The Twilight Saga saga: chapter 2
» Sunday, January 10, 2010

This installment of The Twilight Saga saga is dedicated to Jill, who gave me jello shooters to help me through this thing.

Chapter Two starts with the start of the next day. Those are the words that Meyer wrote: "The next day". Normally I would roll up this kind of writing and beat the author over the head with it, but in this case, it's too late; Meyer is published now and free of all the people who could have stopped this kind of thing from happening.

At any rate, this next day is "better... and worse". How is it better?

"It was better because it wasn't raining yet, although the clouds were dense and opaque".

Would it kill Meyer to pull off a sentence that wasn't tripping over itself? Have you ever seen a dense cloud that wasn't opaque? The day is also better because boys are still following her around and behaving like rival lapdogs.

Faithful boys aside, the day is worse for an entire paragraph's worth of reasons - Bella is never at a loss for things that make her miserable and angry. But the biggest reason for her unhappiness is the absence of the guy who clearly acts as if he wants to harm her. She even feels the desire to confront him and call him on his behaviour, but then she makes what I think might be the only pop culture reference in the entire book:

"But I knew myself too well to think I would really have the guts to do it. I made the Cowardly Lion look like the terminator".

For a book narrated by and aimed at a teen audience, it's curious that there should be so few pop culture references. I don't read young adult fiction, so maybe this is the norm. Also, I can understand Meyer's desire to avoid throwing in names that won't make sense in five years (imagine if a whole chapter were dedicated to James Blunt or The Bloodhound Gang) but both the cowardly lion and the terminator predate Bella's seventeen years. Couldn't Meyer come up with something from the nineties or the 2000s?

This goes some way to confirming what I suspect - that the line between Bella and Meyer is vanishingly thin, and that Bella has no up-to-date teen pop references because Meyer doesn't. Bella is Meyer's half-remembered teenage consciousness, a dying voice hopelessly compromised by the writer's adult perspective. That's why Bella manages to combine a world-weariness with a helpless, paranoid naivete.

Once Bella's day is done, and she's dealt with the indignities of having a fellow student following her around and "taking on the qualities of a golden retriever", she spots the Cullen family (minus Edward) in the parking lot. And here Bella's greatest obsession is revealed: clothes. Or maybe it's not clothes. Maybe it's canned descriptions of clothes.

"I saw the two Cullens and the Hale twins getting into their car... I hadn't noticed their clothes before - I'd been too mesmerized by their faces. Now that I looked, it was obvious that they were all dressed exceptionally well; simply, but in clothes that subtly hinted at designer origins".

That line pretty much drop kicked me out of the story. My head filled up with images of vampires at an outlet store, holding up a pair of khakis and saying 'Hey, does this subtly hint at designer origins?' What the hell does that phrase mean, anyway? Like so much of the rest of this book, it sounds meaningful until you turn a light on it, and then the meaning gets spooked, scurries under the dishwasher and won't come out again. Is it the good fit, the texture of the fabric, the stitching, an unusual but distinctive feature that points to its pedigree? Bella doesn't say, and since we're looking through her eyes, we have no other way of approaching this book. It's like we're being held prisoner in a room in her head, and we're allowed no more than a few glances through a little window to see what's going on outside.

From this point onward I'm going to start using two measures for these reviews. Every time Bella says or thinks something that comes off as pouty, miserable, insensitive or excruciatingly condescending, this book gets one Bella Sucks point. Every time a sentence strikes me as particularly inept, this book gets one Learn To Write point. Then I average the scores out over the number of pages in the chapter. That way we can all keep track and I won't feel as if I'm shortchanging anyone. Skip ahead if you want to cut out my cogent maundering in favour of the tally.

The highlight of the chapter, aside from an email exchange between Bella and her mother that basically ranks Bella as the least respectful daughter since Lizzie Borden, is the first actual conversation between her and Edward... in Biology class. Get it? Biology? Because Bella is having biological urges? Think if they'd met in Sociology class.

Stephenie Meyer has clearly given some thought to the Meet Cute scenario between high school girl and vampire. The giant rock in the stream, I suppose, is Buffy's violent dark alley beatdown of Angel from the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Whedon took the standard victimization cliché in every monster movie and pulled it inside-out, into the beginnings of a romance. Meyer has a similar inversion in mind, but instead of granting the girl unearthly powers, she domesticates the monster by pulling it into a classroom.

