You Should Not Masturbate On Memorial Day Because It Is Disrespectful To Our Veterans

But if you must, it turns out that there are a bunch of HOT pics from Eclipse we left out of the roundtable. Holy shit you guys, this movie looks like it has so much STRAIGHT FUCKING in it, it's going to be like 9 Songs but with vampires.

Obviously I left out the super NSFW stills of Bella performing unsimulated oral sex on Edward a la The Brown Bunny, because this blog is for mixed audiences. But this film adaptation is going to get one thing right: the blistering hot sex. Explicit sex is what S. Meyer is known for, after all, so this is only right.

Sorry, Jacob.

Twilight Roundtable: Thousands of Graphic Design Students Are Weeping With Impotent Rage

So Rosanne suggested to me a while ago that we take a moment to talk about the posters and promotional stills for Eclipse, and that struck me as a great idea. Because seriously, what the fuck is happening with these posters? I hate them so much! I want to murder them! And clearly all of you are against me on the subject of Jacob being an unredeemable asshole, so I think we all need to agree on something to clear the air. And I think we can all agree that basically every promotional image associated with ithus far has been a DISASTER. But maybe I am wrong, and we don't agree, and it's just my peculiar aesthetic taste that has been so offended.

So here is how we will play our game: Post your reactions to the items below (make sure to clarify which item you are referring to) in the comments, and I will repost them here in the appropriate spot. Check back to see what your esteemed Twilight colleagues have to say.

ITEM A [Click any item to enlarge)

Zac: Uh, what the fuck is this? What is the point of getting all your actors together for a photo-shoot if you are just going to make them look like oil paintings? Robert Pattinson got the worst of whatever photoshop tool this is, ("age drastically," probably) but Kristen Stewart sort of looks like she's going to throw up on us. Does the stomach virus come back in Eclipse?

Kira: Why are they being shot from below? It looks like they were about to take a professional photo and then a paparazzo popped (alliteration!) out of a manhole cover and snapped this while they weren't expecting it. They all look so disappointed in that paparazzo!
I hate the weird shadowing, too, where the light source is coming so strongly from one side that robpattz and taylaut's left cheeks are hidden in weird shadow. I get it, eclipse, but still. Taylaut's left eye looks like a creepy robot eye, peering from a melting flesh mask. Yikes!
Also, why is it so windy that kstew's hair is blowing about? Is her active "chaotic" hair supposed to hint at the excitement of the movie? Her hair is so excited!

Zac: Now I'll never be able unsee that robot eye. Maybe Taylor Lautner actually is a robot. It would explain SO MUCH.

Rosanne: I kind of like the melodrama here, but now that I hear what you guys are saying, I'm too busy laughing at how weird they look. What's up with TL's nose and has he always had that dimple on his chin? (Interestingly enough, I just learned today that dimples are technically called foveas.) Bella looks like a total see-you-next-tuesday and also looks like she should be on the poster for The Craft or any other movie about teen witches. And Edward needs to get back to 90210, Dylan's dad is back in jail and he needs a bro's shoulder to cry on.

Emily: I think that summit has gone too far. They have created monsters out of these hardly known actors. (Kstew, Rpatz, TayTay *shuder*) They can't even give the time of day to show up at a photoshoot. So they have to go all CGI on that shit.

Zac: I don't want to believe that these are just like, CGI composites (even though that's what it looks like) because it runs counter to my idea of Summit Entertainment as a draconian but nonetheless incompetent, sort of Orwellian organization who would drag these three in to a photo studio all day long only to airbrush the shit out of the photos so much that it looks like they were never there in the first place.

MusicallyInclined: It makes me feel like I'm (judging by the looks on thier faces) some nearly dead body of an animal that got ran over. It kinda makes me feel like I'm gonna get gangbanged or something.

ITEM B Zac: I was talking on Twitter a while ago about how Jon Hamm is really great at just acting with his face - his facial expressions contain multitudes (multitudes of "what the fuck is Don Draper thinking right now?"). All of these guys, not so much. Is that guy in the back trying to look threatening?

Kira: Good job giving weensy little dfann a double chin! They can photoshop everything but can't blur out the chin created by the awful angle of the photo? Isn't that the purpose of photoshop? Doyoyoy! Sll the actors look like they interpreted the photographer's instructions differently. From our left to right:
"look coy and super gay!"
"look sullen and bored!"
"look confused, stupid and mildly amused!"
"look pouty and also grossed out!"
Man, these costume and hair/make up people are so good at prematurely aging young, attractive actors. If there's an industry award for that they should definitely get it.

Rosanne: The Volturi are so unprepossessing [Nice vocab! Alice Cullen over here!-Ed.] in the movies. They aren't sexy or scary, they just look pouty and like they are trying to hold their eyes wide open. Vampire protip, guys, narrowed, glaring eyes are intimidating. Also, you on the left, you look too foppish. You, the tall one, you look uncomfortable in your clothes, and you on the right, I'm sorry you were turned during your awkward stage. Dakota, you're okay but you don't look fearsome at all.

ITEM C
Zac: I kind of like this one, because my girl Kristen Stewart even looks uncomfortable when she's been airbrushed into almost total obscurity. Are we sure this is even Kristen Stewart? It could be fucking Kat Dennings, you'd never know.

Kira: It's so cold on this photo shoot! (It's like she's holding herself together from the hole in her chest in New Moon! Like an easter egg for us, doodz!) Again, with her excited hair. It sort of looks like they took two separate pictures of her, one of each side of her face, and then pasted them together, but a one side was scaled a skosh too big. You see what i'm saying? Her face looks lopsided.

Rosanne: Oh, it DOES look like Kat Dennings. Also, close your mouth, Bella.

MusicallyInclined: What is with the facial expression??! Its like I look at it and have no idea what its supposed to be.

ITEM D

Zac: I can think of it least two things wrong with this poster. One, everybody has shirts on. Two, I think if they tried Summit's marketing department could fit at least 30 more people on here, and make it an even 100 people. With that dude way in the back it honestly looks like they were trying to make them stretch on into infinity. What is that dude doing WAY BACK THERE? Come up to the front, get in the picture man! I think I found Waldo, BTW.

Renken: First, the first 4 items are too airbrushed. Jacob: Far too tan, (Compare him in Photos A and D to photos F and I). Edward: Too tan! Isn't he supposed to be a vampire? Aren't vampires allergic to the sun? (Compare photo A to photos G and I). Kristen Stewart needs to learn not to inject heroin before a photo shoot, I don't care so much about how airbrushed to hell she is, so much as her expressions make me want to call Celebrity Rehab.

Zac: Jacob does seem suspiciously dark. Do we have a TIME magazine/OJ situation going on here? But lay off my girl K. Stewart, Renken. She is not responsible for her faces!

Kira: O doubt i have anything to say that is better than what Zac said. That teensy dude in the way back is fucking BUMMED. Seriously, that could be anyone in that picture. It could easily be a photobomb by Charlie Swan. I would like some shirtless pictures of the wolf pack to see if they got themselves in better shape for Eclipse because I found their physiques pretty disappointing in New Moon. Jacob is like a ripped superman and the rest of them are just slightly jiggly dudes in cut offs. Get these guys a cooler of meat patties and no more of those huge muffins! Leah Clearwater looks appropriately shrewish. Jacob's neck looks extra long in this picture.

Zac: I think I see M. Ward in there.

Rosanne: Leah Clearwater is a catch! I wonder if that rack affects her wolfself at all, though.

MusicallyInclined: That is a terrible angle for Leah, it's like you look at her and all you see is BOOBS, I mean honestly, they dont even look like they belong on her body!!

Zac: It almost looks like the shadow is coming from the boobs. Like, eventually they will block out the whole poster. Like an eclipse. See what I did there?

