The Blindboy Podcast - Paddy Dracula

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

A hot take art episode about Dracula and its relationship with Irish folklore and Cholera outbreaks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Throw those fizzy chew-its up for the boot by the community centre you Ambrose hooligans. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, maybe consider going back to some earlier episodes. Familiarise yourself with the lore of this podcast. If you're a regular listener, if you're a sweaty Brenda or a henpecked Declan, then you know the crack. I've had an eventful week. Not really that eventful. I've had an eventful week in the context of having spent two years practically locked inside my house. As I mentioned last week, I got myself a little office. I got myself a little office I got myself a little office

in Limerick I didn't have any difficulty getting an office in Limerick City because there's quite a lot of them available there's quite a lot of empty office space in Limerick City not a Limerick specific problem it's just

there's been a pandemic so there's a lot of empty offices in fact I had the bizarre experience of an auctioneer using the phrase brothel clearances when he was describing the abundance of available spaces

in Limerick City Centre but I got myself a little office so that I can write and research this podcast and so that I can try and have some type of a normal existence. So I've been getting up on my bicycle early in the morning and going into my office nine to five and it's been wonderful. It gives me a better sense of purpose, a sense of routine,

little simple things like fucking putting on clothes. Not that I spent the past two years walking around the gaff nude, just like when you're at home all day you just wear whatever fucking tracksuit is lying around the place. Whereas when you have to engage in the public sphere, you're a bit more considerate with the clothes that you wear. So then I automatically feel a little bit nicer because of that. But it's just been lovely to go into a room with my laptop and to do some work.

And I don't have any social media. I've got Instagram on my phone, that's it. Twitter? Twitter's not part of my fucking day. I keep Twitter on a separate laptop it's not on my phone I check in maybe every 48 hours and when you if you're off Twitter for like

two days and you check back in, it's this weird feeling, it feels like walking into a room and everybody is silent standing on chairs looking at the ground kind of scared

and then you're there looking around and really quickly you have to decide do I find out why everybody is scared looking at the ground standing on chairs or do I simply just stand on a chair myself and don't ask and that's what Twitter feels like because

everybody has each other riled up from anxiety and judgment so I've been having plenty of space in my office to read, to research to write to do all the stuff that I enjoy in a separate creative

space and I'm just really glad that I made that choice to get a little office for myself. But it's also given me lovely opportunities for contemplation and reflection, the places where hot takes come from, which is what I wanted. So this week's podcast is a hot take podcast. from which is what I wanted so this week's podcast is a hot take podcast actually before I get into the hot take and just a little bit of housekeeping live gigs all right um I'm not going to be doing as many live gigs as I used to do before the pandemic because the pandemic showed me that the live industry was quite unreliable because a pandemic can come along and fucking obliterate it so i won't be doing as many gigs as i used to do i much prefer the reliability of something like patreon but i will be doing some

gigs and people were really disappointed that they couldn't get tickets for my vicar street shows this month because they were sold out so i'm adding some new Vicar Street shows for March and April they go on sale this morning so just look them up Blind Boy Podcast March and April Vicar Street also Cork Opera House I'm gonna add two dates there at the end of December

is that fucking next month yeah so the end of December I think it's like the 28th and the 29th Cork Opera House now those are two very strategically placed live podcasts and I tell you why. It's in those exact two days after Christmas and before New Year's Eve where you don't want to drink. Because no one comes to a podcast and drinks. It's you sit back and you relax and you chill out and you have a lovely night so it's in that

period between New Year's Eve and Christmas Day where you can actually have a relaxed night and even if you have a roar and hangover you're in the right environment so come along to that so this week's hot take it's

actually there's some just an update on my cats, people are always asking about my cats my two cats, Nappertandy and Silken Thomas they're doing fantastically it's the winter, it's getting a little bit

colder, don't worry about them they both have a lovely little house they're warm. They're snuggled up. They're getting fed every day. Two very happy cats. Napratandi was quite sick over the summer. She's made a full recovery.

Two very happy cats. But. Yesterday evening four black kittens turned up. These four little tiny black kittens just turned up and they were sniffing around the scraps

of Silken Thomas and Napper Tandy's fucking dishes you know and eating a couple of cat nuts or whatever the fuck you call them and I had to just avert my gaze I couldn't I wanted to go out and feed the little kittens I fucking couldn't do it I can't become Mr. Six Cats I can't be Mr. Six Catmen I can't allow that six wild cats I'd lose connection with humanity I'd be doing I'd be

undoing all the hard work of getting an office and doing a 9 to 5 and trying to live a normal disciplined life 6 fucking cats lads that's the tipping point into chaos that's I would become a cat myself I'd be crawling around the place in the nip licking my own arse so I had to avert my gaze

and I just had to walk away and just say I know those four kittens out the back garden leave them off leave them go and I did and they were gone if they start returning now see they won't return you see because I didn't feed them

I didn't feed them that's the thing you can't fucking feed the cunts because then they come back if they do start returning then I'm going gonna ring the animal rescue people to do something about it obviously but maybe it was just a fleeting visit it was a pit stop and part of a much larger journey not six cats that's not happening the fuck like i've already a couple of weeks ago i was walking around my neighborhood and I went up to I came

back from the fucking shopping center with groceries and had a bag and I bought one of them old El Paso Fajita kits so it's like a big yellow box you know and it wouldn't fit into my bag so I had to carry that under my arm because it wouldn't fit into the shopping bag and then the local children started calling me. Old El Paso. What the fuck would they call me if I had six cats. You'd get your house egged in February. So this week's hot take.