And that's where the great lovers of Twilight get their class assignment on.

Yup, a class assignment: Bella and Edward get to know each other over a microscope and a set of slides with the phases of mitosis frozen and dyed for their identification. There's a nice light irony here, as Meyer punctuates their conversation with the scientific language of cell division (see: Bella's biological urges). A high school English teacher would take a moment to point out that we are seeing an example of dramatic irony as well, because we know something that Bella doesn't know. What doesn't she know? That the entire city of Phoenix is glad she left.

What else do we know that Bella and Edward don't know? Well, we know exactly what they mean when they speak. We know this because Meyer rarely resorts to "he said" or "she said" when Bella and Edward talk. Instead, she throws every conversational verb in her pocket Webster's at us:

"Did you get contacts?" I blurted out unthinkingly.
He seemed puzzled by my unexpected outburst. "No".
"Oh," I mumbled.

*

"Forks must be a difficult place for you to live," he mused.
"You have no idea," I muttered darkly.

*

"I think I can keep up," he pressed.

*

"That doesn't sound so complex," he disagreed, but he was suddenly sympathetic.

*

"And you don't like him," Edward surmised, his tone still kind.

*

His eyebrows knit together. "I don't understand," he admitted, and he seemed unnecessarily frustrated by that fact.

*

"But now you're unhappy," he pointed out.

*

"I believe I have heard that somewhere before," he agreed dryly.

Elsewhere in the scene, Edward murmurs smugly, Bella smiles sheepishly, and twice she grimaces.


Official scores for Chapter 2, "Open Book"

Bella Sucks: 25 in 22 pages (1.08)
Learn To Write: 44 in 22 pages (2)

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the twilight saga saga: chapter 1
» Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Yesterday I pulled the insanely stupid move of publicly committing to reading the whole fershlugginer Twilight Saga (which, unless it's an epic Icelandic poem or a lame '80s metal band, is not a saga) and talking about it on my weblog. I have buyer's remorse. But I'm the kind who will gamely try to live with an impulse buy, so never mind the regret. We forge on.

Chapter 1: First Sight

Not a bad chapter title. You think she's going to fall in love at first sight, don't you? Not so fast. Stephenie Meyer is going to piss around and waste our time for a while. Maybe she would call it irony. I would not.

"My mother drove me to the airport with the windows rolled down. It was seventy-five degrees in Phoenix, the sky a perfect, cloudless blue... my carry-on item was a parka."

I like this opening. She's just about to make a change, and to all appearances it's a radical one. She's leaving the heat and unblemished perfection of a desert city for somewhere cold. As in the prologue, Meyer is putting her character in a moment of transition.

Where she's headed is a cloud-covered town in the Pacific northwest called Forks. Christ, Meyer, why not send your heroine to a town called Choices? Or the District Of Growing Up Is Tough And You Have To Make Difficult Decisions? But the word is nicely loaded; there's something cruel about it, calling to mind images of teeth and metal edges. It even reminds me of the inspiration for Burrough's Naked Lunch - "a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". But given the fogginess of Forks, I'm not sure this book is about ecstatic and apocalyptic visions. I think it's about sublimated adolescent horniness.

"It was to Forks that I now exiled myself - an action that I took with great horror. I detested Forks.

"I loved Phoenix. I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city".

I quote these twinned paragraphs because they kind of stopped me in my tracks. How old is Bella Swan? Presumably she's a minor. I'm already running into a problem, and I'm not sure if the problem lies with me or with with the book. After all, this is a fantasy work aimed at a youth audience, a book with glittering vampires - so why should I find it difficult to accept that a teenage girl is allowed to leave her mother and go live with her father after years apart? I should be ready to accept her exceptional mobility without blinking.

I think the problem may lie with Meyer's vocabulary, and the particular voice she's constructed for Bella Swan. Even in the first chapter, Bella doesn't sound like a teenage girl. She doesn't even sound like a precocious teenage girl, except to the degree that she's often lost in the hormonal paranoia of adolescence. Bella sounds like an adult reading from a series of guide books and trade journals. Who, for example, would describe her hometown as "the vigorous, sprawling city"?

