Twilight: An Addiction, or Why I Will Never Read That Series

So I've been reading this book, Crack Wars by Avital Ronell that Tony --

Nanotext? Professor Prichard? The lines of formality have been so blurred that I don't really know how to refer to him anymore. I mean, I'm working on a collaborative novel with him and a bunch of other people, and as such have been to his house and met his wife and daughter but am still going to be in a classroom setting with him as the "authority" figure next quarter in Parasites. Quite frankly I see him more as a friend and mentor than as a teacher. But I'm getting off topic.

that Tony gave me to read a little over a month back. It's been slow going, mostly because I've only opened it sporadically when I wasn't running back and forth from one activity to another or studying for my actual classes. It's all about literature and addiction, and addiction as a parasitic entity. A drug, or rather something you can be addicted to, does not necessitate the use of chemicals, it is more complex than a chemical reaction, but can be anything that sustains the interplay between want, need, choice, freedom: drawing toward but never quite crossing the line in that suicidal euphoric rush of death.


But today I woke up, sat down and really started to get into it.

That is until I came across an annotation posing the question, "Who are we when we write? drug dealers? pharmacists? output's quality depends on your skill." This of course made me laugh as I thought of the author of the Twilight series, Stephanie Meyer. For her blatantly terrible books with their anti-feminist images (stalker vampire, possessive werewolf, weakling heroine) to seduce so many readers, many of whom are educated, respectable feminists, she can't be a writer. All the good authors are terribly difficult to read at times and yet are still considered undeniably good despite and because of any criticism they may receive. Meyer on the other hand is merely addictive.

I went to a panel the other week where her works were described as a relationship. You become involved with the books much in the same way you became involved with that stupid 15-year-old boy/girl who broke your heart back in middle school. But such a relationship isn't really a relationship. It's an addiction. There is an interplay (my I like using that word) of power dynamics in which you seek to appease and acquire that which you want.

So in a sense, she's a drug dealer, peddling to the masses of capitalist America. She isn't wholly to blame, her agent and her publishing company and the movies all play a big role in that as well, but as a writer, she's nothing more than a pusher for her romanticized, impossible, idealized, fantasy world. I cannot support that. There is so much more richness to be found in the reality I perceive around me, I don't want to waste my time. If I'm going for escapism, I'm going to take a little more fun without such unhealthy undertones. Give me fairy tales where at least you can learn from the darkness you encounter.