BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 7: Love Calls You By Your Name

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 4: Waking Up

It’s weird to see so much text on the page again! Apparently we’re out of the initial shock of Edward’s departure, which was so monumental as to alter the aesthetic core of this book for a few pages. The universe has re-aligned, for the physical book. Not so much for Bella.

At the start of this chapter an exasperated Charlie starts demanding that Bella go live with her mother in Florida. Bella is confused—like us, she’s tuning in halfway through this conversation. We’re still climbing out of the “form over content” forest, I guess. She wonders what she could have done wrong and alludes to four months of doing nothing but going to work and school, “after that first week, which neither of us mentioned.” So I guess there was a week of wild, grief-driven, furniture shredding psychosis that we missed, but not much else.

It turns out that all of that “not much else” is exactly what Charlie is objecting to. Bella hasn’t been taking it out and chopping it up, and Charlie wants her to raise a little hell. He says she’s been “lifeless.”

Now we start to get a sense of exactly why we were just hit with a series of blank pages: that’s how Bella’s existed for the last few months, outwardly at least. She’s been pretending to be okay, for Charlie’s sake, and now it occurs to her that it must not have been working. “Honey, you’re not the first person to go through this kind of thing, you know,” Charlie says. But she kind of is, right?

“Honey, you’re not the first person to fall in love with an undead vampire with a strict moral code who will barely allow himself to touch you because of the overwhelming desire to drink your blood, from whom you’ve begged for immortality and from whom you have been repeatedly rebuffed in requests for same, with whom you have nonetheless fallen irreparably in love and with whom you dream about spending literal eternity, and you’re not the first person to then have that vampire cruelly and theatrically dump you in the middle of the forest and then attempt to eliminate any evidence that he ever existed in the first place. Actually, never mind, you are the first person to do any of that.” -Charlie Swan

He starts bringing up his divorce, and you think he’s going to get sympathetic with her, but he basically says, “I didn’t take your mom walking out on me this hard, which was an actual divorce between people who had a child together, so I think there is literally something wrong with you that this is affecting you so much.” He wants her to see a shrink. Bella shoots that idea down, mentally noting that she couldn’t possibly tell her doctor the truth about the family of vampires who abandoned her. Patient-doctor confidentiality only goes so far.

Instead Bella proposes a trip out of town with a friend, and we get another little great Charlie moment that explains more about Bella’s current state in a few sentences than does the ten pages of emotion-exposition we will get at the end of this chapter:

“Look,” I said in a flat voice. “I’ll go out tonight, if you want. I’ll call Jess or Angela.”

“That’s not what I want,” he argued, frustrated. “I don’t think I can live through seeing you try harder. I’ve never seen anyone trying so hard. It hurts to watch.”

Bella really has been shut down for a few months—it doesn't appear to have been just for show, or if it was, Bella has included herself in the charade—we get repeated references to Bella feeling the first “spark of emotion” she’s felt in a while, once when Charlie explicitly mentions she needs to leave Forks to get better, and again when he makes reference to the fact that Edward hasn’t called or written in months. The explicit reference to Edward bothers Bella so much that she leaves for school to avoid further conversation, subsequently getting there so early she sits in her car and reads her calculus book for a while. Finally Bella is apparently studying something that is appropriate for her age level—some of the teachers at Forks High apparently have heads on their shoulders. Then this happens:

I forced myself to keep at it until the parking lot was full, and I ended up rushing to English. We were working on Animal Farm, an easy subject matter.

An easy subject matter? What the hell is that phrase? Also, Animal Farm? What the hell kind of 12th grade English class is this?

Eventually Bella meets up with Jessica and makes an awkward date. Bella's so nervous about having to talk to her that she lingers outside the classroom and ends up late to class. There was a lot of discussion going on in the comments about whether or not Bella's bizarre behavior was realistic in the last chapter. I can't really speak to that, but this compulsive avoidance of social interaction, this fear of asking people for anything, even something reasonable- this I totally have. I am Bella Swan, with respect to most social interaction.

Bella has to flatter Jessica a lot to get her to go to the movies; you get the sense that they haven't talked in a long time. There's more curious brand-name avoidance here: Bella alludes to seeing "that one with the female president," but Jessica tells her that one is out of theaters. "Well, there's that romantic comedy that's getting great reviews," Jessica says. That is definitely a thing that a normal person has said in a real conversation. I'm just kidding that's the most unrealistic line I think I have ever read! What's weird is Jessica mentions a (fictional) movie title one line later, a zombie flick called Dead End. So, why couldn't S. Meyer come up with something that sounded like a rom-com, too? It's important that Jessica mentions it because we need to understand that Bella is avoiding all depictions of romance in all forms of media; she was happy to be dealing with Animal Farm and Communism in English rather than Romeo and Juliet and true love. But to put it this way, with this awful line, just calls attention to the fact that S. Meyer is trying to drive this point home. We got it.

(S. Meyer spells "communism" with a lower-case c, by the way, which is wrong.)

Bella wants to see the zombie movie, so they agree to go to Port Angeles that night. Zombies, huh? I see where you are going with this one, S. Meyer.

