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Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. This week we talked about Bram Stoker. Finally, we did. And we thought we had done it before, which we didn't before. We did not, because let me tell you, I sure would have remembered that Walt Whitman stuff. Yeah, it's pretty great. Is there like a compilation of these letters?

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Like, are the letters easy to find and read? Because I'm fascinated.

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I found excerpts of them printed in various books and different authors have used different ones. But I wanted to include there was literally part of me that was like, can I piece together all of these letters? And maybe this episode is just a staged reading of his strange letter. And then we'll do a top and a tail on it. But that seemed weird. I love this idea. I want to read a little bit of one so you understand how a sort of odd they were because he did go on and on about how amazing Walt Whitman was.

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But then at one point he includes the following passage. I am six feet two inches high and 12 stone wait naked and used to be 41 or 42 inches around the chest. I am ugly but strong and determined and have a large bump over my eyebrows. I have a heavy jaw and a big mouth and thick lips, sensitive nostrils, a snub nose and straight hair. This is odd to include in a letter, in my opinion. Am I?

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Here's the thing. I don't it's funny to me, but I also don't want to make fun of it because there is an earnestness to it and an openness that is kind of refreshing. It's very stream of consciousness. It's just so arresting in tone to have someone speak of himself this way. It's very and I don't know, it's a strange thing. And it's it's one of those things that a lot of people use as analysis when they talk about whether or not they believe that he was possibly a latent homosexual or not.

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That gets into such a tricky area because I feel like I I completely understand the desire for representation and to identify people in the LGBTQ spectrum throughout history to recognize that they have always been part of the world and part of the things we talk about. And but in the case of Bram Stoker, I always feel a little odd about it, only because I feel like he didn't know what was going on with himself. So it it always feels a little bit this is not what it is.

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But in my heart, the thing that makes me trepidations about it is it almost feels like when you label a child as, like, gifted or, you know what I mean, and then the kid doesn't have any say, but that label gets put on them and becomes part of their identity that they have to live up to you or or reckon with it. In Bram Stoker's case, it really does seem like he was not coping with a lot of things going on.

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Right. Subconscious.

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So there's also a difference between interpreting someone's written body of work and like having things they wrote about their own internal life. Right. So there's two different things. Yes. And people can definitely read work and come to profoundly different conclusions than the author intended than when they wrote something like that. Oh, yeah. So like that. That's one of the ways that it gets tricky when somebody when somebody doesn't have, like, a lot of introspection left behind.

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Right. For us to read. Well, and I think and that is to say, I, I absolutely don't want to sound like I am denouncing anybody who looks at stokers work with the critical lens of if this is, you know, in some ways informed by his sexual orientation being one way or the other and then kind of looking at the text and what that could mean in that way. Sure. It's just the I I always feel a little bit strange when people make declarative statements and go, he was this guy, he might have been, but even he didn't know them well.

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And also one of the things that's really important is to like not assign people identities that they they did not have access to in their own lives like that gets really tricky. Oh, yeah. It comes up on the show all the time. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I have, like, this almost motherly thing with Bram Stoker where I'm like, no, no he didn't, he didn't know you.

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Well he's like this giant man on the subject of Dracula. Mm hmm. I have a similar response to Dracula as I do to the work of H.P. Lovecraft in general, which is that I enjoy adaptations of the thing quite a lot. And much more than I enjoy reading the thing directly and a big reason for that with Dracula specifically is that Bram Stoker would do this thing where he would just have these extended passages that were like a common person in quotation marks, speaking in some kind of accented dialect.

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Oh, he loves it so much. And for me personally, it is painful to try to read it. Like in some cases it's barely comprehensible. And I remember I read Dracula. I might have actually read it in two different classes in college, but for sure, one class in college. And I just remember slogging through these passages that were like sort of how Bram Stoker thought this, like, you know, uneducated dockworker talked.

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And I was just like, I cannot deal with you. That is 100 percent valid. That's not a one for one comparison to Lovecraft, but just the fact of, like, enjoying adaptations more than enjoying reading the thing itself. Is this still true now?

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Have you read any of the the supplemental work that his I believe it is his great grand nephew, Dacre Stoker has written? I don't think so. He has written some stuff in recent years. That's like some sequel action and some other supplemental stuff. The actual text of Dracula is also a whole other thing that can be discussed in terms of its own history and what got edited out versus got included again versus, you know, republished in a slightly different way.

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There is the original version, and I haven't done a comparative analysis on any of this, but I was reading something that talked about how in the original version, despite Stoker having been so meticulous about these timetables, their timelines that don't add up and that may have been an editor kind of being like, no, no, no, no, but not. And then in subsequent versions where it was reedited and perhaps some of the added back in, it makes a little more sense on the timeline.

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But like I said, I haven't done a comparative on that. But it's an interesting thing to consider.

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Mm hmm.

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As well as that whole madness with the Icelandic powers of darkness is a very enjoyable thing and great for this time of year.

