Every So Often...

I get a little something in my mailbox that looks more or less like what follows below. This is an email I received last Wednesday.

First of all, Slayers are murderous asses. I knew a girl that was not vampir', only goth, and she was raped and murdered by so called slayers. I know many vampir' and they are not afraid of you. You mistakenly harm goths because they are weaker than the vampir', if you ever come across one that is real, you would be in itense trouble, and harmed yourself. Take warning.

Blackwood

Well the first thing I want to say is that I'm certainly pleased to see that people are reading -- reading anything, I mean, but especially that they're reading my blog.

I had the honor of tutoring English Composition during my short time in college, and that was the first thing I'd encourage my tut-ees to do -- TO READ. I'd tell them, boringly enough, "If you really want to learn how to write, then you really ought to learn how to read, too."

I'd almost always recommend they start with the clean, no-nonsense prose of Ira Levin (since so many of them simply needed to learn how to pay attention to what they were saying and to tighten it up; I'd always imagined that Levin's presence in New York made him a natural at clean, tight prose), and I remember throwing a lot of Stephen King and Dean Koontz their way, too. "Find something that makes you want to turn to the next page," I'd say, or," What kind of movies do you like?" I'd ask -- and we'd go from there.

So it makes me glad to see this sort of thing: people reading and people writing; the Internet is so great that way. But I have to wonder if some readers aren't skimming a bit, or whether these kinds of emails I get are simply perfect examples of how most of us see and hear only what we are ready to see and hear.

I mean, how little of my stuff do you have to read to understand that I'm not speaking of vampires in the literal sense that our friend Blackwood here is, or that practical vampire slaying isn't really so much about "murdering" or even "destroying" our vampires, as it is about "revealing" and "transforming" them?

It's a subject that's been much on my mind these days: revelations and transformations and prodigal vampires and all that.

Excuse me a moment, and I'll be back to talk some more about this.

And thanks for reading!