Rater Reads Dracula

[Saintheart]

However, when visiting a sheep farmer in Jericho, I did get to taste boiled brain. The whole head had been boiled in sheep's milk (or yogurt?), and as the guest we got to taste the most delicious part first - namely the brain. I can't say I cared for it too much.

It didn't blow your trumpets or make your walls fall down, as it were?

[J-H]

Excuse me, but cow tongue is delicious. Ask your butcher sometime, I'm sure they'll have a stock of 'em.

ETA: You're in Texas, so you'll also be able to find it in good taco places. Taco truck near me has tongue as an option, and I love them dearly for it. If you ever head up to NYC, delis around there offer it as a common sandwich meat.

I have at least one beef tongue in the freezer, wife had me reorganize some stuff today. It's all white and stuff.
I'm big on texture so if it is lumpy or whatever, no thanks.

[Peelee]

I have at least one beef tongue in the freezer, wife had me reorganize some stuff today. It's all white and stuff.
I'm big on texture so if it is lumpy or whatever, no thanks.

Can't speak for the possibly-freezer-burned-one, but it's like butter.

Also just remembered the Russian restaurant I went to right by the Brooklyn Bridge (Manhattan side, IIRC) had a beef tongue stroganoff. Don't think I ever had a better stroganoff.

[Brother Oni]

It's a strong but lean muscle. Peel off the outer layers and cook it right and you get something decently tender.

And yet... the idea of tasting something that could have tasted me puts me off it.

How do you feel about fresh pineapple then? You have to eat it before it digests you.

The Japanese are quite fond of their offal - I went to a buffet barbeque thing where you picked up the raw meat you wanted before bringing it back to your table to cook. Intestine was weird as it was smooth on one side and bumpy and textured on the other (presumable the external surface and the villi on the internal surface). It didn't really taste of much, although it was fairly chewy.

[J-H]

It's not freezerburned. I asked, and my wife says she doesn't want to have to deal with peeling it and blanching the tongue and stuff.

[PontificatusRex]

I know back in the day (a good century ago now at least) a calf's head was a legitimate poor family's sunday dinner. Skinned and boiled, eyes, brain and tongue all left in the head and eaten as part of the meal. Served with boiled vegetables I think, mostly things like cabbage and turnip. Sounds ghastly but sensible, my only major complaint is that they boiled* the poor thing, but at the time the ability to cook it any other way would have been very limited.

In Frank McCourt's amazing memoir Angela's Ashes, in which he describes growing up incredibly poor in 1940's Ireland, there's a memorable scene where the family is eating a pig's head given to them as charity by the local church. The kids are horrified, and dad tries to console them by slicing the cheek and demonstrating that once it's carved and on the plate it looks like a regular slice of ham
.

[Peelee]

It's not freezerburned. I asked, and my wife says she doesn't want to have to deal with peeling it and blanching the tongue and stuff.

Never cooked it myself so I don't know what's involved in it. Also never seen it frozen - the packages I saw looked like raw meat, not white, hence my wondering. Anyway, I don't fault her, that sounds like a pain. But dang is it tasty.

[Clertar]

How do you feel about fresh pineapple then? You have to eat it before it digests you.

The Japanese are quite fond of their offal - I went to a buffet barbeque thing where you picked up the raw meat you wanted before bringing it back to your table to cook. Intestine was weird as it was smooth on one side and bumpy and textured on the other (presumable the external surface and the villi on the internal surface). It didn't really taste of much, although it was fairly chewy.

Intestine is very popular in Spain, as a dish or as a tapa, called 'callos'.

Also, in France you should order andouillette (and cover your nose ).

[Majiy]

Intetesting reading choise, looking forward to follow your thoughts on it.

I've read this book once, but that was easily 20 years ago, so I don't remember many details, except for one character doing something rather stupid later in the book:

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Van Helsing (I think) deliberately not telling somebody why he hung garlic in a window, to avoid emotional discomfort, leading to that person removing the garlic, because of the smell.

Otherwise I mostly remember mostly what you already mentioned: A modern author would pack the same content in a lot less words. But I think that's something typical for books of that time. Wonder if readers in 100 years will think the same about todays book.

[Velaryon]

It's a bit strange that the dialog is transcribed directly in a journal entry though. That doesn't really feel real.

Yeah, I did think that was a bit strange as well. I know that if I were keeping a journal of the events of my day, I would only rarely be able to call specific lines of dialogue, and certainly not lengthy conversations. But I guess that's just part of suspending your disbelief for the novel.

Not a bad introductory chapter, but I feel like a modern writer would have told the same stuff in fewer words.

Honestly, the whole novel is probably going to leave you feeling that way, so might as well get used to it if you can. I kept telling myself that Dracula is one of the novels that created our modern horror language and tropes, so this book at least partially made it possible for future stories to convey some of these ideas more concisely. That said, the 19th century wordiness of it is just something I had to grit my teeth and get through. Probably one of the reasons it took me like a year and some change to finish getting through the book, even though I did enjoy it.

