His ‘Dracula’ project: creating a funny vampire
Good morning. It is Wednesday. We meet someone who can laugh at Dracula because he is like family. We will also discover why degree inflation has become a problem at Yale University.
In the past, Dacre Stoker has written or co-written serious fiction about his great-granduncle Bram, the man who gave the world the famously bloodthirsty Transylvanian in the late 1800s. Tonight, the younger Stoker ventures into comedy at an Off Broadway theater playing “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors.”
He told me last week that he had put together some funny material to deliver when he joined the cast on stage after the performance. He said he would bring a prop and say to the actors, “I loved the performance.” Maybe you need a transfusion.’
The prop won’t actually be a transfusion: it will be red wine from a winery in Romania in which he has an interest. The winery is located in Walachia, “the state under Transylvania,” he said. “We gave vampires to the land – why not get involved in the trade?”
Stoker said his mission was to raise his ancestor’s profile “so that the creator himself becomes at least half as famous as his creation.”
He added: “This is how I started writing the books and leading the tours – asking, ‘Who is Bram Stoker?’ Getting him involved in an Off Broadway comedy is another way to increase this man’s fame.
He also enjoys making Dracula funny. “It’s nice to see that people can make fun of a scary, gruesome novel that has been around for 127 years,” he said. (Our reviewer Elisabeth Vincentelli called “Dracula, a Comedy of Terrors” at New World Stages “a gender-bending play” that “pays no attention to the ‘terrors’ part of the title.”)
Dacre Stoker said his illustrious relative had connections to the theater world: Bram Stoker’s “claim to fame before Dracula ran London’s famous Lyceum Theater for 27 years,” he said. He was the obliging business assistant in the long shadow of the infamously erratic star Sir Henry Irving. the first actor ever knighted.
“Irving had extravagant tastes,” he said, and Bram, who had a master’s degree in mathematics, “had to hold him down while he was going over the numbers” in the theater, the great-grandnephew said.
He also talked about the time his great-granduncle spent in New York: Bram Stoker joined the playersthe private club on Gramercy Park South, in 1893, when he and Irving were on one of eight American tours.
“I saw the book where he was nominated by Samuel L. Clemens, his good friend and neighbor from Chelsea,” Dacre Stoker said, “so Mark Twain nominated him. He had more names supporting him than any other page I saw in the book. Others have written about Bram Stoker’s fascination with the American poet Walt Whitman.
Dacre Stoker, 65, a former member of the Canadian men’s pentathlon team who coached the team at the 1988 Olympics, said he had been “kind of an Indiana Jones version of a literary man, trying to tell the story behind the story.” to convey this story.” writer to life, to find out who Bram Stoker was. He used material he found for ‘Dracul’, a prequel written with JD Barker and published in 2018, which imagined what might drive Bram Stoker to create Dracula.
That book followed a 2009 novel, “Dracula: The Un-Dead,” which Dacre Stoker wrote with screenwriter Ian Holt, himself a Dracula historian. It was the first Dracula project approved by the Stoker estate since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.
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A system moving across the Mid-Atlantic states will mean a partly sunny day, with temperatures reaching the low 40s. At night, the clouds will give way to clearer skies and temperatures will drop to around 30 degrees.
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In effect until Friday (Immaculate Conception).
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One consequence of the pandemic has proven lasting at Yale University: almost everyone gets an A.
A new report shows that nearly 80 percent of grades given to Yale students during the 2022-2023 academic year were an A or minus. The average grade point average – 3.7 out of a possible 4.0 – was also higher than before the pandemic.
My colleague Amelia Nierenberg writes that the findings have frustrated some students and professors. What does excellence mean at Yale when 80 percent of students receive the equivalent of “excellent” in almost every classroom? Shelly Kagan, a philosophy professor at Yale with a reputation as a tough student, said that when “almost everything turned in” gets an A, “we are simply being unfair to our students.”
The spike in numbers after the pandemic is not unique to Yale. At Harvard, that was 79 percent of all grades given to students in the 2020-2021 year A’s or A minuses. Ten years earlier that was still 60 percent. In 2020-2021, the average GPA at Harvard was 3.8, compared to 3.41 in 2002-2003.
“Numbers are like any currency,” says Stuart Rojstaczer, a retired professor at Duke University follows degree inflation: They tend to increase over time.
This doesn’t just happen at elite schools. GPAs have risen about 0.1 per decade at colleges across the country since the early 1980s, he said. But private colleges tend to have higher average GPAs than public colleges and universities.
At Yale, where an A is the new normal, the share of As and A negatives has been rising for years. In the 2010-2011 academic year, just over two-thirds of all grades at Yale – 67 percent – were an A or minus. In 2018-2019, the last full academic year before the pandemic, 73 percent were A- class.
Then, during the pandemic, the figure rose. Nearly 82 percent of Yale grades were in the A range in 2021-2022. This figure fell slightly, to around 79 percent, in 2022-2023. The new statistics come from a report by Ray Fair, an economics professor whose work that was first reported by The Yale Daily News. He declined to comment on his findings.
Does any of this really matter?
Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, acknowledged that students can worry too much about GPAs
But he added, “I think a lot of people in 10 years won’t care what grades you got at Yale. They especially care that you, you know, went to Yale.”
Dear Diary:
I was cleaning out my closets when I came across a small Tiffany box. To my surprise, it looked like it had never been opened. Inside, covered in plastic, was a beautiful sterling silver picture frame, nestled in a Tiffany blue felt bag.
Unfortunately, upon closer inspection I could see that the silver had become tarnished. I tried cleaning it but to no avail.
I called Tiffany and was told to take it in for repairs. So I traveled to Rockefeller Center, took the box to the store and was directed to the repair department downstairs.
I showed the frame to one of the women at the counter there. She called two other women to come take a look.
The three of them admired it, but then said they didn’t sell Tiffany items.
“How could Tiffany not sell Tiffany?” I have asked.