(And who the hell loves Phoenix? It's a dust-caked wasteland of swimming pools and fast food huts and foreclosed properties turning up their cracked dying bellies to the sun. That's not vigor. Sprawl, sure.)

"My mom looks like me, except with short hair and laugh lines. I felt a spasm of panic as I stared at her wide, childlike eyes."

It's at page four when I feel my first twinge of dislike for Bella Swan. Describing your mother's eyes as "wide, childlike" kind of verges on disrespect. It's also a vague description that says less than it seems to. Her eyes are wide? How exactly? Are they wide apart? Wide open? Does her mother go around holding her eyes really wide? What for? That's kind of weird.

I also wonder why Bella says that her mother looks like her. I think it's the other way around, since her mother precedes her. This is a small point, but it's indicative of the way Bella looks at the world. I would usually call this 'character,' but I don't think the author is in control of the voice. I think there's Meyer all over this thing, and it won't wash out.

But never mind about her mother. She's already gone by page five, having passed the Torch of Blossoming Womanhood to her daughter. The trip to Forks takes a paragraph, which is pleasingly quick. But the drive from the airport to the house? That takes pages. And pages. While she's stuck in a car with her father, whom she calls Charlie.

"But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn't know what there was to say regardless".

I've picked this sample paragraph to demonstrate why and how this book could profitably be reduced to the size of a hotel brochure. Instead of saying that "it was sure to be awkward with Charlie," why not show the awkwardness with sparse dialogue and awkward, affectionate gestures? Since Meyer does that throughout the scene, we can get rid of that sentence altogether.

Next up. For "Neither of us" subsitute "we". For "was what anyone would call verbose" substitute "were not verbose". Actually, verbose is a clunky, overripe word. Let's try "talkative" in place of "verbose". Wait a second. That's still a bit weak, with a flat copular verb and an adjective just sprawling there like a couple of dead possums on a highway shoulder. I'll turn the adjective into the verb, so "We were not talkative" becomes "We didn't talk much".

How about "I didn't know what there was to say regardless"? It's funny how when you take this phrase out of context it makes no sense. Chop the "regardless" off and let the poor thing regain some dignity. So now Bella "didn't know what there was to say," which means that she "didn't know what to say". Why doesn't she know what to say? Because she and her father haven't seen each other in a long time and she rejected him a few years back. Plus the subject of Bella's mother is emotionally difficult territory. But we know this already because Bella says so. So it's obvious that they don't know what to say to each other. Why have this at all?

So with a few small edits, "But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn't know what there was to say regardless" becomes "We didn't talk much". And you don't even need to say that.

The next few pages is devoted to Charlie and Bella talking about a secondhand truck, which is not what I expected from a teen vampire novel. This better be a haunted truck, Meyer. But it gives us time to explore the relationship between Charlie and Bella, which is mostly him trying to reach out and her shutting him down. Then there's this:

"Do you remember Billy Black down at La Push?" La Push is the tiny Indian reservation on the coast.

"No".

"He used to go fishing with us during the summer," Charlie prompted.

That would explain why I didn't remember him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

There are two possibilities here. One is that some trauma occurred on one of those fishing trips, and part of the Twilight series will deal with this trauma. The other possibility is that Bella is kind of a bitch.

Actually, the truck turns out be important, because Bella likes it. In fact, it's the first thing we encounter that Bella actually likes, and since this novel could be called What Bella Is Thinking About Everything She Sees, we should examine her reaction:

"It was a faded red color, with big rounded fenders and a bulbous cab. To my intense surprise, I loved it. I didn't know if it would run, but I could see myself in it. Plus, it was one of those solid iron affairs that never gets damaged - the kind you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed".

So now we know a bit of what Bella likes: old handsome things that are destructive by their very nature. Let's remember that. But I get stuck on the phrase "I could see myself in it". That is straight sales language, literally part of a car salesman's patter, a piece of psyops designed to weaken customers' defenses by prompting them to imagine themselves inside the car - 'picture yourself behind the wheel of this baby'. Why is a teenage girl talking like this, as she does when she describes Phoenix as a "sprawling, vigorous city"?

And the truck is not "a faded red color". It is a faded red. A TRUCK IS NOT A COLOR. LEARN TO WRITE.

