Professor Raskin's Magic Potion
A student makes a bargain with his eccentric professor.
During the second term of my freshman year at City College in New York – this was the spring of 1974 – I had an unusual professor for one of my English courses. His name was Gordon Raskin, he was a specialist in Medieval Literature, and he was thirty-six-years-old at the time. One of his courses was “The Vampire: Certain Ideas of Evil in Western Thought and Art.” Dracula, of course, was on the reading list, but so were w...