ITEM E

Zac: Rosanne sent me a bunch of posters, but this one I found on a Twilight message board, under which someone had commented that they think it really captures what Eclipse is about. This poster is not bad (at least, relative to the rest), but I really hope it is about more than this.

Renken: The "eclipse" part of the photo is photoshopped onto the clouds, which, according to these graphic designers, means eclipses happen under the cloud-line (Dear kids, pay attention in science class). Also, in dealing with the "eclipse" how come the Logo in Items A, B, D and E all have the "flare" on the right side, but in item C it's switched to the left? Also, why does the "flare" have varying lengths? (Compare the full "flare" in E to the rest, B having the shortest "flare.") If it has varying lengths, it tells me they have to crop it in order to fit it in the photo, which tells me these graphic designers don't know how to layer OR be consistent.

Rosanne: Haha, Renken, you know that Summit has an Eclipse style guide somewhere that talks about what the accepted flare lengths are and when you can use it on the left side as opposed to the right side.

Zac: I should also clarify that upon closer inspection the comment on the board read "i thnik it rlly cpatures what ekclispe is all abot." Who are these people and where do they come from?

ITEM F

Zac: This is Taylor Lautner conversing with Kristen Stewart's stand in, Ellen Page. I don't know why they'd use it as a promo still.

Kira: It's good that they are giving me plenty of time to prepare for how much kstew's hair is going to bother me in this movie. Thanks for the warning, bros. In this pictures it looks like she's doing that "what's that awful smell?" acting technique that Joey Tribbiani uses as Dr. Drake Ramoray. Jacob is not looming enough in this shot. She's supposed to come up to his chest, but whatever. I'm just so steeped in "Jacob is a huge, dark, heavily muscled, white hot-skinned indian man-god" imagery that it's hard to let go of.

Zac: We can't all be so lucky as the Harry Potter people - Rupert Grint growing tall and lanky exactly as written, Emma Watson getting gradually hotter - so maybe we should credit Lautner for getting buff as hell and be done with it.

Rosanne: Did you guys know that one of the reasons for reshoots was that Bella's wig was such a mess in some scenes? They should have just changed Bella's hair in this movie to that hot shag KStew was rocking while filming The Runaways.

Zac: I would have supported that.

ITEM G

Zac: I'm really happy they are keeping in the scene from the book where the Cullens visit IKEA.

Kira: Really, costume designer? Putting Carlisle (pfacc) and Jasper (jrath) in the exact same outfit in one scene? Why would you do that? There are other sweater styles and colors. They needn't both wear it right then. Also, jrath always gets fucked the hardest by the hair/makeup/costume team. So much fucking over of that guy. He can't NOT look like a middle aged lesbian. (In other news: a friend worked on The Last Airbender which is co-starring our under-appreciated friend Jackson Rathbone. They had a cast screening of the movie and jrath was there and my friend said he's really good looking in real life and very friendly, but not a great actor. Two of these were things I suspected and one was a pleasant surprise. FYI. Some good real life Twilight news. Poor jrath. He's the vampire actor no one has a crush on because he looks like a sad clown lady in the movies.)

Zac: I'm glad that I now have a reason to see The Last Airbender, because that trailer (there have been some boring teasers, but I'm talking about the one that ran before Iron Man 2) was AWESOME. And yet I have a well documented hatred of M. Night Shyamalan. But I can watch it for the blog and not feel bad.

Rosanne: So disgustingly monochromatic. The Cullens are the boringest vampires ever. At least Carlisle has an open collar. And yeah, what the fuck is up with the matching outfits? Was it family photo day? (Good to know that about J Rathbone. I always like it when you find out people are nice.)

ITEM H

Zac: Why do the Cullens look like X-Men now?

Kira: Yikes, this is a very unflattering still! Strangely, Rosalie (nfinke) looks very nice in it! Usually she's second in line, after jrath in the human centipede butt-fucking line which the hair/makeup/wardrobe team creates for the vampire actors. Heavy on the denim here. Vampires - we love denim so much for running through the forest! They all look a little full in the thighs, you know? I mean, normal people do, but they're not supposed to be normal people, they're supposed to be undead super hotties.

Zac: It takes a skilled cinematographer to make Ashley Greene look unattractive. Did I say skilled?

thetrace360: WHAT IS UP WITH JASPER'S HAIR?! He was supposed to be so hot, but the hair is just ridiculous. I pictured him much more buff when reading the book. And why is Alice dressing him so poorly? You'd think he'd be wearing something a little more sexy. Is he wearing a jumpsuit? Disappointed Tracey is disappointed...

Rosanne: When I first saw this, I was relieved that they weren't wearing, like, corporate attire. But now it just feels like something you'd see on awkwardfamilyphotos.com So much denim, so many shades.

Kim: What is up with the Cullens and the matching outfits? Is this what they do with all their non-sleeping free time, plan the weekly outfits? "Ok, guys, Monday we're going with blue sweaters and collared shirts - except you Edward. You're the angsty teenager so you get a hoodie. Tuesday, we're going early 90's with lots of denim!"

ITEM I

Zac: Shouldn't Jacob be bigger? (That's What Bella Said.) Can't they pull a Green Mile and have Robert Pattinson stand in a trench? Or did they blow the budget on hiring endless Kristen Stewart lookalikes to play her in this film?

Kira: Robpattz's sideburns are amusing and upsetting me in equal measures. Again, agreed that Jacob should be bigger, but they did a good job here making kstew look small compared to the doodz. Is this another v-neck sweater we see on robpattz? The cullen-hale household has cornered the market on v-necks, guys. There might not be any left for anyone else in the world. Sorry. All of taylaut's muscle tees are a continuing delight. Muscle tees are the best. seriously. in both ironic and serious ways, they are just the best.

Zac: Edward shops at the Ann Taylor Loft.

Rosanne: Aaaaand, back to the 90210 sideburns. Are people wearing those again? Not so much. Jacob must be the only wolf with a Napoleon complex.

Thanks again to Rosanne. Previous roundtables can be found in the sidebar.

Catching Up: The Week In Review (May 21-28)

It feels like everyone's schedules were more in sync this week, which is good. I'm glad when we're all thinking about Twilight at the same time. I know some of you are still a few chapters behind, and that's cool. I'm trying to keep up with comments on older posts, too. Thanks for keeping the discussion alive! Some new people are showing up here because I keep linking to this site from my vlog (haha why the hell do I have a vlog?), which by the way will soon be moving to fancy, new, YouTube sanctioned digs. (Hopefully with preroll adds and everything! Won't that be great for me and annoying for you?) So hey you new people, welcome, and you only have about 80,000 words to read before you're caught up. You could always wait for the abridged, vlog version of my blog about book one, which I just announced right then and there, which will happen eventually. Anyway.

How do you solve a problem like Jacob? We've been talking all week about whether or not Jacob is an asshole, and it seems like we're divided. I believe he is a deeply troubled young boy, who probably should be sent preemptively to jail for everyone's safety. Some of you seem to think he is a great person who would be fun to hang out with. (Maybe I'm weird, but I don't like spending time with people who are constantly declaring their intentions to someday fuck me against my present will. Who am I kidding? That's actually how I met my wife.)

Chapter nine was basically the culmination of all the cock-teasing we've been reading for weeks, but it wasn't the good kind of culmination that usually comes at the end of a lot of cock-teasing. Sorry about that, it just happened; I couldn't control my fingers (is what she said). Instead our culmination was a groan-inducing conversation between two equally deluded young people Miscommunication between deranged people is an unexpected recurring theme in this book.

In chapter ten, a series of unearned events leads to Bella's encounter with the super bear, who turns out to actually be five wolves. Whoops, town of Forks, you were WAY off on that one. Laurent probably gets killed by the wolves, but maybe not. But yeah. Maybe we should have a moment of (textual) silence for poor, (probably) dead Laurent. Always a bridesmaid, that Laurent, huh? He just showed up to presage something more wicked this way coming, never getting the glory for himself. Au revoir, Laurent. Adieu, adieu.