She's still looking at the truck. Let's skip forward to the part where Bella's looking at herself. Because when she looks at herself in the mirror, it gives her an opportunity to talk about her looks and reflect on her character. Why Meyer is adopting such a literal strategy, I don't know. But if I had to guess, it's because the soil in which the language of Twilight grows is a mulch of soap operas and teen drama. The language of Twilight is images, not words, which explains why so many of Bella's expressions and sentences seem like they've been stored in freezer bags for too long. I think this book was microwaved, not written.

Anyway, as Bella is "facing her pallid reflection in the mirror," which is strange because in the previous paragraph she says her face has turned sallow, she lets us in on the heart of her character. I think this is intended to generate some sympathy for her:

"I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my mother, who I was closer to than anyone on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that other people were seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain".

Now there's a possibility. Maybe Bella's upcoming star-crossed love is just the product of a glitch in her brain, and some handsome dude is freaked out because the new girl at school insists he's a glitter-covered vampire and that they're in love forever.

By the way, here's what Bella has to say about her dad's house. The one she has chosen to live in.

"There was only small bathroom at the top of the stairs, which I would have to share with Charlie. I was trying not to dwell on that fact too much".

You suck.

And here's a snip from her first day at Forks High School.

"When the bell rang, a nasal buzzing sound, [Bells are not sounds. Bells make sounds] a gangly boy with skin problems and hair black as an oil slick leaned across the aisle to talk to me.

'You're Isabella Swan, aren't you?' He looked like the overly helpful, chess club type.

'Bella,' I corrected.

Oh, you corrected the guy who was friendly enough to talk to you. You suck.

She talks a bit about her new teachers:

"My Trigonometry teacher, Mr. Varner, who I would have hated anyway just because of the subject he taught..."

God, you suck so much.

"After two classes, I started recognizing several of the faces in each class. There was always someone braver than the others who would introduce themselves and ask me questions about how I was liking Forks. I tried to be diplomatic, but mostly I just lied a lot. At least I never needed the map".

In just three sentences, Bella congratulates herself, subtly compares her classmates to animals, lies to them and finishes off with a snide insult about their town. It's clear why she doesn't relate to other people; she holds them in contempt and has difficulty investing them with the same degree of humanity that she sees in herself. She has more regard for her truck than she does for anyone else in this novel. Why are we caring about her? Why has Stephenie Meyer chosen to make the reader look through the eyes of a glum psychopath? I'm hoping that there will be an answer to this question at some point.

Finally, while she's sitting at lunch with a group of genuinely nice people whom she despises for their friendliness, she spots Teen Vamp Squad. And she likes them, because they are beautiful.

Beauty is hard to describe. You can say that people are beautiful, that their mouths are perfect or their chin is well-defined or their eyes are "liquid topaz," but the truth is that language is always in danger of exhausting itself or falling short of the mark when it attempts to stick a pin through beauty. It's easy to describe what makes someone ugly, because ugliness thrives on detail.

Dante solved the problem by blinding his narrator with God's light at the moment he reaches the summit of Heaven. The nature of beauty in literature is to erase itself even as it is displayed (Satan, by contrast, is described in incredible detail: three heads chewing on humanity's worst betrayers, body locked in ice, and so on.)

The point is, if Dante had trouble encasing beauty in physical form, it's not going to be easy for Stephenie Meyer. After a page of cataloguing the Cullen Clan's body parts and hairstyles, Bella concludes:

"I stared because their faces, so different, so similar, were all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful. They were faces you never expected to see except perhaps on the airbrushed pages of a fashion magazine. Or painted by an old master as the face of an angel".

That's it. They are images, torn out of some transcendent book and stapled to our lousy, boring reality. Like celebrities, they move on top of our world, somehow exempt from it, and as a consequence make everything else seem flat and unreal. Meyer manages to sell us on the Cullen's beauty by the way it penetrates Bella's contempt and unbalances her.

Of course, Bella also likes her men hostile and potentially threatening - hence the next scene: Biology class, when she sits next to Edward Cullen and is treated to a display that would have anyone else filing a restraining order on the guy:

"I peeked up at him one more time, and regretted it. He was glaring down at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion. As I flinched away from him, shrinking against my chair, the phrase if looks could kill suddenly ran through my mind".