Is a bit of a. An art history hot take I suppose. So because I have my office. And it's in Limerick City Centre. And because. I'm my own boss. So I don my office. And it's in Limerick City Centre. And because. I'm my own boss. So I don't have. Like I can sit in my office.

But then if I want to leave. And go for a little walk. I can do it. Whenever the fuck I want. And when I do that. And what I love about. Walking around Limerick City. Is.

Continually being confronted. By just how fucking. Old Limerick City is continually being confronted by just how fucking old Limerick City is how old Limerick City is and the richness and depth and expanse of history that's literally underneath your fucking

feet, it's mad like Limerick City is it's mad like Limerick City is it's about 1300 years old like I could be walking I could turn a corner and all of a sudden I'm looking at King John's Castle

which is a perfectly intact 11th century fucking giant castle a fortress and then I've got St. Mary's Cathedral that was built in the 12th century then I can get a ham sandwich

and I can go to this little secret graveyard that's hidden behind a block of flats and I can eat a ham sandwich on the grave of someone who was buried in the 1500s like Limerick Limerick was given its city charter 10 years before

London and then I can walk up another little bit to the more modern part of Limerick and by modern I mean Georgian and there's a part of Limerick called the Newtown Perry and it's unique in Ireland

in that it's laid out in the grid system so there's this area of Limerick that's done like a grid and this was very experimental at the time in terms of city planning it was a time when Limerick had a bit of a boom in the Georgian period but like it's said that the architect

who designed that grid system was then influential in how Manhattan was built but anyway as I was wandering around the older part of Limerick the Viking medieval part fucking

twelve, thirteen hundred years old I walked past this there's a school and this school's quite new. It's like 14 years old and I remember what was being built. They had to

stop it being built because when they dug up the foundations they found like hundreds of skeletons and these skeletons were, they were from a cholera graveyard from the 1800s because it was just outside

the city walls and there was this huge cholera outbreak in Limerick so they just fucked all the corpses over the walls and said leave them there and then they tried to build a school on it a few years back

and they couldn't, they had to stop to make sure that the bodies weren't like recent but it got me thinking about cholera you don't hear about cholera a lot these days because it's not a disease that tends to happen in we, developed countries, because cholera is a disease that occurs when you have poor sanitation. In countries today that have war and extreme poverty or natural disasters,

so there was an outbreak of cholera in Yemen. There's currently one in Yemen because of what's happening in Yemen at the moment. There was one in Haiti because of natural disasters there. But it's not something that's... In countries that have sanitation, cholera tends not to be a large issue. Unsanitized drinking water, when there's not a sewage system, that's when you get cholera. And cholera used to there used to be cholera outbreaks all over fucking europe but specifically in towns and cities that had ports or had a lot of ships because cholera was very much a disease of the British Empire, British colonialism. It has its roots in around India.

So when the Brits were doing their shit in India, they were bringing cholera back via sailors. And then when the sailors would arrive generally in port towns, towns that had a lot of ships, towns, towns that had a lot of ships, you would then get a cholera outbreak because of a lack of sanitation. Cholera is, it's basic, it's extreme diarrhea that kills people in a short period, sometimes 48 hours. It's very, very extreme. And Limerick suffered quite a few pretty extreme cholera outbreaks over the years and that's what I noticed when I was walking around town and I looked at this school I was like yeah fuck I remember all those skeletons they found from the 1800s but a lot of people also don't know and it's something that I'd like to see even celebrated or mentioned in Limerick a bit more. The cure for cholera actually comes from Limerick.

The cure for it, yeah, comes from Limerick and it came from Limerick before people even knew what cholera was or how it spread. So there was a doctor from Limerick called William Brooke O'Shaughnessy. I've mentioned him before and william brooke o'shaughnessy was looking at all these people dying suddenly of cholera going what the fuck can i do and he was the first person to analyze the blood of cholera victims and what he figured out is what what was killing these people was not just dehydration, but an imbalance of their electrolyte salts. So William Brooke O'Shotness, he invented intravenous administration of electrolyte salts. Like, we take that for granted now.

That's just a basic drip. If you've ever been in the hospital and they give you a drip, they put something into your fucking vein and there's a bag of fluid. That's a drip. And all that's in it is electrolyte salts. It balances those in your body. Like diurylite.

If you've ever taken diurylite, that's electrolyte salts. Gatorade, that's electrolyte salts. That was invented by a doctor from Limerick in response to the massive cholera outbreak. William Brooke O'Shaughnessy. He's saved billions of lives. Like in countries today where cholera is still a problem. When aid can be given.

