Category: Articles & Essays
-
My Book for a Desert Island
Success is as dangerous as failure.Hope is as hollow as fear. –Lao-Tzu Way back in 1972 I found myself in a spiritual and psychological desert of sorts, at odds with everyone and everything around me and uncertain as to what direction, if any, I should take. It was at that precise moment that, like Howard Carter…
-
Fiction, Literary Criticism, and the Writing Thereof
Some years ago I had a conversation with a literature professor about writing in which he maintained that literary criticism is every bit as “creative” as the crafting of fiction. I understood his point. To take a text and tease meaning from it that perhaps no one else has gleaned, and then shape a well-conceived argument…
-
Silent Movies: The Passion of Joan of Arc
Earlier, I mentioned in my post about Louise Brooks that film scholars consider Pandora’s Box to be (arguably) one of the three best of the silent era. Each was revolutionary in its own way, and all have had incalculable influences on subsequent filmmakers. This one is the second of the trio. Joan of Arc movies largely have been unsuccessful with…
-
The Last of Sheila
One of the best and most overlooked movies of the `70s, The Last of Sheila (1973) also is among the cleverest mysteries ever written — with good reason, since the screenwriters were Anthony Perkins (yes, that Anthony Perkins) and Stephen Sondheim. Despite the fact that it starred James Mason, Raquel Welch, James Coburn, Richard Benjamin, and Dyan…
-
SILENT MOVIES: Louise Brooks, The Quintessential Flapper
I love movies. Hollywood classics, foreign movies, and really old, silent movies. If you haven’t made a habit of watching pre-sound films, you might not know the name Louise Brooks. She was one of the most beautiful women of the 20th century, intellectually brilliant, sexually uninhibited, pleasure-loving, strong-willed, non-conformist, and a marvelous dancer. Unsurprisingly, she was…
-
An Army of Angels
An Army of Angels: A Novel of Joan of Arc(St. Martin’s Press, 1997) From the original 1997 edition dust jacket: It is a story that everyone knows; the story of the French peasant maid who successfully led an army against England and was burned at the stake before she was twenty. Historians, playwrights, filmmakers have…
-
“The best lack all conviction…”
Some of our clearest-seeing visionaries have been poets. I love Yeats for his mysticism and his lyric Irish soul. I know of no one like him today.
-
Excerpt – V-SQUAD: A NOVEL by Pamela Marcantel
The vampires at the kitchen’s entrance glanced about uncertainly. Now that they were here, they didn’t quite know what to do. John opened his mouth to ask Henry what the next step should be when Eddie started and said, “Hey, did you hear that?” The others listened intently. A soft whimper came from behind a…
-
Joan of Arc at 600
Today, January 6, is the officially recognized birthday of Jehanne Darc (more commonly known as Joan of Arc), the 15th century peasant girl who led the armies of Charles VII of France to a string of victories against the English and subsequently was burned at the stake after being convicted of heresy. Born on this…
-
V-Squad in the Media
In time for Halloween, UVA Today, an in-house publication from the University of Virginia News office, will publish an article about me and my vampire novel, V-Squad, on Friday, October 28. Although the novel doesn’t fall into the horror genre per se, its denouement does take place on Halloween, so in that sense the timing…
pamela marcantel 