Death Curses LLC.

Because this week's batch is craaaaaaaaazy late, this one is the last one of the three written. And it's about death curses in Frankenstein and Dresden Files and contains huge goddamn spoilers for Dresden Files. I'm going to be using Not-Frankenstein and Frankenstein nomenclature to refer to the monster and the creator, respectively.

The two death curses are not quite the same.

HUGE GODDAMN SPOILERS.

Seriously.

You've been warned.

Alright: Dresden dies at the end of book 12 after losing or having to distance himself from everyone that cares about him. His girlfriend is dead, he has to turn his back on his friends, though apparently, they all still like him and most of them are alive. Ebeneezer, Thomas, Murphy and most of the wolves are alive. All of them seem to understand, somehow, that distancing is something Dresden has to do. And it's at the point where Dresden finally has a minute to decompress that the death curse aimed at him goes off: Die alone. He dies, alone, getting himself gussied up for a date with a girl in 10 minutes.

Dresden dies comfortably.

I will be with you on your wedding night is the curse that Not-Frankenstein leaves Frankenstein with as Not-Frankenstein resolves himself to kill all of the people Frankenstein loves. Frankenstein, then, in addition to the grim tally of his two virginal family members die, has his best friend Clerval and the woman he wants to marry, Elizabeth, die, by the hand of his monster. His family views Frankenstein as an unhinged wreck.

Frankenstein, after seeing the woman he loves destroyed by the thing he made, vows revenge on Not-Frankenstein and sets after Not-Frankenstein, who remains a couple days ahead of Frankenstein, taunting him and leaving messages. Frankenstein dies on a ship bound back to England, away from Not-Frankenstein, in the care of some random sailors that were lucky enough to pick him up from a loose ice floe and indulged his mission as much as they could.

Frankenstein dies of hypothermia, overexertion and being turned insane by his creation. In short: Frankenstein does not die comfortably.

Dresden dies knowing: I saved my daughter. I am going to kiss a woman and maybe a couple other things. My friends still respect me and exist.

Frankenstein dies knowing: The monster I made, that killed my friends and wife, is still out there. My family thinks I'm a maniac and I can't prove that I'm sane. In fact, I failed. I'm dying turning my back on my monster.

Frankenstein dies with failure. Dresden dies with something like a victory.

Today! Time Keeps On Slipping Into the Cosmic Future with the relevant lyric being: "If I can ask one thing when I am dead / would you lay me down by the river bed / and let me wash away? Let it take me back from where I came / because all I am and all I was is just / blood and dirt and bones and mud /and I’m better off that way."

I first heard this song last year while going down to see a Papal Audience. It was an epiphany on public transportation.

Since Always, Love Frankenstein

I finally, finally got to the point in the book where Frankenstein's monster returns to his maker and tells his story. What's remarkable to me is just how quickly, through a couple months of observation, that creature is able to pick up on human customs, and it's been not even a year since Frankenstein created the creature he is synonymous with, when Frankenstein finds himself face to face with his creature on a sheet of ice, so adrift and so cold, I can feel the chill and the rage in Frankenstein's bones. (Either one.)

Even more remarkable than that is how quickly the monster we are calling Frankenstein (hereafter referred to as Not-Frankenstein, for purposes of making readers cringe) grasps sarcasm and humor, using one of the best comebacks I've heard, ever: You accuse me of murder and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man!

Or, somehow manages to capture one of the most brutal, direct and frank maxims of life in language, that well, here: [L]ife, although it may only be an accumulation of tragedy, is dear to me and I will defend it. I just stare at that sentence, sometimes, after I read it on the bus, desperately trying to find my way to Darkest Hour's gig.

There are three reasons why I like it.

First, the use of the phrase “an accumulation of tragedy” is at once both sage and reductive. You have to be thoroughly depressed to look at only the bad sides of life, but there is some truth in the choice of the word accumulation to describe life. The longer we live, the more things multiply and the more things add to each other or compound or play off of what's already there or what will come.

Second, “and I will defend it.” Note: Not-Frankenstein does not use the word kill. Or murder. He wants to protect it, but he/it hasn't expressed the willingness to go beyond that instinct.

