My annotated Dracula has informed me that when Harker said his robber steak was “in the style of the London cat’s-meat!” he was referring to “A tradition in London was the “cat’s-meat man,” a vendor who sold little bits of meat on skewers for consumption by cats”
I am overjoyed by this knowledge that there were Victorians just randomly getting lil kebabs for their CATS
I am so happy to learn this was a thing, looks like they were door to door pet food sellers.
My favourite Dracula discovery: the Victorian kebab vendors for pets! I look upon my kitty treat cupboard and know with full certainty I would give this man a sovereign.
No word from my good friend Johnathan today. Given the state of affairs in his last letter I find myself quite concerned. Perhaps it is unkind of me to judge so harshly on second hand impressions but I do not like the sound of this Count Dracula fellow at all.
I also love how Dracula the book is being read as a pantomime with readers yelling ‘HE’S BEHIND YOU JONATHAN! You just can’t see him because his reflection doesn’t appear in your mirror… welp, there goes the mirror…’
I just want everyone new to Dracula and reading Dracula Daily to note that you are getting to read this novel in a weird and wonderful way that its author absolutely did not intend. This is not a straight serialization of the text. Dates skip around in Draculaas it is written, moving the reader backwards and forwards in time to help shape the specific narrative Bram Stoker wanted to tell. We all will–in fact–be skipping ahead some chapters in a few days to meet another narrator only to skip immediately back to catch up with our collective friend Jonathan Harker.
And I think this is rad! I think it’s amazing to have a bunch of readers who are reading this book–not as Bram Stoker wrote it–but in a way that conforms to the steady march of events within it. This is a unique opportunity in that you guys don’t get to shape your reactions in relation to things you know will happen later. You can’t have your dread or anticipation undercut by future events.
Like all the characters you’re going to meet, you just have to wait for Dracula to act upon you.
the tl;dr is, since dracula is made up of in-universe journal entries, newspaper articles, letters, etc., it’s filled with dates. so dracula daily is sending out each chapter/segment according to the day it takes place in-story. the first was today, may 3rd, and it’ll go until november 2022. there won’t be an entry every day, and they’ll vary in length, all according to how the story goes. and if u see this post after may 3rd, it’s ok! u can still sign up and receive the entries via email as they come out for the rest of the stories, and go to their archive to read any u missed.
For some time I was happily reading a lot of Dracula posts without questioning in any way why I was reading them. Because I am a huge nerd, and it seemed totally reasonable to me that people might fall into a Dracula groove. Sometimes the fancy comes upon one! I have acted out to friends some of the obscure Wilkie Collins novels! They didn’t request that! Literally nobody asked me!
So I thought one Dracula post was simply inspiring another, as Dracula is neat. Dracula is an Irish institution to me: my local cathedral St Patrick’s was covered in red lights for Dracula’s anniversary, and we all listened happily to a Dracula sermon. Bram Stoker was inspired by his mother’s lurid tales of plague in the Irish countryside. Bram Stoker stole Oscar Wilde’s childhood sweetheart–Florence Stoker, a renowned beauty whose type was sexually ambiguous Irish literary legends. Plus I love it when communities come together to talk stories. It’s why I’m fannish: it’s why if I survive an apocalypse I plan to be a bard. Ragtag bunch of misfit survivors, I am your Netflix now. I had no notes!
Only slowly did it dawn upon me, as light upon a hastily closed coffin, that there was a movement afoot. Dracula delivered to your email inbox in installments, in chronological order (which isn’t the order of the book). It’s a new twist on serial fiction and a new twist on a book club, with the comfort of familiarity–Dracula is set in stone. Nobody can cancel Dracula. (You understand how I mean this. I acknowledge Count Dracula is problematic…)
Like many classics, Dracula is profoundly more weird and complicated than the funhouse mirror that is popular culture tells us it is. It makes me very happy to see people embracing Jonathan Harker, a sweet man who is not quick on the undead uptake, and who in some ways reminds me of a Gothic heroine. Now everyone will see Keanu Reeves was a truly inspired casting for him, though the movie didn’t have the portrayal I feel he deserved. And I am learning new things through following along. The best re-reads of the best books are journeys of discovery in this way.