I've been watching Mad Men a lot recently, and many of the episodes follow a certain formula. A character is having a particular emotional-repression problem, and that problem is reflected in something external, usually having to do with the world of advertising. So Don Draper's pitches always sound like they are half about whatever product he is selling and half about his life. There's an overwhelming sense of the weight that is causing these characters to act this way, and you never feel like true emotional health is even remotely possible. But then something big happens, and a character temporarily breaks out of his or her box. Betty Draper starts shooting a gun at her neighbor's pigeons. It is always exhilarating, but then everything returns to normal. This chapter of New Moon is structured in exactly the same way.

Bella goes home to get ready and avoids looking at something in a trash bag at the bottom of her closet: the stereo from Emmett et al., which Bella clawed out of her car with her bare hands. Hey, uh, shouldn't Edward have taken that? It's okay for his brothers and sisters to have seemed like they existed but not Edward himself? See how quickly the "it will be better if it's like I never existed" logic becomes impossible and breaks down? It just makes the whole CD and picture stealing gesture seem even more random and cruel. How is Edward so old and still so stupid? Is Edward a registered voter in Arizona?

(By the way, it occurred to me today that back in the breakup chapter, when Edward offers to mail all of the pictures to Renee on Bella's behalf, he probably took the envelope so that he could remove all of the pictures of himself from it first. Edward's dick moves know no bounds.)

Jessica picks Bella up; Bella makes a concentrated effort to form a smile on her face in the mirror before she goes outside. There's a lot of Dexter-style stuff in this chapter where Bella coaches herself on how to act like a normal person- when she needs to talk, the sort of questions she needs to ask- but she's not as good at it as Dexter. Also she doesn't kill Jessica at the end of the night.

In the car, whatever Jessica is listening to (obviously we don't get a band name) bothers Bella so she changes the station to rap. Jessica is appalled. She's basically like, "You listen to black music?" I like that Forks is so white the idea of a white person liking rap is unfathomable. They haven't even gotten to that mid-90s phase where white guys wore FUBU shirts all the time. Forks is so behind-the-times, that will happen in like 2015 or something. When they finally get high-speed internet and cell phone towers. And they finally find out that Barack Obama is the President. They make small talk; it turns out Eric, who vanished off the face of the earth at the end of Twilight, still exists. Good to know, I guess.

So the movie is playing early, so they "hit the twilight showing" and decide to eat later. Did you guys catch that? That was the name of the last book!

I listen to the /Filmcast every week, and the hosts of that show are extraordinarily concerned with the purity of the movie-going experience. They debate theater etiquette on a regular basis and are essentially terrified by the possibility that someone near them in a theater could be the kind of jerk who talks or takes phone calls during a film. They've told stories about being mortified by friends who talk over films or shout things in theaters; they've shared strategies on how to seem like a psychopath in the theater so that potential talkers will be too scared to set you off. Anyway, I just found myself thinking that one of those dudes would probably freak out at Bella or Jessica for the the way they behaves at the movies. They talk throughout the previews, and then when the film starts and there appears to be a depiction of a romantic couple on screen, Bella gets up and leaves, deciding to get popcorn. She comes back ten minutes later. "You missed everything," Jessica says. "Almost everyone is a zombie now." That's kind of funny, but shut up, Jessica!

Bella manages to enjoy the zombie action for a while, until the very end, when the symbolism of this whole chapter dawns on her.

The scene kept cutting between the horrified face of the heroine, and the dead, emotionless face of her pursuer, back and forth as it closed the distance.

And I realized which one resembled me the most.

I stood up.

So maybe this is a little more blunt than Mad Men. She walks out again, pretending afterward to have been too afraid. Bella notes the irony of the fact that all this time she's been trying to become a vampire, and she ended up a zombie. "It was depressing to realize I wasn't the heroine anymore, that my story was over," Bella says, which is itself also ironic, because we have another 450-something pages to go in this, which is only itself the second installment of her four-part story. Oh man, how long ago did I start this series? We're going to be doing this forever.

Leaving the theater, Bella realizes that Jessica is suddenly very tense and quiet, walking quickly and staring straight ahead. They are passing a sketchy-looking bar, on an unlit patch of road, and there are dudes hanging around outside. It's a place called One-Eyed Pete's, and Bella notes the sound of ice clinking coming from inside. I don't know if S. Meyer has actually walked past a real dive bar, but nobody's drinking anything with ice in there. I walk through Maverick Square every day, and what you hear is the sound of toothless yelling, the sound of stale beer being poured and vomited back out, and the sound of slow death. No ice. Ice clinking is a good sound.

I guess we should have seen the rape thing coming, huh? Why do people even go to Port Angeles if it is basically the rape capital of Washington? "Hey Jess, want to go see a movie in Port Rape?" "Sure that sounds like a good idea. I enjoy the cinema and also attempted rape." Jessica is a model of rape instincts in this situation, as it happens. Head down, keep moving, ignore the cat calls. Bella would do well to learn from her, because what happens next is, she basically tries to get raped on purpose. Betty, get your gun.

She is reminded of the last time she was surrounded by creepy men in Port Angeles, and starts walking toward them for some reason. Naturally Jessica starts to lose her shit. I don't really understand the geography of this scene- Bella walks toward the rapists, Jessica starts after her, but then stops, and Bella keeps going, but Jessica always seems to be within earshot and the rapists don't- how big is this street? It's hard to visualize. Bella is always walking toward them, or thinking about walking toward them, but she only ever seems to travel a few feet.

