a sense of joy and then a panic

I'm getting ready to write a story about self-immolation (what a great opening line that is) so I've been doing a lot of research on that, but I hadn't run across this.

At my internship I'm making this enormous insane database of internal conflict/collective violence in Indonesia since the beginning of the year, with columns like "# Houses Burned" and "Types of Arms Used" and "Army Deployed?" (you would be alarmed by how much of it there is), and this requires reading lots and lots of Indonesian newspaper articles that pertain, even vaguely, to the topic.  The latest one, an argument that these small conflicts are beginning to threaten national security, mentions Sondang Hutagalung, a 22-year-old law student (son of a taxi driver) who self-immolated a few months before his planned graduation in front of the Palace of Independence as part of a campaign against government corruption/graft:

From here (note the picture):

“Time for change, remember Tunisia, dissolve the legislature,” Rakrian Yoga said in his Twitter feed, alluding to the death of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi from self-immolation, which sparked the Tunisian revolution that led to the ouster of the country’s president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Bung Karno University will grant an honorary bachelor’s degree to him. 

“A number of public figures and organizations suggested granting the honorary bachelor’s degree,” university deputy rector Daniel Panda said on Sunday in Jakarta as quoted by tempo.co.  He added that the granting of the degree should not been taken as encouragement for other students to do the same thing. 

“As an academic, I hope there will be no repeat of such a measure. There are other options. This is a too high a sacrifice.”

I had no idea that such things were happening in Indonesia - it is not a "tradition" here (see here).  We burn buildings and get shot by the military, but political suicide is not a thing.  I suspect the "remember Tunisia" line is key.  You always wonder about precedent though (in May - in an apparently completely unrelated, random incident - a 69-year-old Dutch citizen self-immolated in front of the Dutch embassy in Jakarta, but he apparently thought that the police were in collusion with the Balinese mafia and trying to chase him).  It is interesting also that Sondang was a devout Christian who always accompanied his mother to church.  A couple months later his girlfriend tried to kill herself out of personal grief, by overdosing on anti-malaria pills in front of his grave. 

This song was playing on my iTunes while I was reading about this:

Sometimes I think my definition of "dark" isn't in line with other people's.

I recently finished Alan Heathcock's short story collection, Volt.  I bought it on the basis of the first story.  "The Staying Freight" is fantastic, by the way.  It's definitely on my very short list of favorite short stories, and is more pathos-ridden than the others on the list.  It's about a farmer named Winslow who accidentally runs over his only child with farm equipment, and then after the funeral decides that he must take a walk.  Though he keeps thinking that it's time to turn around and go home to his wife Sadie, he can't quite bring himself to do it, and soon he ends up on the wrong side of a mountain range.  He goes feral for a while, and when he tries to re-enter civilization by working on a stranger's farm he ends up becoming a sideshow freak, the man who can take a punch to the gut and not go down.  And it's really quite awful, especially because you can see inside Winslow and you can see that this is all he thinks he deserves, even though what he wants, by then, is to go back to Sadie.  It hit all the right notes for me, plucked all the right heart strings.  I thought it was wrenching.

With later stories, though, my emotional engagement went down.  I didn't connect to any other characters as much as I did to Winslow and Sadie, and their stories and philosophies and visions of the world started to sound the same.  I got a little bored.  A lot of reviewers seem to like Helen Farraley, the grocer-cum-sheriff, but I disliked her; she read to me as a remorseless vigilante cloaked in self-righteousness and astonishing amounts of self-pity.  She's unambiguously cast as a hero, though, toiling against a chaotic world, and although that world is full of murder and vandalism and animal-killings and vestiges of war, I never bought that this was a world any darker than the average Law & Order: SVU.  Heathcock gives his favorite characters a lot of dignity and "basic decency" (not a bad thing).  Bad people are few and far between.  Everyone gets redeemed (though their descents are not very deep).  The only story that I felt really got as strange as "The Staying Freight" was the Grey Gardens-esque "The Daughter," my second-favorite.  In the others you basically have decent folks having to deal with criminals and death and life's normal disappointments with a "traditional Midwestern" stoicism, and it all just got kind of hum-drum.  

So it's weird to see so many people comment on the grimness and darkness of Volt.  I was expecting another Blood Meridian based on the reviews.  "Abysmal world"?  The "grim, rural town of Krafton"?  "Macabre ill-luck"?  Macabre?  Really?  It baffles me because Volt is not gothic in any way.  The universe in Volt is a basically good one.  Save for the ones in "The Daughter," no character even feels anything so ugly as hate!  Here's the only negative review of Volt on Amazon: "revolting, reviling, unutterably bleak, and pointless.  I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy and some of his novels, and Flannery O'Connor came to mind, her "grotesque" characters. There's no question that this author has talent, however not as much as either of the above, I just wish he'd find something more palatable to write about."  I almost can't believe this reviewer has read McCarthy or O'Connor if they think there's any comparison here.  Roald Dahl is darker than Volt.