People who develop cholera are given diarylite or they're given intravenous electrolyte salts and they survive and that's because of William Brooke O'Shotnessy from Limerick the other thing William Brooke O'Shotnessy did is

he introduced the therapeutic use of cannabis to western medicine medicinal cannabis comes from Limerick. Now William Brooke O'Shotnessy was over in India and he was in Pakistan and he noticed that people were using it there as medicine. So obviously he didn't invent it. But William Brooke O'Shotnessy was the first Western doctor to say

there's this shit called cannabis over there in India and they seem to be using it for a lot of ailments, and I think it's useful. That comes from Limerick too. The same fella. He doesn't even have a statue. Not many people know about him. I think it's really weird that he's not celebrated,

not only in Limerick, but even in Ireland. But these are the thoughts that were jumping around my head as I walked past this 18th century cholera graveyard and thought about all the fucking skeletons that were still there because I don't I don't even think they exhumed them I think they just left a lot of them down there you know and the mad thing about what William Brooke O'Shaughnessy discovered he discovered a cure for cholera before we knew what cholera was like William Brooke O'Shaughnessy invented intravenous electrolyte therapy in the 1830s but it wasn't until the mid 1850s until humanity figured out what the fuck cholera was

and the reason cholera is such an important disease is because when humanity figured out what cholera was, it changed how we understood diseases in general. It led to a new field known as epidemiology, which is the study of how fucking diseases spread. That's how important cholera was. In like the 1830s, people didn't really think think of medicine didn't think of germs germs and viruses and bacteria these weren't things that people were aware of there was miasma theory

people believed that diseases and illnesses were caused by like bad air floating around the gaff and to be fair like that makes more sense like actually saying to someone well diseases are caused by uh there's these tiny tiny little things called bacteria and viruses loads of them but you can't see them and they're actually causing the sickness whereas it's much

easier to believe no uh smelly air air that smells bad or feels bad that I can actually sense with my physical senses. That's what's causing it. That's what people believed because it made more sense. But in 1854 in Soho, and I think I actually did a podcast. I mentioned this on a podcast about three years ago, exactly in this place when I was staying in Soho. exactly in this place when I was staying in Soho but London used to have fuck loads of cholera outbreaks especially in the poorer parts and in the 1850s there was a particularly bad outbreak of cholera in Soho which was a poor part of London outside the city walls and people didn't know why it was happening they just knew everyone was getting sick.

But there was this doctor called John Snow, and what John Snow did is, he noticed that everyone who was dying from cholera was drinking from the same water pump in the center of Soho. And he figured out that the water from this water pump was also being mixed with sewage water. And he said to himself, fuck it. What if this disease is being transmitted from people's shit? What if people are getting this cholera diarrhea and then this diarrhea is mixing with the water and the water

that people are drinking is actually what's causing the cholera to transmit between people so he took the handle off the water pump and people stopped using that particular water pump for their water and then people in the area stopped getting sick from cholera and what happened there is he discovered germ theory that diseases are passed between humans through little bacteria or viruses and through sanitation through clean water through mask wearing whatever the fuck we can stop the prevention of diseases if we look at these things. So as you can tell, my little walk around Limerick, passing that cholera graveyard, led to me doing a little bit of research on cholera.

Going online, doing a bit of research. And it led me into some interesting territory. Because I said to you, this hot take is an art hot take. This isn't necessarily about diseases a it's an art hot take this isn't isn't necessarily about diseases it's about art so what I want to talk about is Dracula Dracula the vampire right so Dracula there's Dracula the character that we all know from popular culture, and Dracula the book from 1897 by the writer Bram Stoker. So modern horror, horror of the 20th and 21st century, everything we know as horror, horror books, horror TV shows, films, it kind of starts with Dracula.

It starts with that book. It's an incredibly important piece of work. Why was Dracula so scary? Why was Dracula so terrifying? I read it years ago. I didn't go back and read it recently. You all know the story of Dracula. Count Dracula was this

weird fucker in a castle in Transylvania who was a vampire and he was able to shapeshift and he'd suck people's blood in the middle of the night and if he got bitten by Dracula

then you became a vampire as well and you had to kill him by putting a stake through his heart and garlic and crosses and all of that If you got bitten by Dracula, then you became a vampire as well. And you had to kill him by putting a stake through his heart and garlic and crosses and all of that. That comes out of the book Dracula. Now Bram Stoker didn't invent fucking vampires. Dracula is essentially, he looked at elements of folklore he was very Bram Stoker was very interested in eastern European folklore when he was researching

Dracula because it's set in Transylvania and it's about Dracula coming to London biting people the reason the reason Dracula was so effective as a piece of horror the reason that it scared the living fuck out of people like the reviews for it at the time it was so effective as a piece of horror, the reason that it scared the living fuck out of people,

like the reviews for it at the time, it was favourably reviewed, but a lot of the critique was just like, people going, this is too scary. Why the fuck does this need to be this scary? This wasn't enjoyable. It scared the living fuck out of me. And that's what makes it an important piece of horror.