The guys are probably not rapists, and definitely not the same would-be rapists from before, but it still is a dangerous situation and Jessica is rightly panicked. She asks Bella is she is suicidal, and Bella answers that she is not, but then realizes it was a rhetorical question and the fact that she engaged with it as though it was a valid question in the first place is probably sending a bad signal about her state of mind. Bella steps forward again, and someone yells at her to cut the shit, but it's not Jessica. GUESS WHOSE DISEMBODIED VOICE IS BACK?

Well, I think it is Edward's voice, but Bella avoids saying his name, referring to him instead, always just using masculine pronouns in italics. It's making me think of that dream Bella had in Twilight where the pronoun/antecedent problems grew into a kind of awe-inspiring collection of nonsense.

The writing bottoms out here. I think we're past all of the meta stuff, so it doesn't make sense to suggest that all of the bad writing is supposed to reflect Bella's bad mood. Seriously, though this is some of the worst ever. Bella doesn't understand why she is hearing Edward's voice.

Option one: I was crazy. That was the layman's term for people who heard voices in their heads.

What the hell? I can't even start to break that down, it is so offensive to my sensibilities. That is the layman's term? Crazy? It keeps going.

Option two: my subconscious mind was giving me what it thought I wanted. This was wish fulfillment- a momentary relief from pain by embracing the incorrect idea that he cared whether I lived or died. Projecting what he would have said if A) he were here, and B) he would be in any way bothered by something bad happening to me.

Um, what is the actual difference between those two options? Bella also uses subconscious and unconscious interchangeably, irritatingly attaching the word "mind" after each most of the time. Bella's subconscious mind and unconscious mind are like new characters in this book, filling the void left by Edward and Alice. But Bella's unconscious mind is nowhere near as hot.

Bella has been avoiding thinking about Edward, and explains how she'd gone numb rather than experience pain. But this little moment has snapped her out of it, and she is trying to decide whether or not she wants to try and push it further.

There was a second of choice.

There was just a second of me vomiting because I hate that sentence so much. Bella decides to step forward again, and Edward yells at her some more and she loves it. She loves being reminded how paternalistic that dude was; it fills her with joy! But it turns out the guys aren't rapists, and Bella is disappointed because the voice goes away.

The threat that had pulled me across the street had evaporated. These were not the dangerous men I had remembered. They were probably nice guys. Safe. I lost interest.

That's our Bella, huh? If they aren't going to fuck her to death, deliberately or accidentally, Bella doesn't want any of it.

So she and Jessica go and eat (at McDonald's, a brand name that is mentioned several times; Bella even literally uses the phrase "golden arches," which is like WHAT) and Jessica rightly treats her like a crazy person. On the drive home, Jessica blares music and ignores her while Bella thinks everything over. This book has a lot of "thinking things over," so be prepared. Bella decides she was thrilled by the whole brush-with-rape thing because it made her realize she hasn't forgotten Edward; she's been worried that he was right about how he would slip from her mind.

Because there was one thing I had to believe in to be able to live- I had to know he existed. That was all. Everything else I could endure. So long as he existed.

That's also why Bella got all angry about leaving Forks at the beginning of this chapter: leaving Forks would make him seem even less real. I'm kind of pleased that S. Meyer was willing to wait so many pages to explain the significance of that earlier moment between Bella and Charlie, obvious though it might have been. It's also more Mad Men structuring- Bella comes home to Charlie and we are back where we started. Nicely done. It almost makes up for those last few pages. But it doesn't.

When Bella starts explaining, S. Meyer has a tendency to use a lot of italics, so it starts to look like maybe Bella's been reading a lot of Nietzsche. Also it feels like we're just getting started with the pronoun-with-no-clear-antecedent-indicating-Edward stuff. This happens as Charlie is standing, pissed off in the doorway, because he didn't know where Bella was:

"Hey, Dad," I said absentmindedly as I ducked around Charlie, heading for the stairs. I'd been thinking about him for too long, and I wanted to be upstairs before it caught up with me.

"Him" meaning Edward, all grammatical evidence to the contrary. Bella explains to Charlie that she went to the movies with Jessica, which is actually exactly what she told him earlier, and he calms down. She goes upstairs and we get a long description of how she is overcome with pain.

She describes it as a hole in her chest, with "unhealed gashes" that "continued to throb and bleed despite the passage of time." She gets so worked up that she has trouble breathing and even getting her blood to properly circulate. Bella's emotions have always held a lot of sway over her actual biological functions; that is a very weird talent to have. Some people are double-jointed, others do this. We are all unique snowflakes. Bella hugs her ribs to keep herself from falling apart. Aw, poor baby! Everyone needs to be nicer to Bella, okay?

Everyone needs to be nicer to Kristen Stewart, too. I just read about her interview in the new issue of Elle, which obviously I had to read about on the internet because I am not a subscriber. They basically asked her why she looks so sad and stressed out on the red carpet:

"People say that I'm miserable all the time. It's not that I'm miserable, it's just that somebody's yelling at me...I literally, sometimes, have to keep myself from crying...It's a physical reaction to the energy that's thrown at you."