Here's an idle question: if Bella's internal voice speaks almost entirely in clichés, why is she suddenly thinking about what she's thinking? Why comment on the phrase 'if looks could kill' instead of just thinking it? I don't have an answer for that, but it's odd. Or how about this, from a couple of pages on:

"But Edward Cullen's back stiffened, and he turned slowly to glare at me - his face was absurdly handsome - with piercing, hate-filled eyes. For an instant, I felt a thrill of genuine fear, raising the hair on my arms".

Genuine fear. Just as she distanced herself from the clichéd thought in biology class, she now emphasizes the authenticity of the experience and matches it with a specific physical detail. It seems that terror and the body are the way to the truth for Bella, the only fork to take in Forks (see what I did there? Yeah, you saw that)

She drives home, trying not to cry. You know what? I think I like Edward just for that.

Next up, if I can stomach more of this: Chapter Two.

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the twilight saga saga
» Monday, January 04, 2010

So. That Twilight book and its sequels. Everyone has read them now. Elderly people have read the Twilight Saga. Russian men drowning their insensate livers with vodka have read the Twilight Saga. Even babies, who can't read, have read The Twilight Saga.

Up until noon today, I had not read a single word of Stephenie Meyer's wacky vampire opus. Then I opened a mass-market copy of Twilight and looked at a word (I think it was "the"?) and now I am sitting here with a copy of the book, reading all the other words, in order. Daring sorts like to read novels in completely random fashion, jumping from page 22 to 505 to the dust jacket to a road sign. But me, I'm kind of shy when it comes to reading. I take it one word at a time. That's how I'm taking Twilight.

Say, come join me on my epic saga (?) of reading the Twilight Saga.

To guide us on our shared journey of discovery about a miserable pale girl and the freakish monster who expresses his love by hiding in her bedroom, I've gathered the following materials together:

1) The 1926 two-volume Oxford English Dictionary, which comes with a slipcase and a magnifying glass to read the crazy reduced print. The text is nearly 100 years old, but you know what? They talked English better then.

2) The mass-market movie tie-in edition of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, the New York Times bestseller that is now a major motion picture (you can learn a lot from a book cover).

3) The internet, which has Twilight fans, whom I fear.

4) Iron-clad will, because I suspect this is going to get rough before it's over.

The Preface

'Preface' is the first word of the entire Twilight Saga. Before you get to any of the other words, before you can bathe yourself in the grandeur of Edward and Bella's love, you need to get past the word Preface.

What is a preface, exactly? The OED (see, we're using it already) defines a preface as 'the introduction to a literary work, usually containing some explanation of its subject, purpose and scope'. The preface is not part of the literary work, but stands outside it and provides commentary on it. So how does Stephenie Meyer start her commentary on Twilight?

"I'd never given much thought to how I would die - though I'd had reason enough in the last few months - but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this".

Hold on a moment. Prefaces usually don't start at the moment of the author's death. I'm beginning to think that the words don't belong to Meyer, but to someone else. If I had to guess, I'd say that these are the words of the narrator. What Stephenie Meyer meant to say, instead of 'preface', was 'prologue'.

It is not a good sign when the first word of your novel is wrong.

There is another possibility, but it's even worse than just getting it wrong. A preface is a part of the Christian liturgy, an exhortation of thanks and praise to God just before the Eucharist gets served up. Is that what Meyer is up to? Writing a Christian book disguised as a teen horror novel? And if so, why disguise it? Why hide the structure of the work and leave some exposed pipes and joints for only a chosen few to see? If you're going to be religious, be religious. Own your supernatural belief system. Don't be clever about it or I'll throw your book across the room.

Anwyay, let's take a look at that first sentence again. The narrator is at the cusp of death. She (I admit to cheating here - at this point the narrator could be anyone at all) is caught on a point between life and death. It's an in-between state. It's like standing on a shoreline, or the moment when day blends into night - you know, twilight. Which is the title of the novel. High five on recapitulating your themes, Meyer! Academic types would call this a liminal state, where categories and identities bleed into each other.

But really, if I were about to die, I probably wouldn't think in such careful and cute phrases. I would not reflect in the most tortured way possible that the circumstances of my death were unexpected. I'd be scared. Or ready to fight. Or something. But Meyer is setting up a situation where death is going to be met with - fortitude? Calm? Or maybe numbed passivity.

"I stared without breathing across the long room, into the dark eyes of the hunter, and he looked pleasantly back at me".

