By Blood We Live

Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu

Translated from the Romanian by Catherynne M. Valente

Catherynne M. Valente is the critically acclaimed author of The Orphan’s Tales, the first volume of which, In the Night Garden, won the Tiptree Award and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. She is also the author of the novels The Labyrinth, Yume No Hon: The Book of Dreams, and The Grass-Cutting Sword. Her latest novel, Palimpsest-which she describes as "a baroque meeting of science fiction and fantasy"—was published in February. In May, her first science fiction story, "Golubash, or Wine-Blood-War-Elegy" appeared in my anthology, Federations.

This next piece, translated by Valente, is an excerpt from Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire, the indispensable tome of vampire legends and lore by noted vampire scholar Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu of the University of Budapest.

Valente originally published this prefatory and press material on her website, annapetrescu.catherynnemvalente.com. It appears here in print for the first time. Look for Exsanguinations at fine purveyors of Demonic Texts throughout Europe and America in October 2009.

An Ideal Vampire: Prefatory Notes

Death is such a Victorian conceit.

Death is solemn, it is colorless. The unfortunate maiden is laid in a long bed with a silk scarf at the neck, scented with oils so that her stink does not offend delicate nostrils, her hair brushed to a lustre never achieved in life, skin powdered pale and smooth, lips drawn in obscene red: all to give the appearance of life just snuffed out, so recently that the body has not yet realized it has not merely dozed off in the midst of a pleasant afternoon. Why, her eyelashes never laid so coyly dark upon her cheek! Her color was never so high and fever-flushed! Her teeth never sat so white upon her scarlet lips, her curls never clustered so black around her seraphic face!

In short, all effort has been made to make the poor corpse appear immortal, to dress it as a vampire. After all, it is not a proper funeral if she does not look so fresh that she could leap at any moment from the coffin and affix her teeth to a relative’s jugular. It is a fetish, really, the just-dead virgin. As if death were a door from which she must emerge a whore, demoniac, and hungry.

The vampire, on the contrary, is essentially Byronic. It walks in beauty like the night, and through the night, and in it, it is always windswept and brooding, dandified by the accessories of death-the cross, the coffin, the shroud. But these things are merely fashion, no more intrinsic to the vampire self than a widow’s peak or a Lugosian laugh. What is necessary is the predatory instinct, and the eternal study of death, since the vampire is its most skilled practitioner. The vampire is not half in love with easeful death, it is easeful death, and it has some small duty to make of death an art, an ecstasy, a philosophy. Else why be a demon? Certainly mortals cannot get away with such pretension. One might casually wonder whether the vampire was a product of the Gothic imagination, or the Gothic imagination was a product of the vampire-if one were predisposed to ponder such questions. The vampire, by its nature, does so. Unable to see itself in a looking-glass, it is the vainest of all creatures, and considers its own nature incessantly. These days, there are night-conferences in Bulgaria and Romania, with endless papers and sample chapters of promised masterpieces.

Of course, being Byronic, the ideal vampire is male, heroic in his way, a frontiersman braving the wilds of humanity, piling high his carcasses on the plains.

I am not an ideal vampire.

But surely my curls were never so black and shining as the day they lay me in the dirt. I listened to them mumble the old 23rd and counted like sheep the thud-falls of shoveled earth on the lid of what I must assume was a very expensive coffin. Death, as I have said, is Victorian-thus, no family would allow themselves to be seen in public with sub-par funerary rites.

I will not here indulge in that most vulgar of recent fashions, autobiography. Suffice it to say that I, along with every other vampire since the classical age of our Slavic forefathers, clawed my way out of that very well-appointed coffin and into the inevitably moonlit night. I availed myself, as so many of us do, of the graveyard caretaker as my first victim-how many of us recall the awkwardness of that first exsanguination! It is so much like making love for the first time; one has no clear idea what goes where, but clutches stiffly to whatever seems more or less correct, spraying fluids all over one’s best evening clothes and mumbling apologies to the hapless partner, who no doubt experienced none of the crude pleasure one hoards to oneself. Of course, the experience of feeding is hardly the psycho-sexual revelation recent extra-cultural authors have claimed-do you, dear reader, find yourself in involuntary climax when ingesting a plate of pasta and a modest red wine? Certainly not. Yet certain in vogue lady novelists would have their deluded readership believe our own furtive suppers are orgiastic communions of the highest order.

Ah, but I have forgotten the tiresome necessity of all vampiric literature-I have not given my credentials. I ought to simply attach a notice of my parentage to my lapel or my Curriculum Vitae, perhaps even have it notarized like the breeding papers of a half-feeble spaniel. But certainly, without credentials, I can have nothing of importance to say. Very well.