But as a piece of literature, why Dracula was so scary is how Bram Stoker wrote it was fairly revolutionary for horror, so Dracula is written like a documentary

now this is 1897 so documentaries didn't exist, film didn't exist. But Dracula the book it's basically like do you remember the Blair Witch Project? Do you remember that film the Blair Witch Project from around 2001? Fucking terrifying film. Really scary horror film and the reason the Blair Witch Project was terrifying is it felt real. It broke the fourth wall. When you watched Blair Witch Project, it wasn't like looking at a Stephen King horror film

where it's Hollywood and you're aware that there's a camera and you're aware that it's entertainment or it's not like a scary play or you're aware that you're in the audience and the stage is up there. The Blair Witch Project was a film made from supposedly found footage. It was about these four people went off into the woods and they disappeared and they had a camcorder

and we don't know where they are but we found their videotape and this horror film is their videotape of the scary shit that happened to them in the woods and that's what made the Blair Witch Project fucking terrifying

because it felt real it was told like a documentary Dracula the book uses that literary device but before cinema like it's about this fella who's a solicitor who goes over to Transylvania to visit this eccentric fucking count

in Transylvania who turns out to be a vampire but it's told via that person's found journal and the whole book is delivered via journal entries like ships logs newspaper adverts it's not traditional storytelling it's like loads of different documents. And it feels fucking real. And this is why it scared the living shit out of people. At the time.

And why it's so important as a piece of horror. As something that could really make someone frightened. Because it felt real. It felt like document. So this terrifying. Count Dracula. Who is a shapeshifter. And a vampire. G gets on a ship and makes his way all the way over to London and starts biting people and people turning into vampires and it's very frightening.

But what I want to talk about is Bram Stoker who wrote it. Bram Stoker was Irish. Now, I'm not going to say that like most people don't know that like but at the same time when you think of Bram Stoker his name doesn't immediately pop up in the canon of Irish writers and I don't really know why that is like even still to this day sometimes you feel you kind of have to say it to someone you know Dracula was written by an Irishman

and some people would go fuck off really like yeah Bram Stoker he was from Dublin he was Irish and there's a few reasons for this I think number one because Bram Stoker's work was horror unfortunately horror is one of those genres that isn't viewed as serious literature don't know why it's not viewed as serious literature in the way that fantasy isn't in the way that science fiction isn't so he's not mentioned as a huge literary figure like Joyce would be or Beckett. He should be, but he's not.

Because there's a snobbery around horror, I think. Also, his name is Bram Stoker. So it just doesn't sound very Irish. And then, a book like Dracula, it doesn't take place in Ireland. It takes place in fucking Eastern Europe and in London. And all the references are Eastern European. You don't think of vampires as being particularly Irish. So Bram Stoker and Dracula in general just doesn't feel Irish.

And we need to remind ourselves of it. and it feels a little bit out of place. So what I want to explore in this podcast is a kind of an alternative reading of Bram Stoker and of Dracula that firmly places it within Irishness and Irish history because I think it's there if you look for it so the general the kind of general accepted reading of Dracula is that Bram Stoker took all his literal influences when he was researching the book because he

wrote, Dracula was published in 1897 but he began researching it from 1870 onwards and he did a lot of research when writing Dracula and the accepted knowledge around Bram Stoker's research is that he was looking at eastern European folklore like he read an essay called Transylvanian Superstitions by Emily Gerrard that was written in 1885 and vampires were a huge part of like Romanian folklore and Eastern European folklore. Vampires pre-existed before the book Dracula. Then people point to a fella called Vlad the Impaler. Whose name was also Vlad Dracula.

And they say. Alright so Bram Stoker's Dracula. Was based on this fella called Vlad the Impaler. Who was from the 14th century. In Romania. So Vlad the Impaler was like. This warlord in Romania. And he was a notorious.

Savage man. And he used to be getting into wars. and what Vlad the Impaler used to do was if he conquered an army he would impale a lot of bodies on sticks and just leave these bodies out there as a spectacle to anyone who challenged him. All these people rotting on sticks and his name was Vlad Dracula. So on a surface level the explicit influences for Dracula you could easily say that's where Bram Stoker was taken from he was reading eastern European folklore about vampires and he was reading about this fucking Vlad the Impaler trap

and this is what Dracula is about I'd rather go deeper than that like that's just not how art is created that's not how books are written creativity and your imagination it's quite similar to dreaming and the well of the unconscious mind is a massive force in any type of creativity so you can't look at the literal influences you have to look at the artist's life and the cultural context of

when and where the artist made the fucking art so that's what I want to do I want to go beyond the surface reading of Dracula and search for the Irishness and the cultural and individual conditions of Bram Stoker's life

and do a reading of Dracula through that. So I remember earlier I was speaking about, you know, when I was walking around Limerick City and one of the privileges of walking around Limerick or anywhere in fucking Ireland is just how old the place is and how much history is underneath our feet at all times. Well, Bram Stoker's Daz family comes from Derry, right, the county of Derry, up north. And there's a place in rural Derry called Glen Olin, means the Glen of the Eagle

there's a town called Slothabarty and near that is a field and in this field is a tree and under this tree is a giant stone and this

tree with the stone under it is known as the giant's grave and it's still there now you can go and see it now and it's a tomb and it's one of these beautiful things about Irish folklore where you can have this rich mythology this fucking supernatural mythology

about a tree and a stone. But it's also rooted in actual history. And it blurs the boundaries between the two. So you never know. What's fucking real and what's not. So this. Tree with a stone underneath it. And Derry.