Okay. First off, I did not know that staring and breathing were so closely related, but whatever. The directness of the phrase negates the strange passivity of the first sentence. Her breathlessness, and the muscular tension that accompanies it, is not exactly fear. So what is it? What else makes you breathless?

Then there's that hunter who looks pleasantly at the narrator. It's hard not to hear the phrase "looked pleasantly" echoing as "pleasant-looking". It's also hard not to conclude that the hunter is in some way intimately connected with the narrator's impending death. Put it together, and there seems to be a deliberate conflation of sexual desire and death.

I know this entry is getting long, but can we have fewer books and songs and movies that like to jam sex and death together into one necro-schtuppy ball? Get a little older and you see that death is about collapse and decrepitude, and sex is a way to keep the lights on in the house even as the power fails throughout the city. But I'm old and grumpy, and this is what I get for reading a book for the young folks.

"Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved".

Okay, enough with the fucking adverbs already. Three adverbs in three clunky, clause-heavy sentences? In a work of fiction, adverbs are what you use when you don't know the right verb. For example: instead of 'eating quickly', you can gobble your food. Instead of 'moving down really quickly,' you can fall. And 'surely' is probably the worst adverb out there. The only one worse than surely is sheepishly. I hate it when people smile, look, or do anything sheepishly.

"Noble, even. That ought to count for something".

I don't know how noble it is, considering her breathless staring into the dark eyes of some pleasantly looking hunter who's about to kill her. How about we substitute 'hott' for 'noble' and call it a day?

"I knew that if I'd never gone to Forks, I wouldn't be facing death now".

But a few pages later, the narrator says that she spent her earliest years in Forks when her parents lived there. So if her death is conditional on any appearance she makes in Forks, then her death is predetermined and entirely out of control. Which, as we've already clarified, makes her kind of horny.

It's more likely that she means to say "I knew that if I hadn't gone back to Forks this last time, and not all the other times that I went there, I wouldn't be facing death now", but that's not as catchy. But she could always say "I wouldn't be facing death now if I hadn't moved to Forks". That would have been a clearer, more direct sentence with greater expository density. Meyer didn't write it this way because clumsy phrasing is part of the way the narrator thinks. Her narrator can't think or speak properly. The flame of my ardor is cooling.

"But, terrified as I was, I couldn't bring myself to regret the decision".

At this point I have to point my finger at Stephenie Meyer and say "Write better now please". First: if you were in Forks as an infant, this moment has nothing to do with your decision, because the conditions of your premise preclude your ability to make a decision. Second: who, on the brink of death, brings him- or herself to thing or feel anything? This kind of circumlocution is coy. I want to empathise with this speaker about to die, but instead I feel as if she's trying to be clever with me. And since the narrator is futzing the logic of her statements, I don't think she's being clever at all.

"When life offers you a dream so far beyond any of your expectations, it's not reasonable to grieve when it comes to an end".

At this point it's as if Meyer is standing next to a giant boiler, and the boiler has a plaque with the words "ANY DRAMATIC TENSION AT ALL" engraved on it, and Meyer is just opening the valves and letting all that tension bleed away. It suggests to me that Meyer is either inept, or her narrator is not a character with the kinds of motivations that human beings can relate to. Combined with the words 'noble' and 'sacrifice' and 'count for something', it seems that the narrator is not so much a character as religious archetype: the martyr, who balances cosmic accounts with her willing death.

So which is it? Bad writing or a religious tract?

Can't it be both?

Finally, the last sentence of the prologue preface.

"The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me".

Saunter. That's a good word. A very specific but conversational verb that expresses the ease and confidence of the hunter character. He's sauntering because he knows he's in complete control, and he wants the narrator to see that he knows it. I'd saunter too if I were that hunter.

I like that word so much it's almost enough to make me forget the phrase "smiled in a friendly way". Holy crap, Meyer. What is wrong with you? You know what's more effective than saying 'smiled in a friendly way'? SMILED. Smiles are already friendly - but they're also implicitly hostile. You're greeting somebody by showing them what is essentially part of your skeleton. Let language do some of your work for you. You don't need that adverbial phrase to tart up your prose.

Meyer: trust your verbs. Write about people, not horny martyrs.

That's the preface.

Next up: Chapter 1. In less detail than this.

