so i was like 99.9% percent sure that i saw francesca lia block's weetzie bat on flavorpill, but i can not find a post. i have found this amazing a "weird girl's reading list: 10 best outsider books for teenagers" that i will now add to my many list of books i need to read. however, i know it wasn't this post that i learned of weetzie bat from because the cover is not the same. though maybe the cover isn't why i got it? i just recognized the name. anyway, who cares all that matter is that i have it. and that i found it at the goodwill in delano! yes, in delano, and for like .79 i think. talk about a deal!
so weetzie bat was supposed to be my final read of 2014. it's only 113 pages and the book is a mini one so it's probably more like 50. i started it on new years eve while waiting for my friend danny to finish his shopping at the amoeba in sf, however, i did not finish it before midnight struck. (there was a lot of prep and prepartying on my nye). so instead of being my last book of 2014, it ended up being my first book of 2015 (i finished reading it while waiting for brunch on new years day!)
and can i just say that i love weetzie bat it's like this wild little adventures that takes place in the city that i love best, los angeles! i mean on the first page, graumann's, the farmer's market and okie-dog are name-checked. i texted my friend cody, who dragged me to okie-dog, a handful of nights, when i read that. and it turns out his ex-stepmom had him reaad weetzie bat in high school! (also i learned about ponyland which used to be an amusement park where the beverly center is now!)
so weetzie bat was a young high school girl that lives in shangri l.a., she had a blonde pixie haircut and dressed up in vintage dresses with taffeta or fringe, feather headdresses and moccasins (all the pre-coachella phenomenon.) she befriended the hottest guy at school, dirk. they spent a bunch of time hanging out, there was the promise of love in the air, and then it is discovered at the end of the chapter that dirk is gay! the best ones are always gay! oh and i should clarify, no love in the hetero sense of boyfriend/girlfriend relationship, there is plenty of love between dirk and weetzie!
from dirk's grandmother, weetzie received a magic lamp. a genie granted her three wishes and her life began to unfold. i won't go into a rehashing of the plot, i mean it's 100 pages, you should check it out and i promise it won't take more than a day to finish.
i will say that i loved the story of dirk and duck, at the end of the novel. duck unable to cope with death of a friend to aids ran away to sf. dirk just following instinct found him because duck was in his blood. so sweet and what a wonderful point to make esp since blood became so scary due to aids.
there is so much that happened in this novel and it was all weird and wonderful. oh i just remember about how weetzie, dirk, and duck decided to have a child together! loved that too. it's a great little book and you should definitely pick it up or you can borrow mine. hopefully i can make it through the rest of the series in 2015. it was a great kick off book for the new year!
the library of congress recently released a list of 88 books that shaped america. and "howl" was one listed on it and thus i was inspired to check it out.
after reading "on the road", i decided i would have been a beat in a previous life. though i would have to be a male in that previous life cos there really wasn't a place for women among the beats, they were either sex objects or beards, plus i wouldn't want to miss out on all of the gay sex that happen between the beats. the nomadic-ness, the drugs, the rejection of post ww II conservatism and social standards, sounds glamourous but there was a dark and dirty side too but was worth the suffering.
before i start, i am not one for poetry so did not have too deep of thoughts about this so this post is not an analytical one. i loved the imagery and realized that i need to study the beats more. i will admit i did consult wikipedia for a thorough reading because i did not get any of the references. and if you read it, i suggest you do too. (ps if you want to read it, www.poets.org has it listed.)
part 1 is a look at chaos that is the beats generation, a praise of the "angelheaded hipsters" that lived as they wanted regardless of the consequences suffered. it was dirty and dangerous but also exhilarating.
the poem reads as what i what i could imagine (or would have loved) my twenties would have been if i did more drugs. it is filled with random incidents of jazzing, sexing, wandering, protesting, questioning, experimenting and living.
my favorite incident/story from the poem was:
"who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull"
which wikipedia explained to me as:
"Part of the reason Ginsberg was suspended in his sophomore year from Columbia University was because he wrote obscenities in his dirty dorm window. He suspected the cleaning woman of being an anti-Semite because she never cleaned his window, and he expressed this feeling in explicit terms on his window, by writing "Fuck the Jews", and drawing a swastika. He also wrote a phrase on the window implying that the president of the university had no testicles."
i love that story because it captured the great spirit of ginsberg.
part 2, i can admit was over my head.
part 3 is about being institutionalized which sadly was the fate of many of the free-thinkers of the time. it's sad that your unconventionality or deviant sexual behavior could resulted in shock treatment. its also horrible to think how we treat and marginalized outsiders.
all in all, it did shape america and for someone not born of the generation also romanticized it. though i am unsure i have thick enough skin to be a beat.
other poems were also included with "howl". there was a great one about walt whitman being in a california supermarket. my favorite image was "wives in the avocados! babies in the tomatoes".
there was also one about greyhound. being a frequent rider of the greyhound this was a treat and a very accurate description of the greyhound. my favorite line was "an aluminum box of human blood for Stockton" because i have actually seen human blood be delivered via the greyhound. i was at the greyhound in bakersfield, when i saw a brown box labeled "human blood" be picked up by a houchin blood bank employee.
lastly i have to share my favorite quote which is from william carlos williams' introduction:
"hold back the edges of your gowns, ladies, we are going through hell."
