The Vampire Thing Never Dies: Sunblock

Real Panama hats come from Ecuador. When the Spanish first arrived there, the material in the natives' straw headgear appeared so fine to them, they mistook it for vampire skin.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: Catatonic Music

John Fahey (regrettably obscure guitarist and composer of large amounts of Americana-derived instrumental collages) called Jerry Garcia (regrettably un-obscure guitarist and composer of large amounts of Americana-derived psych-pop drivel) "a psychic vampire." This is perhaps the only commentary about another musician I've found that gets close to what I was trying to say about Vampire Weekend and Paul Simon way back here.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: To Absorb as Many Lives

For the Best American Travel Writing thing I had to write a fifty-word bio. It was the longest bio I've ever had to write and I had a lot of trouble with it. I just came across some early drafts in my papers:

1. Avi Davis wrote, directed, performed six starring roles in, and was in the midst of editing the original version of The Undead Travel when his producers cut his funding (I still have the master tapes, you fuckers!!!) and handed over the project to Tony Scott. Davis is currently overseeing the construction of a winter bungalow in Tahiti.

2. Avi Davis was born and raised in Nepal, the only son of an American couple who ran a popular ecotourism lodge in the Himalayas. He gave up a promising military career in that country to pursue an in-depth study of socioeconomic barriers facing gypsy communities in the former Soviet Union. The fruits of his investigations will appear in the book Raggle Taggle Riff Raff (of which the present essay forms one chapter), set to be released by Vintage Books in mid-2011.

3. Avi Davis cites his formative influences as "my first dog, Ginger Bakersfield," and "being struck by lightning during a family camping trip in New Hampshire." The Undead Travel is his first published work on catamaran repair, a subject to which he hopes to devote more dead trees in the future.

4. Poet, essayist, statesman, painter, astrozoologist, actor, and model Avi Davis lives in a heavily-fortified villa in Cookesbury, a remote town in southeastern Maryland. He enjoys Chinese classical music and the occasional BDSM session.

5. Avi Davis' (Davis's?) (Davis'es?) (Davises'?) (Davisez'''?) work has appeared in Harphers, Harper's Bizarre, The Three-Thousand Penny Review (formerly the Two-Thousand Seven-Hundred-Fifty Penny Review), The Upper-Hudson Hippie Review, The Southern Misanthrope Cousin-Fuckers Review, The Kenyantiafrican Review, Open Shitty, Tin Spouse, The New Porker, WTF, BLROBL, Vizor, and Is This a Magazine?. He is a professor of creative writing at Escritito University in Utah.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: They Put it in a Book

Apparently I write "travel writing." My piece on vampires and tourists for last October's Believer is featured in this year's Best American Travel Writing. It's guest-edited by Bill Buford. I was excited because I thought I knew who that was, but then it turned out I was thinking of Bill Bryson. It's cool though—Bryson did in fact guest-edit Best American Travel Writing at one point.

Somehow I ended up in the company of heavy hitters. The volume has a piece by Ian Frazier, a New Yorker contributor who wrote a book called On the Rez that I read years ago when I volunteered on a Lakota Indian reservation in South Dakota. There's David Sedaris, that guy who writes whiny stuff, also often for the New Yorker. Then there's Christopher Hitchens, who writes bestsellers about Henry Kissinger and God. Also there's a guy who hosts an old-timey radio variety show.

The Vampire Thing Never Dies: Ceasescu Exhumed

This is possibly the first in an ongoing series of observations about the vampire thing and how it never dies. Then again we are all sick of vampires at this point.

Yesterday the New York Times announced that the remains of Nicolai Ceausescu and his wife were being exhumed to prove that they had been buried where people thought they had been buried after their executions under dubious circumstances in 1989. Some Romanians, including Ceausescu's children, suspect that the couple were not buried in their official graves.

As Romania's dictator for twenty-five years, Ceausescu ruled with an iron fist and favored isolationist politics, keeping the USSR out of his country. The medieval Romanian prince Vlad Tepes ("The Impaler") held a strange fascination for Ceausescu. Vlad, who sometimes called himself "Dracula," is most famously remembered as the very loose inspiration for Bram Stoker's Romanian vampire count of the same name. But among Romanians he was remembered as a ruler with an iron fist who favored isolationist tactics, keeping the Turkish Empire out of his country for most of his rule. Ceausescu worked hard to make Vlad a national hero in his own image, and to make himself a national leader in Vlad's image. He ordered a nation-wide observance of the five-hundredth anniversary of Vlad's death in 1976, and issued stamps bearing Vlad's image. As he fled the mobs that threatened his life in 1989, Ceausescu took refuge in the village of Snagov, where Vlad is said to have been executed and buried under dubious circumstances in 1476. (The location of his grave is still a matter of debate, and attempts to settle the matter through exhumation have proved unsuccessful.)

It should be noted that in European folklore, a vampire could usually only be identified by exhuming his or her grave. A body that had not decayed naturally was presumed to be a vampire.

Some choice quotations from the Times article:

Ceausescu's alleged remains were better preserved than those of his wife...

....

Ceausescu was toppled Dec. 22, 1989, as Romanians fed up with years of draconian rationing and communist rule revolted. He tried to flee Bucharest by helicopter but his pilot switched sides. After a summary trial, Ceausescu and his wife were executed by a firing squad three days later.

Oprean's wife, Zoia Ceausescu, had sued the defense ministry in 2005, saying she had doubts that her parents were buried in the cemetery. She died of cancer in 2006 and her brother Valentin took up the case. The couple's other son Nicu died of liver cirrhosis in 1996 and is buried in the same Ghencea cemetery.

....

Ceausescu was also known for the fierce way he stifled dissent with his Securitate secret police, which were believed to have 700,000 informers in the nation of 22 million.

 ....

Aurel Chiubasu, 66, a former carpenter in a military unit, heard about the exhumation and rushed over to tend his wife's grave nearby.

''I didn't agree with him being executed but the family has the right to know where he was buried,'' he said. ''People speak like it's not him there and he's buried somewhere else."