Also, it is twelve days until we meet my favourite. The cowboy.
We might live in a hellscape nightmare timeline but sometimes I remember that, where as a kid in middle school I used to painstakingly pour over back cover blurbs of every book in the school library in desperate hope of finding anything resembling a queer character to let me know I wasn’t alone, coached in hidden terms and tragic endings, wondering if teachers would mock or scorn if they knew, my daughter now can just go to her school librarian, say “I want to read books about girls who like girls” and get a comprehensive list and it genuinely warms my heart like. At least something is okay. This is better
This comforted me, so I wanted to pass the comfort on!
See here’s the thing. It’s not that Secret of NIMH is a badmovie. It’s not that themes about believing in yourself, or about The Power Of A Mother’s Love, are necessarily bad.
It’s that–
It’s that the book is so much bigger and so much smaller. So much more.
It’s that We All Help One Another Against The Cat. And that saves an entire civilization, in the end. And it saves the life of a single little boy. And those things are equally important in the end.
InMrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, everything, the whole world, comes down to this in the end: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
An elderly mouse sets up shop as a healer, charging nothing, asking nothing in return. The frightened single mother gets free medicine from him. Because she has a doctor to go to, she’s in the right place at the right time to see a very young crow tangled in string, and stops despite the danger to free him. Moved by her patience and courage, Jeremy refuses to abandon her and risk her being killed by the cat whose attention his struggle has caught. He is gracious and polite and humble as he flies her to her home, so she swallows her irritation at his youthful foolishness and speaks to him respectfully, so a friendship is forged between them that lasts longer than a single mutual rescue, so she tells him about the danger her son is in, so he vouches for her to an owl. The owl is interested enough by her nerve and the unlikely bond of friendship between them that he gives her his genuine time and attention and speaks to her for long enough that Jeremy calls out to her by name to see if she’s safe, which means the owl recognizes the name, which means he can send her to the rats–
Simple, understated, mundane, none of them coincidences. All of them a choice. To do what’s right and not what’s safest. To do the hard thing and not the comfortable one. To act with compassion even when you’re annoyed at the deviation from your plans.
Justin opens a cage door for eight little mice who mean nothing to him, who he’s never met before. Nicodemus sees the smaller, lighter mice in mortal peril and reaches out instinctively to grab one, two, and the rest are gone before anyone even has time to react. The entirety of A Group having seen what comes of carelessness grimly throws themselves into keeping these two vulnerable mice alive, bracing them with their bodies, holding them close, anchoring them to safe points. Mr. Ages, not Nicodemus, proposes using a screwdriver as a pry-bar. Jonathan crawls through a hole too small for rats and frees them all. Justin burns hours they cannot spare to venture back into the tunnels–
(Having escaped, having reached freedom and safety against all odds but knowing others were left behind, he turns back–)
–Calling, hoping, and they find no one and it was still worth the risk, even if no one was saved, because they mighthave been. The care he shows for the mice means Jonathan and Mr Ages stay with them past the escape, form a friendship that lasts years. That gives his name such respect among them that when they hear it, they drop everythingto care for his wife and son.
Dragon cannot be drugged because they have no mice to run the risk anymore. The rats decide there’s nothing for it–they will work in the open. Risk not only their lives but the discovery of their entire civilization if caught, in order to move a cinder block eight inches to the right, to save the life of a single tiny child, their dead friend’s son. The child’s mother volunteers to run the risk for them. A human boy says wait, don’t let the cat in yet, I’ve caught a mouse because human boys are loud and big and clumsy and it’s traumatizing and she’s hurt butBilly Fitzgibbon saw a tiny vulnerable thing and wanted to keep it safe. And so she remains in the kitchen, and hears about the death of Jenner’s team, and is able to warn the rats just barely, barelyin time.
Because Jenner was not a villain, because he was never cruel. Because he disagreed with his oldest friend but Jenner and Nicodemus never hated one another, so they never wanted anything but the best for each other. So Jenner and his supporters defected peacefully. So their terrible, fatal mistake happened in the public eye, not too far away, because there was no hostility between them. Because they only ever wanted one another to be safe and happy, in the end.