I was sponsored by a very beguiling old debauch by the name of Ambrose Mosshammer who asked me to stay after his Herodotus seminar for special instruction. I fully expected to be accosted in his windowless eighth floor office-though when I imagined his skeletal hand groping my breasts and tearing my new wool skirt, I did not quite realize that he would simultaneously be whispering the tale of Gyges in my ear and divining the path of my jugular with his tongue before slashing into my throat with his gnarled, ancient teeth. It was certainly not what I had been led to expect young ladies experienced behind the closed doors of the offices of elderly colleagues. (I beg the forgiveness of any vampiric readers, for whom this recitation must be as tedious and gauche as a human reading about the expulsion of the placenta from his mother’s womb. But the forms must be followed.)

Ambrose’s blood tasted faintly of dust and the glue of book-bindings, as well as a peculiar undertaste of sandalwood and tobacco. It was not unpleasant, but I was rather in a rush to finish the process, once I realized what was afoot. There is no need to dwell in ritual-that sort of decadence can be safely left to Catholicism. He proffered his wrist in a most gentlemanly manner, and I availed myself of the necessary blood. I cannot overstate his professionalism and patience, truly, the old ones have a gravitas the younger generation of fiends cannot match.

I left his office with a rumpled skirt and a torn blouse, carried by his graduate students out to the parking lot, where I could safely be assumed to have been a victim of an over-zealous mugger. A few days later, I had risen from my grave and thusly embarked on my postdoctoral career.

– Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu

University of Budapest

Night Campus

Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu was born in 1948 to Danish-Romanian parents, Adrian Petrescu and Marie Oppenhagen. Adrian and Marie had immigrated from the Continent whilst Marie was pregnant to the quiet London suburb of Kensington, where they raised their only daughter in relative tranquility

1. The life of a young scholar is often tediously predictable, and young Anna was educated in the usual single-sex boarding schools before entering the equally homogenous St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University. She studied Classics there under the watchful eye of Dr. Ambrose K. Mosshammer, who in her final year of study graciously Converted her in recognition of her great talent

2. Once Anna had graduated, her interest shifted from the roots of human civilization in Ancient Greece to the roots of Vampiric civilization in the Slavic states and Central Europe. Her unromantic and strictly researched work in the field of Proto-History is widely recognized as having been one of the foundations of the field. In 1983, she helped to establish the Order of the Ivory Tooth, an association of literary historians who set out to archive the entirety of the Vampiric Corpus-that is, the sum total of all literature involving Vampires in the West. While this goal is far from complete, the Order is now one of the most highly respected institutions among the Vampiric elite, and its work, and ritual conferences, are watched with great interest.

In the early eighties, while a humble lecturer at the University of the Danube

3. Anna was also involved in the Eden Project, a think-tank which aimed to definitively prove or debunk the ever-popular claims of pre-Slavic heritage through Lilith. In recent years, the Edenites have shifted their focus to documenting the Dark Ages of the Classical World and Early Semitic Culture, in which the records of Vampiric activity are so scarce as to be by and large discounted by the academic majority. The "Lilith Question,” a now-ubiquitous term coined by Dr. Moira Russell, Anna’s partner in Edenism, was never qualitatively answered, and the two disagree on the subject to this day.

In 1986, Anna was hired as a tenure-track professor at the University of Constantinople, where she produced her enormous and definitive critical work,

She Drained Me of My Very Marrow: The Female Vampire in History and Literature ⁴.The success and influence of this work cannot be overestimated, and continues to be the bedrock of Black Feminism⁵, a movement which has become something of a juggernaut in recent years. In fact, it was largely due to the popularity of this "lay" history that the loose confederation of Night Campuses organized the first of its annual Conferences in Madrid, in 1993. Of course there are many other conferences around the world, and meetings of various Societies, but the general Conference of Shadow-Academia is by far the largest, most prestigious, and well-attended. It is, nowadays, simply referred to as "The Conference⁶.”

Disagreements arose between Anna and the Faculty of Sanguinary History at Constantinople, largely revolving around Anna’s involvement with the Edenites and her insistence on encouraging her graduate students to generate texts of their own to counter the horde of human literature on the subject of Vampires

⁷. In 1991, she left Constantinople and took the prestigious Geisslerin Chair at the University of Budapest, where she teaches to this day.

