warm blood feels good
on some FAQ regarding a PSA for the only thing I care about
It’s almost May, so I wanted to take a moment to engage in some service journalism regarding the most important event of the year:
Q: Should I sign up for Dracula Daily?
A: So glad you asked. Yes, absolutely. Here’s the link.
Q: Cool. I trust your judgment and advice implicitly—
A: Because they’re famously infallible, duh.
Q:—but just out of curiosity, what is that, exactly?
A: It’s one of two good things on the internet.
Q: Right. Great. But what… is it?
A: Oh. Sure. It’s a newsletter that emails you the text of Dracula.
Q: Dracula? Like, the book?
A: Yeah. Dracula is an epistolary novel—every piece of text in the book is presented as an artifact with a specific date of composition—so the emails let you experience the events in real-time, so to speak, for the six months across which the book takes place.
Q: Why can’t I just read Dracula?
A: You can! I was thinking of picking up a Norton edition this year myself. But I really have to tell you, reading Dracula for the first time this way was one of the most sheerly pleasurable artistic experiences of my life, and while some of that was definitely thanks to the demented book club vibes to be found in the Tumblr #dracula daily tag, I also genuinely believe that for me, something about the serialized format opened up a deeper and richer intellectual and emotional engagement with the novel than I would have developed toting around a paperback (and I say this as someone with otherwise a strong hard copy preference for fiction in particular).
Q: Wait, people are still on Tumblr?
A: Next question please.
Q: Okay. So why Dracula? Like, I haven’t read it, but I am passingly familiar with all other vampire content in the past century and a quarter of popular culture, so… haven’t I, kind of?
A: Valid, but almost definitely wrong. Honestly, one of the really fun things about actually reading Dracula is that I’ve never encountered something where cultural osmosis had led me so completely astray. Going in, I figured, okay, vampires, famously sexy, the erotics of the vampire bite, the appeal of the forbidden—
Q: Yeah, exactly.
A: —but like, no. Dracula is… not that. The hotness of vampires may or may not predate Dracula—I haven’t read Carmilla—but the hotness of the Count is a later invention, and that element of temptation is, I would argue—against, I believe, some common readings, but whatever, this is my blog—more or less entirely absent from the novel, to the extent that I find it interesting to wonder why the cultural perception of Dracula has insisted on putting it in.
Q: Huh. So what is Dracula about, then?
A: Train schedules.
Q: What?
A: I’m not joking. You will not believe how much this is a book about train schedules.
Q: Uh-huh. Anything… else?
A: Archival diligence, mostly. The limits and power of modernity. Gender, like, my god. Love.
Q: Between the lady and the vampire?
A: Were you not listening? No. Opposite.
Q: Hm. I’m not sold.
A: Okay, well, I can’t force you to love yourself and make good choices. But because I love you, I will say: I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book where my intellectual interest in the text as a historical object and my emotional engagement with the story and the characters were quite so equally matched. I started my Dracula journey surprised by how different and how much weirder it was than what I had been expecting, instantly fascinated by the book as an expression of both the values and the unarticulated fears of an empire that did not yet know it was in its twilight, chief among them the suspicion that there may yet exist places in the world even the most skillful cartographer can map, that there are lands even the Victorians cannot conquer.
I was reading along, having fun thinking about how every detail (like, every detail, this is a book begging for close reading) tied back into this central thread, about the way gender operated in the book, about the insights it offered into the mind and the world that produced it, enjoying myself at a distance from these silly Victorians who don’t even know they’re in a horror novel, and then around September something changed. The book got me. I realized I had come to care about these people: their pain was my pain, their dread my dread; their—and this was the last thing I expected to find—profound, open-hearted tenderness had begun to move me, deeply. By the end of October 3 (iykyk), I had never been more invested in anything; by the end of the novel, I felt changed, a little, the way that you are always changed when you encounter something you know will live with you forever, and I felt—I don’t know, cleansed? Renewed? I felt more connected to my own beliefs and ideals, to the extent that meditating on the book in the weeks after it closed inspired me to say yes to some things I’d been hemming and hawing about that more or less instantly snapped me out of the funk I’d been in. And when I read along again last year, I felt that again when the curtains drew closed, this sense that the novel offered me a chance to look in the mirror, partly, of course, because it’s a reminder that a person who has chosen never to see their own reflection is perhaps not much of a person at all.
Also, it’s, like, really, really funny. Some of it is funny by accident, because you can’t help coming into it after more than a century’s worth of knowledge about vampire lore, and because Bram Stoker was hilariously horny for America (you’ll see), but a lot of is funny on purpose!
Q: Wow, that’s pretty convincing.
A: I know, right?
Q: Is there any reason a person should not read this book?
