BLOGGING TWILIGHT, pt. 16: Gather Ye (Vampire) Rosebuds

I’ve been reading Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, which you may have heard of before, and blogging about my experiences. Previous installments can be found in the directory.

Chapter 16: Carlisle

Edward takes Bella to Carlisle’s office, where the good doctor is sitting behind a big mahogany desk reading. Is it possible to enter a room without finding Carlisle in some kind of dashing pose? I’m surprised he wasn’t facing the other way so he could spin around in his chair all suave and shit. The back wall of his office is adorned with pictures and paintings, and when Carlisle leaves for the hospital Edward fills in the rest of the story of how Carlisle the new vampire became Dr. Cullen, the Gandhi vampire. Okay, I guess Gandhi is going a little far—but he talks about how Dr. C developed his non-violent ideology and persuaded some of his fellow vampires—so I guess it’s more like how he became the David Koresh vampire.

Early on, Carlisle was upset he’d become a monster and tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. Vampire facts: they can’t die by falling off a cliff or drowning. They can’t even starve to death, technically. They just become assholes or something if they don’t drink enough blood. I’m not really sure why they have to feed if they can’t starve to death, but whatever.

There are a few ways to successfully kill a vampire, but apparently S. Meyer is playing that one pretty close to the vest, because Edward doesn’t share any of them with us.

Also, I think I objected to Edward breathing a few weeks ago, and he mentions that he doesn’t actually have to breathe—that it’s more of a habit. The only side effect of not breathing is losing your sense of smell. This might seem like a crass suggestion, but don’t you think over time, breathing for a vampire would become like talking for a deaf person? Wouldn’t Edward smell via a weird, animalistic snort or something? If breathing is unnecessary except for retaining a sense of smell you think their bodies would have figured out a way to reduce lung movement by now.

So Carlisle spent some time hanging around Europe—where he met some civilized vampires and studied medicine. And then he made Edward, and now we’ve come full circle, Pulp Fiction-like, to the backstory we’ve already heard. Almost.

Bella asks Edward if he has always been with Carlisle. “Almost,” he says (pg. 341). Bella presses him, and he confesses to a “typical bout of rebellious adolescence” about ten years after he was vampired. He says he “wasn’t sold on [Carlisle’s] life of abstinence,” so being rebellious, in Edward’s case, means ten years of being a murderer, which is far from your typical bout of rebellious adolescence (pg. 342). That’s the kind of rebellious adolescence for which one usually gets the death penalty. And Bella says this sounds “reasonable.” Reasonable? Think about what you are saying, Bella!

I work at a telephone-fundraising firm, and everyone in the office has his or her own way of talking to the members of various progressive groups we call. One guy, Barry, usually responds to a member who has refused his first ask by asking if a smaller amount, say, X dollars, would be “reasonable.” One day that second request didn’t work either, so Barry made some oblique reference to times being hard, it having been a long winter, but the weather was getting a little warmer, and maybe a gift of X/2 would be more “seasonable.” When you talk on the phone for hours at a time to strangers, you come up with some surprisingly poetic shit. It’s a great gig for bloggers. The “seasonable ask,” as it came to be called, didn’t work. But it would have worked on me.

But okay everyone, don’t panic. It turns out Edward was basically Dexter, and he utilized his mind-reading powers to track down those with the most evil thoughts. I’m not so sure I trust Edward’s definition of evil thoughts; this is the guy who rails about love and lust not always keeping the same company, etc. I trust Dexter to not kill me, but I’m sure I’ve had the kind impure thoughts Edward would probably declare kill-worthy. Also unlike Dexter, S. Meyer really spends almost no time at all exploring the profound moral implications of killing, even killing bad people. Eventually Edward’s conscience gets the better of him and he returns to Carlisle, but we don’t get much more than that. This is a particularly morally bankrupt chapter.

Edward's Wild Years: you can tell this was during
his youthful period because of the shades.

How To Make Dexter Cookies: A Recipe By Zac Little

Edward takes Bella to his room, which also has one glass wall. “The whole back side of the house must be glass,” Bella says, in a bizarre shift to the present tense (pg. 343). He’s got a wall of CDs, a leather couch, and expensive-looking stereo, a “thick golden carpet” and walls hung with “heavy fabric in a slightly darker shade” (pg. 344). This room sounds really awesome, and classy too.

There’s more talk about Edward being a little disappointed that Bella hasn’t run screaming from him yet (I feel the same way, Edward), and she tells him he’s not as scary as he thinks he is. So he growls and jumps through the air and tackles her, lifting her into the air and landing her gently on his leather couch, holding her down (cue porn guitar and/or saxophone). Just then, Alice and Jasper are knocking at the door, and Edward readjusts Bella so she’s sitting on his lap. Like a little girl with Santa, you know?

Alice comes in, Jasper lingers by the door. There is a lot of talk about how Alice moves like a dancer—on page 346, Bella says she “walked—almost danced, her movements were so graceful—” to the middle of the room, and when she leaves on the next page she bounds up to the door “in a fashion that would break any ballerina’s heart.” Alice being “like a dancer” is the new “Edward said darkly.”

Jasper says there’s going to be a storm tonight (he actually says “there’s going to be a real storm tonight” which sounds weirdly precocious) and asks if Edward wants to play ball. He does, and invites Bella along.

I rolled my eyes. “Vampires like baseball?”
“It’s the American pastime,” he said with mock solemnity. (pg. 347).

Nice one Edward! Take me out to the BA-ZING game, am I right?