The giant's grave. This is apparently the tomb. Of a fella called Abertock so during like the 5th century up in Derry right there would have been

what you'd call petty kingdoms so like a kingdom could have been fucking one little hill fort do you know what I mean loads of different

warlords non-stop fighting with each other this is before the Brits this is before the Vikings 5th century and Abertock was a king but Abertock was seen as a particularly nasty king

an exceptionally violent vicious king now what remains about who Abertock was is that they say he was incredibly evil. He was known as being a wizard. He had magical powers. He was described as being a dwarf. He was described as being physically deformed in some way.

But he was really, he was hated. Not only by his enemies, but by the people he ruled over. He was considered to be an exceptionally cruel, evil person with strange magical powers. This Abertock fella up in Derry in the 5th century. So his own people were so frightened of him and disliked him so much that they wanted to kill him but they were scared of killing him themselves

so they went to a different chieftain, a chieftain called Cahan and they said to him will you fucking kill Abertock, he's a prick and we're terrified, will you fucking kill him so Cahan says fuck it I will so

he assassinates him and Cahan kills Abertock and in the middle of the night he takes his fucking body and he buries him standing up and puts a tomb over him but then the next day Abertock comes

back he comes back from the dead and he goes to his own people and he's like ye had that fucker Cahan tried to kill me and I know that ye tried to get this done well I can't be killed and then he goes to his own people

and he starts demanding that each one of them give them a bowl of their own blood so they now have to drain out a bowl of blood and abertok drinks it and him drinking their blood is what keeps him alive and he can't be killed he keeps coming back from the dead and he drinks the bowls of their blood to stay alive so everyone started freaking out they're going this abertok fella he was killed he was buried the kahan buried him standing up and now he's back and he's drinking blood to stay alive so kahan who killed him is like i need to

find out answers what's going on here with abertok why isn isn't he dead I killed him, so he goes off to a nearby woods near a holy well where a saint is living, a fella called Owen and Cahan says to him, here's the crack with Abartok I'm after killing him, he's still alive, he's drinking blood and then Owen says to him, Abartok isn't really alive

he's like a wizard and he's become one of the neve mar of the undead, he's like a wizard and he's become one of the the knave mar of the undead he's a darg duli which is a drinker of human blood and you can't actually kill him but what you can do is you can like suspend him

you can like restrain him so this is what you have to do with abertok you have to kill him with a sword and the wood from that sword has to be made from a yew tree then you have to kill him with a sword and the wood from that sword has to be made from a yew tree then you have to bury him upside down in the earth and then you have to scatter thorns and ash twigs over his grave and then you have to get a really fucking heavy stone and that has to be placed on top of him and only when you do that he won't be dead but he'll be stuck in that grave forever

and he won't be a problem so that's what you have to do but if someone lifts that stone then abertok the undead he's back out drinking people's blood so khan went off and did it he's he's slain abertok with the right sword he put the stone over it and he scattered the thorns and from those thorns grew a tree and you can go there today this is the beauty of that this is a story from the 5th fucking century about an Irish vampire

but right now if you're up near Derry you go to Glen Olin and you can find this tree with the stone. And you talk to the locals and no one fucks with it. Nobody. The reason that that tree and that stone is there 1500 years later is because the legend of that vampire is still present in the land and the locals they won't cut the tree down

they won't remove the stone there's local legends of extreme bad luck that happens to anyone who's ever even attempted to fuck with it and that's just beautiful that's the wonderful beauty and the rich

the history and folklore of Ireland. Like the fact that. Yes. There's a tomb. And yes to the tree overhead it. And it's still there. And it's the tomb of a real fella. Who was an actual high king 1500 years ago.

But because of the mythology around him. And the folklore folklore it still survives so it exists in this like in a way like of course he wasn't a real vampire of course he wasn't a wizard he was just a normal human being who was probably a real prick

but in a way he is undead in a way, he is undead. In a way, his legend has actually kept him suspended. A 1500 year old grave that no one fucks with. So the beauty of the folklore, in a way,

has actually kept him as this undead vampire that still has the power to frighten locals in 2021. But the other thing as well if you see what i'm getting at that abertok story that's fucking dracula that's a vampire that's a fucking vampire all right it's this magical creature that can't be killed and you can only kill it in using a certain type of wood and all this ritual and he drinks blood to stay alive that's a fucking vampire

in a 1500 year old Irish myth in the county that Bram Stoker's father is from and then the story of Abertock if Bram Stoker didn't hear it from the literary circles that he would have been mixing with like a historian folklorist called P.W. Joyce released the story of Abertok in like 1860-something. So the chances of Bram Stoker having read that would be pretty high.