Kim pointed out how it would have been good/awful if S. Meyer had attempted to write Laurent's lines in some kind of French dialect, like Mark Twain or something. This week's game is to do just that: write some FRENCHIFED lines for Laurent in the Meadow scene . Like so:

"Bonjour, mon petite Bella!" Laurent exclaimed. "It eez a, how do you say, zurprise to see vouz here, no?"

"You smell so succulahn, Bella! I vould like to spread vouz on a crossaihn and enjoy you een a cafe in gay Paree!" he purred seductively.

Also this week, Bella Swan became a film critic, and I declared Jessica Alba our mortal enemy. Topics for discussion:

1. Jacob Black: Fuck, marry, or kill? Why?
2. What is the deal with S. Meyer and movies? Does she hate them? Has she never seen them? I'm detecting a real disdain and/or lack of understanding about the art of film in these books.
3. Eulogize Laurent in ten words. One of them can be in French, or sound vaguely French like Laurent himself.
4. It seems like we did a pretty good job with the enemies list: Jessica Alba, Hitler. Opinion was divided on Catherine Hardwicke. Can we reach a consensus? I will say that Hardwicke did not do NEARLY as bad a job kicking off a franchise as did Chris Columbus. But of course the Cullen Crest is incredibly stupid. If I was Bella the second I saw that motherfucker I'd be like, "Your family has a crest? On second thought, I'd rather hang out with that Mike Newton kid." So I guess I can't really fall on one side of the fence or the other.

Previously: The Week In Review 5/15

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 13: Five Wolf Moon

I've been reading New Moon, by Stephenie Meyer. Previous entries can be found in the directory. Recently: Enemies List

Chapter 10: The Meadow

Jacob stays sick and doesn’t call, and Bella’s conspiracy theorist instincts kick in. She’s getting reassurances through Billy and other third parties, but she doesn’t believe them. Obviously she’s going to be right about this, and a little part of me dies every time the conspiracy turns out to be true in any book or movie or TV show.

I loathe all conspiracy theorists—from the “9/11 was an Inside Job” fucks to the birthers to certain strains of Teabaggers. In watching Mad Men recently I think I’ve traced my loathing back to my father’s own dismissal of conspiracy theorists around the Kennedy assassination. My father was six when JFK was shot, and has been interested in the event and the man himself ever since; he’s even taken a few trips to Dallas. And he never paid a lot of heed to conspiracy theories around that event, the mother of all conspiracy-theory-birthing events.

Perhaps as a result, I have no patience for people who talk about the Bilderberg Group, etc. Seeing the world as a vast succession of conspiracies is a coward’s way of explaining his or her own weakness in the face of global events. I’m comfortable with my own weakness—I don’t see it as the result of shadowy secret forces keeping me down. That is the way they see it; eventually with these conspiracy theorists it always comes back to a personal place. The Bilderberg group is why I’m not rich and famous and powerful. (That isn’t to say the world isn’t full of people with lots of money and disproportionate advantage, but those people are out in the open. They don’t have secret meetings on the second Thursday of every month or something.) This is not to mention the fact that believing that you have information that millions of other people don’t (the especially dumb ones unironically use the word “sheeple”) takes a very special kind of arrogance.

Anyway, I hate it when the conspiracy turns out to be true, as it always does in works of fiction, because these moments, however small, reaffirm the beliefs for the believers. Stupid as that may sound, it's true. It’s the same logic that led to Bush Administration officials citing 24-like "ticking time-bomb" scenarios as justifying torture and other advanced interrogation whatever-euphemism-you-likes, apparently not realizing they were citing a work of fiction.

The first time Bella calls and gets no answer, she drives to La Push and no one is home at the Black's. She gets Charlie to call Harry Clearwater for the scoop, but it turns out Harry is having health problems and Charlie gets distracted with that. Eventually he gets off the phone and tells Bella that Jacob has mono.

“Kissing too many dudes.”-Quil Ateara

Bella looks up the symptoms to mono (Bella finds “a medical site” online and types it into the “search box.” See how you can be vague in an unobtrusive way, S. Meyer? More of this, please!) and doesn’t buy it. Still, she gives Billy and Jacob a week before she calls them again. Away from Jacob, all of Bella’s nightmares and anxieties and psychosomatic chest pains come back.

I wasn’t handling alone well.

I’m not handling that sentence well. I feel like I’m getting that stomach virus from the last chapter. After a week (obviously Bella tries a few times during the week against her own promise; she’s an addictive personality) Bella finally gets someone on the phone. Billy tells her that Jacob is okay now, and he went with some friends to Port Angeles for the day. Bella is like whaaaat. She realizes that her week away from Jacob was worse for her than it was for him, and her whole perspective is shaken. All this time she thought she was the cock-tease with all the cards, but it turns out Jacob had a hold on Bella’s cock, too. Is pussy-tease a word yet? It is now, I guess. “I felt the blood run out of my face,” Bella says.

Charlie comes down the stairs and finds Bella still holding the phone in her hand. He’s supposed to go fishing today, but when he realizes what’s up it occurs to him he should probably be on suicide watch instead. Bella tries to get rid of him, promising she’ll call Jessica so they can study for a calculus test. He seems especially concerned with keeping her out of the woods; there's a missing hiker now which is probably related to the giant bear. Obviously once Charlie leaves Bella resolves to go hiking alone, continuing the search for the meadow; Bella never passes up a chance to possibly die.

She sets off and immediately starts talking about how creepy the forest is. Hasn't Bella ever heard of Show Don't Tell? "The sense of unease grew stronger," Bella says. That's cheating, S. Meyer!

And then she finds The Meadow. She literally just stumbles in. That was easy! Bella says it "happened with an abruptness that disoriented me." Is that a little meta-wink from our author or am I crazy?

Speaking of crazy, this whole idea was stupid, and Bella almost immediately regrets it. She takes a minute to appreciate the perfection of the place, noting that it is so round and symmetrical it is "as if someone had intentionally created the flawless circle." I'm getting echoes of Edward's weird Intelligent Design speech from Twilight here, but this one is brief. Any possible Garden of Eden parallels are thankfully never made explicit.

But Bella's Subconcious Edward Father Spirit Patronus Ghost (SEFSPG) doesn't show up, and Bella is overcome with anguish, curling up into a ball on the ground. Oh, please. You knew this was a long shot, honey. I'm losing my patience for Bella's theatrics. She is in need of an anonymous fuck, someone who can make her forget about Edward for a few hours or even minutes-- just enough to realize he's not all there is. Almost as if he hears my thoughts, Laurent suddenly steps into the clearing.

What? I mean, okay, I guess that's fair. A minor character from Twilight is back! It probably wouldn't bother me if this whole meadow subplot had been earned in the first place, but it was a totally mechanical plot development with no real justification. Separate, these two plot points (The Meadow and Laurent returning) might be acceptable, but together they seem especially contrived.

Laurent is not here to fuck, though. He seems to have found Bella by accident-- they're both surprised to see each other.

"This is a credulity-straining coincidence!" Laurent exclaimed.

Bella is surprised by how unchanged he looks, but then remembers he's immortal. "It was very silly and human to expect some kind of change," Bella says. You catch that? Human? I like how Bella very casually slips back into Twilight rhetoric when the vampires reappear. I see what you did there, S. Meyer.

It's a bit of a set-up though, because Bella thinks about how when she thought of Laurent in the past (she thought of Laurent in the past?) she'd pictured him with gold eyes, like the Cullens, since when we last heard of him he was headed to Denali to live with Honorary Cullen Tanya and her family of fellow "vegetarians." I didn't realize he'd gone there to live, but Laurent confirms as much and implies that he's been fucking at least one of them. But the thing is, his eyes are still red. Which means he's been eating humans. Diets are hard, we all know it.

