Thursday, August 9, 2012

Literature, Twilight and Loving Books

I’ve come to the realization that my life will never be fulfilled so long as I have not published a book. I think about it everyday. Walking into a bookstore and seeing it there. To be a producer of the magical tomes of entertainment and wisdom that have filled my life with joy since I was a kid.

When I was six years old my teachers told my mother that I was retarded (Okay, not REALLY, but they said I had difficulty reading), little did they know I’d read the newspaper at home and beg to stay up late, not to watch TV or play with toys, but to read books.

It started with shark books, dinosaur books, and my late father’s collection of National Geographic magazines. I can still recall him reading to me from a book of legends and unexplained phenomena. Ghosts, Spring-Heeled Jack, UFOs. It gave me nightmares and I loved it. It eventually progressed to the world of fiction. I would sit with my mom and watch the Stephen King made for TV movies on ABC. Tommyknockers, The Stand, IT, The Langoliers. All of’em. (Yes IT traumatized me, all clowns must die and cannot be trusted. Also, don’t walk anywhere near a storm drain.) I loved them so much that at about ten or so my mother signed me up for the Stephen King book club. I tried to read the first book that arrived, the massive Insomnia, but I was 10 and it was a bit much for me. I did pick up and do well with Nightmares & Dreamscapes, a collection of short stories, which is easily the genre King excels at.

Fast forward a year or two and my sister’s boyfriend lets me play DOOM on his computer. It blew me away, I got DOOM for my Playstation not long after and devoured it. I played it over and over again while listening to Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and White Zombie in my room. It also prompted me to buy two DOOM novels based on the game, these I devoured in about a week, but in them one of the characters mentioned that the monsters, demons, and the entire situation that was happening was something out of a Lovecraft novel. Lovecraft, huh? I shall have to investigate this name. My mom purchased for me a Lovecraft collection and I was ruined. It floored me.

Over the years since then I read anything I ever wanted to, nothing was ever taboo or off limits. My southern mother’s love of books was passed on to me, along with her progressive open mindedness. I was allowed to read anything I wanted. From the books of “The Great Beast” Aleister Crowley to The Satanic Bible by Anton Szandor LaVey, nothing was off limits.

It’s for this reason that I can usually appreciate something about nearly everything, but my standards for what is “literature” are a little bit high, biased and convoluted. Basically, I’ve become a jaded book snob. A semester ago on the first day of class we were asked to give our name and list our favorite book or books. A lot of Twilight and Harry Potter answers. Some of the guys answered with things like graphic novels, Watchmen, 300 and the like. I was the first, in my opinion anyway, to answer with actual literature when I said Lovecraft, Homer, and Melville.

My personal definition of literature works like this: it needs to be a text that is prolific enough in scope that the ideas embedded in the story allow it to be timeless.

Basically it works like this:

This is fucking awful.

This is not literature. In fifty years, I sincerely hope no one is reading this fucking garbage. The late Peter Steele of Type O Negative once said that “functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.” I agree completely. What is the function of Twilight? What does it accomplish? What is the message it conveys?

 Does it teach young women to fight for what they want? Well, no. Does it teach men that if they want something they should fight for it? Well, no not that either. So, what the hell is the moral of this story? If you meet a vampire let him put his sparkly weiner in you, it’ll be great?

Something else that always bugged me about the story is this, Bella is a teenage girl and this Edward vampire kid is over a hundred years old, they both look around the same age, physically. But mentally he is much older than her, he’s had plenty of time to read all the classics, visit every major museum, learn every language, study countless fields of science… why in the fuck would he have ANYTHING in common with or be able to talk about with a teenage girl? Teenagers aren’t deep, they’re retards. I’m almost thirty and if I had to carry on a conversation with a teenage girl for an hour I probably couldn’t do it. I can barely tolerate and get along with college kids in their early twenties. I can barely tolerate and get along with anyone. Let alone some expressionless mopey girl in the backwoods of Washington.


I won’t pick on Harry Potter too much, because it does actually bestow concepts like perseverance through adversity, courage and things like that. However, I do get annoyed when people act like J. K. Rowling is the greatest author in the world.

 “Hogwarts! Totally original!”

Remember this guy? That's Hoggle. Back in 1986 a young Jennifer Connolly kept bungling his name. You just got it didn’t you? You remember when she called him Hogwart? Yeah, I know.

Then there’s the name for the spells… first of all, Tolkien invented A NEW LANGUAGE for his books. Rowling’s spells are mostly Latin and Greek words cobbled together that just so happen to mean exactly what the spell does. Let me show you how it works, I’m going to make up a spell right now.

Ignarussygkrafeas! I have cast the spell of “ignorant author” on J. K. Rowling. It took me two minutes to assemble that spell.

Now, I’m not entirely innocent of this practice, I’m writing a fantasy/fairytale style novel and coming up with names is difficult. Half the time I want to delete everything I’ve just written because I think it is stupid, we use what we know.

Literature should be thought provoking. It should teach you something, or at least get you to think about things in ways you never have before. Melville can give you a greater appreciation for life at sea and travelling abroad. Lovecraft can redefine what horror is and can be. And Star Wars novels, well you see they uh… increase your power in the Force. Knowledge is power. Yeah.


Darth Bane taught me that “Honor is a fool’s prize.”



That’s it for this week kids, see you next week when I enthrall you with the ghastly tales of… MY EX-GIRLFRIENDS. (Spoiler: I dated a vampire fairy once.) See you then.