I thought of this again when reading about the Wall Street journal article lamenting that YA fiction is too dark.  YA authors and editors immediately leapt to the defense of the YA books that they perceived to be under attack.  I have never understood the appeal of YA or even the definition of YA since its most vigorous proponents seem to be adults, but anyway.  My general reaction to this article and all the commentary that followed was "content does not make for darkness."  The presence of profanity doesn't make a book "dark" to me (just a book with characters who use profanity).  Neither does having a character get beaten or raped or killed.  If it's an "issue book" then that applies doubly so, because then the whole point is to be an after-school special (maybe rated R; adults have their own after-school specials). 

So I've been trying to figure out what makes a book "dark" for me, and I think it's world view.  That may not be the right word, but it's the best I can do right now.  My usual example is McCarthy's The Road vs. Anything Else He's Written.  The Road horrified a ton of people, some of them Oprah's book club readers, some not, because it depicts the end of the world, cannibal tribes, people roasting babies, basically everyone being dead, the sea being black, etc.  But the whole point of The Road is the idea of "carrying the fire" despite the over-the-top desolation of the world around you, of this Christ-like little boy who neither dies nor ever compromises his virtuous qualities.  When I read this book I was like "???" because the first thing I read by McCarthy was The Crossing, which features no Christ-like characters, and a main character who, while not a bad guy, spends the last scene being abusive to a dog that needs his help, then feeling bad about it, wanting to make it up to the dog, and then being unable to find the dog.  There's no apocalypse, no over-the-top violence (compared to The Road, anyway), but I found it way more painful to read.  The Road presents a stark vision of virtue and destruction that I don't find grim or dark at all, despite all the violence.  The Crossing, though, I find grim.  Genuinely dark. 

This is not to say that I think even "real" darkness guarantees merit.  I don't.  "The Staying Freight" is neither "really" dark nor pretending to be, ends on a note of hope, and is great.  But fiction with "surface-level" darkness does seem to be in these days (though I don't know if that's what Heathcock's trying to write - probably not).  Some people respond to it and extol it, usually as reflecting reality and truth and "what the world is really like" (or in the case of The Road, it's "what the world will be like after the government is taken out"), and what seems to be a minority really object to it on grounds that it's depraved or whatnot.  And I wish more people would read The Violent Bear It Away.

This post began with a slightly meandering article by Roxane Gay at The Rumpus about the words we use to write about rape.  While I think she needs to interrogate herself as a writer a bit more - "I write about sexual violence a great deal in my fiction. The why of this writerly obsession doesn’t matter," she says, but yeah-huh, it does matter - but the beginning is a fine criticism of a New York Times article about a gang rape in Cleveland, Texas (bold mine).

The Times article was entitled, “Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town,” as if the victim in question was the town itself. James McKinley Jr., the article’s author, focused on how the men’s lives would be changed forever, how the town was being ripped apart, how those poor boys might never be able to return to school. There was discussion of how the eleven-year-old girl, the child, dressed like a twenty-year-old, implying that there is a realm of possibility where a woman can “ask for it” and that it’s somehow understandable that eighteen men would rape a child. There were even questions about the whereabouts of the mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill may befall the child is clearly the mother’s fault. Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.

The overall tone of the article was what a shame it all was, how so many lives were affected by this one terrible event. Little addressed the girl, the child. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not a town. It was an eleven-year-old girl whose life was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her.

You do notice this a lot in news articles about rape, especially in small towns or suburban communities, and especially - maybe exclusively - when the suspects are teenaged boys.  It's as if the boys are as much a victim as the girl.  I think it can be worth investigating how a town reacts to a gang rape (Glen Ridge, NJ, for example), but sometimes I wonder: how many times do we need to hear the same opinions from these seemingly identical, wagon-circling communities?  The article claimed to be probing "how could their young men have been drawn into the act," whatever that means, but that's not actually where they went with the article.  Because then the article would actually talk about, you know, motive to rape, tendencies toward violence, domestic violence in the town, etc.  Instead the article probed "how could their young men have fucked this little girl?" (oh, she looked older than she was - got it - that means they're not pedophiles, so that's good). 

I get that the Times was soliciting neighbors' opinions and these were the neighbors' opinions, but why is this actually worth a story?  No duh, the neighbors blamed the girl and pitied the boys and bemoaned the state (reputation?) of their town.  I could have figured that in my sleep.  Why is this worth repeating and promoting in the form of an article that does not offer any analysis of their opinion?  Do they deserve some kind of public outlet because they bred a bunch of predators?  Because that might have been an interesting line of inquiry: so how and why did you instill these values in your young men, Cleveland, TX?  Otherwise, I don't care about their ruined community.  Their ruined community is not a human interest story.  Just like I do not care about how The Ryan White Story offended the residents of Kokomo, Indiana.  Sometimes towns deserve to be pilloried.  Sorry, but there it is.  I mean, this NYT article actually says:

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Classic.  Pathetic.  These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives?  What about the girl they raped?  Is it because the boys seem like a greater loss to the town, I wonder - the loss of these promising young men to the justice system, when good men are hard to find (whereas an 11-year-old girl that they all but say dressed like a whore, well, who cares, they're a dime a dozen)?  Is it overwhelming sympathy and empathy for the families of the suspects, even though as one commenter at the Rumpus suggests, they apparently raised rapists (whereas this girl's mother, well, she's the one that let this happen)?  Is it the instinct that seems to pop up whenever something bad happens in one's community, to generalize it until it's so broad that you too can claim to be personally affected and devastated, because goddamn if you're going to let this selfish child hog all the attention?  Or is it just easier to write articles about reactionary people being reactionary, predictable people being predictable?  Maybe it's just an example of communal value, and communal priorities (as Hot Fuzz says, the greater good!), overriding individual value.