So there's no evidence of Bram Stoker having been influenced by that or having read it. Like I said said the explicit evidence is that he looked at Eastern European folklore but the unconscious that finds its way in that Irishness finds its way in so that's the first part

of the hot take about Dracula and Bram Stoker the second part of the hot take where I'm going to circle it back into the Irish experience of cholera which is very much related to

Dracula and Bram Stoker I'm going to do that now after a little break I'm going to take an ocarina pause I don't have the ocarina with me this week again it's upstairs somewhere I don't know I forgot it we're going to have the shaker pause.

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Twitch.tv forward slash BlindBuyPodcast for my never-ending live video game hyper real musical so this podcast started by me speaking about how I was I was wandering around Limerick City and I came across that old cholera graveyard and that got me meditating on cholera and then researching cholera when I got home and that's what led me to this podcast that's what led me to this theme and to be talking about Bram Stoker and Dracula because I came across some very interesting articles written by an Irish art historian called Marion McGarry

and Marion McGarry pointed out something quite fucking interesting about Bram Stoker's mother. So she lived through an intensely traumatic outbreak of cholera in Sligo. And she had an experience that she wrote about that just sounds utterly terrifying. It sounds otherworldly. she wrote about that just sounds utterly terrifying it sounds otherworldly and it's one that most definitely would have had an incredibly profound and possibly traumatic experience on Bram Stoker himself when he was a little child at those important years when the depths of your unconscious are formed. So Bram Stoker was born in 1847, which was the year, that's Black 47, that was the height of the Irish famine. Now Bram

Stoker wouldn't have been at risk of that because he came from a Protestant family and they had a nice bit of money, so he definitely wouldn't have been at risk of starving from the famine. But Bram Stoker's mother, Charlotte, right? She lived in Sligo during the cholera epidemic in 1831-32. And Sligo would have been a small enough town. But that epidemic killed 1,500 people in a couple of months. And she witnessed the worst of it and even though Bram Stoker's mother

was a wealthy Protestant cholera doesn't give a fuck about that so you're at risk so when Bram Stoker was a child he had a mystery illness, an illness, they didn't know what this illness was and from the ages

from his birth until he was seven years of age Bram Stoker was bedridden so he didn't get out of bed until he was seven and throughout the entirety of that time his ma used to tell him stories by the bed

she would tell him scary ghost stories folklore and she would repeatedly kind of tell him that the traumatic experience she had living through the 1832 cholera outbreak in Sligo. Now, Charlotte Stoker also wrote about this. So Charlotte Stoker wrote,

it's like an eight-page page document which is in Trinity College it's called experience of the cholera in Ireland 1832 by Charlotte Stoker and I got a copy of this and it's fucking mad what she saw so she starts by saying it was said to have come from the east. In China it rose out of the Yellow Sea going inland like a cloud dividing into two which spread north and south. In those days I dwelt with my parents and brothers in a provincial town in the west of Ireland called Sligo. It was long before the time of railroads or steamboats. But gradually the terror grew on us. Time by time we heard of it nearer and nearer it was in France it was in Germany it was in England and with wild affright we began to say it was in Ireland so Charlotte Stoker would have been one of the few kind of

privileged Protestant families in Sligo with a little bit of money, seeing cholera now outbreaking in the town and seeing it ravishing people. And one of the first things she says about it was, I vividly remember a poor traveller was taken ill on the roadside some miles from the town. And how did those Samaritans tend him? They dug a pit and with long poles pushed him,

living into it and covered him up alive. So she's describing there the panic of when the cholera arrives, that if someone was even struck down with it, because you have to remember someone dies within 48 hours. She was witnessing people being buried alive. They weren't even letting people die. They were fucking them into pits alive. She says one house would be attacked and the next spared. There was no telling who would go next and when someone said goodbye to a friend he said it as if forever. In a few days the town became like a city of the dead. The great county

infirmary hospital was turned into a cholera hospital but it was insufficient to meet the requirements. The nurses died one after another and none could be found to fill their places. Only one Roman Catholic priest remained. His name was Gillern. He told us that he was obliged to sit day and night on top of the stairs with a horse whip to prevent those wretches dragging the patients down the stairs by the legs and throwing them into graves before they were dead so she's describing there like there were so many people fucking dying that this priest who was obviously just one of these legend fucking priests he stayed to to guard the people who were dying to prevent people from burying them alive he had a whip he was whipping people away from the people who were in cholera to stop them being buried alive

then one day charlotte says that her ma went out the back garden right in the middle of this fucking cholera outbreak and she saw that all the chickens were dead and they took that as a sign that they need to get the fuck out of Sligo so Charlotte and her family remember these were wealthy Protestants they got onto a horse and cart and a coach and took what belongings they had and they went towards Bundor

but on the way they met like this mad mob of people with fucking pitchforks and hatchets led by a doctor a physician who'd gone stone mad and her and her family were attacked by this fucking mob

led by a doctor and they tried to bury them alive, they tried to set them on fire because the panic and terror of this cholera outbreak. And people didn't know what it was. That when they saw Charlotte and her family coming from Sligo. They were just like you're infected. You're infected.