And clearly Laurent intends to eat (or maybe fuck and then eat) Bella, but as usual with Laurent the conversation is weirdly casual and friendly. He inquires after the Cullens and seems surprised they've left Bella behind. "Weren't you sort of a pet of theirs?" he asks. Bella says "his eyes were innoncent of any intended offense," but when your eyes are DEEP RED how can they seem like anything other than "almost comically hostile?"

Laurent asks if the Cullens come around here anymore, and the SEFSPG finally does show up, telling Bella to lie. She tries, but Laurent doesn't buy it. Eventually he brings up Victoria. Remember her? Not really, right? Well, she's mad at Bella. And Laurent says she "won't be happy about this." "About what?" Bella asks.

He looked back at me and smiled-- the expression made him look like a black-haired angel.
"About me killing you," he answered in a seductive purr.

Only Bella would hear that as seductive. Also, angels can't have black hair under ordinary circumstances?

Laurent is supposed to be French, oui? If so, why does he speak in a near-constant stream of English idioms?

"She thought it more appropriate to kill you than Edward-fair turnabout, mate for mate. She asked me to get the lay of the land for her, so to speak."

Laurent tells Bella she should be happy, because he will kill her quickly and painlessly, whereas Victoria had some Eli Roth shit planned. Bella tries to threaten him with Cullen vengeance, but they both know it's bullshit. If Edward found out Bella was dead he'd just off himself and it would be up to Alice to avenge them both.

"Beg," my hallucination begged.

This is like in Twilight when Edward sobbed sobs. Buy a thesaurus! Laurent goes in for the kill, and kind of endearingly, Bella's almost-last thought is "Edward, I love you." Speaking of Edward, when he left and promised it would be like he never existed so that Bella would be safe, did he forget that vampires outside his family existed? Like, for instance, the ones he'd just fought a few months ago? Did he forget that he was leaving Bella in a region with an extremely favorable vampire climate, through which vampires passed all the time? Did he not realize that despite the minor threat posed by Jasper once the best thing he could do to protect Bella (aside from turning her into a vampire) was stick around and protect her from the evil vampires who show up all the time?

EVERYONE IN THIS BOOK IS SUCH A DUMB ASSHOLE! I need Alice back. But then a huge creature comes out of the woods, and S. Meyer kind of misuses a semi-colon:

Then I saw it; a huge black shape eased out of the trees, quiet as a shadow, and stalked deliberately toward the vampire.

I'm not necessarily saying it should be a colon; it should probably be neither. Bella thinks the creature is the super bear, but upon closer inspection it's a giant wolf. And upon even closer inspection, there are four more wolves coming out of the woods. Laurent seems terrified, and Bella doesn't understand why. One of the wolves is only a few feet away from our heroine, and it looks at her and she starts thinking of Jacob for some reason. That's silly, Bella! Why would a huge wolf make you think of Jacob? Laurent flees, the wolves give chase, and Bella collapses alone in the clearing.

Bella can't move for quite a while-- her totally understandable and realistic (for once!) reaction to mortal terror is a bright spot in this chapter (I mean, not a bright spot for Bella, but you know). However, almost immediately she gets down to deeply analyzing what just happened. This is really neither the time nor the place, Bella!

...the wolves should have given Laurent a wide berth...it [made] no sense that they would pursue him. I doubted his icy marble skin would smell anything like food. Why would they pass up something warm-blooded and weak like me to chase after Laurent?

Aw, Bella is dissapointed. "Why didn't they want to fuck me to death?" Mind you she's still supposedly on the ground in a blind panic. "My mind couldn't move past the fear," she said only a few lines ago. Move your ass Bella! Get out of the woods!

She finally does move her ass, and getting out turns out to be an ordeal. (Kind of like this chapter am I right?) I do like the (too brief) description of Bella's escape: she's shaking so hard she has to put the compass on the ground to read it, she's falling down and getting scraped up, little noises make her scream so hard she's hurting her own ears. She finds her truck and locks herself in and has another breakdown. I feel like we should be keeping a tally of all the times Bella loses her shit in this book. Our girl is a mess!

She gets home, but it's late and Charlie is pissed. When he sees her all covered in sap and leaves she has to tell the truth (except for the part about the vampires). She tells him she saw the bear which was really five wolves, and he calls in her report to the police station.

Then Charlie asks Bella if she'd told him Jacob was going to be out of town today-- he sounds suspicious. I wonder if Bella's matted hair and sap-covered body is making him think she and Jacob spent the day having sex in the woods. You gotta admit, that's sort of what it looks like. Well, okay, not really. Turns out Charlie saw Jacob on the reservation today, arguing with someone.

Bella decides Jacob must have confronted Embry, and that must be why he's ignoring her. Okay, that's fine Bella. Think that if you want. But uh, don't you have more important things to worry about, though? Upstairs it finally (breaking) dawns on her: Laurent and Victoria are going to come after her now!

It occurs to me that Victoria's (alleged) motivation makes no sense-- Edward wasn't even the one who killed James! In the book it is sort of vaguely implied that Emmett and Jasper did the honors, no? So shouldn't Victoria be after Alice and Rosalie? In the film, Alice delivered the death blow to James, so should Jasper be the target?

But whatever, I guess I shouldn't think about it too much! The chapter at least ends with another great sentence, as the whole "I'm definitely going to die" thing occurs to Bella:

I pressed my fist against my mouth to keep from screaming.

I feel like S. Meyer is cock-teasing me now, nestling lines like this amongst the wreckage of the last few chapters. I keep saying it's getting better, and I keep being wrong. But we're all suffering through this together, and Alice has to come back sometime, right?

Special thanks to Renee for proof-reading this post. A week later, it is now free of egregious errors. Don't blog and train people at work at the same time, everybody!

Enemies List: Jessica Alba

I feel weird about making lists of enemies. It's very Nixonian, Hitleresque, Columbine-y. Not something one wants to be associated with. I much prefer to list things I like; I try to list my favorite movies all the time (though I have never succeeded definitively. Is it even possible?) and on the Angry Films Blog I started a HEROES LIST that includes Edith Zimmerman, Allison Schulnik, and Lauren Zettler.

And were it that we could spend all of our time celebrating that which we love. That would be great! But there's real evil in the world, evil that must be smoked out and brought to light. And so with a reluctant sense of duty, I must introduce the ENEMIES LIST to the Twilight Blog.

A few weeks ago Esquire magazine started a reader poll for the Sexiest Woman Alive. Esquire being a kind of oligarchy, the reader poll is distinct from the official, editorial-board selection. Apparently there will be two sexiest women alive this year. Doesn't that put Esquire in a rhetorically difficult position? "Our readers have spoken... and we disagree."

ANYWAY, much as I disagreed with many of Esquire's initial selections (No Mary Louise Parker?) Ashley Greene was one of them. Obviously I agreed with that. Greene even heard about it and asked people to vote for her via Twitter. Obviously I obeyed. In the first round she CRUSHED Joy Bryant, 87%-13%. But then my subscription to Esquire lapsed; that James Franco fiction piece was enough to keep me from rushing to renew it. Imagine my surprise when I followed a link to the current state of the poll and discovered that Ashley Greene had lost to Jessica Alba 52%-48%! What?

I'm a red-blooded American male, and I know that Jessica Alba is sexy. I also know that basically everyone on Esquire's original bracket (with the exception of Heidi Montag) is absurdly beautiful and therefore comparing them to each other is a weird exercise in futility, like comparing gold apples to gold oranges (or in Montag's case, bronze watermelons). I also know that naming a Sexiest Woman Alive (from a batch of predominantly white Americans, it needs to be said) is ridiculous and meaningless, especially when you are going to pick two. And especially because we all know the answer is Mary Louise Parker. I know that winning this won't really do very much to help Ashley Greene's career or raise her profile, and any raise she gets won't be a good one, really (that's what she said). It's not like Kate Beckinsale is suddenly famous now. Plus, Esquire's editorial board could easily make Ashley Greene their selection. (If they did I would renew my subscription, even if they brought James Franco on staff at the same time.) BUT STILL.