And the surviving rats escape, save for one who stumbled and fell as he ran from the gas, and one unnamed who might have been Justin, who might not, and does it matter whether it was someone we knew, does it matter, should we mourn him less if he wasn’t, does his name matter more than that he was kind and brave and died for it? That after being kinder and braver than anyone had any right to ask, he dragged one last brother out of a cloud of cyanide and then went back?
They escape, they survive, just as surely as Timothy will grow up strong and healthy and the Frisbys can now return every year to a safe, warm home and never have to leave it. A civilization deep in the forest, safe and secure and entirely their own, because Mrs. Jonathan Frisby was in the right place at the right time to tell them to hide their machines and run–
Because she was kind to a crow.
Because she had a neighbor who dedicated his life to helping others.
Because her husband died helping the rats build a home that was their own, that he would never share in.
Because they were his friends, because he opened a grate for them once, because they held him close and shielded him with their bodies when he was too small.
Because a rat named Justin opened a door.
Because kindness is hard and scary and hurts sometimes, but it’s always worth it, it’s never wasted, compassion finds its way back to you in the most unlikely ways and even when it doesn’t, when you get nothing in return, it was still worth it to try.
Because we all help one another against the cat.
And how dare Don Bluth look me in the eye and try to say that isn’t good enough.
How dare you try to tell me that isn’t magic.
A beautiful write-up about Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which is a classic that deserves to be even more valued. My whole life I’ve been frightened of rats but every time I say I am, I must add ‘But not Justin. I LOVE Justin!’
Hello! I hope that everyone had an amazing time this Christmas. I, personally, can’t look at food anymore. If you’re planning to recover after holidays madness with a book in your hands and need a bookmark I’ve got some of a handmade bookmarks in my Etsystore
No longer is this about the rights of students to access books. It’s now about the rights of private businesses to sell books. Anderson suggests this is a new avenue for parents to fight.
“We are in a major fight. Suits like this can be filed all over Virginia. There are dozens of books. Hundreds of schools,” he said.
Holy shit this is a BIG FUCKING WARNING SIGN. Challenges to school and public libraries aren’t cool obviously, but they’re not unusual and we have a framework for handling them. This is something new and alarming in a whole new way
Republican “free speech” y'all and don’t you forget it.
This is a direct challenge to the freedom of the press and if it isn’t struck down at the first hurdle we need to make sure it never sees the second one.
On the miniscule off-chance that anyone who sees my reblog might be thinking “oh, it’s just queer books that they’re trying to ban” - A Court of Mist and Fury is a het romance. It is a het romance containing het sex scenes, written by a straight white woman.
People have been warning all along that the right-wing thought police were never going to stop with queer lit or ‘woke’ lit, and that every time they got an inch they were going to take a mile until they’d banned absolutely everything that didn’t conform to their strict right wing fundamentalist Christian views. If you were waiting for proof of that, here it is.
adding this which I saw yesterday, which appears to indicate this judge is not just deciding whether to allow this bookstore to sell certain books to minors.
“regarding whether the books may be sold OR POSSESSED in Virginia by EITHER MINORS OR ADULTS”
I don’t even like Sarah Maas (not trying to start anything, I just didn’t get into the first one) but this makes me want to go get this book and maybe a couple of others, just for spite.
Screen shots of the WaPo article below and in the next reblog due to image limits.
Concerning highlights: both books are sexually explicit and there is every reason to think the judge will find them obscene by the standard in the old statue. A request to completelystop the sale of these books in the state while the case works its way through court has been filed and if the books are found obscene will likely be granted.
Technically this case is an attempt to prohibit the sale of the books to children but they’re likely to get a lot more than that both short and long term. If you were a publisher and had to select a book to publish that’s likely to incur court costs and be blacklisted or one that’s not which one are you going to buy?
Hiya! You can now get Glitch on my online store! It comes signed, personalised and doodled in, and you also get a free bookplate and an Izzy enamel pin while stocks last! We ship worldwide!
Glitch is my brand new graphic novel all about Izzy, a girl who can enter the world of her new video game! You can also get it from all good book and comic shops, both online and in the real world!