And you know what? People in the comments at Huffington Post are being assholes about it! Shocking, I know! They're saying things like "don't act in movies, then." Right. Because people who act in movies have to sign off on totally insane TMZ freelancing motherfuckers chasing them down and screaming at them all day? Is that in the contract? It's bizarre to me that people don't immediately realize the problem is our sick celebrity culture; there are plenty of people out there who act in movies without being hunted down by paparazzi every waking hour, but occasionally a few unfortunate people seem to get picked out. And certain audiences out there want to see pictures of these people every time they leave the house (and sometimes just, you know, when they walk near a window) in magazines every week and on the internet every day until whatever happens to break the cycle. The celebrity in question goes insane. People get bored. Someone dies in a car crash. But you are right, commenters. Kristen Stewart should just get another job then. We should discourage all of the people who have normal reactions to this kind of thing from ever getting involved in this industry until the only actors we have left are terrifying, reality-TV show craving fame monster abominations. That will make it so much more fun to go to the movies.

One guy, who looks like a forty year old man, says she should rent our her forehead to advertisers. Thanks, asshole. Would you say that about one of your co-workers daughters?

I have this problem where when I say something in jest on the internet, people think I am being serious, and when I say something serious people think I am joking. I wear a wedding ring, because I am married, and people who have spotted it in videos have asked about it. I have answered them truthfully, saying that I am in fact married. Now, remember like a year ago when everyone was writing "25 Facts About Me" on Facebook? I wrote one, which was obviously full of lies. One of them was this:

14. I am unofficially considered the fifth Jonas Brother. By unofficially, I mean the only thing actually recognizing my status is a Court Order barring me from attending performances. But it does say "Fifth Jonas Brother," on the page.

A month or so ago I got an e-mail from someone asking if I was really married, because they had heard that I was but they also read on my Facebook page that it was a promise ring. What I'm saying is, I am often misunderstood.

So I just wanted to make it clear that when I talk about how awesome Kristen Stewart is I am not kidding at all. This girl is great, and she is doing interesting things with her career, and she deserves our support. And I think our support should mostly entail leaving her the hell alone.

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 6: Meditations in an Emergency

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Steve Carell once said that Marcel Proust once said that all of those years he spent suffering were actually his best years, because they made him into who he was. I personally disagree; the years of my life in which I was less happy than I am now had a tendency of bringing out my worst qualities. If I could, I would basically Don Draper away a lot of that stuff. But I can't, and so maybe someday I will look back and realize that Steve Carell was right about how Marcel Proust was right. Misery, at least, is pretty good for Bella. Look how artsy!

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when the tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

This is the entirety of the first page of chapter four, after Bella's nifty form-over-content calendar trick in and on the proceeding pages (if you haven't figured out the trick from the last post yet, try highlighting it). It's Bella's "Out out, brief candle" speech, an exquisite little moan of great apathetic, you know, whatever. I can hear this tone-poem in Kristen Stewart's voice, but I can also hear Tom Waits speaking it while someone hits a wind chime with a tin can in the background. And that is a good thing.

I appreciate the not-too-intrusive alliteration of a phrase like "blood behind a bruise." And actually, "Aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise" scans as iambic pentameter. Just saying. Okay, well that is a trochaic foot at the beginning. Or you could call the first one a foot with an assumed unstressed syllable in the space before "aches" and then call "like the pulse" an anapestic foot.

The kind of verbal coloring S. Meyer normally uses makes "strange lurches and dragging lulls" seem pretty great by comparison, but maybe in some other context I'd be unimpressed. I'm not sure. Do you think if S. Meyer published this little paragraph anonymously people would like it? Do you think the book around changes it, somehow? In context, is it more ridiculous than it would be out of context? If I bring this up, are we going to get into a huge argument about the state of White Person Literature again?

Put your AP Lit hats on. Is there any poetry-analysis 101 I missed? Somebody want to unpack Bella's metaphors? We've just about dispensed with the narrative trickery, and I have just about dispensed with my last semester of schoolwork, so next time we'll dive headlong into a proper chapter. But I like this little page, in and out of context. How did you all feel about it?

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 5: Meta-Enabling

So all that stuff we said about Stephenie Meyer nobly eschewing the modern tradition of form over content turns out to sort of be bullshit, a little bit. Not that this little trick isn't cool: After Edward leaves, we get a series of BLANK PAGES. The only word, in the center of one side of each, is the name of a month: October, November, December, January. All blank. I knew this was coming, actually, but I think it really would have worked on me otherwise, really brought home the finality of Edward's departure. I mean, obviously it's not really final, but for all intents and purposes.

It's really kind of a half-meta nod, because we really haven't established how Bella is narrating this story. It doesn't have a convoluted framing device like a Henry James novella, it's not a diary, and Bella never makes references to future events, unless you count the preface. So it's hard to know what the blank pages are really supposed to signify; my working theory is that we are literally seeing inside Bella's head, and this is her extremely articulate stream-of-consciousness. And when Edward, leaves, her mind just goes blank. Like the way we don't feel extreme pain until later. I knew a guy who once got hit in the face with a basketball and fell backwards into the wall of his school gym. The next thing he knew he was sitting in class two hours later, and his head suddenly started hurting more than it ever had before. He started screaming. He had no recollection of how he had gone from the floor of the gym to his subsequent class; his mind blocked it out protect him. Which is sort of what is happening here, I think. I'd never really given a thought to the existence or nonexistence of narrator-logic in the Twilight Saga before, how have you been interpreting it? Or have you?

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 4: The Precipice of an Enormous Crossroads

I've been reading New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer. Previous entries can be found in the directory. As always, please share your thoughts on this chapter in the comments.