This is unforgivable, Jessica Alba. You are the first entry on the ENEMIES LIST. While we are listing enemies, does anyone have other nominations?

Recent entries:

Bella Swan Becomes A Film Critic

Blogging New Moon Part 12: Bad Romance

WRITING NEW MOON: Bella Swan Becomes A Film Critic

It turns out that some fan fiction doesn't just supplement or replace events in an existing book/show/film; it just takes the characters (or one of them) and puts them in an entirely new place and time. This opens up a lot of new possibilities. Probably too many. Not to keep making jokes about Bella masturbating, but why does she have to masturbate on multiple planes of reality? Can't she just masturbate in one? But whatever, this is the way the world works I guess. No use fighting it.

Let's assume for a minute that Bella Swan is basically the same person she is in these books, but she never met any vampires or werewolves. She's just a normal girl, who grew up and started blogging, and then got hired as a critic for Salon or something. This is what would have happened:

"Bella Swan Becomes A Film Critic"

Bella Swan stared at the blank computer screen, waiting for a flash of inspiration. She was drunk, but usually that helped. Somewhere, her cat moaned. It was probably hungry. She should get up and feed it. But wouldn’t that be a kind of resignation? No, she had to get few hundred words out first. She lit another cigarette.

The phone rang. Bella saw it was her editor calling. Fuck. She answered.
“Bella? It’s David.”
“Uh-huh. What’s up boss?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Nothing serious. So what is it?”
“Well Bella,” he had that hitch in his voice, like a reluctant scolding was coming. “I’m reading your most recent review.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Well, okay, uh, let’s start with the first graph: ‘The new romantic comedy starring the beautiful blonde actress everyone loves is a love story. The girl meets the guy and they fall in love. Along the way, events happen; people say words to each other and there is a car chase or something.’”
“Right.” Bella sort of remembered writing that; she might have been high.
“Well, don’t you think that’s a bit vague?”
“I figured people would get a sense of what I was talking about.”
“You don’t ever mention the name of the film, the actors, or the director in your entire review. The closest you come to saying anything about the craft of making the film is in the third graph: ‘Some of the shots are filmed at interesting angles which is sort of disorienting.’ The rest of the time you just write vague plot summaries and talk about how you think you’ve seen these actors in other films.”
“Well, it’s weird isn’t it? Like, that the guy from Up In The Air is also The Fantastic Mr. Fox?”
“No Bella, it’s not that weird. Not weird enough to warrant 500 words. The kind of observations you make about movies are the kind of observations most people make at age seven.”
“I guess I’m not sure what your problem is,” Bella said, opening Twitter in a new tab.
“This is your review on Iron Man 2 from a few weeks ago: ‘The hero of the story wears a suit and there are a lot bright colors and patterns on the screen. It’s very soothing to let the images wash over you. At the end of the film there is a stand-off which is kind of tense and I tried to think about something else.’”
“Uh huh.”
“Bella, it’s your job to think about the movie. You write like you don’t pay any attention to the films you are watching, and like maybe you’ve only ever seen five or six movies in your life. You have utterly no ear for dialogue, your formatting is inconsistent and when you attempt to describe action, it’s so inept that I can’t picture any of it at all.”
“Okay.”
“I just need a little more from you. We hired you because of the strength of your blog, which rarely happens anymore.”
“Tell me about it.”
“To be perfectly honest, you’re about four years too young to be a member of the blogging elite. You’ve probably always felt like you belonged to the preceding generation, but you just never got the education you needed until it was too late. There was a first class of bloggers and a bigger second one, but that’s probably it. The new media market is finally as fucked up as the rest of the economy, and you’re screwed. You should probably try and find a real job.”
“Are you saying I’m fired?” Bella was a little too drunk to care very much.
“No, you’re not. The truth is, your reviews provoke so much anger from our readers that the comment sections blow up whenever one is posted online. Ad revenue goes through the roof; our publisher loves you. You’re basically the second coming of Dana Stevens.”
“That’s an obscure and kind of cruel joke,” Bella observed.
“Normally I would say keep up the good work, but I won’t. Keep doing whatever you’re doing.”
“Usually I go to the movies on drugs or during a period of acute emotional turmoil in my life,” she explained.
“Whatever works.”
“Goodbye.”
He hung up and the cat moaned again.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 12: Bad Romance

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 9: Third Wheel

Bella falls into a pattern with school and work and Jacob, which is great for us because she starts skipping over days and we can feel ourselves finally nearing some kind of plot development. Still, our girl is not doing so good:

I was like a lost moon—my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster movie scenario of desolation—that continued, nevertheless to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

Speaking of ignoring the laws of gravity, Bella’s rhetoric is reaching RIDICULOUS new heights, huh? A “cataclysmic, disaster movie scenario of desolation?” Are you fucking KIDDING ME with this, S. Meyer? Also, what kind of tenuous, bullshit metaphor is this motherfucker? That is not how moons work! “I was like a moon, a moon that didn’t behave like a moon at all.” If these are the rules, we can make up any metaphor we want!

It was like I’d been in a deadly car crash, my heart impaled on the antennae, but I just kept on living for some reason but my heart didn’t beat anymore.

I was like a puzzle with a missing piece, but the puzzle had just become a new, shittier picture rather than remaining incomplete; the image on the surface had changed.

I was like a dog who loved a bone, but it turned out the bone was a vampire.

Bella and Jacob have gone back to riding bikes, but as Bella’s skill has improved the potency of the hallucinations has declined. She’s thrown more energy into the denial and self-loathing filled search for The Meadow (which has basically no chance of summoning the Edward Spirit) while somewhat more logically racking her brain for more adrenaline-producing activities (which does). I wonder what Bella and Jacob could do to get their adrenaline levels up. I bet Jacob has a few ideas.

One day Bella shows up at Jacob’s and he gives her a box of conversation hearts (though probably not these ones) because it is Valentine’s Day. Bella has lost track of time (she’s totally the guy in this relationship) and is taken aback by the date. “I feel like a schmuck,” she says. Before Bella was reminding me of an old Jewish man—now she’s reminding me of a specific one.

Maybe Bella ought to behave a little more like Larry David, not just talk like him, and compulsively avoid people for a while. At least Jacob. He creepily insists she be his Valentine, jokingly saying it requires her to be his “slave for life.” Bella expresses dismay at the way lines “get blurred a lot” around Jacob. It makes me uncomfortable that S. Meyer is setting us up to blame Bella for leading Jacob on if he makes any unwanted sexual advances. S. Meyer has the rape morality of a police officer in 1961.

“She was asking for it.”-S. Meyer

Jacob asks if she wants to ride (bikes) on Friday, and Bella sees an opportunity for some distance.

I saw a chance and took it without taking time to think it

through.
“I’m going to a movie Friday.”

There's a line break error there again; they occur with such a startling regularity I no longer regard them as errors so much as really misguided attempts at forcing a pause for emphasis. It’s still annoying—fix this one thing and this whole series would be 200 pages shorter—but I’m resigned to it by now.

Bella’s putting the cart before the horse a little bit, inventing a date with Mike before it really exists, but at this point I suppose she’s rightly confident in her ability to lead men around by the dick. Jacob looks all wounded, though, and she feels his pain like ET or something. So she invites Jacob along too—acts like she meant to all along—and tells him to bring Quil.

At school, Bella puts her plan into action, letting Mike think she’s asking him out for a brief tantalizing second before shattering his heart. She suggests another bloody action film—probably something directed by Neveldine and Taylor—and wants to get a group together to see it. Mike starts suggesting all the couples he knows, trying to salvage what at least looks like a double-date (at least he doesn’t just suggest Jessica like he’s angling for a threesome; with Alice out of town there’s nobody who would be up for it anyway), but Bella says she wants to bring her La Push friends.

