May 8
Jonathan learns that shaving can get dicey
Would you judge me if I told you I gasped when I read this at the top of the Dracula Daily email?
Jonathan is properly spooked in this day’s entry and I’m having a hard time making fun of him. I too have been in awkward situations where the vibes are bad and you feel stuck, but I’ve never been stuck at a giant castle in the middle of the woods in Romania.
Jonathan notes that he only has Dracula to speak to and then notes “I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place.” Which is an interesting leap. He tries to calm down and lay out the facts for us, and himself.
Jonathan gets up in the morning and pulls out the mirror he brought with him to use to shave. Dracula puts a hand on his shoulder and greets him good morning and scares the proper shit out of Jonathan who didn’t see him approach in the mirror. When he was startled he cut himself and noticed he had blood trickling down his face and we get some tasty gay content.
When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat.
Just like in my erotica novels!
I’m also now obsessed with “demoniac.”
Unfortunately Jonathan dodges Dracula’s romantic advance and in a stunning coincidence brushes up against the rosary that Jonathan is wearing and it instantly destroys his boner. Is he a vampire, or is he Catholic?
Dracula warns that cutting himself is “dangerous […] in this country”, then calls Jonathan’s mirror a “foul bauble of man’s vanity” and literally throws it out of the window.
Without saying anything else, Dracula bails, storming out of the room like an abusive husband. Jonathan wonders how he’s supposed to shave.
Breakfast awaits Jonathan in the dining room so he eats alone and notes that he’s never seen Dracula eat. He then spends his morning snooping around the castle, finding the south side of the castle is over a huge cliff and a wicked view. But in his entire search he has not found a single door to let him outside. The only retreat he would have is through a window.
A feeling dawns on him that Jonathan is a prisoner in Dracula’s castle-slash-sex prison, and he proceeds to freak the fuck out, running around to try every door and investigate every window until exhausted with a sense of helplessness. Jonathan sits to think things over quietly, but I envision him putting his back against a wall in the hallway and sliding to the floor in that victim whump way and not the cool London gentleman way. He sits on the floor with his legs spread out like a V-shape, hands folded between his legs, chin to chest. Although he doesn’t write off the idea that he could be falling prey to his own fear, “like a baby”, Jonathan resolves that if he is imprisoned, talking to Dracula about it will do him no good since he is himself the culprit. He needs to keep his eyes open.
Jonathan hears the door shut below. Dracula has returned, but he doesn’t meet Jonathan in the library (I like my version better). Instead Jonathan goes back to his room and snoops on Dracula making his bed for him, confirming that there are no actual servants in the castle. He watches Dracula through the crack of a door as he sets the dining table. This also means (gasp) that Dracula was the driver too!
[…]what does it mean that he could control the wolves, as he did, by only holding up his hand in silence.
Dracula is a werewolf dom!
Jonathan thinks fondly back on the woman who gave him the crucifix, and his own discomfort in taking it at the time. He wonders if it’s a placebo or if it is really offering him some true protection. Jonathan really has a healthy dose of skepticism in him, which I respect. Makes me wonder how annoying he is in his own church, but he probably attends and is just one of those insider/outsider loyalist types.
Jonathan decides he should find out all he can about Dracula, and so ask him about himself when they talk.
His journal resumes after midnight and informs us of his conversation with Dracula. He asks about Dracula’s country and his family and Dracula seems to enjoy going on and on, and Jonathan even finds it interesting. He logs a long rant of Dracula’s about his race, which I’m finding pretty boring today. There are a lot of ethnic groups in the world that I’m totally ignorant of and I could probably spend hours reading the wikipedia pages and only scratching the surface. Dracula does note that he shares a bloodline with Atilla the Hun, which, from what I’ve been told, is not rare.
My family is part of the Irish Diaspora so I have a bad sense of our history. We were Irish and poor and now we’re White and poor. While my mother and aunt have been putting our history together I still fail to have a real sense of who my ancestors were, what they did, and even when they came to Canada. So when people like Dracula here go on about their bloodlines I guess my eyes glaze over. Like it’s cool, I guess, but also hard for me to fathom. Even conceiving that my family is part of the Irish Diaspora is kind of new.
The second half of Dracula’s rant gets pretty wild though. He says an ancestor’s brother sold his own men into slavery to a Turk. His ancestor then tried to invade Turkey a bunch of times and failed a bunch of times, killing a ton of his own troops in the process. He mocks that stupid peasants found issue with this. He says that Draculas were high in the eschelons of leadership in the military after the battle of Mohács (apparently there are two but he presumably means the first?) that they ditched loyalty to Hungary and started making babies. I probably messed something up here in this retelling because I don’t know much about this regional history, but I think it is telling about Dracula that he’s from a proud military family who are apparently more numerous than Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, but he lives completely alone. This talk of royalty and prestigious bloodlines probably makes Jonathan’s English dick hard but he’s scared enough that he doesn’t mention it.
Jonathan writes that it was getting late so they went to bed and makes a cheeky note that I like.
(Mem., this diary seems horribly like the beginning of the “Arabian Nights,” for everything has to break off at cockcrow—or like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.)
This is a long post but the next one is short enough that I think we can squeak it in here.
We have a letter on May 9th from Mina Murray, who Jonathan has mentioned several times talking about getting recipes for her to make him. She writes to her “dearest” Lucy Westerna. I thought that I was getting a gay novel about an Englishman and Dracula but Mina longs to be with Lucy where they can “build our castles in the air.” I have no idea what this means but it sounds very romantic.
Apparently Mina is an assistant schoolmistress and she’s working terribly hard on shorthand writing and stenography and using a typewriter to be of use to Jonathan when they’re married. When she visits Lucy she plans to write a diary like the one we’re reading on his side of the story.
I don’t mean one of those two-pages-to-the-week-with-Sunday-squeezed-in-a-corner diaries, but a sort of journal which I can write in whenever I feel inclined. I do not suppose there will be much of interest to other people; but it is not intended for them.
I love the first line for the cute diary description and the next one for the irony. She looks at this diary as an “exercise book” to use like “lady journalists do” so she can build a skill of being able to keenly remember events and conversations. I keep a daily journal to log events and I don’t think it helps but I do like to review it and remember little things that happened, which then come back to memory quickly. I don’t think it helps my memory itself, but then again I just wake up and go on the computer all day until I go to bed again, so Mina’s life is probably more interesting. Especially since she’s a character in Dracula.
Looking back on the above paragraph I wonder if this is interesting but if you’re still reading this I guess that answers that.
Mina notes that Jonathan will be back in a week and she has gotten a few letters from him. She signs off to Lucy and asks her to write, inquiring about a “tall, handsome, curly-haired man???” with three whole question marks. I like her. It’s honorable for her and her girlfriend to get their hands on some side husbands to pay the bills.
I do believe our next entry brings us back to Jonathan?
Ressa
“We were Irish and poor and now we’re White and poor.”
so real. I have the same experience with my ancestry . A smattering of Western Europe, poor or “working class”. I don’t know when anyone immigrated to Canada, from where exactly or what generation anyone spoke anything other than English.