You need to die. You need to be buried alive. The mob started screaming at them. Fire to burn the cholera people. And then a lot of soldiers or police or whatever the fuck was there at the time came along to protect shard and her family because they were protestants i'm guessing and they saved them so then the soldiers took her and her family to the to the barracks but then when they got there everyone in the barracks was terrified of this

family that had just come out of the cholera town so it was voted that they'd be sent back but protected from the crowds that wanted to burn them they eventually made it to bally shannon where they had a cousin living there and they got shelter in the cousin's house for like a week or so but then the mad doctor dr shields with his mob hunted them down because again they don't know what cholera is they think that these people are like zombies or impure or whatever the fuck so John Shields is arriving there with his mob

trying to burn them again and they manage to escape and then eventually in about a month or so had passed at this point they made it back to Sligo where the cholera was gone and she says we returned to Sligo where we found the streets grass grown and five-eighths of the population dead and had great reason to thank God who had spared us through such dangerous and trying times

and scenes. Sligo was said to have suffered more than any town in Great Britain from cholera. So that's what Bram Stoker's ma lived through. Like that just sounds mad. A mystery disease, you don't know what it is. Five eighths of the town is dying around you. You're being chased by mobs who want to set you on fire because they don't know what it is 5 eighths of the town is dying around you you're being chased by mobs who want to set you on fire because they don't know what this disease is

there's priests whipping people because they're trying to bury other people alive and these are the stories that Bram Stoker heard when he was a little child up until the age of 7 this is what his ma was telling him she was recounting that severe and extreme trauma of that mad situation.

And then you start to look at the story of Dracula. And you start to look at the story of Dracula through the lens of the horror and terror of that cholera outbreak. And now it's not just about this transylvanian count anymore it's about this terrifying thing that impacts everybody that come that goes from the east to the west so dr Dracula comes from Transylvania in Romania and makes his way across Western Europe by ship and he carries with him like rats and Dracula as well has like a mist.

There's a mist about Dracula and he finds his way to the shores of London and anyone that Dracula bites then becomes a vampire and bites someone else and it knows no poverty it knows no Dracula doesn't care about class

Dracula's a vampire he'll just get you and you don't know who's just been bitten or who's going to bite you and it's the terror and the unknown of this deadly force

coming from east to west via ships and arriving on shores and creating this this chaos that just kills everybody there's a doctor character in the dracula novel who's quite similar to that doctor in sligo who was hunting people down who was gone mad and you have the recurring theme throughout the Dracula novel of coffins with people in the coffins who are alive when you think they're dead and people being put into coffins when they're not really dead and all of this uncertainty about if you open the coffin will you actually find a dead person

or is it a half alive vampire who's going to get you and that's I think the most interesting reading of Dracula yes Bram Stoker is telling the story of what he thinks are these Transylvanian

legends about vampires and whatever but the story of what he thinks are these Transylvanian legends about vampires and whatever but the terror of it the reason it's an effective and visceral piece of art he's working out that trauma his mother was deeply traumatised by that experience and she passed that trauma

onto young Bram Stoker and he's working that terror and anxiety out through his art. And that's what Dracula is. It's about the cholera outbreak. It's about the uncertainty of it. And to contextualise it even further, Bram Stoker would have been hearing these stories

about the Sligo cholera outbreak of 1832 but while he was writing Dracula in London where he was living from 1870 onwards like he was living in London remember I mentioned earlier that fella at the start of the podcast John Snow in Soho

who figured out that that pump in Soho was causing the cholera outbreaks. And he discovered that in the 1850s. This would have been all throughout the news. Cholera outbreaks would have been a thing in London while Bram Stoker was living there. He would have been aware of this. And I think what really gives it away too, in 1882, Bram Stoker wrote a short story called the invisible giant and the invisible giant is i think it's about london it's about a big city and there's this huge mist or cloud hanging over the city and this big mist massive thing in the sky is bringing great illness and sickness on all the people but the only person that can see this huge illness floating

in the sky this bad air is a little girl and she's the central character of the story called Zaya and she can see this illness in the air but nobody else can and the story ends with the little girl I think revealing to the city that oh I can see this invisible giant over the city and all you have to do for it to go away is to live a pure life or something

like that but she she delivers the speech at the public fountain and I find that interesting because it would have been in the newspapers at the time when Bram Stoker was writing that story about Jon Snow and the fountain in Soho and how he used this fountain to understand cholera. But I think that story, The Invisible Giant, which is blatantly about a fucking plague or some type of disease, that's his ma. That little girl in that story is his ma as a little girl and her experiences in Sligo with the cholera.

That's him working through that trauma. So there you go. That's this week's rambling hot take. That's Bram Stoker's Dracula Dracula that we all know that hugely influential horror story that the unconscious roots of it are actually quite Irish

there's the Irish folklore and then the cholera epidemics Dracula is cholera that's what Dracula is cholera. That's what Dracula is. It's not a count. It's this, it's terrifying disease.

And interestingly, what made cholera so terrifying to his ma and so terrifying to him is like, so in the context of Ireland in the 1830s, 1840s and what his Massaw, you've got this huge famine, killing only the poor, only the Catholics. So death is all around you anyway. There's fucking famines and poverty.

