Wednesday, September 9, 2009

with other projects on indefinite hold, news of all sorts, some of it self-serving

I haven't thought a great deal about zombies since I read Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow years ago (on the biochemistry of zombification, which mimics death rather than revivifying the deceased). But Stan Woodard has clearly noticed the recent popularity of zombies even more than I have...the term being ubiquitous as a name for technological phenomena and financial institutions that are under the unwilled control of others or dead-but-still-walking-around.

Hence his day of all things zombie on September 12, of which the part that interests me is the academic panel "The Zombie Perceived: Religion, Media and Society," at Clary Theatre at Georgia Tech from 1 to 3:45 p.m. on which, see for more information:

http://www.stanwoodard.com/zombie/index.html

More than a few years ago, someone wrote a book called Our Vampires, Ourselves, which could be updated since I believe it long preceded the Twilight phenomenon. It was a sociopolitical look at the many modes and identities of vampires since they first put in an appearance in literary culture...the point being that we re-invent the vampire in every generation to address different situations and different fears and desires.

Obviously the present moment also needs a Our Zombies, Ourselves. But I am not volunteering to write it.

What I am volunteering to do is read a few new poems and later try to do an improv performance with electronic composer Dick Robinson on September 13, 2 to 4 p.m. at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center: for details thereon, see http://www.aszc.org/activities/zenartshow.html

We knew better than to go up against a Zombie Fest in terms of an audience.

We will perform our improvisation as the Hallucination Sextet. Of the six performers, only the two of us will be live. (Dick describes the other four as "virtual.")

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