Today is one of those days, the kind of day in which you get totally stuck on one more or less unresolvable issue and you have to decide whether or not to devote your energies to figuring out if there’s any way, any way at all, of dealing with that issue, part of which involves addressing the question of whether there even is an issue, resolvable or otherwise, and you’re pretty sure that doing so is probably just a waste of energy, because the issue, such as it is or may be, really would defy quick and easy answers, but you’re having trouble concentrating on anything else, so maybe trying to address the issue or not-issue is worth doing, because at least it would get you off your ass. But you’re not sure. So you just sit there. And worry.

So that’s my day! It does not lend itself to narrative exposition, so! Expect nothing more from me.

(While you’re adjusting your expectations, you can go read about how my daughter met a vampire, and why that raised certain questions for me, not least among them, what do I want to teach my daughter about vampires? and should I be hiding my copies of the Twilight series? and where did I put those old Buffy DVDs, anyway?)

This was the week that I let my Bad Mother flag really fly, I think. I mean, sure, I have, in the past, covered such established bad ground as spanking my preschooler and nursing another woman’s child and dressing my kid up as a Droog, but that ground is pretty well-trodden – doesn’t everybody use A Clockwork Orange as a reference when costuming their kids for Halloween? – and in any case,  I don’t think that you can really call yourself a bad parent until you start blaspheming Santa. Which I totally did.

(continue reading…)

New Moon – the second film in the series based upon the Twilight novels (which I will not explain to you here, because, seriously, have you been living under a rock?) – opened last night and I did not go see it. Oh, I’ll get around to seeing it, eventually, but I’m not in any great hurry because a) if I happen to find spare hours in any given day sufficient to the purpose of going to the movies, I will be using them to catch up on sleep, and b) I actually really kind of didn’t so much like New Moon the book (more on that below), and will only be seeing the movie to see the parts that actually involve a plot – which is to say, the end – and that can wait until I’ve caught up on my sleep. But the flurry of discussion about the Twilight novels and the movies deriving from those novels, much of which repeats last year’s canards about aren’t these books actually kind of bad? and a good feminist would never, ever let her daughter anywhere near these books, has got me thinking about the stuff I was thinking about last year when the first movie was released. So I thought I’d repost (what follows was originally posted at MamaPop), with some minor addenda and amendments, some of my thoughts on the subject.

So there’s this vampire movie? And, like, it’s based on this book that’s like part of a four-book series and it’s about this vampire? Who’s like a nice vampire? And he falls in love with this girl and she falls in love with him and it’s, like, SO AWESOME.

Seriously.

I’m not going to claim to anybody that the Twilight series is high literature. It’s not high literature, by any stretch, unless you happen to consider the works of Dan Brown high literature, in which case you’ve probably already read Twilight sixteen times and made notes in the margins with your National Treasure commemorative ballpoint pen, and, also, could I interest you in a library of leather-bound works by Ken Follet?

(continue reading…)