Dracula Daily
In 2020 I re-read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and as I went through it I recapped it for T. It’s an epistolary novel, which means it’s made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings, and so forth. Every part of the novel has a date, and the whole story happens between May 3 and November 10. Trudy and I realized as we went through the book: you could almost slow down and read this book in real-time, experiencing the novel with the characters.
So: I set up a free email newsletter to do this! Dracula Daily. I did most of the setup one Saturday in January, and then actually shared it around April. So this year in 2021, I’ve been emailing the text of the book out every day (or at least, on the days when it happens). It’s almost done now, so I’ll recap the FAQ here and then some thoughts about the process.
FAQ
Q. When does it start?
A. The first entry is on May 3. That’s when the first email is sent.
Q. When does it end?
A. The last entry is November 7.
Q. You’re going to email the whole book?
A. Yes, in small bits at a time. Some days there is a lot of activity, some days just a few sentences, and many days nothing at all. You’ll only get an email when there’s action taking place that day.
Q. It’s free?
A. It’s free.
OK, actually there are more FAQ at Dracula Daily, but you get the idea.
Post-mortem thoughts
Now that this time-boxed project is almost over, I can reflect on it a bit. It was mostly auto-pilot; a bit of work to carve up the book into the appropriate chunks, but once that was done it was a matter of just copy-and-pasting the text into scheduled emails. They go out on a schedule, and the only real creative work is coming up with a cute subject line for the day.
As far as onboarding goes, it’s obviously hamstrung by its own structure. For the best experience, you needed to know about it before it starts and sign up before May 3. The later you join, the worse your experience is, as you’d have more book to catch up on. It’s actually sort of built to not go viral. I suppose I could do this every year, but… I don’t suppose people will actually want to read Dracula every year!
As usual I have little desire to and/or am incompetent at promoting stuff. SO while this got a some nice shares on twitter, and a post on Gizmodo(the Australian version, which exists!), it never got any serious attention. But the small attention on it was overwhelmingly positive, and the feedback I got on the process was really rewarding. A little more than 1600 people signed up, which felt like a lot. And it got lots of compliments on twitter and via email.
But the big reward was talking about a book with so many people! I’ve gotten lots of email replies and activity on twitter. It’s fun to talk about the day’s events in the story. Just starting a weird online book club has been its own reward.
Helmet
We were on a walk this winter and T picked up a duct bend component like this and wore it around like a helmet for a while. We collaborated a bit and came up with this helmet thing; the front is a one-way mirror that she can see out of.
I love it.
Stan Herd Inauguration
In January this year I got to help start a fire. This was part of a Stan Herd artwork, a one-off commission to celebrate Joe Biden’s inauguration. I barely did anything - just a lot of standing around and then running a torch to light some grass. But it was super cool, and got featured on PBS as part of the pandemic-enforced ‘digital’ inauguration parade.
I’m one of those tiny dots!
Little Profits Part 2
One of my New Year’s Projects from 2020 was to memorize a poem each month; I wrote about this around halfway thru and wanted to get an update on the record.
It went fine! I abandoned one poem because I just couldn’t get it to stick, but otherwise I memorized these and really enjoyed the process.
I’ve been using them as little mental exercises when I have downtime, and also they have become a really effective way to get to sleep. I’m afraid that part is so effective that I might
By the time of my last post I had memorized:
- January: Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
- February: God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- March: The Sun says Yes, Adrian Mitchell
- April: The Second Coming, Yeats
- May: The Country, Billy Collins
And then in the second half I’ve added:
- June: Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’ve always loved this weird poem. I named my wifi network after it long ago, much to the chagrin of my family. I love now having the whole poem at my fingertips. It really does feel like a low-key drug trip.
- July: A passage from Moby Dick (from ch 7, The Chapel), that I may have failed at. I tried, and kind of gave up.! Then switched to an easier set of two short poems: This Be the Verse, Philip Larkin AND Rebuttal by Adrian Mitchell
- August: If-, Rudyard Kipling, which is a little singsongy in the way Kipling is, but goshdarn it I love the manly bluster of Kipling, no matter how unfashionable it is. You’ll be a man, my son!
- September: Back to Moby-Dick the Chapel, tried to pick this up again.
- October: This month was a real failure, I started Scott Cairn’s Embalming, but just couldn’t get it to lock in. SO I jumped ahead to Noember’s poem to get a start on it:
- November: St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. This is one of the poems that I was gearing up for - to have this ready by the actual St Crispins Day.
- December: Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, anon. I love this weird old Christmas hymn and always wanted to have it nailed down. Is a song cheating? Maybe.
My goal in 2021 is to just keep these. Keep trying to remember them and practice when I can. Memorization is so hard!
(Little Profits?) The title of this note comes from the first line of of Ulysses, the poem I started this exercise with: It little profits that an idle king…
FOUND 2020
Every year as a family we pick up coins we find on the ground, and add them to a dedicated jar for that year. The rules are simple: ‘found’ money has to be found outside our house/yard, we can’t know who the owner is, and we can never spend it. The jar is documented and saved; here’s our haul from 2020:
The final count was $37.90, which is almost our largest total amount. But it is by FAR our largest total count.
(Of course I have a spreadsheet.)
We’re getting better every year on this, but 2020, our (first?) year of quarantine, we went on a TON of walks. We found a lot there, and but the biggest was a huge haul we found in an alley, where it looked like someone’s Big Gulp of change spilled out. We found something like eighteen bucks that day.
As usual, this jar of change is archived and saved, destined one day for the Erika Kirkland Museum of Found Objects.