are you still going to do an Invisible Man substack? it seems someone else has already started one

I'm so glad to hear somebody is taking it up--especially given the fortuitous Leap Year. I've been--both fortunately and unfortunately--busy to the point where I haven't had much time for socmed and related undertakings, and while I hadn't forgotten, I'd been uncertain as to my ability to get things running.

Update: My spouse spent the day fixing several of the chapters that were broken--thanks to everyone who reported issues.

Do you know if your annotated Dracula website (the old one) is still accessable through the wayback machine? If so, would you mind sharing a link?

Sorry to have been absent from this blog for so very long that some time has probably elapsed since this was asked, but the good news is that while the old site probably has some accessibility via Wayback, I finally finally finally got it up and running at a new domain. You can check it out here. :)

Do you know if your annotated Dracula website (the old one) is still accessable through the wayback machine? If so, would you mind sharing a link?

Sorry to have been absent from this blog for so very long that some time has probably elapsed since this was asked, but the good news is that while the old site probably has some accessibility via Wayback, I finally finally finally got it up and running at a new domain. You can check it out here. :)

Is your annotated Dracula up somewhere? I was hoping to link my dad to it. The link in your bio doesn't seem to have anything at it.

I has been down for a while--alas--although I still have the original files and I keep trying to coordinate with my spouse (who was responsible for most of the code) to relaunch. It's been much slower going than I initially anticipated though, given the confluence of major life events this year. I'll try to look into it again shortly.

Boat trips feel a lot longer when your aren't actively hunting down the crew

Very important question, my friend visited Hungary and brought me some paprika (both sweet and hot). Obviously now I have to make the paprika chicken, but what would be the recipe closest to the one Stoker describes?

This has been sitting around in my inbox forever, and I hope you've managed to find a recipe to your liking in the meantime--particularly as my advice on the topic probably isn't all that stellar.

Stoker's knowledge of paprika chicken came from his sources on the topic (all of which should be noted tend to be inaccurate and condescending as regards the regions they describe), and we can get a rough idea of what he was envisioning pretty readily. Of the sources he listed that mention the dish, he took his notes for the novel from Andrew Crosse's Round About the Carpathians (cw: slur on linked page), but Crosse doesn't give us much more information than "chicken with red pepper." Nina Mazuchelli's Maygarland elaborates a little more by telling us how "a fowl that, in blissful unconsciousness of the immediate future, has been picking up the crumbs that fell from the traveller's table as he partook his first course, may, at his last, appear in the form of a hasty stew, thickened with red pepper." E. C. Johnson's On the Track of the Crescent probably gives us the most description of any of the books we know Stoker accessed, stating that paprikas csirke "is prepared by giving some ancient chanticleer the 'happy despatch,' cutting his remains to small pieces, and putting them into water, in company with flour, cream, butter, and a great deal of paprika or red pepper." Consistently, we can see that writers with whom Stoker was familiar are describing a chicken dish featuring some manner of thick paprika-based sauce, which is in keeping with most paprikash recipes I've encountered.

I, however, have always used variants on Leonard Wolf's recipe, which he included amidst his various other incredibly zany footnotes in the 1975 Essential Dracula (I tend to omit the tomato and add a touch more sour cream though).

PAPRIKA CHICKEN (Paprika Hendl) 1 young fowl (about 4 pounds); 2 tablespoons fat; 2 large onions, chopped; 2 tablespoons Hungarian sweet paprika; 1/2 cup tomato juice; 2 tablespoons flour; 1/2 cup sour cream. Cut chicken into service pieces, and salt. Lightly brown onions in fat. Blend in half the paprika. Add tomato juice and chicken. Simmer, covered, 1 hour or until tender. Remove chicken. Add remaining paprika to sauce, then add the flour beaten into sour cream. Simmer, stirring, 5 minutes or until well blended. Put sauce through sieve, food mill, or blender. Heat chicken and pureed sauce together over a low flame. Arrange chicken on warm platter. Pour half the sauce over; pass the rest separately in a sauceboat.

