bloodygranuaile (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bloodygranuaile) wrote2022-11-07 04:58 pm
bloodygranuaile) wrote2022-11-07 04:58 pm
Emails from the polycula
This spring, after some initial resistance, I jumped onto the Dracula Daily bandwagon, and as such have been reading Bram Stoker’s 1982 Gothic masterpiece Dracula in little bits and pieces, some out of order, more days than not for the past few months. Though I have read Dracula before, there was definitely something fun and different about reading it in real-time, playing with the epistolary form by waiting for emails from my dear friends about what they’d been up to, and being in a fandom/giant book club with the most insane minds on the Internet via the Dracula Daily tag on Tumblr. These past six months have been so much fun, and have really forced me to slow down and notice so many delicious and weird little things about the book that usually get lost when I just mainline the whole novel by myself in a few days with no one to discuss it with. It was, of course, also lovely watching so many new readers discover all the ways in which the novel differs from the many pop culture variations on it, and get outraged together over the ways in which movies and such have consistently done Lucy and Jonathan dirty, made Dracula and Van Helsing inexplicably sexy instead of the goofy old men they are, and, most unforgivably, always cut our “laconic,” Winchester-wielding Texas gentleman Quincey Morris.
One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.
But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.
One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.
But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.