A very zombie love affair

After a long silence, we hear again from our eighteenth century correspondent, Mary Wollstonecraft who has much to relate of her  philosophical progress since she last wrote here.

I am sitting down to write this half-way between Paris and Lille which I hope to reach before tomorrow night. I am tired from the journey, and being with child has affected my capacity to reminisce – nonetheless, dear loyal reader, I will now attempt to bring back with words some of the painful events that have plagued me since I last wrote here.

'Tis two years now since I fled infected London for Paris – two wonderful, peaceful years, when the only upsetting events were the occasional loss of a dear friend to the guillotine. 'Tis in Paris that I met my dear beloved Imlay, adored companion and father of my child to be. France is mercifully free of zombies. I believe the revolutionary practice of using the guillotine often and plenty has so far prevented a general infection of the country: the blade that slices through the neck is democratic enough in that it kills zombies and royalists alike. M. Guillotine, I should note, was one of the early proponents of the view to which I fully subscribe that in order to destroy a zombie and prevent it from rising again, one should separate its head from its body.

A Valentine's day *special*

I was sort of planning to ignore Valentine's day this year. It seems a lot of hype for not very much - it's just a meal, ain't it? And pressure.
But then my lovely husband brought flowers AND gave me a present. A heart-shaped box with heart-shaped chocolate inside!

So I did start to think more kindly on the holiday (as it's called in America - until recently, I thought a holiday was when you didn't have to go to work).
So I read people's valentine's posts, articles in glossy magazines, to find something we could do (apart from the obvious). And I found that nowadays, people watch films together on Valentine's day. Not just any film, mind you, but Valentine's day films.

Hmmm.

I went to a couple of shops which seemed to confirm this. Bookshop and supermarket alike had binfulls of 'romantic comedies' on special sale for Valentine's day. Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts galore.
I nearly went back to my previous negative attitude to the whole thing. Why pick a day which is supposed to be about the love you and your partner share and then irritate the hell out of it by watching bad movies?

But we do like to watch films together, and we don't get to do it often (you know, one of us is always too tired, usual drill).

So we did watch a film this week. But it wasn't from the Valentine's day special bin. We watched Night of the Living Dead.

So, happy, belated Valentines' day!

Ooh, and I bought a red heart-shaped cake.

I hope this isn't too tasteless...

This week's Gallery is all about children.
Lots of people posted pictures of beautiful, adorable babies and children.
But I think I've posted enough pics of my two here already. And as to pictures of us, the blogging sisters, you've already seen plenty.
So for this post, I'm asking you to spare a thought for children who are not beautiful or adorable: zombie children.

As the title says....


Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

Why you shouldn't just turn away when you see I've posted about zombies, again.

I wanted to start by saying 'some of my best friends are zombies'. But then I though some people might feel kind of targeted. So let me try this instead:

Some of my best friends don't like zombies.
Ok, that doesn't sound all that shocking. No one likes zombies. Except maybe other zombies. But even that's dubious as zombies don't really have complex emotions and tend to respond positively only to things they can eat - hence not zombies.

But I disgress. What I meant is that my friends don't like cinematic or fictional zombies, so that when I tell them I've written this really cool post about the zombie apocalypse, or about an eighteenth century feminist philosopher and zombie fighter, they just smile and say 'zombies aren't really my thing'.
Aside from the inanity of their reaction - zombies aren't any body's thing! It's more a matter of who will know what to do when the apocalypse comes and who will just get eaten -  they're missing  out on a whole lot of rich and fascinating social and ethical commentary. 

The logic of zombie apocalypse

In times of great stress, when the world is on edge, reporters often revisit the more unlikely myths. That is the time to interview the man who spotted Nessie, the little girl whose dog was abducted by aliens.

This is a good thing - as otherwise we would never get to find out anything about the lochness monster or alien abductions then where would we be when faced with actual danger? I refer you to the endless horror movie scenes in which the irritating skeptic is eaten by the monster from space. 

So I want to do my bit towards helping you be better informed. Here goes.

Why you shouldn't despair if a zombie apocalypse happens. 

We've all heard it. If - when - the zombie apocalypse begins, we're all gone.

