For Whom the Bella Tolls

Okay, I'll admit it: I'm starting to get hooked. I'd intended to immediately write a clever, erudite summation of the first Twilight book once I'd completed reading it, but it seems a little silly to do so now that I've plowed almost 200 pages forward into the second book, New Moon.

That doesn't mean that I've come to terms with the questionable writing or the cartoonishly angsty teenaged characters, but I am beginning to enjoy myself despite myself. But this wouldn't be a Swanson blog without my typically arrogant, Snarky McSnarkerson, Stiffly Stifferson commentary, so I will try to not disappoint. This is, after all, a culturally elitist blog (Thurston Howell has nothing on me).

As noted, I completed the first book a few days ago, and am now well into the second. My newfound sense of urgency is partly related to my wanting to finish all four books while Breaking Dawn, Part 2 is still in theaters, so I can say I sort of took part in the movie sensation while it's still around. Kristen Stewart has been making the talk-show rounds lately to promote On the Road, and I'm beginning to anticipate how she may have portrayed the character of Bella in the movie series. I must say I'm intrigued. Stewart's personality seems to be not unlike Bella, and it's not hard to see why she was given the role. As for Robert Pattinson, his pretty boy take on Cedric Diggory never seemed particularly appropriate to Harry Potter, but I can see it working perfectly in the role of Edward Cullen in Twilight. I'm actually excited to start watching the movies, and that is a big reason for my accelerating reading.

Much to my surprise, however, most of the reason for my increasingly eager consumption of this literary celebration of all that is youthful ants-in-the-pants is that I'm actually enjoying it. We were all teenagers at one time, and it's not hard to get dragged back into that mindset from reading Twilight. Now that I'm a 32-year-old, married, professional symphony musician it can get all too easy for me to forget about how the pain of lost love feels to a young person, but Bella's emotional agony at the (presumably temporary) end of her relationship to Edward Cullen uncomfortably brings me back to that time of life. On reading of this development in her story I began to actually feel some sympathy for Bella.

Then I came to the part of the story where Bella is (for some bizarre reason) given two non-functional motorcycles and takes them to her friend Jacob Black to fix up without her father knowing (he disapproves of motorcycles). This is her forward-thinking way of accomplishing this:

"'I've got some money saved. College fund, you know.' College, schmollege, I thought to myself. It wasn't like I'd saved up enough to go anywhere special - and besides, I had no desire to leave Forks anyway. What difference would it make if I skimmed a little bit off the top? ... As we skulked back to the makeshift garage, I contemplated my luck. Only a teenaged boy would agree to this: deceiving both our parents while repairing dangerous vehicles using money meant for my college education. He didn't see anything wrong with that picture. Jacob was a gift from the gods."

Yeah.

My sympathy for Bella now? Not so much. Throughout the first book I felt that Bella simply wasn't a good person, and now it's even harder for to find any sense of agreement with her decision-making ability. I guess a person's overall character and her decision-making are not necessarily the same thing, but Bella's choices have consistently left my jaw hanging (and a hanging jaw is not a good look for me). She's using money from her college fund to fix up motorcycles? Since when did 18 become an acceptable age to have a midlife crisis?

And yet, despite this, I continue reading, and I'm okay with that. My sense of inner chagrin is getting less pronounced every day. I anticipate being 100% chagrin-free by the end of 2012. Maybe it's a good thing that, if the Mayans are right, we'll never live to see that day.

Wipe that chagrin off your face.

Things are getting intense in the latter chapters of Twilight. Bella Swan is being chased by an evil "tracker" vampire named James who is determined to catch her and violently suck her blood until she is dead. So, naturally, I'm quite concerned about the fact her 104-year-old boyfriend has been, without her knowledge, sneaking into her room at night to watch her sleep.

As obsessed as Bella is with Edward Cullen, you would think that the fact her vampire beau has been sneaking into her room to watch her sleep would be a deal-breaker, or at the very least a tremendous red flag. Edward justifies his actions by asking her "What else is there to do at night?" You can just imagine the tough talk the obviously furious Bella dresses him down with:

"'You spied on me?' But somehow I couldn't infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered."

There was a brief period on Friends when Chandler was living with a psycho named Eddie. There was a memorable episode in which Chandler woke up in his bedroom to find Eddie sitting in a chair beside him, watching him sleep. Obviously, Chandler freaked out and immediately set about permanently removing Eddie from the apartment. I would consider that a perfectly understandable and quite necessary reaction.

I do not, however, consider "I was flattered" to be an understandable reaction.

Not only that, but Edward still thinks Bella is overreacting: "His expression shifted instantly to chagrin ... 'Don't be upset!' he pleaded. He dropped his face to the level of my eyes, holding my gaze. I was embarrassed. I tried to look away."

Are you kidding me? What on earth is wrong with these people? I've been married for a few years now to a woman I've known for a decade, and I would find it a bit strange if my wife was regularly watching me sleep. Bella hasn't known Edward very long and she's 87 years younger than him. This vampire story has just taken a turn for the creepy, and not the awesome, horror-movie kind of creepy that one would hope for in a blood-sucker tale. This is creepy in a To Catch a Predator kind of way.

I'm almost done with the book now, but as I write this I'm staring at the tall stack of books in the Twilight series left to be read, and I'm scared of what I might end up having to read in the name of writing a good blog. I've got to say that my mindset is shifting to chagrin.

"Somehow Smolder" would make an excellent name for a rock band.

Hello everyone, and welcome to my fourth entry in Twilight and the High Life! I've been neglecting this blog over the last couple of weeks, and until recently I had been neglecting reading Twilight. This happened for a very good reason:

My wife stole the book from me.

This happened over Thanksgiving, when I was too concerned about where to find good coconut cream pie amongst the sea of pumpkin to bother reading the symphonic ode to teenage girl-angst that is Twilight. As it turned out, Stephenie Meyer's tract of post-pubescent spiritual disquietude was exactly what my wife, Jeanne, was looking for in a holiday read, and she quickly managed to consume the entire book while I concentrated on other things, such as flossing. I've only gotten back into the book in the last three days or so, but have managed to just about get to the halfway point. Jeanne is constantly nagging me to read more, so that she can talk about the book with me. Under such hostile conditions I don't really have much choice to read, but it's hard to do so - really hard - and for a very good reason: the word choices are driving me crazy.

Let me give you an example of the kind of sentence that is very typical in this book. In this example our heroine, Bella Swan, is talking about her vampire beau, Edward Cullen: "He grinned back, his eyes somehow managing to smolder, even in the dark." His eyes somehow managed to smolder? When I first read that sentence I was tremendously confused. Reading the dictionary definition of the word "smolder" left me still more befuddled: "to burn sluggishly, without flame, and often with much smoke." Is it just me, or should Bella have rushed Edward right to the hospital as soon as she noticed the smoldering?

As it turns out, however, "smolder" has another meaning: "to show suppressed anger, hate, or jealousy." This doesn't sound very positive to me, and simply adds to my suspicions that Bella is in an abusive relationship. Sure, Edward has saved her from a number of very sticky situations (Bella calls him her "perpetual savior"), but he also seems to be extraordinarily controlling, cruelly patronizing, and just plain rude. (He also happens to be a vampire.) These tendencies were brought up in my last post, and I was very gratified over the Thanksgiving holiday when my visiting aunt told me "THANK YOU for saying that Edward is abusive. He is." My aunt was a librarian for many years and knows her books. I'll trust her on this one.

Anyway, I've reached a point where the reading is getting faster and easier, and I imagine I should finish the first book by later this week. I was thinking I would wait until I'd read all of the books to watch the movies, but Jeanne is pressuring me to watch the first movie as soon as I've finished the first book. This may have been prompted by a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, in which we took a look at that antiquated area in the back of the store called the DVD rack. Jeanne was most intrigued by the section in which Twilight was located:

Girls Night In.

I've got my work cut out for me.

I'm on Team Eric

Hello everyone, and welcome to my third entry in Twilight and the High Life! My first four days of reading got me only as far as the middle of the first chapter, but the last couple of days have seen a flurry of reading activity that has sent me surging all the way to page 68.

At the time of my last post I had just reached the point where the head-scratchingly-named Bella Swan was about to leave home for her first day at Forks High School. Little did I know that her school experiences were about to demonstrate her propensity for ... er, how should I put this delicately?... oh yes: bitchiness. I suppose I shouldn't be terribly surprised. Being a proud Seattle native, I was already disinclined to like her after reading of her reaction to the rain-soaked topography of Forks: "too green - an alien planet." I liked her even less upon reading of her smirking reaction to two young gentlemen named Eric and Mike who were both helpful and pleasant in helping her get oriented in her new school surroundings. Eric's assistance in showing Bella to her second class of the day earned him a dismissive "overly helpful, chess club type" description from our heroine, while Mike's similar services got him tacitly regarded as "taking on the qualities of a golden retriever."

Meanwhile, Bella has formed an overwhelming obsession with one Edward Cullen, whom she describes as "devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful" and possessing a mug that seems to be "painted by an old master as the face of an angel." And how does this angelic person welcome Bella? "He stared at me...meeting my eyes with the strangest expression on his face - it was hostile, furious ... He was leaning away from me, sitting on the extreme edge of his chair and averting his face like he smelled something bad ... He was glaring at me again, his black eyes full of revulsion..." and so forth. Naturally, Bella seems to be head-over-heels in love with this young gentleman, who if I'm not mistaken is also a vampire.

Is it just me, or is Bella clearly destined for one abusive relationship after another? Granted, Edward is surprisingly pleasant the next time he meets our heroine, and proves to be a shockingly intelligent lab partner in science class. There's also the small matter of him using some sort of otherworldly power to save Bella from being crushed to death by a van spinning on an icy road. Still, even if Edward weren't a vampire, he doesn't seem like he would make a particularly upstanding human at this point in the story. I realize it's still early in the book, and by my calculation I have only read 13.4% of it, but Bella just seems like the kind of person who grows up to be a battered wife who constantly says "It's my fault!" rather like Connie Corleone in The Godfather. I'd feel more sympathy for her if she weren't so patronizingly dismissive of classmates like Eric and Mike, who have shown nothing but thoughtfulness towards her. I just can't say I like Bella Swan at this point.

But still, things are early, and it's just a work of fiction, no? I'll do my best to keep an open mind as I  plow ahead in my journey into the world of Paranormal Teen Romance fiction.

And no, I did not purchase a copy of Alice in Zombieland at the same time I bought Twilight, so let's go ahead and put that rumor to rest.

Stick a Forks in that book!

Hello everyone! Welcome to Twilight and the High Life, and my first day of commentary on the first book in Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular series of vampire novels.

I bought my copy of Twilight last Tuesday at a Barnes and Noble in Spokane, Washington. My first impression of the book immediately upon purchase was an intense and profoundly emotional one: "I just bought a book that was in the Teen Paranormal Romance section???" Not really able to believe what I was doing, I actually (this is true) was so embarrassed by my purchase that I felt compelled to also buy a copy of BBC Music. With Georg Solti on the cover of this month's issue, I felt a little bit safer about combining that purchase with Twilight.

The friendly sales lady, apparently under the impression that the teen paranormal romance novel wasn't for me, naturally assumed I would want a gift receipt. I think it should be an indication of just how comfortable I am in my mature masculinity that I declined.

Anyway, after four days of furious reading I have managed to get almost halfway through the first chapter of Twilight, and in that time I have formed some very developed opinions of the book that are at least slightly more informed than simply judging it by its cover.

Things begin with a bible verse, Genesis 2:17, in which we read that "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." The death that verse speaks of has generally been interpreted as a spiritual death - the separation of humankind from God. The Geneva Study Bible, for example, has this commentary on the passage: "By death he means the separation of man from God, who is our life and chief happiness: and also that our disobedience is the cause of it." Vampire traditions change from book to book, but in most cases vampires are viewed as the embodiment of rebellion against God. The laws of physics and of mortality don't apply to them; they live outside the ordinary constraints of the universe. I assume that is the parallel Meyer is drawing with that particular bible verse, though as yet I don't really have much to go on.

Moving on to first chapter, we encounter a heroine by the name of Bella Swan, who has just moved from Phoenix to live with her father in the small, rainy town of Forks, Washington. I know what you're thinking: what kind of name is Bella Swan? Last night I asked my wife what her reaction would have been if I were writing Twilight and had decided to name my heroine Bella Swan. "I would have told you writing's not your thing," she said. Sage words, indeed. Yet I felt compelled to continue reading all the way to page 14, when I decided I would rather go to bed. But I was intrigued at the choice of Forks, Washington as the primary locale for Twilight, and that may keep me interested enough to finish the book someday.

I recall reading a few years back that Meyer had never been to Forks, and chose it only because it gets more rain than any other town in the continental United States. I have not been to Forks either, but I am quite familiar with the Olympic Peninsula, where Forks is located. While I was growing up my family would regularly vacation at Lake Quinalt Lodge, which is not far from Forks. The lodge is located in a temperate rainforest where moss seems to cover everything. "Like something out of Avatar," was how my wife described it. Bella's description of the region is a little less charitable: "too green, an alien planet." Something tells me I'm not going to like Bella.

I stopped reading right at the point where Bella is about to leave for her first day of high school in her new town. Perhaps I should read a little more before I comment further, but I can't say my initial impressions are favorable. We'll see comes next.

Twilight and the High Life: A Concise Introduction

Welcome to Twilight and the High Life, a cultural elitist's journey into the world of popular literature! In this blog I will be writing about my reactions to the insanely popular series of teen vampire novels by Stephenie Meyer. I don't know what to expect from these books, but if society's winds are any indication they will be a genuine, if somewhat guilty, pleasure. I look forward to sharing my reactions in as entertaining a manner as my effervescent prose style allows. Please be kind.

If you've read any of my previous blog, 80 Days of Toscanini, you'll know that I am a classical musician by trade, and a relatively snobby one at that. Why, then, am I venturing into a very popular subject matter, and one so far removed from what it is I do for a living? The less lofty answer is that my orchestra is currently on strike and I'm frankly a little bored. I have not yet read any of the Twilight books, and doing so while writing about my reactions to them seems like a good way to kill some time in a reasonably enjoyable way.

The deeper reason has to do with my constitutional fear of being left out of a cultural phenomenon. This may stem from a childhood in which I was always afraid of there being a party or some other form of social excitement to which I was not invited. I've never liked the idea of there being fun times going on to which I was not privy. So to this day, despite the high-brow cultural milieu I immerse myself in as a matter of both personal inclination and professional necessity, I regularly find myself drawn into the world of the uncultivated and the faddishly mainstream (or is it just my own myopic view that leads me to see it as uncultivated?). I frequently watch South Park and Family Guy on the same day I've rehearsed Beethoven and Brahms, and there's nothing about that that doesn't make sense.

The time has finally come where I must admit that Twilight has become a true cultural phenomenon. Lots and lots of people are talking about it, and I can't talk about it with them, because I have never read the books. I have also not seen any of the popular series of films based on the Twilight novels, because it just seemed kind of silly to watch them before I'd read any of the books. I greatly admired Kristen Stewart's performance in Adventureland, and Robert Pattinson gave Hufflepuff House great respectability in the fourth Harry Potter film. It's time to see the movies and experience more of what these fine actors can do, but first I want to read the books.

I should caution you that the very nature of this blog requires a big spoiler alert. I will be writing about my reactions to what I've read, and I can't really do that without describing the plot points of the books , at least to some extent. Many, many of you will have already read all of the Twilight series, but if you have not done so or have any interest in doing so this blog will probably be of little interest.

I hope this will be fun! I will post again when I've done a bit of reading.

Happy Friday!