I am buried beneath vampires as details work themselves out for the "Open Graves Open Minds" conference in London April 16-17 (2010). I am manically working on creating the handout/overhead and catching up on the Victorian vampires I haven't met before. I thought I knew them all, then discovered a slew of them that are more available in the UK than they are in the US. Now I wonder how many are hiding in the EU and other National archives that nobody is mentioning. It would be nice if there were a international listing somewhere, but even my own over at simplysupernatural-vampire.com is incomplete. Some vampires aren't available anywhere online and the books or stories are extremely rare, and some require a request to the Library of Congress. Who would have thought that the Library of Congress actually will send its materials out through inter-library loan? I certainly didn't. My Victorian vampires are leading me on a treasure hunt through libraries all over the world.
The conference papers look interesting, and I am sad that I won't get to hear them all. But while I am reading my own paper, two other sessions of three papers will be going on, so for every session I attend, I miss six papers. I will have to choose sessions carefully. I will definitely miss anything that sounds jargony. I have no desire to listen to obscure over-erudite papers where you have to bend, fold, and mutilate to find the thesis and details. I read too many student papers that try to do that -- add enough words and the reader will believe that the paper contains meaning, when it doesn't. Sleight of hand papers irritate me.
Let the graves give up their dead...(paraphrase of Revelations).