In any case, Roxane Gay is one of many people to have complained about this article, and the NYTimes has issued two responses.  There are some very biting comments replying to the second response, and it's worth reading.  My favorite:

“She’s 11 years old. It shouldn’t have happened. That’s a child. Somebody should have said, ‘What we are doing is wrong.’” Implying what, it would have been fine if she was an adult? How reassuring that there's a "voice of reason" in the community.

Yes, such are the questions that we should be asking indeed.  But coverage of rape always sounds the same.

I saw Wes Craven's My Soul To Take last night - it was actually pretty decent.  The plot was a little convoluted, with all the souls splintering and being captured and going into babies and all, but I really enjoyed the characters.  They were teenagers - "who look like they're actually in high school," as Christina said - from various social cliques who were not at all cardboard cut-outs.  They acted like actual people.  They all had flaws as well as positive traits.  No one was romanticized or vilified. 

But here's the other thing: I think that writers often get the message to build three-dimensional, realistic, balanced characters.  But part of that, and the part that I think tends to fall by the wayside, is that these lovely three-dimensional characters are still part of society.  They're influenced by social norms, by the expectations others lay on them; they feel more comfortable with some people than others.  A lot of them probably want to stay wherever they're comfortable.  And in most high school settings, they're going to be sitting somewhere within a hierarchy.  In other words, these characters need to reside in realistic social systems, IMO - realistic, of course, for whatever world has been built.  My Soul To Take totally nailed this one: the beautiful popular girl isn't going to fall for the unpopular, loser-ish outcast - she's got a reputation to maintain, or she doesn't think he'd be good for her, or she doesn't find his type attractive, or "it just wouldn't work."  Does that mean she's a shallow, selfish bitch/whore with nothing more to her?  No.  Of course not.  She's still a whole person, just like the outcast is still a whole person.  It just means they don't exist in a social vacuum. 

Of course, this is not to say that beautiful popular girls have never fallen for unpopular outcasts, or that I as a rule cannot "buy" a story where that happens.  Just that I feel like fictional characters seem to defy society a lot more than real people do.  It's also not to say that social roles are straitjackets, because that's crazy deterministic.

How important this is varies from person to person, I know.  But I've discovered that it's very important to me.  It makes me feel like there's less lying going on, usually about how good the world is (or alternately - in the case of horrific dystopic totalitarian states where EVERYTHING IS BAD and EVERYONE SUFFERS - how bad the world is).  Plus I like seeing social systems in action, I guess.  There's a reason I majored in political science.

P.S.  Watching One Missed Call 2.  Could have sworn director Tsukamoto sampled a bit of audio from one of the LOTR movies.  Only this time instead of Frodo mesmerized by the ring, we have girl being attacked by ghost.  It's all the same, really.

Newt:  I don't want to sleep.  I have scary dreams.
Ripley:  Well, I bet Casey doesn't have scary dreams.  Let's take a look.  [Looks into the disembodied doll head that Newt carries around]  Nope, nothing bad in there, see?  Maybe you could just try to be like her, hmm?
Newt:  Ripley.  She doesn't have bad dreams because she's just a piece of plastic.

The Harvard Hoaxer case is a pretty amazing incident, really.  He's my age, guys!  Well, graduated high school the same year, anyway.  The "powerpoint" version:

• When Mr. Wheeler, now 23, applied as a transfer student in 2007, for example, he sent along fabricated transcripts from Phillips Andover Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In fact, he had graduated from a public high school in Delaware and had attended Bowdoin College, in Maine.
• One tipoff could have been that M.I.T. does not give letter grades in the fall semester of freshman year, like the straight A’s that appeared on the grade report that Mr. Wheeler submitted. And the names of the four M.I.T. professors who wrote his glowing recommendations? The letters were fakes. And while the professors were real, each teaches at Bowdoin.
• (As Harvard would later learn, he had been suspended from Bowdoin for “academic dishonesty,” according to the indictment.)
• In September, when Mr. Wheeler began his senior year at Harvard, an English professor read his Rhodes scholarship submission and saw similarities between it and the work of a colleague. When confronted by Harvard faculty members, Mr. Wheeler remarked, “I must have made a mistake, I didn’t really plagiarize it,” according to Mr. Verner.
• Mr. Wheeler left Harvard, rather than face an academic hearing. He then applied as a transfer student yet again, this time to Yale and Brown.
• In February, Mr. Wheeler applied for an internship at McLean Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, in which he “provided fraudulent information regarding his credentials and student status at Harvard,” the hospital said in a statement.  In applying to Yale and Brown, though, he not only suggested he was a McLean employee, but also submitted a false letter of recommendation from the McLean official who had refused to hire him.
• Officials at Caesar Rodney High School in Camden, Del., from which Mr. Wheeler graduated in 2005, said they were contacted in April by Yale admissions officials. Yale wanted to confirm that he was the class valedictorian (he was not, though he was in the top 10 percent of the class) and that his SAT scores were perfect (they were several hundred points lower.)
• “It seemed out of character that the young man we knew would would try to pull off this type of hoax,” said Kevin Fitzgerald, the district superintendent, who was principal of Caesar Rodney when Mr. Wheeler attended.

