Vampires ... the feeding on the sickness in our souls.

The UN- Dead

Dracula's empathy with the "children of the night" rather than with humans released a dimension of fear: the fear, not of death and the dead, but of being alive (94).

"Dracula"'s original title, up to a month before its publication, was "The Un-Dead," which points toward the essential gift of Stoker's vampires to the 20th cent: a reminder, not of the dreadfulness of death, but of the innate horror of vitality. (95)

The blood is the life ... D. energizes his prey, reminding his victims -- and us -- that they have life in them ... the women he transforms come to apprehend the (sensory) vibrancy of their world. 

Stoker's Undead bestow vitality ... Rice uses this as "Vampire sight" (quasi angelic) ... Stoker associates it with animals.

Life engorges death ... lucy is not stilled ... she turns not to marble, but to blood.

Lucy is the first dead girl we have met who is in her heart alive. 

(I, of course, was an alive girl who in my heart was dead.)

Her kind has no love of death and no sympathy with stillness.

...

I think sometimes that if I don't exist, that it would be the way to get back at her, that hurting myself would hurt her ... like I have been the one all along who has not known that we are, in fact, two separate beings.

Is this what all this crap is here to teach me? I've been angrier the last few days since I finished my amends on the 4th (today has been the 8th, though now it's technically the 9th) than I have for a while ... it was so hard to be able to really see what I've had to deal with, and to never know which person it would be, the person on day #1 or on day #2, that no matter what I say, even how many times she asks me the same questions over and over, she does not hear me at all.

I've been thinking a lot today about how Alisa said that if it wasn't for me doing all those drugs in high school, I never would have made it out of my teens alive, and days like today, I can see why.  It is also becoming clearer why I have these "strange mental blank spots" about people being complete assholes, but only in certain situations -- allowing my landlady to call me names; allowing my boyfriend(s) to treat me so badly and not feel like either of these things are unusual or I'm undeserving because they both have to do with the "house" and my deepest emotional abilities. Now that this summer I've taken away the glamour of my job and have been forced to look at emotional stuff, there are huge gaps here for me to be conscious of and ask the Goddess for help with.

Now that my shield is gone, not from my life but from my physical space, I can really begin to have my own life and trust God. It just has to hurt for a little while for it to feel better. I guess.

Still, I don't want to talk to, um, Mom for a while and you know what? I don't have to. So there.

Love,

Rachel Alina. xxxxx

Dracula "is so suggestively amorphous in Stoker's novel that he is free to shift his shape with each new 20th century trend." In 1897, though, Dracula was, despite his occult powers, so comparatively docile a vampire, so amenable to others' definitions, that he stifled the tradition that preceded him (Auerbach 83).

Like Dracula, the 1890's were a decade shaped by medical experts ... particularly on the "homosexual." (Oscar Wilde's trials)

Dracula is silent, cannot love, cannot participate...

Dracula inhibits more taboos than he breaks...his existence is hedged by absolute of arbitrary rules vampires fear to break even now.

But he has the ability to shapeshift ... though this ability, in the novel, is downplayed (i think for creepiness effect ... "his changes are modestly presented compared to those of Lucy and Mina...once again, women perform of behalf of withheld males the extreme implications of vampirism" (87).

Sexually, Stoker's vampires are dutifully conventional; personally they lack flair, craving only power and possession -- they are striking only in their transformative potential.

In most vampire films, animalism is less metamorphosis than coded eroticism, but is late Victorian England, animals were not represented as notably sexual. Instead, they generated a lonely awe human  beings were too socialized to inspire (88).

• Also watch Kinski/Herzog's Nosferatu

NEW!

So now I'm thinking, after breaking up with that total -- wait, what's that? -- energy vampire -- that perhaps the best way to go about doing my project is to 

a.) not go overboard

and 

b.) think of a few themes that can be illustrated by various "visual texts," i.e., stealing scenes off of Youtube.

The vampire is much more complex than just a single metaphor, but can and has and will represent many different facets of blah blah blah.

Some possible ideas could be:

• Possession: "He belongs to me" -- Gary Oldman
• Addiction: Lili Taylor
• Consumerism: Lost Boys? Lestat?
• Old world vs. New world: Lestat? ironically, Dracula in London?
• Disease: Nosferatu? HIV?
• Psychic Vampires:
• Rebirth/Death -- Louie turning into a vampire; death and birth together ...

This should be in film, not tv, as I can't handle all that shit. 

This is a good working start. Stuff to watch/check out includes:

The Hunger

The Vampyr  (Dreiser)

The Vampire Lovers (Hammer, Baker, 1970)

Blood and Roses (Vadim, 1960)

Familiar movies to cull for scenes:

Both Interview movies

The Lost Boys

28 Days Later

• Please note, Miss Rachel, that this research is to be done on YouTube itself, as that is your main source of material.

Lots of love.

R. xx

Podcasting update/interesting article

So ...

The Cubs lost the second half of the Subway Series and Spain won the final in the European Cup.

My boss (I always like to have one of those I guess) sent me this awesome article about podcasting in the classroom: 

http://campustechnology.com/articles/64433/

More later.

R. x

Some Serious 19th Century Shit

Auerbach writes about how 19th century vampiric literature focused on the vampire as a close friend without the familiar litany of identifying marks that we identify with it today. 

Male vampires, especially Lord Byron/Polidori and Varney the Vampire, offer a close bond or oath in friendship with each other or their prey, whilst the female vampires -- especially Carmilla and Christabel -- center on physical and emotional intimacy.  

Both of these genders' actions and feelings are portrayed as what the succeeding centuries would describe as homosexual, especially the females' obsessive closeness.

Auerbach then goes on to remark of the 19th century, "a century of alluring vampire friends invade erotic sites, the shared reality of bodies, on behalf of an abstract bond and a purely surgical violence." 

BS' 1897 Dracula provided a "lexicon of vampirism for the 20th century. Predators were identifiable by their fangs, victims by two little holes in their neck. After Dracula, contact between vampire and victim is as external to the body as possible. Moving from the erotic to the clinical, from affinity to penetration, vampire iconography abandons bosoms, fastening with scientific precision on higher, cleaner wounds."