The Many–tentacled Vampire of Andrei Codrescu

Political parties appeared and disappeared like the thick grounds at the bottom of Turkish coffee cups. Gipsies read fortunes and played addictive violin music that made one lascivious and light-headed. All this frivolity rested like a multitentacled vampire above a huge, backward peasant mass that lived in hunger and rags in villages. The aristocratic vampire with its grotesque appetites sucked dry the energy of millions of wretched humans.

--Andrei Codrescu, 'The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess'

Notes:

- Are political parties necessarily 'thick'? If the coffee referenced had been Greek, a culture known for a better quality of coffee grinder, or perhaps more time on their hands, or more muscly-armed coffee grinders (most of whom are women, I should add) then perhaps the coffee grounds and, thereby, the political parties, would have been 'thin'.

- For 'Gipsies' read 'Gypsies'. The differences are slight, but important: American gipsies have lighter hair, a tendency towards baldness, particularly in the eyebrows (often mistaken for alopecia) and commonly occupy positions in local government. European gypsies are more peripatetic, with longer arms used to keep better hold of the reins of their caravan horses. Often with innate artistic abilities, they congregate in hinterlands and have an aversion to tentacles.

- the inaccuracy of the reference to 'addictive violin music' is an easy one to make; Italian gypsies and their genetically displaced Irish cousins were known to lace their melodies with atomised heroin derivatives in the early part of the twentieth century, often disguising themselves among Romanian travelers to displace xenophobic sentiments upon their rival counterparts. (A form of ground Turkish coffee mixed with Greek squid ink was used to dye the red hair of Italian and Irish gypsies, often bought from the coast of what is nowadays called Croatia, though the recipe existed in the days of Sparta.) Conventionally, Romanian gypsy violin music is designed to thread well with various herbal smokes, particularly that of burnt cloves, which, while habit forming, is not considered physically addictive.

- Since when have vampires been folklorically connected to tentacles? Perhaps Codrescu is thinking of a rare breed of winged Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni.

- Due to the middle-clawed feeding technique of the colossal squid, the peasant masses may well have found themselves inverted, or 'backwards', during consumption, but traditional depictions, particularly in woodcuts from the region, show peasant masses to be facing forwards.

- The association of the vampire with aristocracy is a simplistic one, arguably deploying a crass 'Scooby Doo Effect' (cf. Toby Litt, et al) that reduces the pure solution of the monstrous to an ugly analogical residue. This perhaps may be a misprint for 'arithmetic vampire', a far more terrifying concept, linked to the rice-grain counting Old Higue of Caribbean folklore. Similarly, for 'grotesque appetites', read 'grotesque algebras'.

- This narrative fails partly for the inconclusive disposal of the enervated masses. Although indisposed in terms of kinetic and heat energies, the waste corpus of the masses still has a functionality in terms of weight and inertia that implies a continuation of the masses. The bodies of the dead will nourish the seeds of the new masses, re-energised and shooting anew against the calculating demon. While the demon may continue to feast upon the equations of the new masses, in that period of dead mass one can see the opportunity also for the dependent vampire to dwindle into irrelevance, or the madness of starvation. Vampires require an energy source, while the masses do not, are not, addicts, though they are capable, in their music of creating addictions.

George Ttoouli : 29 Jan 2010 09:00 |  Tags: Andrei Codrescu Dada Dadaist Analysis Tentacles The Posthuman Dada Guide Vampires |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem