Skip to main content

Twilight Keeps Buzzing

Anne Rice gives her thoughts on the Twilight series, and everyone is up in arms on one side of the fence or another. Which is funny, 'cause I don't see these lines as being very critical:

['Twilight']’s based on a really silly premise: that immortals would go to high school. It's a failure of imagination, but at the same time, that silly premise has provided Stephenie Meyer with huge success," Anne said. "The idea that if you are immortal you would go to high school instead of Katmandu or Paris or Venice, it’s the vampire dumbed down for kids. But it's worked. It's successful. It makes kids really happy.

Sure, calling the Twilight books "silly" isn't very flattering, but "it's worked" and "it's successful" and "it makes kids really happy" sound pretty good to me, considering the vast expanse between Anne Rice's version of vampires and Stephenie Meyer's. The article later concedes she even referred to the concept of Twilight as "almost a stroke of genius." So...why all the fuss? There's a point at which sales figures outweigh any idealistic purism you might have for a genre. I can moan and groan all I want about the absurdity of The Da Vinci Code. Or the inanity of Eat, Pray, Love. After a few million copies fly off the shelves, my convictions just sound a bit...well, pretentious.

So I'd like to tip my hat to Anne - center of so much fuss herself lately - for giving credit where credit is due. There's just no sense arguing with a phenomenon.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

window in the sub

Dear Nathaniel, I am microwaving pie that Mom bought up in Oak Glen this week on her way home from the orthodontist. As I put it in the microwave, I was full of sadness that I was not in Oak Glen with her. Why did I not go? I was working. I want to see the trees turn. I want to wander slowly through autumnal gift shops. Under the water, you cannot sense the approach of the seasons. Even here it is difficult because, after all, it's California. But I can still sense it. After three seasons in Illinois and one in Scotland, it must be with me for good. Or at least for a while. Because I am all abuzz with eagerness for fall and winter, for turkeys and dried leaves and Santa. I should start cooking again this fall. Fall foods are my favorite. Baked squash dripping with melted butter and brown sugar, pumpkin soup... this year, if I have enough money, I will put together a holiday dinner for my friends. And we will drink Scandinavian mulled wine, which is the most wonderful thing I have e...
13 comments
Read more

Again in Gilead

I just finished reading this for the second time last week, thanks to the forever book group of Grace. It was equally as lovely the second time around, and while reading it, I wrote down a dozen more quotes from the incomparable Ames, who is both too beautiful a man to be real and too beautiful a man not to be real. (I'm grateful and amazed to know a few like him.) "It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water." (p.82) I have found this to be remarkably true. I see it in myself, and in many others as well. "I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect." (p.91) This seems to be about the only way I experience visions, but because memory is a rickety thing, I tend not to trust them much. Which makes me a poor prophet. "I know, too, that my own experience of the church has been, in many senses, shelte...
Post a Comment
Read more
So I started filing my taxes. I know, they're due in three days. Then I find that I owe. More particularly, I owe more money than is presently sitting in my checking account (or checking and savings combined - I know, a sad state). This means that I'm not paying with TurboTax online. I'm going ghetto and mailing a check, crossing my fingers that it won't get deposited until after Thursday. Sad, sad state. Let's hear it for that raise.
5 comments
Read more