My name is Cleo, and I am maybe a Dracula

[cleolinda]

This is just to say that I'm fine; I just looked up and realized how much time had passed without me posting again. I was tired from liveblogging two nights in a row, and--in a most likely related occurrence--my eyes have started burning a bit, so I've been trying to get away from my computer screen (... a little) the last couple of days and catch

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[cleolinda]

Much of the U.S. is off watching the State of the Union address, so it's a bit quiet online at the moment.

[sunni_sideup]

Whitby - also my favorite part of Dracula. The annotations sound very interesting.

[cleolinda]

I haven't! But it keeps being mentioned--I also want to go get the other two annotations Klinger keeps mentioning.

But yeah, I get a bit tired of the conspiracy angle because sometimes it gets bogged down in perpetuating itself. When it works, it's a fun new way to consider something; when it doesn't, you're just going through ever-increasingly convoluted motions just to keep up appearances.

[cleolinda]

Yeah, I did see a mention of "makes vampirism fashionable" in passing. I'll have to look that up. I've just tried to be really careful--in working on my own vampire thing for the last 6-7 years (DEAR GOD), I've tried to read only the pre-1900 stuff--to see what someone at the time could have known, culturally speaking, about vampires. (You know, the way the concept of "sunlight kills instantly" didn't show up until Nosferatu in the '20s. Like that.) I guess on some level I'm terrified that I'm going to read modern vampire fiction* and realize it's all been done before--which it has, but it's one of those "don't look down" things. You have to close your eyes and do it anyway.

* Obviously Twilight doesn't count.**

** Although, actually, it's been really instructive to see what pisses people off about Twilight, what traditional vampire fans feel the books do "wrong," and what the books actually do effectively. Because they have to do something effectively, or they wouldn't have sold eleventy frillion copies. So I really enjoy

[remindmeofthe]

I just got my copy of The New Annotated Dracula today! I ordered it precisely because of the "it's all real" gimmick, because I'm a hopeless sucker (so to speak, whoops) for that kind of thing. The thought of trying to make what reads like a never-revised first draft make consistent sense sounds like, um, quite a challenge. Plus, other stuff! I'm looking forward to reading it and am excited to see a positive review of it pop up on the flist with such perfect timing.

[cleolinda]

Hee. Well, as they say, if you are into this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will be into. I really recommend Klinger's Sherlock set, if you like that--people have been having fun with "The Game" for a long time, so there's a lot of that to discuss. And I think the gimmick benefits there from being spread over many, many stories, instead of a single, shorter work with tons of discrepancies. I mean, there's a whole appendix dealing with time/date issues in Dracula. I'm perfectly content with STOKER WASN'T PAYING ATTENTION, because--what's trying to reconcile it actually going to achieve? Because it's all fictional and there's no correct reality, as it were, you can't do it.

But even within that, Klinger still gets to stop and say, okay, look, whether someone "fabricated" this or not, this makes NO SENSE. Like why Dracula would actually kill everyone on the Demeter, which he needs to get to England. (Klinger mentions an interesting theory that Dracula wasn't feeding to kill, but that, rather, the excitable Romanian first

[remindmeofthe]

Oh, man, this is gonna be AWESOME.

One thing with Dracula is that Stoker was paying attention to some stuff - some of Van Helsing's exposition feels like Stoker straining to force the whole thing to come together so he can justify the story. It reads like he was so focused on that stuff that he totally forgot about how, like, killing Drac with a couple of knives is not the most convincing ending ever. It kills me a little that just a bit of rewriting here and there could have fixed so much of the shit that's wrong with it.

[cleolinda]

Heeeeee, yeah. Klinger mentions that--I'm sure he'll explain in more depth once we get there, but already he's suggesting that using knives instead of stakes is a tacit admission that Dracula doesn't actually stay dead, and may have actually bullied Stoker into changing parts of the book. Which... okay. But yeah. It's so bizarre that Van Helsing would go on and on about stakes and the mountain ash and the blah blah blee and then... knives. Really? Some of that--the rewriting that should have been done, and done so easily--kills me, because there is no way in hell a writer could get away with that today. Their inbox would be on FIRE the day after the book came out, assuming their editor didn't smack them upside the head with a galley first.

[iczer6]

HE DIDN'T CARE, OKAY? ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE JUST REALLY DID NOT SERIOUSLY CARE ABOUT SOME OF THIS STUFF

There are so many fandoms where I want to yell this out sometimes. Maybe the writer just fucked up okay? Maybe they weren't paying attention or maybe that information just wasn't important to the story they were trying to tell.

Also I was wondering I came across this and was wondering if you could mention it.

Short story a man name Kevin was paralyzed in accident and since then has been screwed over by his insurance company who flat out refuse to pay him and is nearing homelessness.

They are asking for donations but the LJ owner says what they really want is to get the word out.

[cleolinda]

Sure--I think I mentioned it on Twitter a few days ago, but it can't hurt to post it here too.

[iczer6]

Thanks.

[nicolars]

I know, right? It drives me crazy in fandoms, especially on TWOP where people will obsess over a minor continuity error for WEEKS. Or maybe that was just the old Buffy & Angel boards. Either way, argh.