Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney
By the way, I took a crack at watching the new Vampire Lestat series. On the one hand, I marvel that Lestat really has achieved immortality as a character people are still lusting after long after he thrived as Anne Rice's romantic fantasy. On the other hand, Sam Reid's Pepe le Pew fake French accent is really distracting. Why doesn't his rock band just go ahead and cover "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"? And, boy, are they not shy about diverging from the source material. Rice's vampires didn't have sex but these TV versions not only have sex they urinate. I kind of thought it was sad Rice didn't live to see the successful TV show she'd tried to get off the ground for so long but maybe the reason it did get off the ground was that the studio wouldn't budge on making these changes she resisted. But why must they always do this? I remember now Beau Demayo's tweets about working on Marvel movies and shows in which he talked about how much the people in charge of them tend to despise the source material.
Which reminds me, Lanterns started bad enough but then hit 13th Doctor levels of bad. I mean, in just the same way. Like the Doctor's companions taking time outs to spout phony academic rhetoric about race. I saw a meme this morning predictably labelling people complaining about Lanterns as racist, the meme rebuking those viewers by sharing panels from the original DC comic in which John Stewart talks about race. Yeah, comics from the '60s and '70s did tackle racial issues. The point is they did it better. I was reading Chris Clairemont's original run on X-Men this morning in which he deliberately put together a multiracial team with members from Africa, Japan, and Russia. And Thunderbird, the American Indian character, who spends a lot of time griping about having to help white people. Sometimes it's cheesy but it's a lot better than the phony bullshit we get on Lanterns, like the brown skinned woman married to the white guy, of whom she says his whiteness gives him the "privilege" to be "eccentric", as though it's this big revelation that people of colour can't be eccentric while white people are allowed to be. Has she never heard of Dennis Rodman or Flava Flav? Maybe she never met a black guy like the one I saw on the trolley a few weeks ago using the safety bars on the ceiling to do flips while his miniature stereo blasted rap music. Sure, maybe that's anecdotal, maybe somehow, somewhere, someone has measured levels of eccentricity with statistics and found there to be fewer eccentric people of colour in the world. Somehow I doubt it. And then there was the third episode, which I couldn't even finish, in which John's mother says it's not fair for the Guardians to ask a black man if he's afraid just like they'd ask a white man. Setting aside for a moment the implication that white men inherently have a greater capacity for bravery, or are more likely to lie about it, what does it matter to the Guardian? They want someone fearless to do the job, regardless of race. What do they care what colour the candidate is? It's hard to believe this series is supposed to exist in the same universe as Peacemaker.
I've been rereading The Vampire Lestat as part of my research on H Rider Haggard's She. I wondered how no-one had ever noticed that Akasha was clearly based on Ayesha and Lestat had acquired the "de Lioncourt" name as a reference to Leo, the handsome reincarnation of Ayesha's lover, who's often compared to a lion. But then I asked Google's AI and it helpfully pointed me to academic papers in which people had drawn that comparison. Reading the last segment of The Vampire Lestat, the comparisons become even stronger. Both books feature the protagonists ruminating on the nature of immortality and the goddess-like woman who can grant it. So in its way, She does live on in the public consciousness, I guess.
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