His redacted resume, posted by The New Republic when he applied for an internship there.  It is quite nuts.  But in all honesty, how dumb is Harvard?  They apparently did not check to see that they gave two "prestigious writing prizes" and thousands of dollars of prize money to plagiarized submissions.  Come on!

These are the books he's the sole author of:

• Mappings, Unmappings, and Remappings (In Progress): Critical work that has attempted to explain the experience of geographical and textual space in modern writing has focused predominantly on the map as an analytical tool of orientation that makes formal writing structures legible. My dissertation, however, articulates a positive and generative potential in the experience of getting lost. Disorientation, then, allows us to come to terms with the difficulty of modernist literature from the ground level—to view these works not as an abstraction seen from the “God’s eye” perspective that is implicit in most maps, nor a teleological outcome of the Enlightenment seen from retrospect. By restoring the experience of disorientation, I argue that getting lost becomes a radical discourse that reflects back to us how we orient ourselves—what we pay attention to as we move through physical space and how we construe meaning as we move through a text from page to page.

• The Mapping of an Ideological Demesne (Under Review at Harvard UP): The massive proliferation, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, of technologies for measuring, projecting, and organizing geographical and social space produced in the European cultural imaginary an intense and widespread interest in visualizing this world and alternative worlds. As the new century and the Stuart era developed, poets and dramatists mediated this transformation in the form of spatial tropes and models of the nation. I examine the geographical tropes by which Tudor and Stuart writers created poetic landscapes as a mode of engagement with the structures of power, kingship, property, and the market. Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.

Dude likes maps.

[The job being: I'm a Project Assistant for a university professor who gets contracts from the state department of education to do research on whatever the department wants to know about.  Last year it was the transition to a new testing program.  This year's project, failing schools, is one I've been involved with the whole way.] 

I don't have an education background at all, and all of this is of course based on a sampling of Nebraska schools that are classified as failing in some way, and not meant to be conclusive.  

1.  Failing schools have "difficult" demographics.  Either there's a lot of minorities or there's a lot of poverty or both.  Indian schools fail almost by default in this state.  There is a crazy superintendent man who jumps from Indian school to Indian school, misusing funds and planning new buildings.  Research says you can't fix most schools that chronically fail. 

2.  Principals harbor a lot of pent-up rage toward Hispanic students that move, because they don't want to have to implement an ELL program and the students bring down their scores and then move away.  As a result, people will either build new school districts away from urban centers to stay away from all the minorities, or will force the minorities to stay in their own school district outside of the urban center.  And by urban center, I mean like, 20,000 people.  Some principals will tell Hispanic students to go to a different school.  This is actually illegal.  

3.  It feels like there are a lot of kids being placed in special education, especially in small rural schools.  Whether that's a jump in awareness, a jump in diagnoses, or a jump in actual prevalence of cases, I don't know.

4.  Most parents don't get involved except to complain, or so teachers say.  Many parents seem scarred by negative experiences when they were in school, and in any case are too tired from working thousands of shifts at finger-chopping meatpacking plants to sign little worksheets saying they read to their kids or checked their kids' progress.  In "diverse" schools, schools invite white parents to be a part of parent committees. 

5.  Older teachers mock younger teachers for being panicky or "too creative."  Younger teachers mock older teachers for having been there "since the building was built."  Everyone will say that there is collaboration in their school, but I seriously wonder, considering all the passive-aggressive stuff that comes out in interviews. 

6.  A lot of times students need to be bribed to try to do well on tests with pizza parties and cupcakes.  High school students. 

7.  Schools seem to think that an inability to do story problems in math can be solved by upping reading comprehension skills.  I can say for one that this would not have helped me. 

8.  Some teachers want to be part of a unified curriculum, and some teachers want to be able to do whatever they want.  If you bring up changes or research or anything, these latter teachers will say, "I've been teaching for X-years, I would hope that I know what I'm doing!"  Few are comfortable being assessed, critiqued, criticized, or judged in any way.  Principals say they assess teachers more than teachers say they are assessed.  Schools are distrustful of outsiders, especially outsiders from "the government."  Outsiders want the state to intervene in failing schools, possibly by firing principals that are judged to be ineffective, but neither the state nor the schools want this. 

9.  Education is something that the general public goes absolutely crazy on.  It's getting close to the level of abortion et al.  There's basically 3 perspectives: 1) "Public school is a black hole and public schools should receive no money.  Why should I have to give them my hard-earned tax dollars when I don't have kids/my kids go to my super awesome ["exclusive"] private school?" 2) "Stop blaming the socio-economic environment.  Tell those kids/teachers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  Motivate them harder!" 3) "I'm a teacher and I think you're being really mean to teachers, because they would give up body parts for their students and they love these kids more than their own parents love 'em and they are really trying the best they can!"  Most of the people with the loudest opinions do not actually have kids in public school.  See #4.

