The first great poem to be written in English, or rather, Old English, "Beowulf" has been required reading in university classics courses for decades: Beowulf, the legendary dragon slayer and the model for countless heroic figures that followed him.
Laura Kasischke is hardly the first to use such figures (as fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" know) but with her new novel, "The Raising," she pursues them almost perfectly.
Her pitch line for the film — " 'The Secret' meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a dark alley, naked" — has attracted notable figures to be interviewed, including Tom Robbins, the author of "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues".
The bells of Notre Dame pealed for those killed in the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a left-leaning slayer of sacred cows whose cartoonists have been national figures since the Parisian counter-cultural heyday of the 1960s and 1970s.
I always did stuff like that because I figured if you saw me or saw my name, you'd at least think of Slayer, and then they did a video.
JOSS WHEDON may be as much a cult figure as the characters he conjured for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel," but since 2004, when his vampires faced the final apocalypse, he has been everywhere but television.
Along the way, to demonstrate what he calls "creative cabala" and "frontier cabala," he cites a bizarre host of contemporary cultural figures, from Jacques Derrida to Oprah Winfrey to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
An action figure right out of the box, he's a literal and self-proclaimed dragon slayer who uses the unlighted cigar jammed into his mouth as the world's biggest tobacco chaw.
"Honey, are you sure you're a slayer?" "Have you tried not being a slayer?" "It's 'cause you didn't have a strong father figure, isn't it?" "You can't just drop something like this on me and pretend it's nothing!" Watching this scene, I found myself relating to Buffy.
Slayer sticksman Dave Lombardo concurred.
