Zombie Notes

Laurie Rozakis, Zombie Notes (The Lyons Press, 2009).

You’ve read all those dusty old classics – Hamlet, Moby Dick, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and more – but you’ve probably forgotten (or skipped over) the parts where it is revealed that, for example, Romeo and his family were zombies, while Juliet’s family wasn’t.  (Now you can see where the idea for the Twilight series came from.)

Dr Rozakis’ Zombie Notes’ tells how these classics first appeared – including the zombies and vampires.  She writes about Shakespeare, Disckens, Twain, Melville, Austen, Shelley and Conrad.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is omitted – most likely because it’s come down to us in its original form.

Zombie Notes is clearly a parallel to the ubiquitous Cliffs Notes, but while Cliffs is dry and dull as Egyptian tomb-dust, Zombie sparkles with wit and imagination.

Each work gets a chapter, and each chapter includes sections on

• Cultural Context – Shakespeare’s time, for example, was marked by the Zombie plagues

… so fierce they earned the name the “Black Plague”

• The Characters – in which the vampires, zombies, and just plain folks are identified
• Three Big Ideas [ideal for writers of term papers]

… zombies take many forms” (e.g., “Moby Dick, the Zombie Whale”)

• Big Three Symbols – in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Vampire Slayer, Yorick’s skull

… represents how Denmark’s vampires have sucked the brains from Denmark

• The Plot and What it Means – this part includes quotes from the texts, restored to their original form:

To be, or not to be a vampire, that is the question…

Finally, there’s a “Discussion and Essay Guide”, and a “Quiz” (in which some answers depend on Rozakis’ explanations).

In Hamlet, the Vampire Slayer, the play-within-a-play is “The Vampire Trap”. And we can easily guess what happens to Ophelia.

The “Cultural Context” section puts the writers in the context of their times. Dickens, for example, was

… writing under the name ‘Boz’ (short for ‘Be Opposed to Zombies’)

I wouldn’t recommend this as an introduction to those classics. If you haven’t read them, you might be amused by the zombie and vampire references, but otherwise, it would be like listening to a British comedy team doing a roast at a meeting of an exclusive men’s club – full of obscure references and inside jokes, signifying nothing.

But if you have, this highly-recommended book will re-open them, and re-illuminate them in a eerie new light.

Vocabulary Builder: invidious

Nabokov said that a good reader is someone who always has a dictionary at hand. 

I’m probably not alone in skimming over unfamiliar words, thinking “well, that probably means ….”.    Starting with this post, I’m not going to let those words slip by.

Not too long ago, we had Bill Buckley to thank for keeping less-frequently used words alive.  Someone once complained to him that he used too many difficult words.  Buckley replied that it was just that he used the word most appropriate to the subject. 

Today’s entry is “invidious”.  The source is the irrepressible John Derbyshire, of National Review, this time on The Corner, for January 18, 2009:

 There were many duplicates, so it would be invidious to assign credits.

As Derbyshire uses it here, it means

offensively or unfairly discriminating; injurious:  invidious comparisons.

It comes from the Latin word invidiōsus, “envious”.  The idea behind the word is that to single out one of many might make the others envious

Calendar Tests

Google says you can embed a calendar here. Let’s see………

Nope – WordPress doesn’t like “iframe”.

Perfect months

February 2009 is a “perfect month”: it starts on Sunday, ends on Saturday.

		Feb 2009
S	M	T	W	Th	F	s
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

It happened last in 1998; the next one will be in 2015.

Some people like to have their calendars start on Monday.  That seems reasonable, since it keeps the two weekend days together, at the end of the week.  Let’s call one of those perfect months a “second-order perfect month”.   We had one in 1999; there’ll be another in 2010.

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First post. WordPress doesn’t seem to like postless blogs.