Rater, isn't Harker's first name "Jonathan"? That's how I remenber it and that's how it is spelled on Wikipedia ( I can't find my copy of the book right now).

You remember correctly. I like to imagine that a "Johnathon" is either a distance race in which only people named John compete, or some sort of toilet-sitting endurance competition. Or maybe both.

Otherwise I mostly remember mostly what you already mentioned: A modern author would pack the same content in a lot less words. But I think that's something typical for books of that time. Wonder if readers in 100 years will think the same about todays book.

I personally attribute this to a combination of 19th century writing being more wordy on average than modern writing, and also the fact that a lot of typical horror story beats and tropes either didn't exist or at least weren't formalized yet, so Stoker was sort of breaking new ground here.

[Saintheart]

I personally attribute this to a combination of 19th century writing being more wordy on average than modern writing, and also the fact that a lot of typical horror story beats and tropes either didn't exist or at least weren't formalized yet, so Stoker was sort of breaking new ground here.

19th century writing (at a very large scale) tended to be more polysyllabic because writing (and reading) was an educated man's game until around Charles Dickens' time. The educated man's languages, which therefore underlaid his English writing, were French and Latin. French was the unofficial universal language of diplomats (Tolstoy's War and Peace is sprinkled with it), Latin what every English schoolboy was drilled in from the time of Shakespeare onward; it was the language that lawyers dealt in. As a general rule, French and Latin when imported into English produce long words with complicated usage rules, and often prefixes and suffixes. And they usually turn up hand in hand with passive writing.

For diplomacy this was actually pretty useful since one of the features of passive writing is addressing concepts indirectly. Thus, it allows us to avoid directly confronting a reader with an unpalatable idea. It's a form of communication diplomats developed in order to avoid the whole "shooting the messenger" thing that can set off wars. Along the way, and tragically for civilisation, passive writing developed an unjust reputation of making its author look "considered" or "circumspect", i.e. smarter, which is why so many scientific papers drown in passive writing without a drop of miseracordia for the poor sod who has to read them.

By contrast, Latin - and therefore Latin words imported to English - influenced English because it was thought Latin was a precise language. St. Thomas More argued that common-use translations of the Bible should be drawn from Latin (the 'vulgate') -- because Latin was a fully formed language that had been around and known by the West for the better part of fifteen hundred years, and St. Jerome's translation was presumed to have a high fidelity of meaning between his Latin version and the Greek texts he translated. Early Modern English at that stage was, well, early; the meanings of words themselves hadn't been settled, Shakespeare's work is riddled with examples. It was much the same reason lawyers tended to fall back on Latin: because that language was used to record Roman law back to Justinian, and lawyers are bound to the idea of precedent.

(Fashion does play into this. 19th century writers loved superlatives, adjectives, adverbs, and, as you'll note from reading the first chapter, rarely used conjunctions unless in the dialogue of "rough" men, as verisimilitude for the reader to understand a peasant uneducated person was talking. It took Charles Dickens to change that by writing about the lower classes as if they actually existed, just as in a very real way it was Charles Dickens who introduced the very idea of childhood to the public rather than left the child as just a miniature man.

Why, yes, I am cynical about this.)

The tradeoff for English being taught reliably to everyone capable of picking their nose and servicing an ever-more complex and fast-paced world, was that it had to become more conversational, and thus had to be simplified. The strongest, and one of the earliest, expressions of this movement was Ogden's Basic English, which dates back to 1930 and reduced English from the 25,000 words in contemporary standard English dictionaries to 850, said DCCCL perfectly capable of expressing 90% of concepts in the language.

Ogdens never took off at the time, but it has a much stronger argument for it now. Attention spans are too short, hell, nobody can remember what Shakespeare says from line to line and he had iambic pentameter in his favour. Even the great citadel of obfuscation known as the English Civil Service has directives out about how to simplify written briefings for ministers; the days of Sir Humphrey's massive monologues which say precisely nothing are on their way out. That is required simply because nobody has the time - and increasingly, in the "Information" Age, nobody has the working memory - to absorb meandering loads of French- or Latin-derived verbage when <1,000 scrappy words from an old Anglo-Saxon tongue do the job just as well.

As said, I regard this as a tradeoff, not progress. 19th century language was ornate, certainly, but it's also written for a population that literally had more time on its hands to actually let concepts sink into its brain and had a stronger vocabulary (written and verbal). I regard taking the time to let an older book's language flow over you as a revolutionary act.

[Brother Oni]

As said, I regard this as a tradeoff, not progress. 19th century language was ornate, certainly, but it's also written for a population that literally had more time on its hands to actually let concepts sink into its brain and had a stronger vocabulary (written and verbal). I regard taking the time to let an older book's language flow over you as a revolutionary act.

I wish I could upvote this. I mentioned it above that while a modern writer could simply the text, it simply wouldn't feel like the journal and letters of a 19th Century person.

To take this simplification to its extreme, imagine Dracula re-written for the modern day via the medium of Instagram comments and Twitter.