10.  There is a minimum proficiency that all students, regardless of poverty, ethnicity, English-speaking status, or special education status, are expected to reach for the school to not "fail."  It is the same standard for all these groups. 

I get really tired of the argument that it's all right for kids' books to be social-norm-enforcing, poorly-made crap because "at least it gets kids reading."  Reading what?  Grown-up crap?  Ah, but it doesn't matter what they read, right, cuz it's all just about a word exercise - there's nothing contained in the story itself.  Oh no.  No message, direct or indirect or subliminal.  No moral of the story.  No push-nod toward a particular course of action, a particular sort of person, a particular status quo.  Nope, books are empty.  In one ear, out the other.  It's just the act of picking up a bound bundle of paper and looking at words and stringing them together to form a sentence.  Just like addition and subtraction.  A skill, if you'd like.  Girl A only reads Sweet Valley High books and she's intellectually better off than Girl B who doesn't read at all, just watches movies.

Please.

I know you want your kid to read.  But just because your kid doesn't like to read doesn't mean you should give them shit to read.  How does that make any goddamn sense?  You're basically saying your precious little pudding has no ability to understand complexity (or other people, or difficult situations...) and shouldn't even try.  And sure, parents should not "monitor" what their kids read or scan their Barnes & Noble purchases.  But should they have conversations about the books their kids are reading?  Yes.  Should they encourage their kids to challenge themselves?  Big Fucking YES.  


Disclaimer: I'm sure it can and has worked, the "gateway drug" method.  And there's nothing wrong with reading SVH or what-have-you.  I was into Goosebumps myself.  (I'll credit Goosebumps for getting me knee-deep in horror, but not reading.)  The problem is that "at least it gets kids reading" is used as a justification-of-shit defense that also functions as a your-critique-is-inherently-invalid card.  Somebody says, "Wow, this book presents a really bad image of people from other countries."  And somebody replies, "At least it gets kids reading!"  And the conversation ends.  (I would love to see this argument applied to The Turner Diaries or The Anarchist Cookbook).  Kind of like "support the troops!" and "it's for charity." 

Double Disclaimer: I never had to be coaxed to read when I was in elementary school (I was given easy-reading versions of Victorian children's lit), and I rarely did out-of-school reading in high school, but I always had hard books to read for class (I absolutely did not know what all words meant as I read them, and I almost threw The Sound And The Fury, The Crossing, Dubliners, Billy Budd, Orlando, Zorba the Greek, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and the entire works of Shakespeare into the fires of hell after reading their opening segments.  But you don't have to understand what each word/stylistic trick means to read and enjoy the story.  I'd like the story, so I'd read it again, and understand more.  I probably understood only 60% of the words in Blood Meridian.  So I never understood the whole "circle the words you don't know" approach to English class either.  Makes a little more sense in foreign language class, but not much).  My cousin's kid was one of those non-readers who only played video games, so the family pushed Harry Potter onto him, guns blazing.  He was okay with Harry Potter, mostly because of the movies.  Never moved onto anything else.

So, I went to the midnight last night. Wasn't my idea, but I enjoy midnight showings (except for the tight-asses that want everybody to be quiet so they don't miss a line in the oh so majestic movie). And here's the thing about the Twilight movies: I don't dislike them.

I know that's scandalous. This doesn't apply to the books, I should add. Never read them, don't want to try. I suspect what I like about the movies would not be present in the books. But I went to the first one as a joke, just to laugh at it, and I actually ended up enjoying it somewhat. I wonder if I would like it more if I was still in high school (or better yet, middle school).

A. New Moon: Demographics

Most of the people at the midnight showing fit a certain type: the tween-girl Hot Topic shopper (when I was a tween-girl, I should add, I found Hot Topic too scary and edgy, though appealing). They're not cheerleaders. They're too "intense." They dye their hair. They under-achieve. They all showed up to New Moon wearing horrific overstretched Twilight shirts, and they sit with a couple friends, probably the only friends they have, and drown in the wish fulfillment of this movie. People make fun of them, but people have probably been making fun of them their whole lives, so they're used to it. Twilight is a franchise for them, and part of me wants to say that that's great, because everybody else ignores them. They don't have any other franchises. Gossip Girl is not for them. Harry Potter has too wide of an appeal, and Harry Potter is pretty damn hegemonic anyway. A lot of movies pander to outcast boys (Zombieland being the latest I've seen), because outcast boys can grow up to be smart or secretly cool, but outcast girls have no value in society, and they don't get movie-candy. Except for Twilight. Both of my friends who unabashedly like Twilight were loser-outcasts in high school. So was I.

B. New Moon: Aesthetics

Gloomy and angsty is the vibe Twilight goes for. It's the only teen franchise that does, really. And I'm all about that shit. Bella, the heroine, mopes 24/7. She also screams in her sleep and drives a beat-up truck and slouches. She walks awkwardly, arms crossed over her stomach. She doesn't do a lot of smiling - laughs are even rarer. Her eyes never quite seem to be totally open. And because she's played by Kristen Stewart and this is a movie about wish fulfillment, she's pretty, but not jaw-droppingly so. She isn't sunny, that's for sure. Her make-up's done to make her eyes look sunken in and her face unhealthily pallid.

