Lost cities, lost treasures, lost books…. The legends of the lost are powerful stories. Sometimes things are lost and found and lost again. Schliemann found his stash of ‘Trojan’ gold — really the loot from a royal burial — and installed it in Berlin. Sometime during the last months of WWII, some of his treasures went to Russia with and were never returned to Berlin, where the Neues Museum displays beautiful copies of the missing pieces. (Of course, Schliemann and his successors didn’t consider sending it all back to Turkey, either.) A legend of treasure lost, lost and lost again.
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The Frankenstein monster’s inarticulate roar of pain, a werewolf howling at the moon, the hypnotic patter of a seductive vampire, the grunts of Bigfoot as he tromps through the woods and the bellow of Nessie as she breaks the water’s surface in the loch — the language of monsters…. When writing a tale about a monster, sometimes it’s best to keep the monster silent. Let him/her/it slink along on the outskirts of the human world without uttering a sound. Silence acts as a vacuum that absorbs the human experience or becomes a twisted mirror reflecting back a distorted image of
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My Google Alert for ‘The Mary Shelley Game’ has alerted me to a play in London based on the life of Mary Shelley. I would love to go, but — flying to London to see a play is not on the agenda right now. Too many things to do and too many bills to pay, but I’m not complaining. It’s gotten me thinking about the pace of life when Mary Shelley lived and wrote her masterpiece. It was a much slower time. Visiting friends in the country meant staying for weeks on end and traveling to town meant days on
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On Wednesday I invited one of my intrepid friends to join me at the semi-annual Poe Room Event at NYU. It’s a community event hosted by the University in one of the law school’s buildings. The Poe Room came about because of the ‘Poe House’ that was on Third near the corner of Sullivan Street. When I was at NYU it was a frat house. The historical connection of with Edgar Alan Poe, spit and chewing gum seemed to be holding it in place. When the University wanted to build on the site there was a huge battle, between the
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I had planned a light-hearted, early spring BOO! But a friend sent me some photos she took at the Cloisters (New York City’s piece of Medieval Europe). She’s said, in an apologetic tone, that one of them was a little scary. I reminded her that I not only read mysteries and thrillers, I write them so… the photos came via email. The scary photo was a section of a painting depicting the angel of death on a horseback. It’s a scary image. No doubt about that, but is death a monster? No, death is a natural aspect of life. Mortality
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Once you start looking up, you find more and more gargoyles perched above city streets. My neighborhood in New York is prime gargoyle hunting territory. The 19th century/early 20th century industrial loft buildings in the Union Square, SoHo and Chelsea neighborhoods are rich with decorations and, often enough, gargoyles. Of course not all the buildings in the area are leftovers from that era. There are a good number of ‘post-war’ (after WWII) apartment buildings with brick faces, low/standard ceiling heights, mini balconies and a dearth of stone monsters. As I was looking up, up, up at a line of lion’s
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I’ve been living in apartments for too long. I have to reach back to my childhood for images of an attic. Attics are landscapes rich with potential for monsters — and monstrous revelations. I’ve always imagined discovering a secret diary in an old trunk. A diary? Yes, but not the musings of a teenaged girl from an era before computers when some girls kept little pink books secured with locks any determined 10-year-old sibling could pick. The diary of my imagination is the journal of a mad scientist’s investigations into the unknown or a monster’s day-to-day log of his human-sized
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I thought I’d heard all the Greek myths about monsters but somehow one of them slipped by…. And it is really monstrous — fodder for a gruesome horror story. It’s the story of Metra. I was thumbing through my Dictionary of Classical Mythology (a paperback book with yellowed pages that I’ve had at least since high school) while looking for a reference that I could use for a client’s product name. Naming an esoteric product is a fun project, but it requires imagination games and old familiar reference books can be inspirational. While looking for something about transformation and positive
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I’m blushing as I post this! It’s the link for my very first author interview. Check it out, post a comment, send me feedback — all that good stuff. http://citiesofthemind.org/interview-candy-korman/ Connor’s ‘Cities of the Mind’ blog is a great indie resource, with writer interviews, reviews of new books and fascinating musings from a freelance writer’s point-of-view.
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I went to the Frick Museum this afternoon. With the sunlight streaming through the skylights of the robber baron’s Fifth Avenue mansion and a great special exhibit of Renoir’s full-length portraits, it was a wonderful day for art. It was also a unique opportunity to hunt for improbable monsters. Setting aside the monstrous record of Henry Clay Frick when dealing with his company’s workers, there were many wondrous monsters on display. You just have to look beyond Frick’s magnificent collection of paintings and pay attention to the small bronzes that are scattered on tables throughout the museum. This is not
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