Chapter 3: The End

The next morning Bella is feeling shitty and Edward is still all dead inside. I mean, he literally is dead inside, but for once he’s actually acting like it. Bella’s afraid he’s been thinking about “right and wrong” all night—if he has, he’s probably got some really retarded ideas this morning. Does Edward stay in bed with Bella all night? Does he ever get up and go for a walk? Catch a movie? It just feels like such a waste. What good is immortality if you’re not going use all of that time? Alice and Jasper have band practice at night. Emmett plays Call of Duty and re-watches Die Hard. Carlisle and Esme play board games (Operation, natch), and Rosalie practices bitchy faces in the mirror. They’re making the most of it!

Bella’s anxiety is sort of taking the form of a hangover—she’s got a pounding headache, she’s wincing at loud sounds—and to make matters worse, Edward is almost totally ignoring her. She’s got a million questions for Alice, but she never shows up to school. Edward finally tells her in the middle of that day that Alice is with Jasper. And Jasper has “gone away for a while.”

“And Alice, too,” I said with quiet desperation.

I would object to the appropriation of “quiet desperation” here, but Alice is gone? That blows! Edward keeps up the cold shoulder routine for the rest of the day.

“Did someone say pork shoulder?”-Charlie Swan

Bella’s frustrated that she keeps having to break the silence, but she does. She tries to use sex again to warm him up—okay, she uses the promise of more dry humping—but it doesn’t work this time. He’s ice cold. Literally, but also figuratively.

Bella has to go to work, and when she finally parts with Edward she basically has a panic attack in a parking lot. “I was able to talk myself into enough composure to handle getting out of the truck and walking to the store.” That is an ugly sentence—“enough composure?”—but I kind of admire it as a pseudo-entry in the Bella Swan Mixed-Metaphor Hall of Fame. Blame lying “on the doorstep of the town of Forks,” is still one of my all time favorites.

The “store,” by the way, is the Newton family sporting goods store. Mike greets her enthusiastically (Now we know the strings Bella pulled to get this gig—or rather the one string. Is that suggestive enough? I’m talking about Mike Newton’s penis.) and Bella nods “vaguely in his direction.” That’s a good move, Bella. I use that one a lot.

Bella spends work distracted thinking about what Edward could be thinking—she decides she’ll offer to stay away from his house from now on. “I’d see Alice at school,” she says. “No doubt I would also run into Carlisle with regularity—in the emergency room.” Sorry Jasper, Rosalie, Emmett and Esme! I guess you don’t rate! Then Bella has a reprise of her “let’s away to prison” King Lear speech, where she decides that the two of them should run away together into semi-seclusion. At some point in this chapter she just starts assuming that also is what Edward is thinking. It reads to me like a profound delusion, but maybe it’s supposed to be a real red herring.

Bella drives home and is relived to see Edward’s car in her driveway, but she ends up walking straight into some kind of Sam Mendes-style domestic hellscape. Edward and her father are sitting in the living room, watching SportsCenter. For a minute Bella talks to Charlie and Edward doesn’t say anything. Finally he makes dead-eyed eye contact as Bella heads to the kitchen, saying “I’ll be right behind you,” before returning to the TV. It’s weird that such a thing would be chilling, but it is. All of Edward’s charming chivalry is gone—he’s not sitting in a wife beater drinking a can of PBR, but he might as well be, you know? What is wrong with my testosterone levels that I find sitting around seemingly half-conscious and watching ESPN to be utterly appalling?

Bella sits in the kitchen running through worst-case scenarios. If Edward wants her to stay away from his family, she’ll do it. “Of course, he wouldn’t expect Alice to be a part of that,” she says. That’s right Edward! Don’t you dare try to keep Alice and Bella apart! Would you try to keep peanut butter away from jelly? No. You would not. Would you try to keep Ellen away from Portia? I promise I know other lesbian couples, but they are not springing to mind at the moment.

Bella returns to the “running away” scenario, and is troubled by the idea of leaving her parents. Thinking about them, she regards her camera and scrapbook sitting on the table and decides to start documenting the time she has left in Forks. She starts to think about Edward’s “carefree laughter” the night before juxtaposed with his current Al Bundy incarnation in the next room.

It made me feel a little bit dizzy, like I was standing on an edge of a precipice somewhere much too high.

"All due respect, Bella, you got no fuckin' idea what it's like to be Number One. Every decision you make affects every facet of every other fuckin' thing. It's too much to deal with almost. And in the end you're completely alone with it all."

We’re accumulating themes at a pretty rapid pace here—we’ve got the Romeo and Juliet motif, the self-absorbed love stuff, the cliff imagery, the soul garbage. I’m not complaining; compared to the relatively thematically shallow Twilight this book is reaching Shakespearian thematic density. Didn’t see that coming.

Bella takes a picture of her room, despite the fact that it hasn’t really changed since her childhood. She notes that her mother will recognize the quilt—you know, the one she dry humped Edward against—because it was made by her grandmother. Gross.

Bella feels change coming, and the urge to take pictures is weirdly compulsive. She goes down to the living room, where Edward and Charlie are still staring at the TV, and forces them to pose for a few shots. She notes the “strange distance” in Edward’s eyes. “Probably he was worried I would be upset when he asked me to leave.” Poor Bella! Oy! They take some joyless photos—Bella can barely smile—and she tries to be casual around Edward but after Charlie takes a picture of them, this happens:

Edward dropped his hand from my shoulder and twisted casually out of my arm. He sat back down in the armchair.

