CONSTRUCTION TIME AGAIN

Ciao ragazzi, e benvenuto to my profile. Behold its ghetto-style glory.

TBC...

The Basics:

Age: somewhere between 25 and death.

Gender: female

Occupation: doormat/ward of the state (i,.e. graduate student), wannabe art historian, TA/Section Leader rock royalty, smarty pants, curmudgoen. Humanities all the way!

Education: B.A. magna cum laude Art History and History, M.A. Art History (Italian Renaissance), currently Ph. D. candidate/A.B.D. (all but dissertation), also in Italian Renaissance art history. Yes, I am over-educated and under-experienced. Welcome to the wonderful world of academia... Stephen Colbert and the NIN tour manager have both called my degree/field useless--those swine! I hereby challenge them to a duel. A plague on both their houses!

Hometown: NYC...but now I'm stuck in the midwest (boo, hiss, sob). Ann Arbor = Dawson's Creek.

Music: NIN, The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Dresden Dolls, The Decemberists, Mogwai, Bauhaus, A Perfect Circle, Tool, The Dandy Warhols, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Cooper Temple Clause, My Bloody Valentine, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio, Modwheelmood, The The, Joy Division, Primal Scream, Radiohead, Dr. Dre, Beck, Saul Williams, old Marilyn Manson, U2, Peaches, Failure, Autolux, Stellastar, Ladytron, funerary violin, Purcell, Hindemith, Arvo Part, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mahler, Satie, Chopin, Kurt Weill...and others

TV: The Tudors (obsessed!) Slings and Arrows, Brideshead Revisited, Scooby Doo Where Are You? Law and Order, CSI, Top Chef, Jeeves and Wooster, My So-Called Life, The Closer, pretty much anything on BBC, Meet the Press.

Books: (to name a few, and in no particular order) The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), I, Claudius (Robert Graves), Macbeth, Othello, and Hamlet (Will S.), The Annales (Tacitus), Carmina (Horace), Atonement (Ian McEwan), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), The Dark is Rising series (Susan Cooper), The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter), Nine Stories (Salinger), Straight Man (Richard Russo), Wonder Boys (Michael Chabon), Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding) and, of course, Harry Potter. I'm reading the geeked out annotated critical edition of Dracula right now and it's rocking my face off. I love footnotes!

Movies: where to begin...I just saw Atonement and it was almost as awesome as the book (so it was almost perfect). Other movies that are awesome: The Lives of Others, Laurel Canyon, The Lord of the Rings (all 3), The Thomas Crown Affair, Pride and Prejudice (BBC 6 hour one), The Talented Mr. Ripley, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion, Zoolander, Hamlet (Branagh version), Richard III, Being Julia, Sense and Sensibility, Charlotte Grey, Oscar and Lucinda, Notes on a Scandal, Closer, Pirates of the Caribbean (1), The Others, Pan's Labyrinth, The Painted Veil, Cold Comfort Farm, Labyrinth, Marie Antoinette, Elizabeth, To Catch a Thief, Ocean's Eleven, The Bourne Identity, Casino Royale, Interview With the Vampire (why did they have to fck up Queen of the Damned? Why? Why?), South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. I think Van Helsing is great mindless fun, but a "great movie"? No.

More General Interests: art museums, Corpus Christi (the feast day, not the town in Texas), dead Italian men, confraternitas, Eucharistic devotion, knavery, frippery (but not foppery, foppery is lame), yoga, music, Latin, talking smack, parlare-ing Italiano, the ablative absolute, democrats, teen girl squad, vampires and other "monsters," alterity, mass transit, inter-library loan, eating food my boyfriend makes me, Roxula/Richard Roxburgh (pathetic crush of the moment...too bad, so sad), Robert Mapplethorpe, Hanna-Barbera cartoons, I Can Has Cheezburger, celebrity gossip, ponies, and the words "reception to follow." I like music and...um...cloth. And reviews! I love reviews!

Languages in (at?) which I am Allegedly Competent: Zee English, Italian, Latin, French. German's next, poo.