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So, yes, I'm sure the other thing I wanted to mention that is interesting about him that doesn't get talked about a lot and I didn't go very far down this particular rabbit hole is that as he and his siblings aged his mother, Charlotte, way ahead of the suffrage movement, kind of became a women's rights activist. Nahar, which is pretty interesting, the kids, she had mostly like home schooled the kids up until they got to a certain point and was clearly really, really interested in in making sure that, you know, they were not a super wealthy family.

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They got by and they were fine. But even with her daughter, she was like, education is more important than dowry. Like I this is what I value. Yeah, she's very interesting. And I would love for somebody to do a really deep dig in on her and do like a very lengthy annotated biography. I don't know that it will ever happen. Maybe it exists and I just never found it possible.

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Is our Bram Stoker discussion for the week and hopefully was a fun addition to the October Lord that we tend to cover. This week we have an interview that I did with Dr Kathryn Sharpe Lambeck, which was so long in the works.

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I alluded to this a little bit in the episode way, way back when she came onto the show to talk about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, which that is still in the archive. We are not bringing it back as a Saturday classic this month because it's October. And I feel like we're just we're doubling down on the October a little bit this year for the most part, because I know for a lot of people, that's their favorite episodes of the year, not just Holly, definitely Holly's favorite episodes of the year.

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But every October we get so many emails from people that are like, I love the October episode so much that like we're we're we're focusing the Saturday on Halloween stuff to set up. You can definitely go find those women Air Force Service pilots interviews in the archive. They are still there. But yeah, she had mentioned Jackie Cochrane shortly after that. And I was really reluctant because I was just afraid it was going to cover too much territory that had already been covered.

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And no one in the earlier episode, the Jackie Cochran appears and she's not in there for that long. It's not that much about her at all. But then number two, she was just such a character in so many ways, like. I don't think this came up in the interview, but there are accounts of, you know, some of the people who were flying with the WASP and they would be at the airfield training and this car would drive up and Jackie Cochran would step out of it, just looking so glamorous and like she was in a uniform, but still somehow looking so incredibly glamorous.

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I don't know.

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I was captivated by her whole story with all of that.

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The the listener mail that you read in that episode about seasickness made me laugh. And I didn't want to derail the episode, but we haven't done in the last several years. But I used to every Father's Day, my dad and I would go deep sea fishing. And I have talked about my dad before. He's a very No-Nonsense man and his rule. I have mercifully never gotten seasick on one of those trips, even though things have gotten dicey for a lot of people on board.

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But the thing that my dad will always say is, I don't care if you puke, but puke over the side because if you puke in the back, it gets churned up in the wake.

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And then, you know, it just makes me laugh so much thinking about it.

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Yeah. I don't I've never been on a cruise, so I want to go on one just to see if I get seasick or not. Well we were going to but it got cancelled because yes, my grandfather on my mom's side, who is sadly no longer with us, loved to deep sea fish so much.

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But he also had such terrible seasickness that he would literally set his line and then just lie there on the deck and go until he needed to do something to attend to it.

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Yeah, you really can. I mean, I love deep sea fishing. For me, it's kind of one of the few times you will ever, ever see me truly relax. Oh, really? Yeah. And it's just because one I mean, I like being on the water, but to when we go, you know, it's a little charter boat and it's like there's no Internet. No one can email me or call me. No. Yeah.

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No connection to anything. So all you can do is just hang out. Yeah. And it's like my brain just goes, all right, I got no recourse. I may as well just chill right out.

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So on the when I have been on cruises, often the cruise ship, you can get an Internet package. It's usually pretty expensive and very, very slow Internet. And the first one that I ever went on, I paid for an Internet package to be able to check in with work and that I don't know what nothing I was doing was that important. And it took me so long to connect. And every time I try to check in with work that I was like, I wasted too much of this trip.

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So I was like, I'm not going to do it that way anymore. And there were a couple of them where I really did totally disconnect, like there were people who knew how to contact the ship in case of an actual emergency.

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But I was not having any kind of email or anything like that while I was there. And it was really nice to just be like, people cannot get to me right now and I'm going to not think about this at all.

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And then the most recent cruise that I took was the opposite of that, because a pandemic was declared in the middle of it.

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And I it I was like, well, I'm just going to so much for relaxing. Yeah. I had gotten a cell phone package from my my cell phone provider. I'd gotten a package for use on the cruise ship so that our pet sitter could update us every day. And I was like, well, I'm going to use all of these minutes finding out what's happening with this pandemic and being worried about whether we're going to be able to disembark from this ship, which we were indeed able to do anyway.

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We we talked about that whole story on that whole earlier episode where we talked about the fact that we're living through a pandemic.

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Still, it's October. That was in March.

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I'm only laughing because I don't know what else to do.

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Yeah. Oh, yeah. Folks who have emailed us recently have asked whether we are still doing OK. No, we are still doing OK. You and I are both very fortunate to be able to do our jobs from home and have minimal contact with other people still.

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And like I have the double fortunate ness of having already been set up to do that before we even had to because the pandemic. So we hope our listeners are doing as well as possible.

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Yes, indeed. So if you would like to email us about this or any other podcast for a history podcast that I heart, radio dotcom, we're all over social media, edmiston history. We should go find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. You can subscribe to our show on our podcast and I heart radio app.

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