lakegenevaslumberparty

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Happy deathday, Lord Byron !!

You may have been a great poet, but for me, a geek fan of horror, your biggest accomplishments will be being the source to three huge figures of horror movies AND computers.

To elaborate, here are my mixtape of Lord Byron's greatest hits :

Launching the writing session that saw Mary Shelley write "Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus",

Inspiring John Polidori to write "The Vampyre" which in turn inspired Bram Stoker to write "Dracula",

Inspiring (through his poems and Byronic heroes) Robert Louis Stevenson to write "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"

Being such a slut and spending all his money that his wife Anne Isabella Mildrake decided to push her daughter Ada Lovelace to study math instead. Ada Lovelace then became the first person to write a program for Charles Babbage's calculator and paving the ways for computers to come (and then losing all her money anyway.)

So it's thanks to Lord Byron that I now have horror movies to watch AND a computer to tell stupid things about them ! Thank you, Lord Byron !

#awww baby Ada<3 #the lake geneva gang in force!

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Lord Byron writing about book-burning, queer representation, and the value of poetry . . . in 1821:

“Let us hear no more of this trash about ‘licentiousness.’ Is not ‘Anacreon’ taught in our schools? translated, praised, and edited? Are not his Odes the amatory praises of a boy? Is not Sappho's Ode on a girl? Is not this sublime and (according to Longinus) fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Phillips's translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this? When you have thrown the ancients into the fire it will be time to denounce the moderns. ‘Licentiousness!’ — there is more real mischief and sapping licentiousness in a single French prose novel, in a Moravian hymn, or a German comedy, than in all the actual poetry that ever was penned, or poured forth, since the rhapsodies of Orpheus. The sentimental anatomy of Rousseau and Madame de Staël are far more formidable than any quantity of verse. They are so, because they sap the principles, by reasoning upon the passions; whereas poetry is in itself passion, and does not systematise. It assails, but does not argue; it may be wrong, but it does not assume pretensions to Optimism.”

Context: this letter was written during the Bowles-Pope Controversy, a seven-year long public debate in the English literary scene primarily between the priest, poet, and critic William Lisle Bowles and the poet, peer, and politician Lord Byron. The debate began in 1807 when Bowles published an edition of the famous writer Alexander Pope’s work which included an essay he wrote criticizing the writer’s character, morals, and how he should be remembered. Today, we would say that Bowles tried to “cancel” Alexander Pope, who had affairs without marrying, and whose works had sexual themes. Lord Byron defended Pope, who was one of his all-time favorite writers. Pope had been dead since 1744, so he was not personally involved. This debate shows that while moral standards have changed throughout the centuries, the ways people have debated about morality have remained similar.

Source of the excerpt: — Moore’s Life of Byron in one volume, 1873, p. 708 - https://books.google.com/books?id=Q3zPkPC8ECEC&pg=PA708&lpg=PA708&dq=%22Are+not+his+Odes+the+amatory+praises

Sources on the Bowles-Pope Controversy: — Chandler, James. “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English Canon.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 3, 1984, pp. 481–509. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343304. — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pope-Bowles-controversy — Bowles, Byron and the Pope-controversy by Jacob Johan van Rennes, Ardent Media, 1927.

#Byron

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

and yet through all this interest in the myth people still have not rediscovered mary shelley's Proserpine

#HELL YES #Mary Shelley #Persephone #Demeter

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

It's April 19, 2024:

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, has been dead for 200 slutty, slutty years.

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

my introductory paragraph insisting upon my sanity and denouncing all those who would insinuate my madness is raising a lot of questions in the reader already answered by my paragraph

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

@anawkwardblue writes:

Quincey Morris. Well you know what they say, Quincey is All Man. And in Castle Dracula, that is not a survival trait.

Quincey, good boy, brave boy, goes out to meet the wolves. And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he dies, a gallant gentleman.

Quincey P. Morris, alas, can not survive Castle Dracula.

he's fine up till that point because vampires don't feed on their own kind

#DHAMPYR QUINCEY AGENDAAAAAA #Drac Attack

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Me after googling something I knew I’d regret

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

It's not a full week, but...

The 200th anniversary of Lord Byron's death is coming up next month.

April 19, 2024 (your local time), let's take over the Romanticism hashtag. Fic, meta, fanart, memes, forgotten arcane rituals, translations, poetry, research, mood boards, RECOMMENDATIONS for your favorite lesser known Romantic works, etc.

Rules are for classicists, let's have fun!

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

still reading frankenstein and i completely forgot that theres a part where victors wrapping up doing devious deeds on a sparsely inhabited island off the shore of england and he loads all his mad scientist shit into a rowboat and pushes off into the water and then fucking falls asleep with no navigational tools and when he wakes up hes like, adrift with no land in sight and hes like ‘FUCK my creation!!!!!’ even though the monster had absolutely nothing to do with getting him lost in the middle of the fucking english channel and he starts lamenting about how hes going to die and his family is never going to see him again and hes going to go to davey jones locker or whatever because hes been without potable water in a rowboat for like 4 hours and then he sees land and hes like ‘oh thank god im saved!!!’ and he gets to shore and is met with an angry mob who thinks he murdered someone and hes like ‘but where is english hospitality?????’ and theyre like ‘this is ireland you dumb slut’ and as theyre marching him to the magistrate hes like ‘i was still thirsty but did not want to show my weakness……’ like could you even imagine

#she was also there with Percy #Percy 'I have a PROPHECY of death by drowning I WILL make it happen' Shelley #so like #liiiiike #I know she loved them both but love doth not preclude Knowledge and Resigned Acceptance also

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

finding out there's a frankenstein ballet and that it was in october of last year…DEVASTATING

look at this. look at these. im foaming at the mouth

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Could Laios from Dungeon Meshi survive?