Mike bristles at the idea of huge brown men coming along, but she tells him her time spent with Jacob is like “tutoring.” For some strange reason, Mike’s thoughts don’t go immediately where mine went—I wrote a note in the margins that reads, “Tutoring minorities… about my body”—and he is reassured.

He tries to convince Bella to see something other than whatever gorefest she’s picked out; he has another romantic comedy in mind. At my old BU job I worked with a lot of frat-guy types who unironically claimed their favorite movies were like, Pretty Woman and shit. They talked about how good The Bounty Hunter was. It strikes me as a lack-of-imagination problem more than anything. Mike references a film called Tomorrow and Forever, which is apparently S. Meyer’s idea of a realistic-sounding rom-com in the aughts. It’s more like a realistic-sounding Lubitsch rom-com from the 30s, but whatever, thanks for trying. “Rotten Tomatoes gave it a better review,” he says.

Rotten Tomatoes? Mike has access to an actual internet website? Clearly he exists in some kind of alternate-tech-universe, since we know Bella basically has oil lamps and rotary phones to work with. Mike is apparently not sophisticated enough, however, to understand that Rotten Tomatoes is a review aggregator, so it doesn’t actually give anything a review so much as summarize the critical landscape, but whatever, thanks for trying.

Through a series of unfortunate, boring events, Bella’s Coalition Of The Willing To Go To The Movies falls apart—Quil gets in a fight at school (“You should see the other guy!”-Quil Ateara), some of the girls excuse themselves from the trip on account of the fact that they think Bella is a bitch, and some other people get sick because a stomach virus is going around. In the end it’s Bella, Jacob, and Mike. Bella is like, “fuuuuuck.”

Jacob shows up first, and he has finally finished fixing up his car. He wants to drive them to the movies in it tonight as the “maiden voyage.” I’m not saying I don’t trust Jacob’s skills, but wouldn’t a better maiden voyage be like, around a cul-de-sac a few times? They’re going to take that bitch out on the highway?

Shit gets rape-y again really fast: Bella high-fives Jacob and he twists his fingers through hers, morphing it into a hand-hold. Shudder. Then Mike shows up, and Jacob recognizes him from way back in the day. This happens:

“The one who thought you were his girlfriend. Is he still confused?”
I raised one eyebrow. “Some people are hard to discourage.”
“Then again,” Jacob said thoughtfully, “sometimes persistence pays off.”

It reminds me of that Jeff Dunham interview from the NYT when he started talking about how he made fun of all groups and races except for white Christians because his audience was white and Christian and also he was white and Christian and then he suddenly breaks off and says “Oh boy, I'm walking into something here.” Jacob teeters on the precipice of shattering his own self-delusion but jumps back just in time.

Jacob and Mike are not quite openly hostile to each other, but Bella comes fairly close to telling them to just whip ‘em out, measure ‘em and get it over with. Bella asks Mike if it’s okay if Jacob drives—he just built the car “from scratch” and all. From scratch? It’s not like he hammered out the steel, Bella. Mike is repeatedly described as having a “sullen” or “disgusted” expression. Good. Fuck you, Mike. It’s actually kind of hard to dislike Mike when he is around someone as hateable as Jacob, but Mike earns my scorn despite the odds—he leans forward from the back seat and leans his chin on the shoulder of Bella’s seat, so their cheeks almost touch. Gross. Bella practically puts her head through the window jerking away so fast (or so I imagine).

Bella’s mildly impressed with Jacob when Mike asks if he can put music on and Jacob explains that Bella doesn’t like music. She never told him that, but he seems to have picked up on her avoidance of all things potentially romantic. It’s weird for me to think about Bella getting bothered by the lyrics to music, because it’s hard for me to remember that people think about lyrics very much at all. I haven’t given lyrics much thought (beyond lines I find particularly clever) since I was 14 trying to deconstruct “Adam’s Song.” I haven’t the faintest idea what most of my favorite songs are about, which is probably because of two reasons.

A) The current trend in indie-rock seems to be a push back from lyrics with any significant, obvious meaning. There’s an emphasis on harmonies and a backlash leftover from emo and the hyper-verbose-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness of that movement. (And yet they always seemed so dumb, those lyricists. My friend Ryan and I used to always joke about how that Dashboard Confessional song “Vindicated” was like the second coming of Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic”—a song built around a word the songwriter mistakenly believes is a big, fancy word in the first place and nonetheless fails to fully understand in the second place.)
B) It’s impossible to understand what the lyrics are in Grizzly Bear and Radiohead songs anyway, and the best parts of Dirty Projectors songs aren’t even words so much as generic vowel sounds.

Mike can’t believe that Bella doesn’t like music, and out of context it does sound weird. My wife was recently talking to a guy who claimed to not like music, which she interpreted as a new kind of hipster affectation. “I’m too hip to like ANYTHING.”

Bella finds it hysterical when Jacob gives her money to buy his ticket; he’s too young to get his own. She asks if she’ll get in trouble with Billy. “No, I told him you were planning to corrupt my youthful innocence,” he says. I had to stop for a second there—Jacob told Billy WHAT? Why would I not be surprised if Jacob was keeping his father up to date on his quest to get into Bella’s pants? I’m not saying Billy Black is a bad father, but when it came time to teach Jacob about the birds and the bees he just put a porno in the VCR.

Do you think S. Meyer has seen a movie before, by the way? The ones she imagines are all so bland that it almost seems like she’s mocking film as a medium in general. (I read once that S. Meyer has never seen an R-rated movie, but that has to be bullshit, right?) Bella tells us about people getting blown up and impaled, but then for a while she just watches “the colors and movements on the screen.” Bella would make a great film critic, huh?

Mike and Jacob spend a good portion of the film with their arms on Bella’s hand rests, both with their palms up, “like steel bear traps,” Bella says. Both of these guys have such a terrible strategy! “I’ll just annoy this girl’s clothes off!” Jacob has the edge in the “creepiest” competition for being more manifestly self-deluded; Mike just seems dumb.

And the Jacob situation gets worse. Mike gets sick in the middle of the movie and Jacob and Bella follow him out. Jacob has to check on him in the bathroom. Not a fun gig. Once when I was sixteen I was in Vegas and an old woman asked me to check on her husband in the bathroom and make sure he was still alive. Hard to forget stuff like that.

Bella and Jacob have to wait for a while, and the ensuing conversation sums up the central, troubling theme of vaguely sexual misunderstanding that has characterized this section of the book. When Bella sits by Jacob he puts his arm around her. She shrugs it off and he grabs her by the hand, then locks his other hand around her wrist to hold her in place. “Where did he get the confidence from?” Bella wonders. I don’t think “confidence” is the right word, but “rapedacity” isn’t a word at all. It would be perfect if it were, though.

Jacob asks Bella if she likes him, she says she does, more than Mike, more than anyone she knows.

“But that’s all,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.

Run-on sentence aside, that is what is galling about Jacob: he knows she doesn’t like him in a romantic way, but then he tells her that he’s “prepared to be annoyingly persistent.” He’s just going to WEAR HER DOWN. Very sexy. Bella is not improving the situation either; Jacob says he has “loads of time” (Ron Weasley over here) and this happens:

I sighed. “You shouldn’t waste it on me,” I said, though I wanted him to.

He says he can live with their current, sexually frustrating situation but when Bella tries to pull her hand away he doesn’t let her. Then she basically admits she likes holding his hand anyway.

“This doesn’t really bother you, does it?” he demanded, squeezing my fingers. [Shudder]
“No,” I sighed. Truthfully, it felt nice.