Third, the way the whole phrase sounds, phonetically. I like the qualification in the middle and the use of commas. Each successive idea adds another wrinkle to the sentence, which at its finality, it hits like a bomb. It might suck, but it is meaningful enough on its own merits to guard.

Plus, there's love. It's a bigger subject than I can encompass.

Today being Valentine's Day, you probably shouldn't be sitting here and reading me talking about Frankenstein and Not-Frankenstein. You should (yes, I'm being prescriptive) go talk to girls. Or boys. Or both. Or those aren't that sure. It's up to you and this futile blog isn't going anywhere.

I'll see you Wednesday and if you have a partner, I had better not see you later tonight and if you don't, person, remember: more will come, so go find something to celebrate, and though this might be selfish, lift something in honor of Frankenstein. Well, Not-Frankenstein. But you get my point. Lift something. Kiss someone. Etc.

One of the tracks from Defeater's forthcoming 14-song release Empty Days and Sleepless Nights. It's two records, a 10 song hardcore punk disc called Empty Days and a 4 song acoustic EP called Sleepless Nights. This one's from Sleepless Nights, called “I Don't Mind.” It's adorable and simple.

“Did I forget to tell you how pretty you looked in that dress? And, the first time that I saw you you cleaned the mess from my head?”

It's Like Dr. Frankenstein Took A Knife, Edgy And With Electricity And I Think I'm Stretching The Comparison

I'm at the portion of Frankenstein where Victor returns to find William dead and his family broken from the death and the father says something to the effect of “rely on the justice of our laws, and the activity with which I shall prevent the slightest shadow of impartiality.” When I hear something like that, I think instead, man, you're looking the wrong way at it: You want the judges partial to you. You want them very partial to you.

Okay. I've read a lot, but having avoided Frankenstein, I feel like I've missed the original version of many things that I've read now that are playing off of it. In other words: I got to the scene where Frankenstein's monster is illuminated in the lightning and I wasn't terribly impressed when I first read it. I finished up the chapter and then realized: This is the one that started them all. This is the burst of lightning and I have seen it for the first time.

This is where they all come from. Ms. Shelley constructs it well, but man...I really want to be reading By Night In Chile, which I finally have in my possession. By Night In Chile is also about a realization in flashes of understanding, but that's really the extent of the commonalities of the two.

The other major "cover before the original" in my life is I'm On Fire, by Bruce Springsteen, or, should I say, I'm On Fire, by Hawks And Doves. Bruce's version, today, sounds tinny and stuck with an unfortunate synthesizer line, but it struck a chord in the 80's with its frank (dare I say earnest?) lust and its simplicity. Everyone, apparently, has covered it, from Kenny Chesney to Tori Amos to Johnny Cash and of the three (get ready for this), Ms. Amos' version ages the best.

But: The Chesney version and the Cash version both play up the earnestness angle of the song, leaving behind, almost entirely the undercurrent (and also main current) of naked lust. In other words, it does not have the vividness or terror of the original flash. It is a lesser reproduction of what came before.

Assuming that I understand the synthesizer line correctly in the original as something that is there and would be removed now, Hawks And Doves (former Planes Mistaken For Stars singer) gets it right. There are other instruments in the background, but mostly, its Gared with an acoustic and his gravely voice, which emphasizes the dirt, the sand, the grains, the fucking lust. (Finally, one of the few times I can use the word fucking and not have it be gratuitous and have it work, exactly, the way it is meant to. Vulgar, correctly.)

Now. The cover by Tori Amos is another story entirely. She uses the piano (like, obv.) to carry all of ideas and lets her own voice carry the lust for the song. And yes, her voice is lighter and is a little more fragile, but where it is supposed to, it carries that lust. Maybe it is the heavy breathing on the microphone that does it, but. It is pretty and also dirty, in a way that does justice to both.

Anyway. Point is. There is the original and then there are other things. In Frankenstein, I am getting an unadulterated dose of the original. It is terrifying, brilliant and fantastical.

Hawks. Doves. Fire. If you want to reverse engineer my love for Planes Mistaken For Stars, crank the amps as loud as they will go on this song and let the guy vocalize in a way that smiles, bawdily, through bloody gums and broken digits.