Anna remains unmarried

8 . ____________________

¹ It is considered somewhat gauche to reference one’s mortal parentage when in polite society. Most modern vampires trace their heritage purely through the line of Conversion, often in the Spanish style, in which case Anna’s rather baroque moniker would be Anna-Silvia Oppenhagen-Petrescu y Mosshammer y Chamberlain, etc. Nevertheless, for the sake of the laity, she has chosen to briefly recount the flotsam and jetsam of her pre-Conversion existence here. Those of standing in the Community may feel secure in passing by this piece of historical curiosity.

² Dr. Mosshammer has kindly agreed to write an introduction to Dr. Petrescu’s forthcoming work, Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire. (University of Csejthe Press, 2005). The apprentice-master relationship between many vampires and the quasi-parental figures who Converted them is well-documented, but Dr. Mosshammer has been particularly supportive, and the editors of this site wish to take this opportunity to publicly thank him.

³ And thus able to take part in such specious feminist activities, as the Danube is well-known as a hotbed of radical thought and shoddy workmanship-even popularly referred to as "The Berkeley of Eastern Europe.”

⁴ University of Darvulia Press, 1987.

⁵ Black Feminism, a movement which centralizes the role of the female Vampire, the succubus, in Sanguinary History, is somewhat tainted in the view of most historians due to its roots in human scholarship. In the mortal world, second-wave feminism resulted in a great deal of literature-much of which was written by women like Anna who would later be Converted, bringing this rather specialized interest into their Vampiric studies. In addition, many find it ridiculous, in light of the great Vampires of literature being predominantly male, to privilege the role of the female-in essence, placing the role of the Three Sisters over that of Dracula. However, Black Feminists trace their lineage through such actual Vampire personages as Elizabeth Bathory, Clara Geisslerin, Augusta Gordon, and Emily Draper, scoffing at any attempt to drag Dracula into serious discussions of gender in the Community. This remains a controversy which finds Anna and her colleagues at its center, however, it has been suggested that since Anna herself was Converted by a male Vampire, she ought to be more grateful to the masculine animus, and confine herself to more traditional histories.

⁶ The 2005 Conference will take place July 25- 29 in Lodz, Poland, hosted by Plogojiwitz University. Hotels fill up quickly, so reservations are suggested.

⁷ Much as it was once considered beneath mortal nobility to engage in mercantile activities, it is widely asserted that for Vampires to produce their own quasi-fictional texts is vulgar in the highest degree. To speak for ourselves threatens the exposure of our entire Community, and most agree that the formulation of ridiculous and outlandish stories of bloodletting and cannibalism ought to be left to those mortal authors who find it titillating.

⁸ Predictably, this has caused a number of rumors to arise as to the orientation of Dr. Petrescu. While the editors of this site feel that such a subject is merely salacious and has no place in a professional biography, or in the parlor rooms of certain aged male Faculty members, they will note, without commentary, that Dr. Petrescu has co-habited with the Italian Edenite scholar Genevra Verzini in Budapest since 1995.

University of Csejthe Press

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CONTACT: Andrei Bogoescu, publicity@csejthepress.com

EXSANGUINATIONS

A Handbook For The Educated Vampire

by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu

translated from the Romanian by Catherynne M. Valente

____________________

AN OCTOBER 2009 RELEASE

In October 2009, the prestigious University of Csejthe Press will release Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu’s long-awaited work,

Exsanguinations: A Handbook for the Educated Vampire. This much-discussed volume will contain a distillation of 25 years of research into the Origins, Customs, History, and Literature of the Vampire Community. It will serve both as a primer for the Newly Converted and a convenient desk reference for the experienced Dark Academic. Never before has such a variety of scholarly work been brought together in one place, and readers can look forward to a truly definitive delineation of the Vampire Culture in Dr. Petrescu’s trademark simple, elegant prose.

Look for

Exsanguinations at fine purveyors of Demonic Texts throughout Europe and America in October 2009.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR EXSANGUINATIONS

“Petrescu has done it! This text will stand for many cycles of Conversion hence. There can be no finer manual for the Vampiric existence than this lovely volume, no more concise and sensitive expression of the postmodern fiend.”

– Genevra Verzini

“Dare I call this the Vampiric Bible? I think I must, for no more inclusive and profound a book has yet been produced in the Community.”

– Adrian Maru

To interview Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu, or to request more information about

Exsanguinations or any other Csejthe Press titles, contact Csejthe Press publicity director Andrei Bogoescu at publicity@csejthepress.com.

EXSANGUINATIONS

by Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu

(Non-Fiction / 978-1-59780-156-0 / $15.95 / 400 pages)

a Csejthe Press trade paperback / October 2009

to learn more visit www.csejthepress.com