Hi all! Erica Kudisch here, promoting my debut novel THE BACKUP, queer urban
fantasy with a side of myth and music. Thanks so much for keeping up
with the blog tour! Be sure to swing by the other stops for
awesome multimedia content and a $50 prize package giveaway!
Why The
Bacchae
I have a copy of D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths in the underwear
drawer of my childhood bedroom. It’s in pieces. It’s been in pieces since I was
nine years old. Even back then I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story, so I got
my hands on other versions as soon as I could. My grandmother and I read the
Iliad together when I was twelve, and watched the entirety of the BBC’s
I CLAVDIVS, and I
probably experienced the demythifications of Mary Renault a little too early in
my emotional development, but there you go.
Around the same time, I was taking drama classes at school, and we learned about
Greek theatre and the roots of Western drama. I loved the scope of the stories,
loved seeing all those myths I’d read as a child brought to life and somehow
humanized. We read through the Oedipus trilogy, Elektra, and
Antigone, and studied the megaphone masks and the elaborate dances, and
tried to incorporate them into modern theater. It didn’t always work, but I saw
the immediate connections between Greek theatre and musical theatre, especially
opera. The stories are larger than life, and so is the language they use, and
just because the acting isn’t naturalistic or cinematic doesn’t mean it’s false.
The world of Greek drama, just like Greek mythology, is a heightened reality, a
distorted mirror of our world.
I first came across Euripides’s THE BACCHAE
in my local public library when I was about thirteen. I’m pretty sure it was
because I was terrified by the ending of THE KING MUST DIE and wanted more dirt on Maenadic ritual. I
don’t even remember whose translation of the play I found, but I tracked down
another and read them side by side. The shape of the story was the
same--Dionysus comes to town and ruins his cousin’s life--but there was
something in the differences between them that struck me. One was sympathetic to
King Pentheus for trying to keep order in his city: another made it clear that
his hubris made him deserve everything the God gave him.
So imagine gawky, adolescent me, with my characteristically teenaged
black-and-white view of the world, trying to make sense of the disparity. How
could a play have two diametrically opposed morals? How could Dionysus and
Pentheus both be right? Honestly, I’m still not sure. But I know they both
think they’re right, and that it’s the context that determines the moral.
In the intervening years, I’ve read and watched a dozen other translations. One
in particular, Hans Werner Henze’s opera, The Bassarids, was a huge inspiration for THE BACKUP. In The
Bassarids, Pentheus’s music is strict but dissonant, completely beholden to
the academic conventions of the 1960s; Dionysus’s free atonality is expressive
but unpredictable, and just as aurally unnerving. And the rules of the opera,
the choices Henze makes, are broken one by one, leaving the audience just as
lost and manipulated as Pentheus.
That’s what this myth is capable of: showing us both the prides and pitfalls
that can come when we break the rules of the Gods.
The Giveaway
To celebrate the release of THE BACKUP, Erica is giving away
iTunes and Riptide credit totaling $50! Your first comment at each stop on this
tour enters you in the drawing. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on
January 30, 2016. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. Entries. Follow the tour for more opportunities to enter the giveaway!
Erica Kudisch lives, writes, sings, and often trips over things in New York
City. When not in pursuit of about five different creative vocations, none of
which pay her nearly enough, you can usually find her pontificating about dead
gay video games, shopping for thigh-high socks, and making her beleaguered
characters wait forty thousand words before they get in the sack.
In addition to publishing novellas and short stories as fantastika-focused
alter-ego Kaye Chazan (What Aelister Found Here and The Ashkenazi Candidate,
both available at Candlemark & Gleam) Erica is responsible for the BDSM
musical Dogboy & Justine, and serves as creative director and co-founder of
Treble Entendre Productions.
She also has issues with authority. And curses too f#cking much.
I’m supposed to be better than this. I'm supposed to have a tenure-track
job teaching music history to undergrads, writing papers about Bach, and proving
to kids like me that you can work your way out of Harlem. I'm not supposed to be
following a rock star around the country, fetching his mail, making sure his
groupies are of age.
I'm definitely not supposed to be sleeping with said
rock star, who claims to be the Greek God Dionysus. At first I thought it was a
load of crap. Nik's fans might think his music captures their hearts—and
souls—but I knew better. Until one of Nik's orgiastic concerts gets out of hand
and I don’t know which is worse: that he might be a god after all, or that he
has a body count.
Nik doesn’t care what I want or what I should be. He
wants to tear down the world I've built, warping all I am, until his music is
all that's left of me. I can't let him do that. I shouldn't believe in him. I've
seen what happens to the people who believe in him.
But I can't get his
song out of my head.
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