The landscape - a gorgeous, misty, rustic town in the Northwest U.S. - is equally morose. The sea thrashes violently, the beach consists of hard pebbles. The roads are all hair-pin curves surrounded by dense woods filled with monsters. Honestly, I would go to these movies just to see Forks, because it's one of the richest movie landscapes I've ever seen, and definitely somewhere I wouldn't mind living.

Then of course there's all the brooding. Vampire boy broods, Bella broods, werewolf boy broods. The only one that doesn't brood is my favorite character, Bella's long-suffering, clueless cop father, Charlie. Charlie (played by Billy Burke) is just a great character - essentially, a single dad who doesn't know what to do with a moody teenaged girl, but he sure tries his damn best. Back to the teenagers: there's a lot of dramatic talk about not being able to live without so-and-so, and suicide, and not talking and not eating, and running away. But teenagers - especially this subset of teenagers - are dramatic and they do talk that way. The franchise becomes laughable when it actually takes this teenaged angst seriously - but let me make a distinction here.

1. Bella's vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, decides that he's a danger to her and moves away. Bella goes into a very deep depression. This part of the movie is pitch-perfect. I've read a lot of complaints that Bella is pathetic and a "bad role model" for going into this depression, but seriously, I've had friends react to break-ups like this. It's not unrealistic and quite frankly it's a very honest portrayal of something that a lot of teen movies ignore. And as someone who was clinically depressed for a few of my tween-years, I found it encouraging that a movie can be honest about depression in teens. Then Bella starts hanging out with werewolf boy, Jacob, and things look up, sort of. But Jacob wants to be more than friends and Bella is just using him as a crutch; when Jacob pulls away to join the werewolf brotherhood, Bella freaks out. Is it selfish of her? Sure. Is it realistic? Absolutely. So this isn't what I mean by the movie taking teenaged angst too seriously.

2. What I mean is the ultimate plot of New Moon, which is a slipshod version of Romeo and Juliet: Edward jumps to the conclusion that Bella is dead, and then goes off to Italy to kill himself in dramatic fashion. Bella has to go and stop him. This leads to a confrontation with the vampire aristocracy and basically, the teenaged doldrums turn into something much larger and more consequential than they really are. Thankfully they don't involve saving the world, but it's still far too extreme. Edward (who is 109) tells Bella that leaving her is the hardest thing he's done in a hundred years. Seriously? Geez. The only good part about this plot line is that you get to see Dakota Fanning as an evil preteen vampire, a la Kirsten Dunst in Interview with the Vampire. Hopefully they won't share a career trajectory, because Fanning makes a good baddie.

On a couple other basic movie-review notes, the acting is shit except for Dakota Fanning and Billy Burke and to some extent (when the material gives her something to actually do), Kristen Stewart. The non-romantic dialogue is passable, but the romantic dialogue is total tripe. The pacing is poor. The narrative arc is non-existent, as is the tension. The only things the movie succeeds at are song choice (but not musical score), and landscape. But we all knew these weren't going to win any Oscars.

C. New Moon: Social Implications

The biggest problem that I have with the Twilight series: Edward and his vampire family. Bella is believable as a human girl, and Jacob is believable as a werewolf boy - by which I mean, their actions and reactions ring true. But the Cullens are these opaque monoliths. They literally look corpse-white, all have extremely vacant, stony expressions, and when they say cheerful words to Bella it's just creepy as all fuck. They certainly don't act like hundreds-of-years-old, wise-but-jaded vampires (I'll give it to Anne Rice that she makes a convincing vampire of this type). Edward is totally unreadable, and the things he says are unbelievable. I hate the Cullens. They're unattractive and snobbish. Edward looks like a cross between Edward Scissorhands and The Crow, except in chest-revealing, expensive clothes. The werewolves, by contrast, are clannish but relaxed and homey. They're clearly flesh and blood, vivacious, adventurous. Bella's healthier with Jacob than she is with Edward. I could believe that all of this is done consciously, because vampires are supposed to be undead and icy and soulless. Except the movies make it obvious from the get-go that we (the audience of Bellas) are all supposed to swoon over Edward. We're supposed to want to become a vampire, like Bella does. And I'm like, why?

The worst part of the entire franchise, in my opinion, is what it contributes to race and class issues. Here's what I haven't said: the werewolves are all Indians. The Cullens, and 99% of the other vampires (there's one evil black vampire) are white. The werewolves are, as follows, also poor. They do things like drop out of school and fall in with "bad crowds." The only example of domestic violence here is attributed to the werewolf clan. The vampires, by contrast, are extremely fucking loaded, zipping around in expensive sports cars - Bella knows that one of them is at her house because she recognizes the fancy straight-from-a-car-commercial car - and living in a huge glass mansion, something out of the special Aspen edition of Home & Garden. They're also, you know, wise beyond belief and have refined, classical European tastes. They can do a bunch of fancy tricks like flying and Matrix acrobats and memorizing Shakespeare, while the werewolves are pretty much just very strong, as Bella remarks over and over. Like they're "on steroids." All this is made painfully obvious when Jacob and Alice, Edward's sister, confront each other at Bella's house. There's Jacob, in his (sort of) ratty clothes, and then there's Alice, in her very expensive-looking white coat and professionally-rendered hair and make-up. She tells Bella that she'll come back to talk, "once you put the dog out."

