i can’t believe francesca by hozier is a real song. it feels like a religious experience, like the second coming of christ, like first love and first heartbreak, like touching the earth with the sun on your back, like wine-stained lips, and passion greater than life itself
hozier was so insane for writing francesca. he announces the song and you’re like okay maybe he’s in love with someone named francesca and then really it’s about a pair of lovers from dante’s inferno, who fell deeply for each other outside of marriage and consequently were sent to hell for their “uncontrollable lust”. telling each other “put me back in it”, i would do it all again, i would condemn myself to hell to be with you both in life and after. god could give me the option over and over again and i would not change a single thing. our love has never been wrong, heaven is too small to fit a love like ours. why would he write that
The whole Dracula time loop thing and Hozier releasing Francesca hurts when you think about them together.
The ending of Francesca mirroring the feeling of a storm to play on the motif of punishment for the lustful being an endless hurricane that sweeps them off their feet only for the vocals to defiantly assert that he would not change a thing and that heaven could not fit such a love anyway, is exactly the kind of deconstructive intertextual brilliance I’m expecting from this album and this is exactly why I want to marry Mr. Hozier for his brain not his body
1. A Primer for the Small Weird Loves - Richard Siken / 2. The Crane Wife - CJ Hauser / 3. Automat - Edward Hopper / 4. Red Doc> - Anne Carson / 5. Melancholy - Edvard Munch / 6. The Village (2004) / 7. So We Must Meet Apart - Gabrielle Bates and Jennifer S. Cheng
i’ve seen a couple people ask this question on my posts about it, so i thought i’d go ahead and clear it up here!
ok so, the classic horror novel “dracula” is an epistolary novel - that means it’s told via letters, diary entries, ship logs, and news articles. (technically the term “epistolary novel” refers to works told solely through letters or emails, but many have expanded it to mean any work that is told via in-universe documents, hence why diaries and logs often get included as well. “frankenstein” is another classic example; the whole framing device is robert walton is recounting the story he heard from victor to his sister via letter. a modern example would be “several people are typing,” which is told via slack messages, or “the perks of being a wallflower,” which is told via letters from charlie to his anonymous pen pal, which is functionally more like you’re reading his diary.)
because of the nature of the narrative, we actually know the exact day nearly everything in dracula happens - the letters, news articles, diary entries, etc. are all dated.
“dracula daily” is a substack project where the novel is broken up into parts, with people who are subscribed to the project getting emails every day something in dracula happens - for example, the novel opens with jonathan harker’s journal entry on may 3, so on may 3, subscribers are emailed that entry. the action of dracula takes place from may 3 - november 6, plus an epilogue set some years later. the project started in 2021 (i think), but fucking BLEW UP in 2022, and they’re doing it again this year! lots of us are very excited - especially people like me who fell behind last time.
why not just read the book?
valid! due to some parts of dracula being told out of chronological order, dracula daily does reorder some things. for example, the first section of dracula is told entirely from jonathan harker’s pov, then the second section switches the pov to mina murray. their sections have some overlap in the timeline, so dracula daily jumps back and forth between their perspectives.
if you want to read the book as bram stoker intended, dracula daily may not be for you. but for a lot of people (myself included!), it breaks up a very long text into easily digestible chunks (….mostly. there is one entry that is 10k words), and the fact that it’s a big project means there are a lot of people reading along with you.
i think there’s also something valuable about experience the slow revelation of wtf is going on along with the characters. the book which you might otherwise get through in a few days is stretched out into months of suspense and agony as you wait for the other shoe to drop, and it’s great.
plus, the whiplash between “jonathan harker’s neverending horror” vs “lucy is basically on the bachelorette” that you get in dracula daily is very very funny.
how do i sign up?
right here! and if you sign up and fall behind in the emails, no worries - the dracula daily website posts past entries so you can catch up.
what if i prefer audiobooks?
have i got great news for you!
like i mentioned before, i couldn’t keep up with the emails last year. part of it is that it is much easier for me to focus on an audiobook or keep up with a podcast than it is for me to sit down and read, especially with longer entries.
this year, there is going to be a podcast titled “re: dracula” that was inspired by dracula daily. every episode will be a dracula daily entry, with a full voice cast! (seriously, if you listen to british podcasts, you will recognize some of these names. the magnus archives and wooden overcoats girlies are WINNING.) you can find that here.
there is also a podcast called “cryptic canticles” that has an already-completed audiodrama of dracula that i’m told is also extremely good, and was also broken up by date. you can find that here.
why do i keep hearing about paprika/the boyfriend squad/lizard fashion/cowboys?
you’ll see.
oh god am i gonna hear about this nerd shit for the rest of the year
yes. sorry.
🧛🏻♂️
if anyone is interested in following along this year, today is the day! And as a reminder, most of my Dracula Daily posts occur on my side blog @thedreadfullygrim !!
brown works so hard and does so much and everyone is so mean to her. coffee chocolate hair leather tea wood eyes broth a warm coat autumn leaves caramelized onions the crust on a loaf of bread. all things good and warm and kind are brown. bitch!