Labels: books, exegesis, twilight

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Palinode at MamaPop: Something Something Bachelor Sex Scandal
» Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Just like every other Tuesday, I post at Mamapop.com. This week's entry is all about the shocking and scandalous sex scandal shocker that The Bachelor's PR people are making sure you know all about in advance: Contestant on The Bachelor Caught Fooling Around with a Crew Member, Which I Guess Is Wrong.

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How Would You Solve A Problem Like Maria if Maria Were a Gigantic Blue Cat-Person? and other thoughts about Avatar
» Monday, December 21, 2009

I watched Avatar on Saturday afternoon, and I can confirm that it suffers from all the weaknesses that its detractors point to. The plot is a crude rendition of Dances With Wolves made by a guy who clearly spent his teenage years getting high and listening to Yes. The characters are paper-thin, the dialogue is not awe-inspiring, and the whole amounts to a half-baked fantasy stemming from white guilt.

If any of those criticisms were relevant, I would agree that Avatar, for all its technological accomplishment, is a lousy film. But the plot is just a rough bridge laid down for the world of Pandora to cross from Cameron's imagination to the screen. Once the bridge has been crossed, how cares how sturdy it is? No one's using it again.

The plot of Avatar is nearly as old as dirt – or more precisely, it's as old the first time one tribe decided to take another tribe's dirt. Paraplegic ex-Marine Jake Sully ships off to Pandora, a far-off moon where a well-financed corporation (Weyland-Yutani, maybe?) is attempting to negotiate with a group of indigenous aliens (the Na'vi) to gain access to a whopping deposit of precious minerals. Jake arrives at the point when years of diplomacy and cross-cultural relations are breaking down, and the use of force is rapidly becoming the preferred option.

Although Jake is a grunt, a piece of happenstance selects him for the Avatar program, in which he gets to occupy the body of a vat-grown alien and interact with the locals in a form that they will accept (a 10 foot tall Thundercat, apparently). Once in the avatar body, Jake gets into trouble and is saved by the daughter of the local clan leaders. Jake is tentatively accepted into the tribe, falls in love, and turns against the invaders. Even better, he gets to lead the Na'vi in battle and send the chastened humans back home.

So much for plot. Avatar finds James Cameron exploring the same obsessions as always: entombment, displacement and the search for home. In Avatar the hero is entombed and displaced into another body. In the Terminator films, the heroes are sent backwards in time. In Aliens, the heroine emerges from sleep to find that nearly sixty years has passed. In all cases, the characters are outcast and lost, and their story is a quest for home. Cameron appears to be showing us Dances With Wolves, but underneath all that fancy dressing, he's offering us another version of The Odyssey. Once looked in that light, the movie turns on its axis and offers up something wholly different and a great deal more satisfying, in part because Cameron's homes are never where you expect them to be.

But why call the movie Avatar? It seems like a pretty flabby title. In the context of the film, an avatar is a substitute body, and that doesn't seem like a promising name for a blockbuster. The film is full of substitutions and prosthetics - the Space Marines walk around in gigantic mech suits, descendents of the loader exoskeletons from Aliens; Jake gets around on a wheelchair; and every interaction with the environment of Pandora must be done behind a mask or a wall, since the environment is toxic.

The ultimate prosthesis in the film is the big blue avatar (I'm glad they didn't call the film Prosthesis) that Jake uses. The Na'vi find the avatars repulsive, calling them 'false bodies'. But how can a body be false? What they mean is that the body does not properly belong to the mind that occasionally inhabits it. When not filled up by the consciousness of the human, the body is limp and unresponsive, utterly comatose, a corpse that will not die. Like vampires and zombies, the avatar exists in an unresolved state, and the story of the movie is about the resolution of the avatar. Will Jake keep his body, move exclusively to the new one, or continue to live in both bodies at once, never truly sleeping or waking?

The problem with inhabiting the avatar, as Jake begins to realize, is that you begin to relinquish your claim on your original body (In a nice twist, Jake himself is a substitute for his dead twin brother, so he is already a kind of avatar). He confesses at one point, his hair unwashed and his stubble verging on beardhood, that he longer knows who he is.

What he means, entirely aside from the ideological and cultural divide that he constantly crosses, is that he has begun to understand his own body as an avatar as well. Once he begins to occupy two bodies, one a gift of biology and the other of technology, then the real story becomes clear: how will he resolve his divided self? How will he behead the zombie or stake the vampire? How do you solve a problem like Jake Sully?