O cruel! What a dick! Bella sits on the floor and tries to hide her shaking hands. The show ends and Edward gets up to leave. What a dick! My allegiance to Team Alice grows stronger every day. Bella follows him, he refuses to come back and stay the night, and he leaves her awkwardly standing in the driveway in the rain until Charlie calls her back from the porch. I have to say, it’s quite a compelling miserable scene, New Moon’s own little Revolutionary Road. And someone needs to punch Edward in the face. Dick.

The cycle continues for a few days—Edward walks with Bella everywhere, goes to class, and doesn’t talk. It echoes the scenes in Twilight where the opposite happens: they talk for days and days. Both are a little tedious! Last time I was like, fuck already! Now I’m just like, fucking break up already! “If only Alice would come back,” Bella laments. I know!

One day after work Bella picks up the first roll of developed photos. She goes home and looks at the first picture. “When I pulled it out, I gasped aloud.” That’s what she said. Bella, I mean. Edward looks just as good on film as he does in real life. “It was almost uncanny that anyone could look so… so… beyond description. No thousand words could equal this picture.” Well, thanks for trying anyway, S. Meyer.

The next few pictures, taken after the party, show the very different, new asshole Edward 2.0. He’s still hot, but it doesn’t cheer Bella up. Looking at them together she feels uglier by comparison rather than hotter by addition. She folds the picture in half and puts it in the book, Edward facing up. I’m thinking maybe instead of a picture of a shadow being cast by the number four I should just have a “cymbal” sound effect or something for symbolic moments like these.

One day the axe just falls. Edward asks Bella to take a walk with him in the woods. There’s a lot of stuff about smiles not touching/reaching eyes and Edward speaking in an “unemotional tone”—clearly this is not going to be a walk to a surprise party or something. Bella’s been waiting for a chance to talk through whatever the fuck is happening, but now she’s seized with panic.

I didn’t like this. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, shit, the voice in my head repeated again and again.

Well, that’s not exactly an accurate quote, but you get it.

They only walk a few feet into the woods before Edward stops. “We’re leaving,” he says. Bella, not understanding what he meant with the “we,” starts pushing him to wait a few months until graduation. When he starts talking about how Carlisle is trying to pass for thirty-three, the awful truth dawns on Bella. It gets pathetic real fast.

“I’m not good for you, Bella.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I wanted to sound angry, but it just sounded like I was begging. “You’re the very best part of my life.”

The problem is, the rest of this chapter has turned me against Edward so much, I’m kind of excited he’s leaving. I’m not stupid—I know Bella is about to get fucking miserable—but this motherfucker is more trouble than he’s worth. Good riddance (for now) to bad rubbish (at the moment) is what I say.

The fight hits some predictable beats:

• Bella brings up his promise in Phoenix that he’d stay—he reminds her that he said, “As long as that was best for you.” Bella knew that was going to come back and bite her in the ass one day.
• Bella brings up the soul stuff: “You can have my soul. I don’t want it without you—it’s yours already!” Nicely played, Bella. That would have worked on me!
• Edward’s eyes aren’t “liquid topaz” anymore—his eyes are harder, “like the liquid gold had frozen solid.” If Edward is leaving I hope he’s taking the eye metaphors with him. We get another one in a page or so: “His eyes were like topaz—hard and clear and very deep.” Why is this written like it’s the first time we’ve ever heard about the topaz?
• Edward delivers the crushing blow when he tells her, “Bella, I don’t want you to come with me,” somehow emphasizing the subtext. “You…don’t…want me?” Bella says. Don’t you just want to give her a hug? Where’s Esme when you need her?

Bella kind of goes numb for a while, and Edward gives a big speech about how he’s sick of being human.

“Don’t.” My voice was just a whisper now; awareness was beginning to seep through me, trickling like acid through my veins. “Don’t do this.”

I really wouldn’t be able to break up with Bella! That would have totally broken my resolve! But Edward is a stronger man than I. He does eventually break out of the super-cold mode for a second to plead with Bella to take care of herself, and she promises that she will. He says he’ll make a promise in return. “I promise this will be the last time you’ll see me. I won’t come back.” That doesn’t seem like a fair promise-for-promise exchange. Don’t act like you’re doing us a favor, Edward! “It’ll be as if I never existed,” he says.

I know what you’re thinking: what this really needs is a patronizing coup de grace—that would really complete the asshole package. Edward delivers:

“Don’t worry, you’re human. Your memory is no more than a sieve.”

Hey Edward, didn’t you say you were going to leave or something? For one of my seminar papers this year (you know, the thing I should be writing right now) I’ve been looking at rates of “don’t know” responses in public opinion pills. Clyde and Lolagene Coombs found that among the usual expected lack of information, apathy, and similar factors that contribute to levels of “don’t know” responses, rates are also just correlated with time. Longer surveys wear people down, and don’t know responses go up as survey length does.

There may be something of that going on here, because the worst moment for Bella seems to come when Edward says, “We won’t bother you again,” and Bella realizes that Alice is gone too.

“Alice is gone?” My voice was blank with disbelief.