There are two main reasons for this. First, we are bound, by the laws of horror, to do the wrong thing every time, just like we are bound to go and look in the attic if we hear strange noises caused by a demonic entity, or to open the front door and step outside to look when a murderer is lurking in our garden. Nothing can be done about that. If you would like to know before hand which stupid things you will find yourself doing in the event of a zombie apocalypse, then head over to the Oatmeal who offers a fairly comprehensive guide.

The second reason we are led to believe by the literature on the topic that zombies will eventually exterminate us is more dubious. Zombies, it is said, will reproduce faster than us. There will be millions of zombies for every pocket of surviving, shivering, arm-missing humans.

But what exactly are our grounds for thinking that this is the case?
It's not entirely clear how, precisely, zombies are created and how they reproduce. The consensus seems to be that zombification is the result of an infection, of sorts, kind of mixed up with voodoo magic, and maybe extra-terrestrial influence. Any way. 

The point is, how exactly does the infection spread? Does it spread only to corpses? Corpses that have been exposed to zombie saliva? This makes sense. So: if you are bitten by a zombie and then die, you will in turns become a zombie. But that requires contact and chance. The zombie must catch you. It must bite you. It must kill you. A zombie may well be lacking mobility or speed. A zombie is traditionally a rather clumsy heap of rotting flesh. Not as fast as your average unfit, overweight, stroller pushing, shopping carrying forty year old. So, unless you're actually stuck in an elevator with a couple of zombies and no blaster (not sure whether these are actual weapons or just things they have on Buffy, but they seem like they would be kinda effective on zombies - messy, mind you) - you'll be fine.

The part of the story that usually scares people is the thought that all the buried dead will come back as zombies. This is no where more obvious than in Halloween parties where people see fit to dress up as Victorian zombies. I mean, come on, people, use your common sense. Why do you think zombies are all torn off limbs, leaky eye ball, and exposed bone? Because they are rotten corpses. And how long do you think it takes for a buried corpse to fully decompose? (I can't believe I googled this). The flesh is gone within a year and in fifty years, so are the bones. So Victorian zombies? I don't think so. All you'll get out of a graveyard is the recent dead.Only those corpses that are sufficiently complete will become zombies. The rest may want to get out and eat our brains, but they won't have the means to claw their ways out, or if they do, to bite us.

I'm sorry to be blunt here, but, as a philosopher and a blogger, it befalls me, in these troubled times, to set the record straight. To believe that we would be suddenly invaded by armies of zombies is the result of a simple error of reasoning.

Of course, there are still ways in which a zombie epidemic could go bad. Zombies could attack a hospital, finding thousands of potential victims tied to their beds, and, let's face it, probably glad of the opportunity to become brain eaters so they don't have to swallow any more hospital food.

Another bad stroke of luck would be to have an epidemic in Egypt, where corpses tend to keep longer. But then it's not clear whether that would count as a zombie apocalypse rather than a mommie apocalypse, and if the latter, it's outside of the topic of this post.


So I will conclude by advising my readers not to be overly worried in the event of a zombie apocalypse, but to get a blaster, or, if you can't get hold of one, avoid getting into lifts with people who are obviously rotting corpses.

Pink books are for boys. Girls prefer blood.

Do you read chick lit? I do. I've read all the Shopaholic books. I've read things I don't remember the name of but that tell the story of a recently divorced woman who finds love after lots of comical mishaps, or of a younger woman who finds love after lots of comical mishaps. And there are always friends involved: the sassy girlfriend, the gay best friend, the enemy from high school who's rich and anorexic, the parents, etc. These books satisfy my need to have a number of written words entering my head everyday -  can't all be good words! And they sometimes make me laugh.

I used to recognise these books in the shop by the cover. Just like you can recognise a sci-fi book because it's usually dark blue with some exploding orange star or spaceship in the middle.
But that's no longer the case. Now most books written by a woman are pink. Just so you know, if you're a man, or a serious woman, to avoid them.

I bought a new copy of Emma, the other day - I recently had to refill the Jane Austen gap on my bookshelf, not an actual physical gap, you understand - haven't had one of those since I was about four. The book was off white, with a black silhouette drawing of the kind that you sometimes see in fashion magazines, and details were coloured in pink.  The back cover spelt out the main lines of the story in a very chick lit kind of way. Emma's attractive, gets into trouble, finds love.

Now I'm all for the pimping up of classics so that more people read them. But surely turning Emma into chick lit is ensuring that less people read it, no? Unless we assume that only women read women novelists in the first place.

