TV Fangdom

TV Fangdom, a conference on television vampires, takes place on June 7-8 at the University of Northampton. Although not exactly in the vein of this blog, there are a couple of talks on the programme that could be interesting and fun to listen to, like Zhana Popova from the University of Sofia on Vampires among Housewives and Mothers in Post-totalitarian Bulgaria and Maria Mellins from St Mary's University College on Fangtasia London: The True Blood Franchise and Vampire Lifestyle. More information on the conference website.

According to Dr. Lorna Jowett from the University of Northampton, who teaches horror and vampire fiction, 'The TV Fangdom conference aims to put the university on the map as a location where exciting media research is happening, to encourage research in all areas of television studies. We want to demonstrate to our own students, at all levels, that we have a dynamic research community and environment.'

Thanks to Jordi Ardanuy for mentioning the conference.

Voyage to Transylvania

Allessandra Bisceglia's Dracula: Viaggio in Transilvania (Giunti, 2008) is a colourful companion to the Italian TV series Voyager presented by Roberto Giacobbo. The book is no doubt meant for a relatively young audience who are presented with the history of Vlad Tepes, vampires, the fictional Dracula and his cinematic incarnations. A number of photos from Romania from the making of the Voyager documentary on the subject are included.

The few pages concerning vampires are cursory and go into very little detail, although it may be worth noting that the author favours the possible translation of the word nosferatu - which in my opinion Emily Gerard hardly heard, but simply read while researching her book on Transylvania - as "non-spirato": 'il non-morto'...

An Exile in Paradise

The entry on Edward Lear (1812-88) in my Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature - incidentally right below an entry on J. S. Le Fanu mentioning In a Glass Darkly, the collection including Carmilla - states:

'Lear was by profession a landscape painter, but his elaborate landscape paintings have much less distinction and interest than his drawings and sketches.'

Fortunately, there is more of interest in Lear's work as a landscape painter than the Guide will have us believe. He published his Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, &c in 1851, and a couple of years ago a television series followed in Lear's footsteps on his journey through Greece and Albania: An Exile in Paradise: The Adventures of Edward Lear is currently aired here in Denmark, so I just caught the episode in which Robert Horne - described as 'an adventurer, traveller and writer with a keen interest in art and science fiction' - guides the viewer through Albania, looking for the places where Lear stayed and tracing the history from Lear's time until today. Lear appears to have been something of an adventurer himself.

Detailed information on the production is available from Lear Productions, with the promo below. A DVD, unfortunately, is currently unavailable.

'I can smell the sunlight on your skin...'

I am currently three episodes into watching the first season of True Blood which I received on DVD from USA the other day. I am not quite sure what to make of it, but somehow I tend to get involved in what's happening in these series - I recently watched the first season of another HBO series, The Wire, and initially thought it was unbearable to watch, but quickly got hooked! Certainly, True Blood is a humorous take on the vampire genre, as well as an unusual series with its explicit focus on sex, at least I am not used to seeing condoms in a TV series!

As an aside, I can also recommend the Mad Men series. Not that it has anything to do with vampires, but because it has something to do with history. Set in New York in 1960 it shows how many things that were just part of the everyday world back then have changed over the past five decades: They constantly smoke and drink at work, and don't mind driving a car after drinking an incredible amount of alcohol. Sexual harassment of female employees is almost obligatory, and women in general are either secretaries or house wives. Racial segregation, of course, is the norm. If we find it hard to understand the world of our ancestors a few centuries back, it is worth being reminded how things that were part of the social order just fifty years ago have become unacceptable today.