Dracula on Audiobook and Dr. Oestker’s Chocolate Instant Individual Mug Cake Mix
As metaphor for much of human behavior, micro, macro, and megmacro, vampirism is pretty perfect. It also works as vunderbarz material for creating art, books, and movies. But it has never totally been my favorite handbag, so to speak. Maybe fangs bore me? Blood? Necks? Hmm. In fairness, generally, I can kinda take or leave the supernaturalia.
So I’d have given Dracula a miss until it became free with my audiobook subscription. I figured it might fill in ignorance gaps, RE:
- litterachewar (o’ neglected cannon)
- culture, as muchos subgroups like goth, emo, glam, S&M seem to owe something there and
- insight into Today’s Youth, many of whom seem to have been almost exclusively entertained by yearn-y vampire books and movies for the last ten years.
Now, to me, Bram Stoker sounded like a stuffy Victorian who might write stodgily about an exciting monster—but nay, nay, Bram-O was a Potboiler King who wrote thrillingly about the most grotesque Antichrist. So thrillingly, in fact, it kind of wore me out. WHAT A BOOK.
At some point (hour 4? 5?) as another unfortunate gal in a nightie was beset by mean bats and wolves outside the window, I began to wonder if Dracula wasn’t at least in part about coziness.
Coziness? Heh? you might very well say. If you are attuned to coziness as I (and I am indeed both as practitioner and morbidly fascinated observer of others) you may have noticed the occasional arms race, if you will, in the realms of the gemütlichkeit. Maybe it starts with someone glad to be sitting in a favorite squishy chair when cold rain is pattering outside. Add a purring cat. Maybe the rain ramps up to a blizzard and you might throw in a mug of cocoa. Ah, super cozy. Smother everything in an afghan. No, wait, make it snowbound by blizzard. Add roaring fire. Wait, add a suspicious death in town and a downed telephone wire. Really there’s nothing like crime, bad weather or generalized menace to score you some pharmaceutical grade coziness.
And who, now, but this Dracula fella and his minions to make you appreciate your comfy-coziness by invading your home, your eating habits, your sleeping patterns, your marriage, your virtue, your country, your sanity and ultimately, and most insultingly, your death. Dracula makes the angel-of-the-house more angelic, and in turn, she makes Dracula more transgressive yet. YING-YANG, baby. At what point does snugness becomes incarceration is interesting especially when you are talking about Victorian era. But that’s for another Flash Dissertation.
So, what in the bloody blazes does this have to do with a mug snack cake mix you might ask?
Well, for one, I was listening to Dracula when reviewing Dr. Oestker’s Chocolate Individual Mug Cake Mix, creating an association that may go with me to my (untroubled, let’s hope) grave. And yes, this is less about a perfect parallel than one thing evoking another. For example, it would be incorrect to say a mug cake is to a human like a human is to a Dracula. And I for one cannot imagine Dracula enjoying a blood mug cake (I am under the impression Bram Stoker’s vampires are like the seals who only eat live fish and will swim about indifferent as dead herrings rain about them).
But while this is the case, there’s amore there (or: there’s more more there—?) which I would like to toodle about in for a spell. O’ ambivalently governed ungovernable appetites. It’s possible I may trip over my own soapboxes as I do so. But then, who doesn’t?
You may have noticed how neatly the untrammeled, deeply icky wants of vampires work as an expression of a culture’s freaked-out feelings about sex. Of course you have. What are you, an idiot? Everyone has.
Now food, especially certain foods (like: cake), have been bait-and-switched as a conduit for our desires in a way well not soooooooo-o-o-OOO-o-o-o different from vampirical bloodlust. It’s often less about forbidden fruit as, like, a forbidden donut, you might say to put it overly simply. There seems to be a well of endless self-reproach around eating these forbidden foods that rivals and surpasses actual shitty things people do to one another. Some of the soldiers in the yoga-completing, organic-eating/organic eating/mindfulness army that exists thick on ground where I live, can, occasionally, and with remarkable unselfconsciousness, lapse into a form of Puritanism. Purity in terms of coziness is that nice safe place of a clean conscience. Or if your standards are a little lower, caring about having one.
Mugs, may I boldly suggest, evoke cozy things. Pad to the kitchen in your slippers to make a nice squishy mug cake before settling down with your mystery stories and the most challenging decision you’ll have to make is: spoon or fork? It’s just really hard to imagine something terrible happening while eating a mug cake.
Now to be ferociously literal: a cake in a mug is a serving, one you can eat less of but not more. If you want another, you’d have to start over, which isn’t prohibitive but requires conscious intention (rinse out mug? get new mug?) in a way that mindlessly chomping through a bag of Oreos or Doritos does not. Your desires aren’t craven as a mug-cake eater. To have one’s wants under some sort of mug-sized control, if you will, and to discover they are not mugless AND able to be met is a cozy thing indeed.
Now many of us have been terrorized (note inflammatory rhetoric, see previous comment about soapboxes) into thinking treats are always ill-advised, so some might feel snack cake on par with sucking blood out of a nice person, i.e. there’s not small quantity of sin. In any case, not only do vampires want terrible things, they don’t fight their wants. One might consider if vampires unashamedly abandoning themselves to their desires is the most frightening aspect of them. And that’s just exciting, a form of liberation.
Maybe one thing I felt resistant to about Dracula is suspecting some disingenuousness in it as a morality play. It’s a hell of a story, don’t get me wrong, but outside of the child murder it seems, like Chick comic heavy metal storylines (Jack Chick, R.I.P.), to be advertising the thing it aims to revile.
Now, I’m proud that I’ve gotten this far without turning this into a rant about Thomas Kincaid, as he is a false god of coziness and quite possibly my mortal enemy (I know he is dead, I speak of T.K. as the artiste not the man, who I do not have a beef with). I’d like to set a vampire movie in one of his paintings, or pillowcases made out of his paintings, and see how it plays out. His paintings are like perversions of mug cakes.. If uberawful Dracula is on one end of the cozy spectrum (the uncozyiest), then TK my friends, is on the other (the grosscoziest).
As humans, we long for liberation. We for containment. We long for from freedom from our passions. Oh, it’s SO HARD. Over and over, round and round: vampire. Mug cake. Vampire. Mug Cake. And everything in between.
You don’t have to agree with me, just nod and smile.