This guy seems very popular but I do not know him at all! So I shall let you fight amongst yourselves.

#...well someone's gonna snack on SOMEONE here

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

mmmm you know how in the franking stein novel victor dies so thee monster just kills himself. except. thee monster literally had all of vicky’s notes and shit. theoretically, he knew what the ‘’’cure’’’ to death was. wouldn’t it have been so so so sexy conceptually if after victor finally experienced the sweet escape of death, hoping it’ll bring him back to his loved ones, only for thee monster to bring him right back?

#YOU. KEEP TALKING. #Frankenstein

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

Moby Dick

Gskgdkgdlgdg

Okay.

Moby Dick is immortal. Moby Dick cannot be killed. So trivially Moby Dick would not be killed in Castle Dracula.

But is that the same as surviving in Castle Dracula? Moby Dick is a whale - can he ontologically exist in Castle Dracula at all? Ishmael tells us that not only is Moby Dick immortal, he's also ubiquitous. Does that ubiquity extend out of the oceans into the Carpathians? On the one hand, Moby Dick is a whale, and whales are fish, and fish definitionally cannot leave the water - this is what excludes Walruses from the kingdom of the Cetaceans. But on the other hand, Ishmael also gives us examples of whales coming up onto land to attack cities, a la Porphyros, or devour princesses, a la Cetus. Whales and Dragons are one in the same, and St George was a whaleman - and what place is more appropriate for a dragon than a Castle? Particularly Castle Dracula - that is what the name means.

Hang on though - I have forgotten one crucial piece of the equation: Dracula himself. Anyone attempting to survive Castle Dracula is doing so as Dracula's invited guest. Dracula is not going to invite someone out to his Castle without providing adequate accommodation. Maybe he dug a sperm whale worthy swimming pool down in the crypt. Very fast way to full up 50 boxes of dirt.

I don't think it's likely that Moby Dick would accept the divine protection of the crucifix, but then again, he doesn't need to, he's plenty divine in his own right already. Either he's a God himself or he's the instrument of Divine Judgment - or both! Also he doesn't shave and has no neck. Also you apparently have to get through quite a lot of blubber before any blood comes out. From a vampirism perspective, Moby Dick is probably more trouble than he's worth.

All of that said - I honestly don't think Moby Dick would accept an invitation to Castle Dracula. Dracula has nothing he wants. He doesn't need a two bit satanist to be the Living Embodiment of Material Evil. Honestly Dracula wants what Moby Dick has. And besides, he's got a good thing going with Frankenstein's Creature. He's got his own whale stuff to do.

So in conclusion, obviously Moby Dick can survive Castle Dracula - he's immortal, ubiquitous, and divine. But he chooses not to, because he's got better things to do.

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

The Creature from Frankenstein at Hamburg State Opera

[lakegenevaslumberparty]

i feel like this year a lot of dracula takes have focused in an interesting way on the ways that the horror of dracula includes how he makes his victims be or at least feel complicit in their own victimization. some of this is supernatural vampire stuff like the prohibition against entering uninvited or the ways that vampiric hypnotism seems to include as part of its nightmarish quality the experience of a desire that you don’t actually have, which we see the vampire ladies exert on jonathan in the castle and can extrapolate as a drac-power as well. but a lot of it is the straight up weird psychological manipulations and power play dracula does to jonathan in the castle - the emphasis on “enter freely and of your own free will,” all the little moments of dialogue where he makes something jonathan’s fault or purports to presume jonathan’s desires in a way that leaves no room for jonathan to dissent. it’s a kind of horror that still rings as genuinely unsettling today because it remains an unfortunately familiar and very human kind of violation. and actually even the more magical vampire stuff translates pretty easily to a metaphor for familiar human experiences, right? how many people in the midst of a traumatic event have frozen, like jonathan does when the ladies set upon him, and felt the shame afterwards of their inability to fight against what was unfolding? (cw sexual assault) it’s also well attested to that human bodies sometimes react in situations of sexual assault/abuse with physical responses that overlap with those that accompany consensual sexual experiences, something survivors of sexual violence have spoken about as part of what can make it so difficult to emotionally process what happened - and that’s not even getting into situations of coerced consent or other forms of manipulation that result in experiences only recognized as nonconsensual in retrospect and often with much difficulty and doubt.

anyway. it’s a really rich vein in the novel for me on this reread and i’m grateful for all the posts pointing out the count’s language games in particular, which didn’t jump out at me but once my attention was drawn i couldn’t stop seeing them. but while i am on principle neutral about any individual adaptation doing Whatever with the material, tracking this aspect of the novel’s horror has given me a new dimension of But Why for the sheer prevalence of adaptational choices and academic analyses that have looked at a novel that so viscerally captures so many aspects of violation and gone, “but don’t you think she kinda wanted it?” or even that have looked at dracula’s choice of victims and tried to find or place in them some appeal or weakness inherent in their essences rather than their status as victims of opportunity and vulnerability and dracula’s ability to use them to demonstrate his own power and control, which is how he operates in the novel and which is also an extremely strong parallel for how serial predators operate in the actual world. like any individual movie or retelling or whatever can do whatever it wants, but it is hard to look at the ways the contours of the story as “known” through cultural osmosis have morphed across the century-plus of its popularity and not feel like the versions of it that have lingered have done so in ways that ultimately tone down the horror by placing it more in line with many common cultural misapprehensions about abuse & sexual violence.