Part of me doesn't have a huge problem with  what that says. That is, I tend to read mostly women novelists. I also tend to think of some writers, like Hemingway, Salinger, John Irving, as 'boy writers', i.e. people who write books that boys like. As opposed to just 'great writers'. Now I know that's not fair, that it reflects double standards, as I wouldn't want writers I love to be dismissed as 'girl' writers. And even if I thought that so-called great male writers were only fun for boys, I wouldn't say something like that in a public forum, like err, on a blog. It wasn't me who wrote I thought most great novelists were women novelists.

But whatever you think about John Irving, Jane Austen's novels aren't just for girls. They're not a way to pass the time and giggle on the train - although they'll be that too. They're for discovering, thinking about, growing old with. Reading Austen is good for us, it helps us mature intellectually and emotionally.  So the thing is, if only women read Jane Austen, we'll end up with a world full of wannabe Elisabeths, and Eleanors, and truck loads of Bingleys and Willoughbies to match!

I feel this can all be avoided somewhat if we ditch the pink covered Emma and turn instead to this:

I can dance like a zombie

 For our Weekend Charter this week, we've chose the theme 'Dance'. When I agreed to it, I thought at first I was humouring my sister - I don't do much dancing this days outside my kitchen, not just because I don't go out so much but also because Turkish pop and I don't get on that well. I'm picky.

But then I remembered what we did last autumn.  And there, I felt, is a story worth telling.

Look, Maman, there's this really fat zombie in the Michael Jackson video. If he can do the dance routine, so can you!

With this encouragement under my belt, I decide that Yes, my daughter and I are going to take part in the 2009 Thrill the World dance event. Our friend Jo is organising the Ankara event right here, on campus. She's sent out ads on facebook and pasted them all over the place. There's to be rehearsals, for four weeks beforehand, weekday evenings and a couple of hours on Saturday mornings. 'Im indoors is onboard with this. He'll take Max shopping Saturdays while we rehearse.

Back to London, leaving the zombies behind.

This is another guest post by the young Mary Wollstonecraft. 

We have just arrived at Hoxton. Our boxes are yet unpacked, and the house has not been cleaned for us. Eliza and Everina are presently dusting and scrubbing with our maid. But I have been allowed some rest time because I said I was suffering from the headache. I do not like to lie, and in truth I do have the headache, but I must admit I do not perhaps need the rest as badly as I have given to believe. However 'tis all the same to them. Mother has gone straight to lie down, and father out to investigate the neighbouring ale houses. I am left in charge of my sisters. My older brother Ned is already gone to the house of our uncle where he is to learn the business, and my younger brothers,  James and Charles, are bringing boxes in the house, still. All are accounted for but Henry.

I'm writing an opera. With zombies.

A little while back I made a pitch to Andrew Lloyd Webber for a musical (well, not really, I wrote a blog post about it, but you never know, maybe he read it). It was called: Mary Wollstonecraft, a Musical Life. I'm thinking of changing it to Mary Wollstonecraft, a Musical Life with Zombies. For one thing, I've got the material. But mostly, I think it would sell more tickets.

A Vindication of the Rights of Zombies

Another guest post from the lovely Mary Wollstonecraft.

It has long been my impression that our world is riddled with inequalities both in nature and in our treatment of each other. What has never been till now quite clear to me is how little those we treat as inferiors owe their inferiority to nature and not prejudice. In some cases at least it is obvious that it is our societies' treatment of them that has rendered them inferior. (I think that French manners, in particular, are much to blame for this.) Such is the case, I am now convinced, with zombies. Is a zombie by its nature a brain chomping, limb dropping fool, or has it been forced to become so by the prejudices of our society?

How to journey to the North of England in difficult circumstances.

This is a very special guest post from the sixteen year old Mary Wollstonecraft, who writes about moving to Yorkshire because her feckless father, once again, lost all his money.

Dear Readers

It has been requested of me by a friend that I make a humble contribution to a sort of log book, the nature of which I am as yet unclear about. If I reflect on the topic it seems to me that the weblog is not a letter nor a diary, and perhaps 'tis closer to the pamphlet. I have seen a pamphlet, several, indeed, in the library of my new friend's father – he is a philosopher, I believe. But I must not digress already. My task, if I may call it so, is to recount to the best of my as yet unrealised abilities, my experience of growing up a young woman in late eighteenth century, zombie-ridden Yorkshire.