Bitten

I’m sorry to be linking to something that isn’t online, but I can’t help myself, and you kids should get out more, anyway. There’s been a lot of foofaraw lately about who’s the worst critic of his generation. But the best critic of her generation, until further notice, is Terry Castle. Her article in the London Review of Books on lesbian seductress Mercedes de Acosta made me laugh more in twenty minutes than I have in the past month. The only thing in recent memory that compares to it is her essay on Patricia Highsmith in The New Republic, which I pressed on friends until they tired of me. How can you resist someone who writes like this:

The great thing about vampires, after all, was that they really cared about you. They were interested in you personally! So much so in fact that they would rise up out of their coffins, wamble over long distances (all the way from Transylvania) and sneak into your very own bedroom just to suck the blood out of you. It was weird but peculiarly gratifying.

It’s in the choice of the word wamble that you know you are looking at genius.