ZOMBAY DES REFUSES: THE AMERICAN CLASSICS ROOM

As promised, a new room of the salon every day until the ZOMBIE IDOL FINALS! I hope you enjoyed the Shakespeare Room. Today, I bring you some American classics, retrofit (and perfected) by the insertion of the undead.

You still have until the end of day Thursday to send me an e-mail and enter round two!



The Zombiesburg Address
Margaret Crocker

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a zombie horde, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all brains are delicious.

Now we are engaged in a great zombie apocalypse, testing whether zombies, or any undead, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that apocalypse. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their brains that that zombie nation might continue to shuffle along. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and undead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget the brains eaten here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which the zombies who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored undead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these undead shall not have not died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new re-birth of freedom—and that government of the zombies, by the zombies, for the zombies, shall not perish from the earth.



Big head = big brains = zombie happiness


The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
M. Crewe

She had been looking into my eyes all the time. Her eyes had different depths, sometimes they seemed perfectly flat, like the zombie's had. Now you could see all the way into them.

"When I think of the hell I've put chaps through. I'm paying for it all now."

"Don't talk like a fool," I said. "Besides, what happened is supposed to be funny. I mean, a zombie, how can you get funnier than that. I never think about it."

"Oh, no. I'll lay you don't."

"Well, let's shut up about it."

"I laughed about it too, myself, once." She wasn't looking at me. "A friend of my brother's came home that way from Mons. It had tried to take his brains, you know. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?"

"No," I said. "Not when it comes to zombies. Nobody ever knows anything."


XXVII, Emily Dickinson
E. Isman

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
and Munch, death's pet zombie.

We slowly drove, he knew no Haste,
And I had to put away,
My labor, and my leisure too,
While Munch munched on my brains.


Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
A. Lipkin

"Frankly, my dear, braaaaains."



"I'll never be hungry again!"



Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
J. Hartman

"TOM!"

No answer.

"TOM!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them . . . . She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and slashing
under the bed with the chainsaw[....]

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So, hefting her shotgun, she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted:

"Y-o-u-u Tom!"

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small zombie by the neck of his roundabout and arrest his charge.

"There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?"

"BRAAAAAAAAINS!"

"Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?"

"BRAAAAAAAAINS!"

The lad began to gnaw contemplatively on her wrist.

"Forty times I've said if you didn't let those brains alone I'd skin
you. Hand me that switch."



“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
Devyn B

Once upon a full moon cheery, while I feasted, fast and fury,
As I munched, her eyes became dark and dreary,
While I fumbled, nearly falling, the blood on my tongue is what I was lapping,
I could imagine in my victims mind, the darling must be crapping, This thought landed me on the floor, with a joyous laughing.
Only this, and nothing more,
Quote the Zombie, “nevermore”.



The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
H. Ryan

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the zombies in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."

He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious undead natures to me... The abnormal zombie is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown zombies. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young zombies, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.


Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Malsperanza


I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the twitching corpse.


II
I was of three minds,
Like a zombie
That has eaten three brains.


III
The stained rag whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.


IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a zombie
Are in trouble.


V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of rotting meat
Or the beauty of desiccated flesh,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.


VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the Creature
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An inevitable doom.


VII
O thin men of Haiti,
Why do you imagine drooling jaws?
Do you not see how Baron Samedi
Nibbles on the feet
Of the women about you?


VIII
I love vile carnage
And stinking, unimaginable gore;
But I know, too,
That the Zombie is involved
In what I do.


IX
When the Undead limped out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of my worst nightmares.


X
At the sight of corpses
Staggering in a green light,
Even the mouthless victims
Would cry out sharply.


XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a growing angst.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For monsters.


XII
The river is moving.
The Undead must be lurking.


XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
We were bleeding
And we were going to bleed.
The revenant munched
On the scattered limbs.