.

The other thing that disturbed me was when vampire-dude admitted he’d been hanging out in his girlfriend’s bedroom every night watching her sleep. She seems to think this is sweet. I think it’s stalking. When this sort of creepy male behaviour is portrayed to millions of adolescent girls as normal and even desirable, it’s no wonder they have problems reporting harassment and stalking until things get extreme.

A wicked winter storm is howling through here this evening, so I think I’ll expunge Twilight from my brain with a dose of real vampire action: Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic Dracula, washed down with an appropriately rich, dark and spicy Peter Lehmann shiraz.

Sex, drugs and...Samuel Taylor Coleridge??

I was lucky enough recently to get to go to a concert by Iron Maiden, who rarely tour in my neck of the woods. (Yes, I admit it, I’m a child of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s and I still LOVES me some head-bangin’. The very first album I bought with my own money was AC/DC’s Back in Black.) Iron Maiden’s lead singer Bruce Dickinson is quite the showman. In fact, even if you’re not that into heavy rock music, their live act is worth seeing just for the sheer theatrical scale of it. They recently beat out several much younger and ‘cooler’ bands to win the 2009 Brit Award for Best Live Act.

Now, Iron Maiden (or ‘Maiden’ as the hardcore fans call them) are surprisingly literate as far as 80s head bangers go. Quite a few of their songs are based on classic books or poems, and such a one is their take on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. At the start of this particular song, a set slowly appears from the darkness of the stage, featuring as a backdrop the tattered sails and rigging of a ghostly wooden sailing ship. Dickinson appears, dressed in a ragged overcoat and swinging a staff, and starts stalking the faux decks. In ominous tones, he introduces the song, saying he is about to tell a famous, dreadful tale by -- Samuel – Taylor – Coleridge! Ha! I never would have believed it, but this swarming mass of long-haired weed-smoking black-jeans-clad head-bangers lets out a huge roar of approval. Coleridge gets the ultimate metal fan’s accolade - the Devil’s horns - and I hear a few drunken shouts of “yeah, Coleridge!”.

It was truly a moment of culture clash on a grand and bizarre scale. Although Coleridge himself may not have felt entirely out of place in this anti-Establishment, drug-smoking crowd.