UGH all around. This whole situation is fraught with stupidity and I just want all of them to shut the fuck up and go home. Luckily, I basically get my wish. Mike comes out and they leave, and on the way home Jacob and Bella can’t really talk so Bella dives inward again.

It was so wrong to encourage Jacob. Pure selfishness. It didn’t matter that I’d tried to make my position clear.

If she was totally honest with herself, Bella would admit that she can blur lines with the best of them. But instead she goes into a weird extended metaphor that sounds kind of like that self-help program Ruth joined briefly on Six Feet Under.

I was an empty shell. Like a vacant house—condemned—for months I’d been utterly uninhabitable. Now I was a little improved. The front room was in better repair.

Does she mean her boobs? Am I not getting it?

He deserved better than that—better than a one-room, falling down fixer-upper.

You’re losing me, Bella! Is it a one-room house or is the front room in better repair? (And what is “better repair?”) It can’t be both, can it? Can a one room house have a front room?

No amount of investment on his part could put me back in working order.

Bella’s personal housing bubble has burst, Edward took out the last sub-prime mortgage she had, and now her heart is foreclosed and she needs a bailout or a voucher from HUD or something. Get it? Do we need to dig this metaphor any deeper?

After they drop Mike at home, Jacob starts to feel sick too, but before he goes he really self-consciously makes a non-rape-y overture to Bella. “I won’t ever let you down,” he says. “I would never, ever hurt you.” Bella is touched—and at one point a smile breaks across Jacob’s face “the way the sunrise set the clouds on fire.” That’s a simile with a metaphor nestled inside it, by the way. In case you’re keeping score.

He leaves and Bella finds herself wishing they were related, “so that I would have some legitimate claim on him that still left me free of any blame now.” Jacob and Bella would be the kind of really affectionate siblings who freak everybody else out.

At some point Bella just starts talking in straight Rod Stewart lyrics.

“One thing I truly knew—knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest—was how love gave someone the power to break you.

We start to crawl out of the abyss of bad writings and worse feelings, though. Bella sums up the last 20 pages or so of bullshit in two sentences:

He was my best friend. I would always love him, and it would never, ever be enough.

And then we get the best sentence of the last hundred pages or so:

I went inside to sit by the phone and bite my nails.

That sentence really cheered me up. We also get a great Charlie moment—when Bella comes in he’s watching the game, sitting on the floor a foot from the screen, he’s so excited by whatever he’s watching. Charlie is the best.

Bella had asked Jacob to call when he got home, and she panics when it takes too long. She calls and gets Billy on the line; Jacob is home but too sick to talk. Billy discourages Bella from visiting when she offers (“We had to have a can of Campell’s around her somewhere,” Bella muses in an odd bit of product placement) but all of her concerns about Jacob go away when she starts vomiting uncontrollably.

In a way, it’s like she’s purging away all of the awfulness of the last few chapters; it’s a cathartic stomach virus, at least for me. She spends the following day lying on the bathroom floor, but eventually Charlie gets word that Mike has recovered. Hours later, Bella is on her feet. She calls to check up on Jacob, and he answers, but he sounds like shit and feels like it too. He thinks whatever he has is worse than the stomach virus, and he reinforces Billy’s visitation ban.

What does Jacob have? The world’s worst case of blue balls? Or something wolf? I mean, something worse?

Catching Up: The Week In Review (May 15-21)

Another week is behind us, and very little has happened for our characters. Sam Uley's death cult is continuing its slow, inexorable advance on Jacob. Duh, they are going to get him sooner or later. But fate is really taking its time! Maybe it just feels like it has been taking forever because the writing in these last few chapters has been so bad. Seriously, what the fuck?

Bella is continuing to discover her powers of persuasion. When Bella becomes a vampire someday do you think she'll have supernatural cock-teasing powers? Will she be able to just look at a guy and give him blue balls?

I guess I should say if, right? If she becomes a vampire. Because Edward and Alice are still gone. When are they going to come back? I'm sick of werewolves who aren't even werewolves yet!

Chapter 7: I Am A Fugitive From A Werewolf Gang

Chapter 8: Falcon Can't Hear The Falconer

In other news, the contract dispute between Ashley Greene (& Kellan Lutz but who cares?) and Summit Entertainment is over, and it sounds like Greene is getting about 1.25 million. Good for her! Kira was right that we are a great little community over here, a great community of lit critics but also apparently reporters. Jacks of all trades! Or at least two trades! So thanks to everyone who followed this story!

In more Ashley Greene news, it sounds like she is maybe going to star in Scream 4, which is good news for her breasts, but probably not her career.

Robert Pattinson was on Ellen this week, and Rosanne watched it so we didn't have to.

I also wrote an alternate version of chapter seven in which Jacob Black pretended to be gay.

Bored and frustrated though we may be, we still have much to discuss. From now on every week I am going to post topics for discussion, like a real book club, and you can feel free to answer them or suggest your own topics and questions in the comments.

1. Vampires have freezing cold bodies and werewolves, it seems, are burning hot. Which would be more unpleasant, sex-wise?
2. Can anyone justify Bella's decision to find The Meadow?
3. If you were Ashley Greene's agent, wouldn't you be telling her to stop appearing in slasher movies? Do you think Ashley Greene is going to play the "virginal heroine" or the "slutty girl who dies" in Scream 4?
4. Related: Do you think Summit will somehow get Greene and Lutz to do nude scenes in Breaking Dawn as penance for their contract negotiations?

I think everyone should play the "out of context line" game too (it needs a snappier title). Find some TWSS worthy prose from New Moon and take it out of context. These were my suggestions:

• As always, Jacob was game for anything I wanted. No matter how strange it was.
• “I would have figured you for a trail kind of girl.”
• I didn’t playfully shake it off, as I might have otherwise.
• It really looked like he knew what he was doing.
• I’d been waiting for him to bring it up again, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

But I'm sure I didn't find them all. Next week, Bella goes to the movies. And speaking of movies, we are probably all going to spend some time bitching about the utterly horrible posters for Eclipse. The god of photoshop is weeping on his photoshopped mountain. But that's later. We've got plenty to complain about already.

There's a new episode of RSR out, too!

We Will Probably See Ashley Greene's Boobs After All

"Both of them."

So last week a few of us were having a discussion on Twitter as to whether or not Ashley Greene seemed like the kind of girl who would show her boobs in a movie. The general consensus was that yes, she was, and we found it a little weird that she hadn’t (to our knowledge).

(It’s weird that I keep using collective pronouns, it probably sounds like I regard myself royalty. I do not; this blog is not a monarchy. It is not a democracy either, it’s probably more like an oligarchy, except it is those of us who are rich with misdirected creativity who control things.)

There is the question of some leaked pictures of fairly dubious origin, which some of you promised to investigate further, which I was promised was not a euphemism for anything. But it turns out we will probably get some slightly higher quality nudity anyway, as it was recently revealed that Ashley Greene is in talks to star in Scream 4.

Scream 4? Really? When did Scream come out? 1987? It seems a little late to keep this franchise going, doesn’t it? But okay! Ashley Greene is getting work! That's sort of good.

I don’t want to tell Greene how to run her career, but don’t you think she should cool it with the slasher flicks? Summer’s Moon/Blood was not really a horror flick; its director had kind of weird delusions about it being some kind of inversion of a horror film, but mostly it was just nothing. Greene just wrapped shooting a film called The Apparition (there is no way it will still be called The Apparition when it actually comes out, but Draco Malfoy is in it too which is like, what) a few weeks ago.

I guess this can be her niche, but it’s kind of a crappy niche, no? Kristen Stewart wisely chose the indie flick route, and she will be acting in movies until we are all dead. I don’t think you can say that about any of the cast members of the original Scream (The rousing success Cougartown notwithstanding). Neil Young once said it’s better to burn out than to fade away, but I don’t know if that is true with respect to Hollywood, or if Young was being serious anyway.

