WHAT DO YOU GET WHEN YOU CROSS WYATT EARP WITH COUNT DRACULA?

In Friday's post, I playfully asked if anyone out there wanted to write a cowboy vampire novel.

I'm pleased to say that someone has actually done this. Meet Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall, authors of The Cowboy and the Vampire. I wanted to give you links to the author websites as well as the book, but they don't seem to have one. Too bad; I'm dying to know what such a site would look like, and what the authors' backgrounds are.

More generally, Friday's post got me thinking about literary hybridization: the mingling of DNA from two or more genres into a new type of book. Hybrids like this are sometimes called "mashups," for obvious reasons.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith (with author credit to Miss Austen as well is such a book, as is his Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.So are Ben Winters' Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina, and Sherri Browning Erwin's Jane Slayre. So is Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next mystery series, which melds literary classics with sci-fi. (Sorry not to have hyperlinks in those titles; for some reason, Amazon's link system isn't working. (Perhaps it is a vampire, and it's asleep in its coffin this morning.)

If you're a literary purist, books like this could drive you crazy. I am not a literary purist, as you might have guessed if you've read my (well, Suzanne Scott's) single long-ago Harlequin romance, One Hot Summer (now available from Alibris for less than a buck, and hence, of course, a ginormous bargain). So I love this kind of cross-bred creature, even when it races right to the edge of absurdity and then falls off.

As a teacher, I would rather have young people read Jane Austen with Zombies than not read her at all. And as a writer, I love the freedom we all have to create whole new genres by mixing and matching older ones. It's worth noting, too, that "high art" writers can use this strategy as effectively as us ordinary scribblers. Modern fiction and metafiction does it all the time. My favorite case in point is Italo Calvino's extraordinary If on a winter's night a traveler. I would love to synopsize it, but I can't; suffice it to say that it's a fiction that combines a love story, a meditation on reading with a narrative that offers ten different genre/style takes on the same opening paragraph.

If you have a passionate love for two different genres—a passion so deep that both have become part of your DNA, so to speak, or at least your soul—it's worth considering how, and if, they might go together. (You can't do this well if you're just trying to combine genres salably; you have to really love them for the result to become a coherent whole of its own.) If not, just enjoy the knowledge that other writers are using literary hybridization to keep the wolf—the coyote, the sea monster, the masked intruder—from their doors.

AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

A FINE MESS: a metaphor brought to you courtesy of the department of roads and bridges

For the last six months, the state road that leads to my house has been undergoing a vast widening project. The stretch closest to me is now in the grading stage, I discovered when I left to go to the Post Office this morning. As far as the eye could see, the landscape was littered with orange cones, detour signs, mounds of gravel, parked trucks. All so that a single guy could ride back and forth in a small truck pushing a big roller, doing something that seems to have no visible effect at all.

And then I thought: isn't that the pot calling the kettle black (as my grandmother used to say).

A big mess. A long time. A solitary person. The seemingly endless task of leveling. And smoothing. And packing. And balancing. And smoothing again, all to make changes so subtle than no ordinary human can see the difference.

Welcome to the Working Writer's world.

If our work as writers was visible, I suspect it would look just like this kind of road project. No "normal" person, no non-writer, would understand the minute revisions we so often find ourselves engaged in, or the seemingly endless time that they seem to take. But we know that this work is not just necessary but foundational. If we don't get it right, the visible parts of our book or poem, story or essay, just won't work. And if we don't get it right now, it will be much messier--or even impossible--to fix it later, when everything is set in stone. Or in asphalt, as the case may be.

THE BRONTË SISTERS ACTION FIGURES: Kick Some Victorian Butt, Charlotte!

Words can't express the delight this "advertisement," made in 1998 by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, gave me. And...once we have Emily, Anne, and Charlotte B. as Power Dolls, can Jane A., Virginia W., and Emily D. be far behind?