A: I do believe everyone has the right to draw their own boundaries about what kind of fucked up shit they are or not willing to compartmentalize about in their leisure time, so: it’s pretty heinously and irrecuperably racist towards Romani people, who exist in the novel, when they appear, mostly as sort of ontologically evil voiceless thugs. You also just can’t really separate “evil foreigner who drinks blood” (and it’s very important, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, that Dracula is a foreigner) from, uh, you know. Or maybe you don’t, one time I saw a social media conversation featuring a bunch of people who had ostensibly gone to college enraged at the idea that anyone might read anti-Semitism into, again, a novel about an evil foreigner who drinks the blood of innocents, which was… dispiriting. I tend to assume that only sexy geniuses who are on my level follow me, but I guess you never know. Also, a lot of the novel takes place in a Victorian asylum, which includes some upsetting “treatment” protocols and what I would love to say are outdated conceptions of severe mental illness involving delusions but I can’t actually say that because of how I’ve watched every episode of Criminal Minds. Those are the big ones, I think, because they’re inseparable from the actual plot; there’s also the occasional glancing mention of something upsettingly racist in the middle of a bunch of normal stuff happening (off the top of my head I can think of two, but I don’t have the book memorized). I have a pretty high threshold for compartmentalization when it comes to novels by dead people—that’s not a political stance, it’s just how I am—but if you don’t, in general or for these specific issues, you know, that’s fine. Everyone else, however, has no excuse.
Q: What about gender? You keep bringing it up and I assume that a novel by a dude published in 1897 is pretty sexist.
A: Ah. Hm. Well. I—okay. It’s—the thing is—I don’t—let’s see. I would not say, like, “Dracula is feminist,” or whatever. Nor would I say it is a novel free of the social construction of Victorian womanhood. But—but I would say it’s complicated. It’s complicated, and kind of weird, and in some ways that feels deliberate, and in some ways you’re like, Bram, you okay? It’s—maybe one way to say it is that I don’t know that the novel is wrestling with Victorian ideals of gender, exactly, but it reads very much like the work of a person who was, and who maybe… didn’t totally know that? I don’t know. I go back and forth on this one a lot. It’s interesting. Gender in Dracula is very, very interesting. And, for what it’s worth, I find the women of the novel convincingly written, and Mina in particular has become one of my favorite fictional characters of all time (something I do feel confident Stoker would endorse, because he clearly adores her, too).
Q: What if I don’t like reading?
A: What?
Q: Reading. Like, words written down and then my eyeballs go across them and send them to my brain, I don’t like that.
A: Real weird blog for you to be on if that’s the case, but if that describes you, no worries and no excuses: last year, some people did a podcast version! I hear it’s pretty good!
Q: Are you going to be Dracula Daily-ing this year?
A: You know, I’m still deciding. My first year was 2022, and then last year I sort of thought I would maybe skim along and peek in on the reactions, but it turned out that the front half of the novel was a totally different experience now that I was emotionally hooked into the book, and I wound up getting all the way sucked back in again. This year I’ve been like, okay, self, as much fun as this has been and as much enrichment as it has brought to my interior landscape, there are other books in the world I would like to read, I cannot spend a third year having weeks at a time where all I fucking think about is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, at most maybe I’ll listen along to the audio version and keep abreast of the memes. But then I realized that Dracula season, May 3 to November 7, overlaps basically perfectly with U. S. election season, and I was like, hm, actually, maybe we save “other books” for next year and this year I take advantage of having something I know can absorb me obsessively for months on end.
Q: Oh god it’s an election year. Oh god the discourse has barely started. Oh god, oh god, there’s six more fucking months of this and it’s only going to get worse, I can’t, I can’t do this again—
A: Shh. It’s okay. I know. But it’s okay. Dracula’s got you.
Q: Is there anything else I should know about before we begin?
A: Yeah, the woman’s heart quote.
Q: The what?
A: Hold on, let me—okay. Early in the journey one of Tumblr’s premiere Dracula experts highlighted this quote from Stoker’s diaries, referring to himself, and I truly believe no one should go into Dracula without keeping it in mind:
Will men ever believe that a strong man can have a woman’s heart and the wishes of a lonely child?
Q: I… oh. Okay. Wow. That’s—huh.
A: RIGHT? Especially when you put it next to the Whitman letter!
Q: Oh, wow.
A. I know. I know. Biographical criticism is a dicey proposition, but there are elements of Dracula I find it very, very difficult to read without calling that letter to mind.
Q: I see.
A: Yeah. Anyway, I think that’s basically all I’ve got on my end, along with the fact that, like, I know I say this every time, but I mean it more for Dracula than for just about anything else: if you choose to follow my advice and love yourself by signing up for Dracula Daily today, you are more than invited to share with me both this wonderful news and literally any thoughts you may have in the future about a book that, again, has managed to take up 100% of my brainspace for weeks at a time for two years running now. (Also, if anyone has a Stoker biography they like, lmk, I keep saying I have to learn more about what this guy’s actual Deal was, but maybe this will be the year I actually do it.) Do you have any further questions for me?
Q: What’s the other one?
A: What?
Q: You said Dracula Daily was one of two good things on the internet. What’s the other one?
A: It’s Kermit Bale. You’re welcome.