Bram Stoker's Dracula... Spoilers Below, Punks!

Finished Bram Stoker's Dracula. Good book, and a lot more modern than Frankenstein. I love the format. Diaries of different people and newspaper clippings and other transcripts are pieced together for a cohesive narrative. This is very suspenseful and intriguing until maybe the second half of the book where all the diary-keepers finally meet each other and put together all the clues. After that, it loses a lot of momentum, and while it stays in diary format it becomes just like a novel that switches between different first person narratives. Half of the dramatic tension came from the fact that you as the reader knew exactly what was going on but the characters didn't. The ending was terrible. I haven't seen the Dracula movie but I could totally understand if they changed the ending; they open the coffin and cut off his head. The end. They don't fight him or anybody or anything. I don't care about combat that much, but they could've at least had a dramatic showdown or something. Alas, no. Well, they had a minor character nobody cares about die in a really dumb way.

Also, while the characters were likeable in their diaries, once they all get together to hunt vampires you start getting some of that terrible Victorian dialogue. The book is quite dated in many ways, from its descriptions of quaint medical procedures (like blood transfusions before the discovery of blood types), staunch belief in physiognomy which has been debunked as a science, 19th century views of the lower class, and appalling ventures about the nature of mental illness and the criminal mind. Of course people go crazy when you imprison them in horrible asylums in the middle of nowhere in padded rooms with straightjackets and no friends, family or other social relationships! Jackasses. I can excuse Dracula's cruelty because he drinks blood to survive; Dr. Seward's cruelty as a psychiatrist is harder to excuse. And who on Earth describes people they meet as being, "noble"? Nobody I know uses that word as an adjective to describe anybody anymore, unless they actually are aristocrats, which is a social status, not a character trait. And nobody I know invokes God and His righteous justice quite as often as these people do.

The most notable aspect of Victoriana is that the whole vampire thing reflects sexual anxieties, where the female vampires are described as being "wanton" and "voluptuous," while the human heroines are always described as being "sweet" or "pure." (Of course once human heroines become vampires, they too become wanton and voluptuous, which is an extremely horrifying thing for all the male characters of the novel, watching their girlfriends turn into undead sluts and whatnot). And all this with maidens dying before their wedding days (and this in Frankenstein too) and having her fiance become horribly anguished over his duty to destroy the sensual creature who has risen from the grave as a travesty of the memory of his chaste, untainted girlfriend... and by doing so, saving her soul from eternal damnation and allowing her pure and holy spirit to rest peacefully in heaven... Honor killing, essentially. Hell, if that doesn't say, "I hate my id" right there I don't know what does.

I do like Mina Murray as a female character though. Despite her Victorian tendencies toward swooning or shrieking or getting the hysterics (really, not all that often) and making melodramatic speeches on how brave the men are, she is quite strong. She's one of the most developed characters in the book, and is extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive, as well as being an organizational and logistical genius.

She also gets kudos for knowing how to use a gun.

Do Me, You Big Studly Viking Warrior!

On Friday, saw Hidalgo with Jeremy, Tim and Kay, because none of us wanted to see Passion of Christ. Much as I like the guy who plays Jesus, Jim Caviezal (who I've repeatedly been insisting is the Next Big Thing since last year when I saw Count of Monte Cristo, despite everyone being like.. who??), I don't particularly feel like seeing that movie. Too damn violent.

Anyway, Hidalgo was pretty dumb. It's about this long distance horse racer raised by Sioux Indians and who ends up being conscripted into the Union Army and taking part in Wounded Knee (where I'm sure he would've met Tom Cruise's character from Last Samurai and gotten along quite well) and feeling big walloping doses of White Guilt as he gets deeply depressed, drowning himself in alcohol, has horrifying flashbacks and needs to find himself and meaning in life, etc. Except unlike Tom Cruise he ends up in Bedouin Arabia instead of Meiji Japan, and gets called an infidel every five seconds and of course the sheikh's daughter falls in love with him because he's a symbol of western freedom and she's all oppressed by her sexist society and whatnot. I don't think there was any character who wasn't a stereotype.

"Oh, White Man! Save me from my arranged marriage!"

You know.

"Oh, White Man! Teach me about the values of individualism because we have silly accents and don't understand!"
I wanted to see a nice, sexy, enlightened Arab man in a movie for once, dammit. But in the meantime white men can continue saving everybody..

Oh yes. And apparently a great way to celebrate when you've won a 3000 mile horse race with a wounded horse is to splash around with him in the ocean.. full of, you know... salt water...

On Thursday, went with Jeremy to a discussion by several guest speakers about whether Christianity is intellectual suicide. Jose was the one who gave us the idea to go, but he never showed up, having gone to fencing instead. His loss, really. It was rather exciting; the place was packed and with the air of people turned out expecting a fight,　because of course all the Christians showed up in spades, and all the atheists showed up in spades because they couldn't turn down such a tempting call to arms. A ton of people we knew showed up, like Sam and Mike (who had actually graduated last semester so I hadn't seen him since then) and Strong Sad Eric (formerly known as Loser Eric in my blog, but he's actually a really nice guy, if socially inept, so calling him Loser Eric sounds mean.. and he reminds me of Strong Sad from Homestar Runner). These debate things are the best when every single person entering the room has his own foregone conclusion, and nobody's foregone conclusion coincides with anyone else's. Also, they had chai, so it was good.

Actually, the event was sponsored by several fellowships, so all the speakers presented the Christian point of view with intent to convert, and there were no opposing speakers. Still, I (unlike Sam, who is an out and out atheist) found that they addressed criticism pretty well, if with logical loopholes. The first speaker we had was a scientist, and a horrible speaker though an educated man. The second guy was better, presenting a hilarious parody of the modern liberal mindset which I can't say I'm not guilty of, though he tried to prove that Christianity wasn't intellectual suicide by listing a number of mentally talented Christians over the years. This is a dumb argument, because surely nobody believes that individual Christians can't excel in the sciences or arts or philosophy, it's just that Christianity as an institution makes Christians in large numbers one of the most terrible things this world has seen. For every Tolkien or CS Lewis there's a hundred rednecks, moms who do things "for the children," or medieval serfs. And surely they aren't bad people on their own and with their families, it's just when they start getting together and lighting torches and brandishing pitchforks that the world is in trouble. And this, honestly, goes for any other ideology in the world which believes itself to be the only right one; communism, veganism, football fans, what have you.

On the most part though I do respect the speakers immensely. I did talk to one of them, the second speaker, afterwards, asking him why salvation had to be obtained through Christ specifically, as opposed to any other God. His answer was that he personally believed it to be so because it was in the Bible, which he as a historian believed to be true over any other religious document. He told me to spend a long time looking at the Bible analyzing it like any other historical document and asking questions regarding its truth value. Is this well translated? Is this a good copy of the original manuscript? What time period did it come from? Who was it written by, who was it written for, and what society was it a product of? How well does it correspond with the accounts of other documents of the era? I would, like any other document, have to make a judgement using rational analysis, about whether what was said therein was historical fact.

I told this to Sam, who did the online version of rolling his eyes and asked, "Why not believe Greek myths then?"

Which is a good point, but I still do respect the speaker as the only Christian, Jeremy not withstanding, who has ever given me an answer to the question of, "Why Christ? Why should I believe in the Bible moreso than any other holy text?" with something other than the circular response, "Because it says so in the Bible."