Yet we're all supposed to conclude, at movie's end, that the werewolves are well-meaning but crass (and perhaps violent?), while the vampires are cool and sexy and everything-you'd-ever-want-to-be-and-more. Incidentally, Bella's awesome dad fits right in withe the werewolves, personality-wise and socio-economically, meaning to join the vampires Bella also has to cut off her own family. This is where Twilight becomes shameful and nasty. The vampires are the plasticized, photo-shopped, megamillionaire celebrities - or, if you'd like, the cold carcass of capitalism - that we as the masses are all supposed to fellate, while the werewolves and humans are all the real, normal people (like friends and neighbors and family) that we're all supposed to trample in our hurry to dote upon the vampires.

And that's shitty and stupid and has nothing at all to do with being an angsty teenager.

In honor of "Worst. Children's Books. Ever" at the American Scene, I present my own assessment of children's books I read (and a few un-read) - mostly as a child.  I expect bits of it will be contentious.
- any Enid Blyton.  ANY.  OH MY GOD.  Yes, she taught me about kitchen middens, stilts, and macaroons - this information was not worth the ordeal of reading any of her badly-written, status-quo-enforcing stories in which thieves are foreign and girls must be taken care of.  Hers are the first books that I remember consciously hating and eviscerating out loud.  Even my mother had to stop reading "Five on Finniston Farm" when it got to the horrible American villains stamping out cigarettes with their feet as they try to rape Britain of its medieval history.  I don't know who gave me her books but I should probably thank whoever it was for sowing the seed of anti-colonial rage.  Never fear, the Daily Mail is still on Ms. Blyton's side: "not one of those voices raised in clamorous complaint against her belongs to a child."  I was a child when I objected, Daily Mail, fuck you very much. 
- "The Chronicles of Narnia" series, except for "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and "The Silver Chair": heavy-handed, two-dimensional characters.  Veeeery easy to see through.  I always liked Puzzle the Donkey and the White Witch, of all people.  I always hated the "yay we're dead" ending.
- "The Swiss Family Robinson": "Father, I think I've just killed the most beautiful creature in the world!", etc., etc.  Learn how to use turtles as laundry basins and boat engines.  Kill all non-humans in sight.  I said kill!
- "The Devil's Arithmetic": a mind-blowingly bad attempt to force children to appreciate Judaism.
- "Little Women": a bunch of annoying teenaged girls, a pathetic author stand-in, and unimpressive prose.  Kick it out.
- "Charlotte's Web": overrated, mediocre.  mediocre, overrated.
- "Harriet the Spy": virtually unreadable and boring prose.
- "The Railway Children": sentimental claptrap, painfully boring.
- "The Boxcar Children": and even more (unrelated!) sentimental claptrap that encourages children to run away because they'll survive and eventually get discovered by some fabulously rich, kind relative.  Caution: will only work if the eldest is a strong presentable boy.
- "The Cat in the Hat": most annoying houseguest ever.  Always made me want to scream.
- "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie": sooooooooooo tedious.

Books I Never Wanted to Read (and that weren't Foisted Upon Me):
- "Anne of Green Gables" series
- "Pippi Longstocking": no, I did not have a thing against redheads. 
- "Are You There, God?  It's Me, Margaret"
- "The Secret Garden"
- "A Little Princess": also, I mixed this one up with the one above all the time, and still do.
- "Winnie the Pooh" series: my mother loved them but never passed them on.

Meh:
- "Where The Wild Things Are": the fact I remember none of it says that I never found it interesting.
- "The Little Mermaid" (not Disney): not bad, but not fun.
- "Black Beauty": see above. 
- "Rapunzel": see above.
- "Goodnight Moon": but then again, I was a baby when this was read to me.
- "Around the World in 80 Days": some truly wtf cultural moments, and Fogg has a stick up his ass, but it's a decent read.
- "The Borrowers": disturbing as all fuck, but not as disturbing as that book about people made out of wool.
- "Island of the Blue Dolphins": rather a cold, distant read, but interesting subject.
- "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory": Roald Dahl's not so good when he writes as Preachy McRighteous.
- "Matilda": see above.
- "Number the Stars": my twelve-year-old self said yawn to the entire genre of "the great Holocaust caper".
- The "Wrinkle in Time" series and all their progeny: I felt pretty much only one amazing moment ("We're shadowed.  But we're fighting the shadow." - WiT) in the whole franchise.  Not bad, but never my favorites.
- "The Ugly Duckling": pretty pictures, iffy moral.
- "Tuck Everlasting": I think I read this and promptly forgot it.
- "Ramona the Pest" series: pretty much the definition of meh.
- "Bunnicula": creativity points, but must the cat always be bad?
- "How the Grinch Stole Christmas": oh so secular, but didn't engage me much.
- "The Little Engine That Could": uh, golf clap?
- "Heidi": only thing I remembered about this one was the "ghost".  That was also the best part, as I recall.
- "The Wizard of Oz" (abridged but the original, if that makes sense): I never got into Wizard of Oz.  I think something about it really frightens me (and not the witch).  Still, I appreciate the hidden socio-economic commentary.

