Now, understand that there is a story behind this rant. (There always is.) The story runs thusly:
On Monday, October 29th, I was sitting in the Barnes and Nobles near(ish) to my college. I had nothing to do, so I was reading some Runaways stuff, 'cause it had been collected into Manga form, and I liked the series, blah blah blah. Anyway, the manga section was apparently close to the classic literature section, because as I was reading, a girl who couldn't have been much older than 14, her mother, and a sales associate went walking by me. I noticed the girl's outfit (both color-combination-wise and piece-wise, it interested me), and decided that since she had piqued my interest, I would pay a little bit of attention to her. Not that I could have avoided it, anyway, because as she went walking by, she said (in that so-certain tone that most/all 14-year-old girls seem to have mastered), "Well, the first vampire book I ever read was Twilight." (Twilight, in case you've not heard of it, is the first in a trilogy of vampire novels, following the point of view of Bella Swan, and tells the story of her romance with Edward Cullen, a (fairly young) vampire, and the love-triangle that occurs when Jacob Black, a local werewolf, falls in love with her, and on some level, she with him. It's a pretty good series, in my estimation, so there is nothing wrong in my head with a girl that age saying that it was the first vampire novel she read.) So, the sales associate, being of the superbly-helpful variety (they really are; one even tried to help me find a book because he heard me mention a title while I was on the phone with Bradleyman), said, "Oh, well if you liked that, then you should read Dracula. It's a good story, classic literature. Would you like me to help you find that?" The girl's mother (who I determined had to be slightly more intelligent than her daughter, and was trying to make her daughter more intelligent at least by broadening her horizons) seemed to take well to this idea. "Yeah, honey," she said, "do you want to read Dracula? It's a good book. You should read it." This girl, however, instead spoke the words that have been resounding in my head admist a buzz of terrible confusion:
I stared at this girl for a few moments, then went back to staring at my comic book, unable to hide my shock any other way. I mean, really. "I've never even heard of Dracula"? How can someone NOT know what Dracula, as a character and a story, is? I mean, fuck. I grew up knowing the basic vampire myth, that Dracula was the king of vampires, and when I grew older and my elementary school ran the Book Fair, I inevitably found the Dracula novel, and became aware of it as a literary story. By the time I was 11 at the oldest, I knew what Dracula was, and so did all of my friends and contemporaries, probably even the people I didn't like or spend time with, either. So how on Earth did I end up as (hopefully) just a year or so out of being part of a generation that doesn't even know what DRACULA is? Has this girl never been to a costume party, and seen someone dressed in a cheap ripoff of Bela Lugosi's cape-and-suit number? Has she never heard about how vampires seem to come from Translyvania, or that cheesy, "I vant to suck your blood"? Did this girl learn everything she knew about the vampire myth from reading the Twilight trilogy (if she has even read the other two books in that series)? What the hell kind of world do I live in, where a 14-year-old can walk into a bookstore and honestly say, "I've never even heard of Dracula, one of the original vampire stories, on which all other vampire novels build their base"? Even if there is just one, even if that little brat is the only person in the world who has never heard of Dracula, this is a travesty, a crime against literature and education.
So that's it. That's my rant asking what the hell kind of world I live in. Really. I am ashamed of those people who I will inevitably be lumped in with as a generation, if they are all about the same as this girl I saw (unfortunately) at Barnes and Noble's.