i never got on the vampire bandwagon. i've never read (or have a desire to read) "twilight"; never watched "true blood" (again who has premium cable?), i will admit that i have sat through episodes of "vampire diaries" with my cousin erin but nothing in our vampire saturated culture caught my interest. i also never got caught up in the anne rice's work either. i was young when "interview with a vampire" came out and loved "queen of the dead" but mostly cos stuart townsend was hot. so "dracula" was my first vampire read and i mean where else does one start but with the original vampire book. (question: do all other vampire works acknowledge dracula as the og vampire? like does edward come from his line?)
the funny thing about reading "dracula" is that you have to read it with a clean slate. you have to act as if you have never heard of edward, or buffy, even dracula himself (i mean you are meeting the guy for the first time, if its your first reading). if not, you will be frustrated with characters for their lack of vampire knowledge. i first encountered this with jonthan harker, and what feels like his inability to instantly recognize the true nature of count dracula. though i shouldn't be so harsh on jonathan, for someone who has never heard of vampires superstitions prior to his working with count dracula, he did well with recognizing that the lack of mirrors or his host's disappearance during the day and lack of appetite at dinner didn't add up to that of a normal human being. i mean the weird group sex fantasies were a good red flag that something was up too, but he did well in trusting his suspicions.
another character i wanted to kick because of her lack of vampire 101 was lucy's mother, i know garlic smells gross (i personally associate it with food so love the smell of it) but she should have never removed that garlic garland from around lucy's neck. but i have to remember she didn't know better. and in addition to this, why was mina the only one that noticed the two red marks on lucy's neck and in what world would anyone see vampire marks on their neck and think they pricked themselves with a pin!?!? (that is like girls trying to convince themselves that their hickey looks like a curling iron burn!) but i guess their lack of knowledge is in line with the tradition of horror, where we, as the viewer, always know better than the victim (and would have never ran in that direction.)
as much as i was upset with their naivete, i was impressed with their, well primarily, van helsing's medical knowledge. (and yes, as i read, i totally envisioned huge jackman as van helsing. swoon.) what amazed me was that van helsing performed blood transfusions! "dracula" was published in 1897 so i guess it isn't as old as i thought it was. but still blood transfusions seem like a modern (granted "dracula" is turn of the century.) phenomenon. maybe i'm biased because i'm a chicken (fear of needles) when it comes to giving blood and think the current way of giving blood isn't that sophisticated, so i can't imagine what people a hundred years had to endure. so when van helsing suggest that they perform a transfusion for lucy. i immediately googled on my phone and it turns out (thanks to wikipedia) that the first successful blood transfusion was performed in 1818 by british obstetrician dr. james blundell. pretty impressive! and how create of stoker to use it as a means to try to combat the dracula's converting of lucy to the darkside!
blood, obviously is very important throughout all of "dracula". that is his source of life, (it's our source of life too). but there was one blood issue that i figured would arise especially with dracula's female victims, but it was never addressed. (and if stoker really wanted to push victorian buttons he should have talked about this.) but what effect does menstruation have on vampires? a small amount of blood could provoke a vampire, when jonathan nicked himself while shaving, the count reacted with "eyes blazed with a sort of demonic fury" and he "made a grab" at jonthan's throat. imagine what a woman bleeding for 3-7 days could cause a vampire to do? does twilight even address bella's cycle? i mean it seems like a good deal for edward. we, women throw out that blood each month, so bella could start using a diva cup and save it for him. that sounds gross but i think it's thoughtful. i mean did buffy the vampire slayer ever discuss that in the movie or in the series? i mean at the risk of sounding like a perv, this could be the premise for a great twilight parody porn. i know, inappropriate! but is it . . .
it's not. that joke would be in stoker's vein of humor, if he told jokes about oral sex, not sure if he did, but he did write about it. i was shocked when i read mina recounting her interaction with the count:
With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the--Oh my God! my God! what have I done?
when i first read it, i thought i was a bit of a pervert for thinking inappropriately about what i had read but after reading the intro written by brooke allen, it is to mimic fellatio. vampires were sex-driven creatures. and if one googles there are tons of essays on sexuality and "dracula". i came across one that explained how the two dots on lucy's neck were suppose to resemble a vagina?!?! that seems to be stretching it for me!
there are also tons of essays on stoker being sexist and his portrayal of female sexuality in "dracula" as well. but without getting too deep into the topic. i will say that i did not find "dracula" sexist. the sad reality for us women is that we have to be both the virgin and the whore, this dichotomy has plagued us throughout all of history and our current mass media only endorses. so yes we are the orgy loving vampire trio along and virginal lucy needing men to keep us safe. it's like luda says "he wants a lady in the streets but a freak in the sheets."
also i did not find stoker to be sexist due to the fact that mina was a strong female character. i would add her to my canon of amazing females. i found it interesting how she criticized the "new woman" and their unconventional views of marriage yet her own involvement to stop dracula was unconventional. it's her intelligence and brilliance that pieces together the accounts that lead to the exposure and ultimately destruction of dracula (sorry for the spoiler but for a split second when i was reading, i thought he was going to survive). in this light mina to me is a true feminist, one that is not embarrassed to hold on to conventional female roles yet still has the open-mindless to embrace new ones.
all in all, is dracula worth a reread? i enjoyed it, so yes. it's clever, and i enjoyed how it was told from different perspectives. and if it's a choice between this and "twilight", go for this!
ps i was also upset with "twilight" because in "dracula", dracula and the wolves get along? was there some great schism that stephenie meyer included in "twilight" to explain the team edward/team jacob hatred?
quotations:
"if ever a face meant death--if looks could kill--we saw it at that moment."
(is this where the phrase come froms?)
pss- i have included a little film
short by spike jonze that features mina from "dracula". enjoy!