- "The Wind in the Willows": God's gift to children's lit through his prophet Kenneth Grahame.  Likable, flawed characters (who you will probably be able to see friends/relatives in immediately), humor, war, class upheaval, and even pagan idolatry (apparently sometimes cut from later editions, which is blasphemy).  It doesn't get better than this.  I can still sing "When The Toad Came Home."  I also wanted to be a weasel for the longest time, which apparently means I had early Bolshevik tendencies.  LOL!  Compare these woodland creatures to the ones in Narnia and you will see why the latter fails my standards.
- "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass": These two were my literary bibles growing up - especially Looking Glass, which with its complex political structure ("Alice, Mutton. Mutton, Alice."), haunting hallucinations and fits of insanity, is really pretty remarkable for a children's book.  Adopt Wonderland and Looking Glass creatures' wisdom as your guide to life and it explains my problems.  I totally believe ten impossible things before breakfast.
- "Peter Pan" (not Disney): The Disney version is standard fantasy adventure.  The original is, I remain convinced, a story about dead children (they "fall out of their prams in Kensington Gardens," for Chrissake) and a story about the inevitable treason of the revolutionaries (when Peter starts wearing Hook's clothes).  It's also haunting and haunted and finely written to the end.  I wrote my final paper in Colonial Encounters on this book.
- "The Jungle Book" (not Disney): The Disney version is musical and giddy.  The original is probably the darkest piece of children's lit on this list.  To populate your book with monsters is one thing - Kipling is basically writing "Heart of Darkness" for children.  That's how sophisticated the animal hierarchies and human-animal hostilities are.  Shere Khan, Kaa, and the Bandar Log are all unforgettable creative inspirations for me.
- "Just So Stories": Rudyard Kipling continues to show what a bad-ass writer he is.  Bemusing creation myths for the lyrical soul, destined to drive children insane with descriptions like "my long and bubbling friend."  I long ago decided that I am "the cat that walked by [her]self, and all places are alike to me."  That story, about the domestication of animals (except for the cat, which refuses to be hurt by humans), has been known to make me very emotional.
- "The Owl and the Pussycat": so freakin' cute and tropical, and the illustrations are amazing.
- "The Lion and the Gypsy": I hesitate to use "profound," but it pretty much is.
- "People": I do not hesitate to use "profound."  This is a book every little kid should own and live by.  The humanist bible.
- "Caddie Woodlawn": As a "frontier girl" book, the lesser-known "Caddie Woodlawn" is actually superior to the Little House series, both technically and artistically.  Caddie is the definition of "fierce" and "irrepressible," far more so than any of today's "relatable" heroines.  The climax, when a snotty cousin arrives and the family has to choose whether to reclaim their inheritance in Britain and "live like little lords and ladies," is a stellar piece of patriotic Americana.  
- "Little House on the Prairie" series: Laura Ingalls was one of my really early heroines.  The books aren't exactly high art, but they do feel palpably true, and they always got me invested in rooting for Laura to wear pink in her brown hair, defeat Nellie in both schoolyard and romantic combat, and wear a black wedding dress.
- "Fairy Tales" (by Terry Jones, Monty Python guy): probably my most-frequently checked out book in elementary school.  The thirty stories are creepy, funny, and existential all at once.  My favorites were the (creeeeepy) Fly-By-Night, the (creeeeepy) Ship of Bones, and the (existential) Island of Purple Fruit.  Sort of like the Just So Stories, only more modern and overtly fantastical.
- "The Hobbit": my first "grown-up" book, one my third-grade teacher told me to read.  I started reading it with my mom but finished it alone because the story was so engrossing.
- "James and the Giant Peach": trippy as hell.  Probably one of his less-read books (and it's the one I don't own), but it's deserving of more attention.
- "The Witches": deliciously disturbing and scary, although Dahl's crazy biases are very evident here.
- "The BFG": see above, but without the biases and probably scarier.  So scary I wouldn't let my kids read it if they had psychological issues.
- "Animalia": Grahame Base is such a powerful illustrator, he doesn't need a plot.
- "The Prince and the Pauper" (Disney): I found this both hilarious and exciting, a winning combination.
- "Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories": my favorite Dr. Seuss.  Very anti-fascist, anti-social-Darwinist stories.
- "Madeline": probably the only "sweet" book on my "best" list.
- "The Tale of Peter Rabbit", etc.: a lot of people think Beatrix Potter is too archaic now, but I'm still convinced her quaint countryside stories are what got me into Midsummer Murders.  Ok, these and "The Wind in the Willows".
- "Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight": ok, so probably not for young children.  Still awesome.
- "The Velveteen Rabbit": to quote Christie Keith, "if you want your children to realize that other creatures have their own worth that's independent of our use of them, it's an important [lesson]".
- "Dinotopia": ignore everything outside the original picture-travelogue about a human-dinosaur utopia. 
- "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" and "The Silver Chair": it's like C.S. Lewis let himself have fun with these books, because for the most part the "preach" doesn't come through at all.  Of course, these are also the "cousin" books, which may have something to do with the liberties they take.
- "The Grouchy Ladybug": "hey you!  wanna fight?!" was pretty much me.
- "The Runaway Bunny": sentimental favorite.