What's it about?

What's Dracula really about?  Every time I have read it, I seem to have read a different book.  The last time I read Dracula was about 5 years ago, and I was floored by the sexual subtext.  About that time I saw a stage production of the novel which positively dwelled on Mina and Lucy's sexual awakening, and I became convinced Stoker's book was designed to be warn Victorian women about the dangers of promiscuity, or even orgasm.  I began to question my whole beloved vampire genre.   As much as I adore vampire movies (oh, and I do love them), I've never seen an adaptation of Dracula that doesn't make the sexual overtones common by simply making the Count sexy. It's so obvious- and lazy. The steamy sex story that I thought framed the novel is about the heroine and her libido, not her falling for the accent and piercing gaze of some Frank Langella hottie. Only the incredible "Nosferatu" has any of the kinky intention I read in Bram Stoker's story. (Watch the whole film below!)
But of course I first read Dracula in 7th grade- and I didn't see the sex then- it was just a delicious aura around the castles, haunted ships, and ghosts of a great dismal yarn. I read it about the same time I read Wuthering Heights, and innumerable treacly Victorian romances, and it all created for me a nostalgic miasma of darkness and love and despair and sighs.  When I reread Dracula in my early twenties I was shocked at how much I had forgotten or just never noticed, so much weirdness, and the romance so...blah.  Boring, even.  Then came my overly critical early thirties reading.
And here I am, at 36, rereading it again for Infinite Summer, for the month of October.  I am so excited to revisit my old friends.


-- Posted from my iPhone

The best possible thing to read in October

Couldn't quite contain my excitement when it was revealed that infinite summer's next hipster nation indulgence in literary minutaie was none other than my all time favorite novel, Bram Stoker's Dracula. My dear friends, how can I express my elation? Fall is well and truly here, and I can't think of a better way to embrace it than rereading, rehashing, and redigesting Dracula. So I can have my name on the infinite summer blogroll, and so I can nurture my inner obsessive, I am going to blog this experience. I'll post some of my ideas for Dracula tarot cards, too, which have been stewing on the back burner for a couple years. Ooohhh I am a happy girl. Whitby, I approach.


-- Posted from my iPhone

Passion, wherefore art thou?

Heard another inspiring talk today, this one from Sean Griffin.  All these go getters that just get an idea and run with it- in his case, many an idea.  I'll post my viz notes tomorrow.  His whole thing is finding your passion and living it, and his passion is visually communicating potential and what is possible.  For companies, for people.  So part of the exercise was to draw a mind map of your passion.  ?!  Needless to say, my page was blank. I forget what I was passionate about before I was passionately sad, or passionately angry, or passionately pessimistic.  I finally wrote: inspiration.  Vague- but really, that's the beginning of everything, right?  The breath of hope, of life.  The inspiration that bringing another soul into the world will go well, that love won't go unnoticed, that sorrow serves a purpose.  If I don't get inspired again, it will be harder and harder to get out of bed.  So the only passion I currently have is a passionate longing for inspiration.

Finnegan Begin Again

Another day, another blog.  Ah, well.  We can't all, and some of us don't.  White trash moment of the day: begging 75 cents off co-workers for a Diet Dr. Pepper. 
Dig this Twin Peaks poster- a RT from someone but since I can't do the tweet thing from work...
http://eljefedesign.com/posters/twinpeaks.html

Also he has super cute Decemberists poster designs.