www.wiffli.com

by Jason Edwards

Can I bear witness to you? I think I first noticed the Twilight books while stalking the aisles at my nearby Barnes & Noble, right about when the third or fourth book in the series was coming out. Actually, I’m not sure how many books are in the series. There’s five books in the Douglas Adams Hitchhiker trilogy, so obviously numbers aren’t the issue. The point is, the books had been out a while before I knew about them.

And I’m telling you about my ignorance not to suggest any kind of moral superiority, like my taste is so refined I don’t even notice books like those by Stephenie Meyer. No, I’m trying to point out that this was right on the edge of Twilight become a phenomena. Look, I’m on the internet 10 hours a day or more. I know about things. If I hadn’t noticed it yet, it wasn’t huge yet.

I considered taking the books out for a spin, cause I like a good vampire tale as much as the next 30-something pervert. I mean, I own all the Buffy and Angel TV-show DVDs. But I had tried and not liked one of Laura K Hamilton’s books, and I didn’t like what I’d read of Charlaine Harris, and Jim Butcher’s stuff had left me very unhappy about serial genre fiction. So I was gunshy. Not to mention that they stocked Twilight in the teen section, and JK Rowling’s final Harry Potter book was an enormous let down, and I’m not talking about the plot, I’m talking about the writing style, which had been getting worse at a steady rate ever since book 4.

So, when the Twilight famdom hit, and with it the requisite naysaying, I was relieved. I mean, all the Twilight hate that splooged onto the scene justified my having eschewed the books. And it soon came to be the case that there was way waymore “Twilight Sucks!” than there was love for the books and movies. (Of course, that might be just because of the types of websites I go to.)

But then people I respect were telling me how much they enjoyed the books and movies. Note the word there: enjoyed. Not even liked(though most who enjoyed the books liked them too) and certainly not praised. These were people (okay, mostly women between the ages of 25 and 35) who were educated, intelligent, well read, thoughtful… maybe they weren’t “critical,” but in these modern times, “critical” and “cynical” are more or less the same thing.

So, to be sure, when I read websites that painstakingly pointed out, line by line, why Twilight was awful, I agreed with the analyses. But I also tried very hard never to say “Twilight sucks.” I did say it, on occasion, and I rue having done so, as it was hypocritical of me to have passed judgment on something I have not read all the way through, a judgment based on my own arbitrary sense of value. It was exactly the sort of arbitrary system that I hated in college, the one professors used to tell me: “Shakespeare is good because he wrote well, and he wrote well because what he wrote was so good.”

Anyway, the other day, flipping through random websites, I came across another Twilight-hating blog, and in this one, the writer pointed out that hating Twilight had become an institution. And then he went on to say something along the lines of “all these people, jumping on the I hate Twilight bandwagon—when I was one of the original haters, back in the day!” In other words, this person was complaining that hating Twilight had become too mainstream, and he wanted everyone to know he was Twilight Hate OG, one of the founders, and not just another johhny-come-lately hater wannabe.

Personally, I can’t stand that crap. The whole “I liked the band first” crap. It’s crap. And not nutrient-rich manure that you can use to fertilize plants. It’s dog vomit, leper diarrhea, toxic waste. The idea that something you like becoming popular is bad? I mean no offense to Sarah Palin’s baby when I say: that shit is straight-up retarded.

So here’s me, thinking Twilight sucks, but not wanting to hurt the feelings of people I respect who like the books and the movies, and now I want to distance myself from the stuck-up snobs who take pride in always having been anti-Stephenie. I’m in an awkward position.

But Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol? I read it. That shit was horrible.