Quote of the Moment: "I don't want to be moulded! I'm not a jelly!" (Bertie Wooster)

Rhetorical Question of the Moment: "Why does that thought of something dark that comes in the night and moves to your neck, why is that appealing to some people?" (Richard Roxburgh) Honey, I think you just answered your own question. Ha.

Poem of the Moment: Catullus, Carmina 101 (influenced ch. 2 of my story)

Catullus wrote this poem after the death of his brother, who died far from Rome in Asia Minor. The translation is my own, it sounds way better in Latin.

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
et mutam nequiquam adloquerer cinerem.
Quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum
heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu
atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Having been carried through many tribes and across many seas
I arrive, my brother, at these sad funeral rites,
in order that I might present you with the last tribute of death
and that I might vainly address your mute ashes.
Since fortune carried you yourself away from me,
alas, wretched brother, taken undeservedly from me,
nevertheless now receive these things which were handed down
in the ancient manner of our ancestors as a sad gift for the grave
dripping with brotherly tears,
and forever, my brother, hail and farewell.

Scholarly Article for Fun of the Moment: Herbert, Christopher, "Vampire Religion" Representations 79 (Summer 2002) pp. 100-121. Really interesting stuff! Another great Dracula article is Arata, Stephen D., "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization," Victorian Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1990) pp. 627-634.

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My Stories: To Trammel Some Wild Thing (in progress) Basic summary: In order to save her brother's life, Anna makes a dangerous bargain with the infamous Count Dracula and finds herself playing a dangerous game on both sides of the board. This story grew out of a one-shot based around some lines from The Two Towers, and is essentially a re-imagining and expansion of the movie that asks "what if." "What if" Anna was (unwillingly) working for Dracula the whole time? There's a love triangle (oh la la), a Dracula back-story, seduction, lies, intrigue, and a touch of romance. But what will happen when Anna is eventually forced to choose between her two "masters"? Can they learn from the past or will they be doomed to repeat it? This is my first-ever fic, and I haven't done any creative writing since high school (class of 2000, baby!), so we'll see how it goes...Feedback is most welcome.

As I Lay Me Down To Sleep (oneshot, complete). Basic summary: She is always calling for him. She has been calling for him since the day she first wrote his name. Dracula's nightly visits to a nameless young woman come to an inevitable conclusion [Drac x OC. This is my (much darker) take on the ubiquitous "Drac meets modern girl, there are hearts and Care Bears and of course Pantsless Twister" topos. I guess I'd describe it an adult fairy tale, it's my favorite thing that I've written so far.

Goodnight Lovers (oneshot, complete). Basic summary: after Marishka's death, Verona confronts Dracula about his intention to replace her only to come face to face with the impossibility that he will ever love her. She thinks back to their first meeting in Italy and then about their 'married' life. On the emo side, it's kind of a meditation on the imperfections of love and what ties both of them together.

Possible Co-Authorship (in the works): My lovely fiancée, the ever talented and outrageous Hell Harpie (when we get hitched it'll be 2 times the coolness...holla!) and I are currently hatching evil plans to write the most ridiculous, fantastic, smutty romance EVER. It will have EVERYTHING--slash, angst, quivering members, and heaving bosoms. But, it will be classy, because classy happens to be both of our middle names (see? We have so much in common, truly this is a love for all the ages!) Can you handle His Massive Pee Pee? We don't think you can...

Summary: Once upon a time in a faraway land, a time before history became legend and legend became myth, a time when vampires, werewolves, zombies and ghouls still stood as metaphors for the inversion of gender, sexual and racial roles, a time when a monstrous Other still functioned as the embodiment of colonial and industrial anxieties, there lived one man who stood to defend all that was holy, heterosexual, and Caucasian. His name was Gabriel Van Helsing, and he had a massive pee pee.

Coming soon to a faniverse near you...

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For those of you who enjoy my work: I strongly encourage you to check out "The Principle of Evil" by Lorien Urbani. It is one of the most well-written fics I've read on this site and deserves way more reviews than it's gotten so far. Trust me, this girl is amazing. So run, run and read and review! You won't regret it! And while you're at it, peep "Before Eternity" and "Le Petit Mort" by TheStoryGypsy. She is marvelous. Plus, she's really fun to talk to at 3 am.

Namaste, motherfuckers. :)