But if you're a Protestant, you're going to be alright. Except when there's cholera, because that doesn't give a fuck whether you're a Protestant or a Catholic. That's going to wipe you out in Ireland. So the terror of cholera to the Stoker family would have been the democracy of it. It gets everybody. But then, when they finally figure out what cholera is, you learn that cholera actually is a rich

and poor disease and that's why now today it's not a problem, it's not a problem in the west it's not a problem in Limerick, it's not a problem in Ireland and Sligo it's a problem in Yemen, in Haiti so there you go I'll catch you next week

possibly with another hot take I'm going to sign off now going to take hot take. I'm going to sign off now. I'm going to take a break and I'm going to come back with my new segment where I play a song from my never-ending hyper-real musical. If you're not interested in that type of shit, you just sign off now, no hassle. If you are interested in that type of shit, you can come back after the break and listen.

I don't want to enforce it upon anyone. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring,

followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. So welcome back. So at the end of the podcast now what I do is so I go on Twitch once a week. Twitch is a live streaming

site and I've been doing this all through the pandemic. What I do on Twitch is I play a video game called Red Dead Redemption 2 which is like a digital simulation of the American Wild West, it's this huge open map

and while I'm playing this video game I have musical equipment with me, right recording equipment various instruments and I write and create songs in the moment depending on the events of this video game while a live audience is watching me it's hyper real songwriting i'm trying to do a new way to to create music where the music is created in a digital environment it's not created to reality it's

created to a hyper real digital environment on the spot in the moment taking inspiration from a hyper real environment the way you'd normally take inspiration from the real world inspired by the quarantine so an interesting thing happened this week so I've been making songs on Twitch for like a year and I've been publishing them on the odd one on YouTube or Instagram or whatever so I wrote a song about a year ago it was one of my first ever songs that I made in Red Dead Redemption 2 and the song was called Wild Horse You Didn't Have To Die because what happened in the video game was I'd found a wild horse, I jocked it, I tried to tame it, I started having a little bit too much fun and then it fell off a cliff and the

horse died and it was actually quite a sad moment in the video game and for everybody watching so I wrote a song in that moment about me accidentally killing the wild horse while I was trying to tame it so I put it online or whatever like a year ago and something bizarre happened this morning

so one of the voice actors in Red Dead Redemption So one of the voice actors in Red Dead Redemption 2, one of the real life human beings who plays and voices a character in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, his name is Stephen Jay Palmer. He's an American actor. So it turns out he happens to be a fan of this podcast and also a fan of my Twitch stream where I make songs in Red Dead Redemption 2. And this morning on Twitter, this American actor had actually come to Limerick

and done like a Blind Boy podcast pilgrimage thing. And he sent me a video of him outside Thomann Park in Limerick taming a wild horse that he found in Limerick because in Limerick there's just loads of horses wandering around everywhere so I made

I made a hyper real song in Red Dead Redemption 2 in the digital environment where I'm taming a wild horse and then a year later one of the actual actors in Red Dead Redemption 2 has come to Limerick

and is now taming a wild horse outside Thomond Park as a direct response to my song and he went to the chicken hut as well so that's just fucking mad that's absolutely bizarre that's a lot for me to take in but I thoroughly enjoy it

because now I've made a piece of hyper real art and then now that's bled into actual reality with one of the actors from Red Dead Redemption 2 I don't even know what to call that but it's very enjoyable

and it's a lot of fun and I really appreciated it so thank you to Steve and Jay Palmer I hope you had good cracking limerick God bless so here's the song it's called Wild Horse you didn't have to die

this was created live in the moment in Red Dead Redemption 2 as a response to the death of a digital horse bear in mind as well this is one of the first ever songs I made on Twitch. So audio and production wise, it's a little bit rough. I was learning skills.

I was learning skills. I hadn't nailed fidelity yet. One, two, three, four. Wild horse, wild horse You didn't have to die You died cause I was singing about you Singing a song about your life And then I made you jump over that hill Wild horse, wild horse, you didn't have to die

Wild horse, you didn't have to die Wild horse, you didn't have to die Wild horse, you didn't have to die Wild horse You didn't have to die Wild horse You didn't have to die Wild horse You didn't have to die Wild horse

You didn't have to die Wild horse You didn't have to die Wild horse Wild Horse City Bye. I'm gonna cleanse the situation Gonna cleanse my soul Gonna cleanse my soul and your body with this fire Gonna cleanse your soul and my body with this little bit of fire I'm a little man running to the flames Oh, I'm gonna fight

Gonna fight, gonna fight Gonna myself, I'm gonna die I fucking deserve it, I deserve it Asking children, are you watching? I am dead, I am dying Off the head for killing a horse Cause I sang a song, killing a horse I sang a song, the poor little wild horse.

Wild horse. He didn't have to die, but I did. Wild horse. And I had to die to set myself afire. Wild horse. And I died. And now I'm back in that new reality. New universe, new reality.

I'm starting again. I've got constipation. I'm on our skin chillers. We're going down to Amadou. That was a dark journey, a dark little journey. Cleansing all of our souls with fire here tonight on Facebook are you a daddy on Facebook

are you talking to your family much do you think you should be talking to your family more I don't know man it's your family shout out to all the dads on Facebook I see you I hear you you are listened to