I will in no way vouch for its authenticity, but I feel that even were it not terribly Stoker-accurate it meshes pretty well with Dracula fandom in spirit, having been connected to the novel by the annotator who also tried to recreate the vampiresses blood sucking noises with his own mouth and had an undergraduate student pretend to be Seward and demo cutting through an iron bar with a medical saw.

I was working on some drawing dracula entries, but this idea was too silly to ignore

Mina is Dracula's archnemesis in so many ways, but the most obvious ones are

Mina was Dracula's very first adversary in England

Mina is personally hurt by him over the same man and the same woman

Dracula claims Jonathan. Mina promptly marries Jonathan

Mina is the only one that Dracula openly attacks with personal malice, in the most intimate ways

A single, glaring scar on the same place for both Mina and Dracula

Only these two share the same blood

Psychic link exists only between them

KIN OF MY KIN

Van Helsing hasn't even personally confronted the guy yet come on now

Invisible Man from my sketchbook!! Love this crazy gal <3

If someone you only kinda-sorta knew/vaguely remember from college showed up in your home, now invisible, and asked you to help him start a Reign of Terror, what would you do?

Alternatively, if you were taking a walk in the countryside and an invisible man came up to you and was going to force you to help him steal some things, what would you do?

The answers to both of these questions depend deeply on how tired I am. In my present state of mind these days, I'm probably more liable to say yes to the former and no to the latter than I would be in the best of circumstances. Some mornings pre-coffee, I think I could be sold on giving into some misanthropic scheme to bring humanity to it's knees. On the flip side of the coin, I feel I could also find myself not terribly caring if some ill-tempered floating rock threatened to bludgeon me.

Finally settling into some sort of routine where I might have some free time in the near future, and I'm eying my long neglected asks at long last.

Have you heard about the new Scottish play adaptation of Dracula, Mina's Reckoning?

I had not! While I'm not in any position to catch a show, thanks for letting me know it exists, however. It looks fascinating.

I'm curious if you've seen the woman in black adaptation from 1989? Its gothic haunted house and there's some wonderfully detailed depictions and plot relevant usage of a phonograph.

I hadn't until this ask, but I'd seen and greatly enjoyed the stage play, and I decided to give it a watch and enjoyed it a great deal (even if I personally wasn't super sold on the presentation of the ending). I haven't read the original text, but I really appreciate what both renditions of the story I've seen do with sound and the supernaturalized reenactment of events via audio. Thanks for the recommendation. :)

Do you know what the most recent research has said on the whole Dracula/Mörkrets Makter/Makt Myrkranna authorship and authenticity?

As many people have no doubt noted, I'm a little behind both regarding Dracula Daily this year and as regards the state of Dracula scholarship in general. I have not, to my great regret, managed to finish any of the translations of Mörkrets Makter that have come out, and I'm unsure as to a lot of what has been done since its discovery. I know that a lot of De Roos' initial speculations regarding Stoker's involvement in Makt Myrkranna clearly haven't panned out following the discovery of the Swedish text, and while I've read Clive Bloom's own speculations that there is some link between Stoker and the enigmatic A---e, I didn't find any of his proposals so compelling that I was immediately convinced of them.

No because Seward introduces Van Helsing as one with iron nerves and a cold brooch of unshaken self command and steel will and Van Helsing breaks down weeping for in front of his once student and we're not supposed to find him weak for it.

“Well, here I am tonight, hoping for sleep, and lying like Ophelia in the play, with ‘virgin crants and maiden strewments.”

—

- Lucy Westenra

Bram Stoker jumped into the Thames to save a man who was drowning on September 14, 1882. The man (never identified) later expired on his kitchen table. Throughout his written works that followed he repeatedly revisited the idea of drowning, although largely with female victims who were often saved by his heroic young protagonists. Two years before Dracula was published, he wrote The Watter’s Mou, an overwrought melodrama about a young girl who drowns trying to save her father and whose pale ghostly image haunts her lover before he goes mad and throws himself into the sea.  I might be sentimental or over-reaching on this one, but I don’t think its entirely coincidental with Stoker’s background that Lucy recites lines from Ophelia’s funeral a week or so before she dies.