Real Life Vampires

In honor of New Moon’s release, I thought I would do some digging and find some unusual Vampire news. I didn’t need to go any father before I found a link from boston.com.

A Boston University Religious Studies Scholar, Joseph Laycock,   has published a book called Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism where he discusses people who believe that they are actually vampires. They don’t bite peoples necks (that’s unsanitary) but most  feed of of people’s energy. A few will occasionally drink a few drops of blood obtained by a syringe.

Interestingly enough, Catholics have been called Vampires because of their belief in transubstantiation (that the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ during the Mass)

Read the transcript of the interview here. There’s also a few related videos.

Twilight Madness keeps spreading

Just stumbled across a Column in the Boston Globe where the headline is “Falling in Love with Twilight”

So naturally I read it.

Not because I too am obsessed with the series. Quite the opposite. I refuse to get into it. First of all, I don’t have any spare time to read pleasure books at school. Second of all, I do not want to waste time reading the series. I know I won’t be able to read  just the first book. It’ll have to be all four. And I refuse to do that.

I did buy Meyer’s foray in to SF, The Host, a few years ago. I have not read it yet. Though the story did intrigue me more than vampire romance.

The author of the Globe column says she was captivated because she got in touch with her inner teen – some fifty years after being a teen. Yes even grandmas are reading Twilight. And as the column points out, it’s not just casual readers who are obsessed. There’s a commenter who had been reading 1984 and Brave New World before moving onto the series. To me, that is going from one of the highpoints of lit (disclaimer: have read 1984 but not read Brave New World yet) to one of the lowpoints. No one is going to argue that the Twilight series is written well…

Beckham writes in her last paragraph “Lots of people turn up their noses at books that have mass appeal. It can’t be good if everyone’s reading it. That’s the mindset.”

Yep that’s me. And I’m proud to be a discriminating reader.

I’ll stick with Star Trek for my pleasure reading thank you very much.