[Rater202]

The next update might be a bit as I just received a book I've been meaning to read as a gift. It shouldn't take too long, since I'd just be reading it for myself, but just to give fair warning.

Feel free to discuss anything relevant to this book in the mean time.

[Peelee]

The next update might be a bit as I just received a book I've been meaning to read as a gift. It shouldn't take too long, since I'd just be reading it for myself, but just to give fair warning.

Oh awesome! Hope it'd enjoyable!

Feel free to discuss anything relevant to this book in the mean time.

So, about vampires in Star Wars...

[Fyraltari]

So, about vampires in Star Wars...

Well, there's this fellow:

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[Manga Shoggoth]

So, about vampires in Star Wars...

Disney Corp, you mean?

[Peelee]

Disney Corp, you mean?

Nonono, vampires in Star Wars, not vampires that own Star Wars. Easy mistake to make.

[Rater202]

By the way, are we allowed to discuss vampire folklore or is that too close to religion? Or does it depend?

I'm always a little confused about where the line is. A while back we had that thread about Japanese ghosts that I was expecting to get shut down and it didn't but then other times.

Being able to discuss vampiric folklore, even if it's just a surface-level understanding of it, could lead to a deeper discussion of the novel—what comes from folklore and what is just Stoker making things up for his narrative—but on the other hand, I understand perfectly if it's just a little too close to the line to be safe.

[Peelee]

By the way, are we allowed to discuss vampire folklore or is that too close to religion? Or does it depend?

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: It depends. Generally, you can talk about standard vampire folklore (eg repelled by crosses and holy water) so long as you don't delve into the reasons for that outside of the confines of specific fiction. For example: you can discuss Dracula being repelled by silver specifically due to

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Dracula being Judas Iscariot, whose death was rejected by God and who was cursed to never again touch silver because that was what he received for betraying Jesus

so long as it is clear that you are only discussing that within the confines of the Dracula 2000 movie.

And just in case, I'll offer an admin''s oft-repeated view: Roland St. Jude, the Forum Guru, is fond of saying, "when in doubt, don't".

[Kantaki]

I wish I could upvote this. I mentioned it above that while a modern writer could simply the text, it simply wouldn't feel like the journal and letters of a 19th Century person.

To take this simplification to its extreme, imagine Dracula re-written for the modern day via the medium of Instagram comments and Twitter.

Thank you for that lovely image.
Well, on they upside it might end with the heroes getting foiled because Drac follows them on social media.
Or the good Count stakes himself over those crimes against language.

[IthilanorStPete]

I mean, a series of Tumblr posts would certainly be one way of doing a modern epistolary novel. I actually think it could work, maybe do an interpretation where a very nonworldly blogger gets entangled with Dracula, completely ignoring all the red flags that something sinister's going on.

[Brother Oni]

Thank you for that lovely image.
Well, on they upside it might end with the heroes getting foiled because Drac follows them on social media.
Or the good Count stakes himself over those crimes against language.

It's a little depressing that it's all to easy to imagine: the first journal is replaced by the instagram account of amateur food blogger JHarks1874. Add some IM transcripts between himself and Mina and that's basically it.

[The Glyphstone]

Itd be an interesting artistic experiment, if nothing else.

[Fyraltari]

It'd make the bit where

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Harker is detained inside Castle Dracula against his will and sees his captor feed a baby to his wives and the bay's mother to his pet wolves.

harder to justify. Like, you'd think some of his followers would notify the police.

[Peelee]

It'd make the bit where

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Harker is detained inside Castle Dracula against his will and sees his captor feed a baby to his wives and the bay's mother to his pet wolves.

harder to justify. Like, you'd think some of his followers would notify the police.

Bystander effect maybe?

[Fyraltari]

Bystander effect maybe?

You know, one of the few advantages of parasocial relationships is that they might overcome the bystander effect. I think it only happens when a stranger is in trouble.

[Peelee]

You know, one of the few advantages of parasocial relationships is that they might overcome the bystander effect. I think it only happens when a stranger is in trouble.

That's it, I'm calling the gendarme!

[Brother Oni]

Itd be an interesting artistic experiment, if nothing else.

Depends on how deep you go and whether you set it up over multiple accounts and services as a complete re-imagining, or just as a single microblogging site.

Unfortunately, I'm completely at a loss with modern social media and the conventions therein.

It'd make the bit where

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Harker is detained inside Castle Dracula against his will and sees his captor feed a baby to his wives and the bay's mother to his pet wolves.

harder to justify. Like, you'd think some of his followers would notify the police.

Especially since cell phone coverage is good for Romania for three of the 4 major carriers (including Orange), so the tried and tested 'no coverage' literary fail safe won't work.

[The Glyphstone]

Dracula's castle could have a cell jammer installed. They are illegal, but when you've reached the point of eating babies that doesn't matter as much.

[Peelee]

Dracula's castle could have a cell jammer installed. They are illegal, but when you've reached the point of eating babies that doesn't matter as much.

Is it illegal in Transylvania?