On Blood and Bottles

For those who follow the doings of tweens and teenagers (and you should as they dictate much of the content of TV, film and music, ie the arts in the mass media), you know they are voracious in their consumption of all things related to the vampire saga Twilight.  The new trailer for the third installment, Eclipse, is out.  The buzz is deafening.

On Google if you search "Eclipse and Dracula," after video trailers for the Eclipse episode of Young Dracula, another product of the current vampire phenomenon, the fourth hit is Lorenzo Thomas' Dracula as made available by Eclipse, the digital archive associated with the University of Utah and Craig Dworkin.

What does it means for a curious teenager, saturated with mass media representations of vampires, to be confronted with this:

Start the thing over again:

DRACULA is not a myth but
Just another cheap novel
Written in the boring 18th
19th century made into the
Worst film of 1932 1958 and
Unless we get wise to our-
Selves next year over again
Then what is all this

Dracula is real Dracula is real!

or this




Dracula
                                       your white faces

                                         against the night
                                     Hair falling back
                                      over your faces

formula STORY
 
Would Thomas' Dracula speak to that teenager?  Would it educate?  Would it entertain?  What does it mean to read it online?  Would the teenager print it out?  Or read it on a Kindle?
 
And what about poor old, irrelevant me, three years out of the 18-35 demographic, who just searched on Abebooks, eager to purchase a copy of the 1973 Angel Hair edition, and just discovered that no copies are available?   
 
I guess I will have to live with my Angel Hair Anthology by Granary Press.