It might just be correlated with time, but I hope not. Bella gets dizzy, and Edward bails, but not before pecking her on the forehead. Thanks, Edward. I’m sure that made the girl feel so great! Don’t let the forest hit you in the ass on the way out!

Bella tries to follow him, but soon she’s just walking through the woods in a daze. “Love, life, meaning…over,” she muses. She walks for hours, trips over something, and then just stays down. It’s dark out. She gets the feeling a lot of time has passed, but she can’t tell because there’s no moonlight.

A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn’t cold.

I know, Bella. The symbolism knocks me out. Not really though. More like symbolis-meh, you know?

Eventually Bella starts hearing people call her name, but she doesn’t answer. She realizes she probably should, but she can’t summon the energy. She falls asleep and wakes up again when it starts raining.

She hears an animal-like “snuffling sound” nearby. Bella again notes that she should probably do something, but she doesn’t give a fuck. She is so beyond giving a fuck. A dude shows up with a propane lantern (retro!) and tries to get her attention. He’s like, “I’m Sam Uley,” and Bella is like, “Fuck off.”

But then Sam mentions Charlie and Bella snaps out of it. She ends up allowing the dude to pick her up and carry her home. “Some part of me knew this should upset me…but there was nothing left in me to be upset.” Bella totally gets off on all this misery, and I am right there with her. Sam brings her back to where a big crowd of people have gathered; Charlie put quite the search party together. There’s a sweet moment when he runs up to Sam and carries Bella into the house, even though he can’t quite manage it gracefully. He wraps her in blankets and puts her on the couch. There’s a doctor there, but uh, it’s not Carlisle. Forks has more than one doctor?

Bella pretends to have gotten lost in the woods, but she’s sort of very obviously having a nervous collapse. It seems like most of the males in Forks are in her living room—even Mike Newton. It’s got to be embarrassing to have so public a breakdown, but if Mike Newton is anything like me it will just make Bella seem hotter. Maybe I’m weird. Well, I definitely am.

Bella overhears in the swirling, hushed conversation going on around her that the Cullen family has come up with a public alibi for their exit: Dr. Cullen got a job offer in LA. Bella is like, well obviously they are not going there, but she seems to be forgetting that just a few months ago the Cullens came up with the brilliant strategy of making it seem like she was running to Phoenix so that it wouldn’t seem like she was going to Phoenix so that she actually could go to Phoenix. I wouldn’t eliminate that LA possibility just yet. The search party leaves and Charlie answers a bunch of worried phone calls while Bella zones out on the couch. Eventually she hears a tense conversation between Charlie and Billy Black—it turns out they are having celebratory bonfires on the Reservation.

At this Bella gives us a weird paragraph of backstory about how the Quileutes hate the Cullens. We’re still doing summary this late in the game? Page 81? I was enjoying wallowing in your misery, Bella. Don’t interrupt!

Charlie obviously wants to know why Edward dumped his daughter several miles into the forest, but Bella explains that she tried to follow him. It turns out Edward forged a note in Bella’s handwriting explaining that they’d gone for a walk in the woods that afternoon. So Edward knew she’d probably wander off all devastated, and would, you know, probably require a search party, but he didn’t care enough other than to leave a clue for Charlie? What a dick!

And Edward isn’t even done with his dick moves—Bella goes to her room and all the pictures of him in her album are gone. Her birthday CD is gone. Every artifact she could associate with him is gone. Fuuuuuuck.

Whoever edited this video is a fucking CHAMPION. I was looking for the original 2Gether video and I found it. Same wavelength, whoever you are.

The whole “give me back my stuff” thing is a particularly callow way to end a relationship. This, as most of the other stuff, is kind of a subtle perversion of normal break-up tropes, and I can appreciate the sitcom-level cleverness of it. Obviously it doesn’t remind Bella of an episode of Seinfeld or something, though. She collapses onto the floor.

I hoped that I was fainting, but to my disappointment I didn’t lose consciousness. The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under.

I did not resurface.

Like I said, I kind of enjoy Bella’s misery. Not that I want to see her suffer—I think it’s more like how some white people probably felt watching Precious or something. I have a feeling I won’t be so jazzed after a few hundred pages of this, though. And that’s exactly what we’re about to get.

BLOGGING TWILIGHT, The Deleted Scenes pt. 1: Some Things Are Better Left Undead

We’re really never going to run out of stuff to talk about here—the Twilight Universe seems to be expanding rapidly. I got into this thinking I was dealing with four books and four movies. Now it’s five movies, a novella, a graphic novel, and deleted and altered content from all four books that S. Meyer has made available online (I’ve also taken it upon myself to follow the careers of the actors made famous from the Twilight films, but that’s on me more than anyone.) There’s also something called Midnight Sun, which is basically S. Meyer’s Cardenio. So this week, I took it upon myself to read two of the deleted chapters from Twilight—it turns out we’re not done talking about it after all. Previous entries can be found in the sidebar-- Blogging New Moon can be found in the directory.

“Shopping With Alice”

So this is an alternate version of the 20th chapter—in the book we get Bella’s fractured-narrative, mostly past-perfect tense account of the drive from Forks to Phoenix. This one is much more linear, and a lot lighter. Bella’s misery at separation from Edward and the experience of a long and stressful drive have made her look like a meth addict, something even Bella seems to find darkly amusing as Alice drags her through a shopping mall in LA (en route to Phoenix). I also like the way we get a much fuller picture of the kind of lives the Cullens lead most of the time—they have multiple false identities and apparently adopt a “rich asshole” persona when they want people to stay out of their way. And it works! It’s hard to believe that Jasper has the self confidence to stride into a hotel like he owns the place, but maybe that’s because I’m working with his new personality as required by the plot of New Moon. (What if the receptionist got a paper cut?)

