Hanging out in the long shadow cast by Mary Shelley and her creations — Dr. Frankenstein and his famous monster — it’s hard to resist the lure of her husband the poet Percy Shelley. I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be… I doubt that neither the poet nor the novelist could have imagined the impact that Mary’s story would have on future generations. Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster is an iconic figure and the idea of putting disparate things together
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There’s a new show at the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The exhibit includes a variety of original manuscripts, showing the development of Poe’s work and will feature an early version of his poem ‘To Helen.’ I visited the Poe Museum back in February during my Poe Road Trip Weekend. In February, the special exhibit was of James Carling’s wildly hallucinogenic illustrations of ‘The Raven.’ The pictures made me re-think the familiar poem. Carling delved deep into Poe’s imaginary — and dangerous, monster-filled — world. James Carling 1857-1887 began his art career as a child ‘pavement artist’ drawing with chalk
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This week I’ve been pondering the monsters lurking inside. Mr. Hyde was the prototype alter ego monster — unleashing the violence within the good and kind Dr. Jekyll. To one degree or another, we all have alter ego monsters, pieces of ourselves that we keep hidden away from our friends, or colleagues, or loved ones, or from everyone. Some of these alter egos are romantic. There are secret poets, scribbling when no one is around. Some are sad, a little shameful and perfectly ordinary. I’m thinking about the huge numbers of secret eaters, consuming gallons of ice cream in private.
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I almost skipped the travel section of today’s New York Times. As I’m planning a ‘stay-cation’ in my hometown this summer — with afternoons on the roof of my building with my computer, visits to my favorite local museums, theater tickets (both ON and OFF Broadway) and the many cheap and cheerful summer events in the city — reading about spending a weekend in Melbourne or where to eat in Pueblo, Mexico or how to choose a brewery in Bend, Oregon is a small torture. But I’m glad I didn’t skip that section of the paper because there was an
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This past week New York was full of bright sunlight, clear skies and temperatures that could be best described as a sneak preview of June. Of course it’s still April, so those blue skies could not last through the weekend. April showers are not exactly unexpected, but rain does shift the mood. Gray and swollen storm clouds, big fat rain drops, the rumble of thunder — imagined or real — combine to create an atmosphere that’s fitting to gothic horror, thrillers and other great rainy day reads. I was reading Poe in the sunshine on Thursday. The disconnection was fun
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I had planned to write about a strange relief of a centaur that I found on the exterior of a building on Park and 36th, but I stumbled onto a much better monster-related find while walking up Fifth Avenue. A banner hanging at the entrance to the New York Public Library announced ‘Shelley’s Ghost, The Afterlife of a Poet.’ How could I resist an exhibit on the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary (of Frankenstein), his friends and family? For non-New Yorker monster fans, the main branch of the New York Public Library is the big, often photographed
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A lot, if that name is Dracula. I was pondering the names of monsters and how it must feel to share a name with someone with a ‘loaded’ reputation. Out of curiosity, I checked the Manhattan White Pages for Dracula listings. (No, I don’t have one of those gigantic, old, ‘sit-on-this-because-you’re-short’ phone books — I went to the Internet.) There were NO Draculas in Manhattan, or anywhere else in New York, but there is one in Colorado Springs and another in Ramona, California. Frankenstein yielded better results. There’s a family of five in lower Manhattan. There’s also someone calling himself
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I think I’ve found the Gargoyle Gathering place of New York. I was walking on Union Square North and my eyes naturally followed a photographer’s lens, up, up, up above street level and, for the first time, I noticed the top floors of the Decker Building. I’ve long admired the ornate stonework surrounding the doorway of what is now a PUMA shop, but somehow I never noticed what was going on eleven floors above the street. It looks like a little like a medieval monastery, in Spain where the Islamic influence was powerful. But, this is New York City so
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The Internet can be a maze of dark corners. Sometimes it feels like a threatening landscape with confusing twists and turns. It’s certainly home to the virtual personae of some human monsters. Between the sexual predators pretending to be lonely teens and the scammers trolling for social security numbers, it can be a dangerous place. Don’t get me started on the ‘Nigerian Princes’ and other fraudulent banking schemes. They are the bottom feeders in the deep ocean of data. That being said, the Internet can be a cozy lair. On the Internet you can be — or appear to be
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Is there a better opening line? Once upon a time sets the stage for just about anything: a lonely house deep in the woods, a castle at the top of a steep and forbidding mountain; a lonely troll under a bridge, a mad scientist at work in his lab, an innocent wish gone wrong, the seal on an ancient tomb broken, a room at the top of the stairs, a lost soul wandering the streets of a city, and so much more. Variations on the ‘Once Upon a Time’ theme display even more potential for monstrous mischief… Once upon a
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