The great battle at the end of the film, in which alien-Jake leads the Na'vi clans into battle against a well-armed military (themselves in mecha suits that are a type of avatar), is a version of Odysseus killing Penelope's suitors. In this case, Pandora is the bride, and the humanity his rival. The twist that makes Avatar enjoyable is that Sully arrives on Pandora as a suitor, unaware that he is really the long-lost husband. Watching him reclaim something that was not his in the first place is the movie's chief pleasure. That and watching people get hit with five-foot long arrows.

Labels: film

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I Guest-Posted Over at Mr. Teacher Man
» Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Once upon a time, I had a best friend. We did everything together and never took prisoners. And that friend's name... was C.J. Koster.

Nah, I've never met the guy. But we've exchanged emails, and I can say with confidence that if he ever left Korea and came back to the relative sanity of Canada, I would mail him a beer.* Especially now that he kindly asked me to post over at his blog, which is an always-enjoyable howl of despair read.

My new boots remind me of how my dreaming has changed with the approach of middle age. As I grow older my remembered dreams grow fewer. I not only mean that the frequency of memorable dreams has diminished, but that some of the ones I pinned to the corkboard on the inside of my skull have grown brittle and fallen off.

And those are just the opening sentences! But I warn you, the rest of it is just some text I copied off an adult video site.

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concepts of toast
» Sunday, December 06, 2009

[Night. Too late for food. Too late for baked potatoes. Schmutzie and Palinode, protected by darkness, are having baked potatoes.]

Schmutzie: I'm craving toasted marshmallows.

Palinode: I'm craving marshmallow toast.

Schmutzie: What is that?

Palinode: That is the exact opposite of what you're craving.

Schmutzie: But what exactly is it?

Palinode: It's toast made of marshmallows.

Schmutzie: So we want the same thing.

Palinode: Not at all.

Schmutzie: Completely at all.

Palinode: Nuh-uh. You want to take a marshmallow and toast it. I want a piece of toast that's made of marshmallow.

Schmutzie: The final product would be the same. And it would taste awesome.

Palinode: Would you put cheese and pastrami on your toasted marshmallow?

Schmutzie: Um... no.

Palinode: But I'd put cheese and pastrami on mine because it's toast.

Schmutzie: You're changing the food. You can't win the argument by talking about cheese and deli meat.

Palinode: I'm just providing an example of the uses of my marshmallow toast. I'd put pastrami on mine.

Schmutzie: No you WOULDN'T, because marshmallow toast doesn't EXIST.

Palinode: I introduced pastrami as a substantive addition to my assumed marshmallow toast. QED.

Schmutzie: I'm holding a sharp knife.

Labels: conversations

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a musical education #4: odds
» 

Every weekday I suffer through a snippet of easy listening '70s music in the bathroom at work (read the overly elaborate setup here). Why not turn a mild annoyance into an opportunity to educate myself, and yourself, by the transitive property, about the easy listening music of an earlier generation?

Of all the genres of music that have made me reflect on the insane diversity of human artistic expression, from Insane Clown Posse cover bands to people who play the lute, late '70s soft rock must be the strangest of all.

I just don't get that stuff. How did the Western world get from the guitar/drum/bass/piano rock and roll of the 1960s to the hideous mellow stylings of Californiated easy listening stuff that seemed designed for senior citizens of the future? I can picture David Geffen thinking, "Hey, the kids love this crap now, and they'll love it in fifty years when they're hiring people to get them to the toilet in the morning".

I refer specifically to Player.



Player are kind of known for one song - 1977's "Baby Come Back," (it is not, as The Bloggess recently insisted, by Hall & Oates). Well, they're not so much known as vaguely remembered. They're kind of a stand-in for all those bands that had one or two surprise hits, then sort of did stuff for a while. You know, stuff - an album here, a side project there, and the inevitable reunion album (1995's Lost In Reality, ) that produces absolutely nothing of note. That's Player: an abstract glob of musical effort smeared across the calendar from the late '70s to the mid '90s.



Facebook visitors: please visit my weblog to view the video portion. And by 'video portion' I mean a bunch of smooth California rockers with puffy hair and glittery vests.

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