There are also some interesting details, like the way Alice has to stay in the shadows when she’s walking into a mall, and some interesting (and mild) social commentary, like the way salespeople seem to ignore Alice and Bella as a couple of weird lesbian drug addicts until Alice pulls out her credit card and they suddenly get all subservient. We also learn that Alice has a keen eye for the size of other women’s bodies (hmmmm), has a sharp memory, and is a particularly decisive shopper. Alice also seems to only buy very light clothing—so despite the fact that they are ice cold, vampires apparently avoid being warm when possible.

We were just talking about comedic interludes between dramatic moments—and having Alice unable to resist the temptation to shop even while on the run is kind of funny. It’s also great that this irony is really unacknowledged by Bella in the narration. This is acknowledged by S. Meyer to be a rough draft, so maybe that’s unintentional. (I therefore didn’t really look for formatting problems and ignored the fact that at one point Rosalie seems to named “Carol.”)

The comedy continues when they check into the hotel—Bella falls asleep and slides off the couch, hitting her head on the table. One time my brother did that when we were kids—actually we were wrestling and he bounced off a bed and hit his temple on the corner of a nightstand—and he cut his temple in such a way that blood started like, shooting out. It was actually kind of terrifying. But this time it’s funny. Jasper thinks so too, but that’s because there’s no blood, and no paper cuts. There’s also a very adorable moment when Bella is overwhelmed by the kindness Alice and Jasper are showing her—just because they get the hotel staff to bring her a toothbrush and stuff. It’s a great little character moment, cut apparently in the service of moving the plot along. But what plot? A book doesn’t have to be sleek like a 90-minute movie. Twilight is largely plotless, and the late introduction of a plot is kind of jarring. The inclusion of stuff like this would have softened the impact.

This version of the chapter also has the advantage of setting up the friendship between Bella and Alice. In New Moon we sort of just have to take Bella’s word for it—again, a bunch of past-perfect establishment—so it’s nice to see how it could have formed organically in the text.

It’s a good read, and I sort of wished S. Meyer had left it in. I see the appeal of switching up the narrative every now and then from a writing standpoint, but not from a reading one. When you think of the way the last hundred pages or so rocket through the action you kind of want it slowed down a little bit. Then again, I’m currently making notes for the first of several of Bella’s long interior monologues in New Moon, so be careful what you wish for I guess.

“Prom Remix”

I complained before about the lack of brand names and detail in the epilogue and prom scene on behalf of the fashion conscious among us, and obviously I regret that now. Once again a whole scene here became a past-perfect flashback in the book. It’s actually very similar to the way the Twilight and Harry Potter film adaptations save time by overlapping the dialogue from one scene in the book with a visual montage of something else. Different mediums, but essentially the same trick.

It’s another comedic scene, and again Jasper seems capable of doing things he is no longer capable of in New Moon. Rosalie obviously was a different character at some point in the writing process—a friendly, female mechanic, apparently. This chapter also uses the phrase “haute couture.” So there’s that.

Basically Alice and Rosalie get Bella real dressed up and stuff her into a corset (there’s an actual reference to cleavage—which is kind of surprising) and then everyone acts shocked that she looks so pretty. Shouldn’t it bother Bella that Edward pretends not to recognize her and then proceeds to talk about how beautiful she looks?

Jokes from New Moon show up originally here. It’s good to know that S. Meyer reuses jokes she didn’t get a chance to use the first time around—I have about 15 unused episodes of Rock and Sock and Robot that I go back and reconstitute every time I run out of ideas. Esme shows up to take pictures of Edward and Bella all dressed up, and Bella makes that crack about him not showing up on the film from Chapter 1 of New Moon.

The whole thing with Tyler being a dumbass is still here, and of course the central premise of Bella not understanding that she is going to prom. Again, we have a little more time, and there is less hinting that Bella thought anything else (a vampire induction ceremony, say) was happening. There’s really no reference to the fight about becoming a vampire, except for a brief moment where Alice & Rosalie seem to be contemplating vamping Bella to make her prettier for the prom. (Or something? I’m actually not clear on what is happening in that moment.) The point is Bella’s realization that she is being taken to prom seems far less ridiculous here than in the book.

There’s more comedy—where the other deleted chapter gave us “wacky Alice foibles,” this one gives us “wacky Charlie foibles.” He lusts after Edward’s “special occasion car,” an Aston Martin Vanquish, which is such a ridiculous car name it must be real. Edward makes dinner for Bella at her house, and the chapter (and presumably the book) ends as they drive away. I like the prom scene a lot though, so I can’t really endorse this as a replacement epilogue.

These were both pretty good though, and I have to give S. Meyer credit for being above board, posting all of this stuff online. Obviously I have to avoid most of her website until I get through the rest of the series, spoilers and all that. Plus it probably colors my experience in a certain way, and I think I said something about resolving to remain true to my own subjective experience a while ago. Maybe I didn’t say it here, maybe I said it in the shower. But the point is I look forward to checking out the rest of this stuff eventually. What did you think?