Frankenstein To Rome By Way Of Perdido Street Station

This one's late. Here's why: I'm not doing these with a buffer. It's my fault and no one else's. In response to and because of the fact that I'm going to be away from the Internet for the weekend, this is the first of the three pieces that will be up tonight. Call it the China Mieville Triptych. I have another two books by Mieville with me, so I don't see his influence becoming less pronounced on me, but also, because the other book I read, Jim Butcher's Storm Front, (the first book of the Dresden Files series) also has magic and a cynical outlook and was sooooooooo much quicker to read. That doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Anyway. This one is a comparison to Frankenstein, which I have chosen for my next A Theory Of book. What will be Wednesday's will be whatever Mieville I remember, on its own. And what will be Friday's is Perdido Street Station compared to the first Dresden Files book.

The other reason why is because my flights to Rome ended up arriving...eight hours late, I just went to bed Monday night and didn't have internet access until today, Thursday.

Which means I need to stitch this thing together, using whatever I've been reading and whatever I remember from Frankenstein. As you might have guessed from the title, I've been working my way through China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, a book about a lot of things, but also about a far too curious scientist meddling with things he shouldn't. In Frankenstein, it's, well, the scientist named Frankenstein, shooting life into a waiting creature he curated and created, using miles of blood vessels, discarded brains, body parts and whatever else he could find. In Perdido, it's an absent minded sorceror called Issac, living in a cosmopolitain shithole called New Crobuzon feeding a curious recreational drug to a caterpillar that blossoms into a soot-black terrifying creature of the night, which exists in multiple dimensions, can cut through armor like a knife through a receipt, flies adroitly and drinks the dreams and knowledge matter of its prey (anything, including apparently, a very Hell, who'se ambassador refused overtures to help the city.). Issac didn't know that going in. He just kept the caterpillar around because it didn't eat normal food and he pitied it.

Perdido and Kraken have a number of similar plot elements (along with The City & The City.) There's a skunky/manipulative head of an academic department who seems haughty and ends up being evil and behind one of the growing threats. There's a failed strike against a overclass (not present in City, IIRC). Authorities are at best, well-intentioned and ineffective (well-intentioned in City and Kraken, evil in Perdido and ineffective against the growing threat in all three) at worst, careless, responsible for the threat and ineffective (the trifecta is in Perdido.) There's also a cobbled together resistance which is startlingly effective against the threat (Kraken, Perdido).

In all these though, the cobbled together bits work the best. Apparently, trained militia can't hit the snake moths any of the time, but our heroes, only a couple of which have any kind of history with pistols can, 2/10 times. Oh shit, there's also a member of the underclass, ignored and underestimated by their masters, who rise in ways that save our heroes' ass. (Kraken, Perdido, maybe City) Honestly, when I read the Scar next, I am putting money on the idea that there's going to be a rising underclass member, an evil academic, and negligent, myopic authorities.

That said, Dr. Frankenstein could be a villain in a Mieville book: He brings life to something he created and then treats it like a thing without autonomy. He's also evil, but in a way that doesn't see himself way, or at least bad. Frankenstein feels a lot, lot denser. The type is smaller and is spaced even more shorter than Perdido, but I think the expectation of Frankenstein weighs on me.

There's another bit about Frankenstein that Mieville doesn't have. (Mieville's also not one of the celebrated authors of all time. That's a thing.) Frankenstein, or at least the first forty-nine pages of it I've read is immensely quotable.

“I shunned my fellow-creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime.” Gives you an idea of the guy's state of mind as well as the fact that he might in the back of his mind, thinking about what he's doing is wrong.

“I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling.” This might be Mary Shelley in a self-deprecating moment. I can see her writing that with a sly smile.

“A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never allow a passion or transitory desire to disturb his tranquility. I do not think that the pursuit of knowledge ought to be an exception this rule.” That last one was on page 44, just before Chapter Five of Volume One and just before Frankenstein flips the switch on his now famous monster. That, kids, is how you do foreshadowing.

Song is called The Disarming Smile, by the World/Inferno Friendship Society. It's from their new record, which is a lot...jauntier than I would have expected. (Except for the track about a friend's suicide.) Think of what the band would be whistling as they're walking away from a crime sporting a shitfaced grin and that's about it. Not exactly new territory for the band, but less agitated. It's clear: the band knows something you don't.

Think more Hothouse Flowers and less Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater and you're about there.