The point is, there will probably be boobs in this movie. Ashley Greene is reportedly being offered the lead, which actually could mean she'll be playing the virginal survivor, but I don't really think she could sell that, do you? Hayden Panettiere is also in talks to join the cast, so she probably has that market cornered. When is someone in Hollywood going to have the guts to make a slasher film where all the virtuous kids die and the slutty girl lives? Could Scream 4 be that film?

BLOGGING NEW MOON, pt. 11: Falcon Can't Hear The Falconer

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 8: Adrenaline

On a remote back road, Jacob walks Bella through the steps of operating the motorcycle. It’s not indicated how long he’s been going over it, but Bella seems pretty on top of things.

“I bet she’s on top of things a lot. Like dicks.”-Quil Ateara

There’s a lot of Jacob telling her not to use the footbrake, so obviously at some point she’s going to use it. Chekov once said that if you have a footbrake on the wall in the first act, someone has to step on it in the third.

Bella’s a little nervous, but she doesn’t feel like she should be—“I’d already lived through the worst thing possible,” she says. I’m pretty sure she means getting dumped by Edward, but shouldn’t she mean almost being beaten to death by James in the last book? Get your shit in perspective, Bella. It takes several pages of directions—it’s like a Cormac McCarthy novel for a second—but finally Bella is about to take off. Guess whose disembodied voice comes back?

“This is reckless and childish and idiotic, Bella,” the velvet voice fumed.

SO HOT. Bella lets go of some important piece of machinery and ends up on the ground with the bike on top of her. She realizes it must not be déjà-vu that triggers the Edward Patronus but rather “some combination of adrenaline and danger.” Trial and error: works every time. Bella is a like a scientist in the field of her own fucked-up subconscious.

This whole “discovery” scene is sort of comic, I think. I don’t know how seriously we can possibly take Bella acting like such a nutcase. But it also seems like we’re getting important information. With lines like “Maybe I’d found a way to generate the hallucinations,” it’s hard to know where the jokes end and the plot points begin. Bella gets on the bike again, and has a nice little bon mot to boot:

It took several good tries, and even more poor tries, before the engine caught and roared to life under me.

What a wit you are sometimes, Bella!

“At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the vampires.”-Bella Wilde

Ghost Edward starts in again: “Do you want to kill yourself, then?” he asks. Ghost Edward is such a nag! Quit harshing on Bella and Jacob’s mellow, square! There’s a kind of Death of a Salesman moment where Edward says “Go home to Charlie” and Jacob tells her to ease off the clutch and she replies “I will” to both. But not really, because she’s going home to Charlie like, eventually, not right now, and so that's not what Edward asked. It’s a stretch. But I like that S. Meyer is trying to get creative with the staging a little bit. And by “getting creative” I mean “imitating Arthur Miller.”

Bella takes off, and enjoys the flying sensation, but she comes to a turn and panics, slamming down on the footbrake. The bike wobbles beneath her and she reacts too suddenly, bringing it to the ground and crashing into a tree. I made exactly the same mistake on a skateboard one time, trying to impress my friends like an idiot and zooming down a huge hill. I didn’t realize that if I tried to stop by stepping on the ground my foot would just fly out behind me and send me head over heels across the pavement.

Jacob rushes to Bella’s side and asks, kind of hilariously, “Are you alive?” Bella hops up enthusiastically and wants to try again, but Jacob explains that she is bleeding profusely from the head.

“Oh, I’m so sorry Jacob.” I pushed hard against the gash, as if I could force the blood back inside my head.
“Why would you apologize for bleeding?”

That’s a weird echo of Bella’s earlier attempt to apologize to Edward for bleeding, but at this point I think it’s just suggesting that Bella is ridiculous, not trying to drive home the connections between Edward and Jacob. Yet.

Jacob takes off his shirt for the first of, I assume, many times so that Bella can hold it to her head while he gets the bikes back to the truck. He wants to straight to the hospital, but Bella talks him into driving her home so she can clean up first. She wants to make up a new story about how she got hurt so they won’t get in trouble. Should we start counting the domestic abuse imagery? I’m already uncomfortable.

“She uh, fell down some stairs.”-Jacob Black

On the circuitous route to the hospital, Bella philosophizes more. These diatribes are starting to have a kind of insane, ranting quality—like S. Meyer’s been reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “And then to discover the key to the hallucinations!” is an actual sentence up in this bitch. Also like Nietzsche, some of it sounds like it was badly translated from another language:

The feel of the wind in my face, the speed and the freedom… it reminded me of a past life, flying through the thick forest without a road, piggyback while HE ran—I stopped thinking right there, letting the memory break off in the sudden agony. I flinched.

So did I. I took the liberty of using Google to translate this passage into Traditional Chinese and then back again to see if it got any better.

Feel the wind in my face, speed and freedom ... it reminds me of a past life, the shuttle is not in a dense forest road, when he ran carrying, I'll be there to stop thinking and memory disruption sudden pain. I am back.

Nope. Bella’s story ends up being that she fell in Jacob’s shed and hit her head on a hammer—after changing at her house they depart for the hospital. Bella observes that Jacob is still shirtless. If Jacob walks into that hospital with no shirt on and Bella is all bloodied up and one of the doctors doesn’t AT LEAST give the police a heads up, I am going to be pissed. It really completes the “Episode of COPS” tableau though, huh?

It’s cold in the car, but Jacob is perfectly comfortable, stripped to the waist though he is. So Edward is freezing cold and Jacob is burning hot, huh? I wonder who would be more unpleasant to have sex with?

Bella remarks that Jacob’s skin is really pretty, but I kind of feel like S. Meyer is trying to convince us that she isn’t racist. On pages 192-4 we get another set of arbitrary breaks between paragraphs. What the fuck is going on with this? Bella does a lot of time-jumping, but only occasionally is it accompanied by a break.

More inexplicable stuff happens:

I had to have seven stitches to close the cut on my forehead. After the sting of the local anesthetic, there was no pain in the procedure. Jacob held my hand while Dr. Snow was sewing, and I tried not to think about why that was ironic.

Why WHAT was ironic? I really don’t get it. Is it ironic that Jacob is holding her hand? If so, why? Is it because the doctor’s name is Snow, and Dr. Cullen is literally cold? Am I overthinking it?

Bella is still having nightmares, still feeling like she’s got a hole in her chest, but it’s not as bad. She and Jacob start riding (the bikes) on the reg, and Bella mentions Charlie’s eyes narrowing in suspicion when she has to tell him about a second “tripping” incident. Thank god someone is finally noticing! She worries that Charlie is going to shut down her trips to La Push, though she’s not worried about no longer seeing Jacob so much as no longer getting to hallucinate. “My velvet voiced delusion has yelled at me for almost five minutes” today, Bella says. What the hell could Edward have said for five straight minutes?

“Bella! Don’t ride that bike! Stop it! Eat more vegetables! Stay in school! Don’t do drugs! Uh, hey, you still haven’t gotten off the bike!”

But Charlie is reassured (for some reason) when Bella tells him the injury occurred hiking. He has a hard time at first believing she actually went hiking, which is fair, because she didn’t. “Mike Newton was bound to rub off on me sometime,” Bella says. Okay, that’s not exactly the line, but do you see how my way is better? Bella promises Charlie she’ll be more careful while “surreptitiously crossing my fingers under the table.” WHAT? Jacob and Bella have been argue-flirting for several chapters about real age—Bella gets ten extra years because she can cook and pays the bills for Charlie, Jacob gets fifteen because of his mechanical skills, etc.—and I think Bella should be docked like, a hundred years for that little move. I don’t even know any five-year-olds who do that seriously!

Nonetheless, Jacob and Bella decide to cool it on the bikes for a while. Faced with a dead-end on the adrenaline rush front, Bella essentially reverts to her earlier hypothesis about what generates the hallucinations for no reason whatsoever and decides they should go on a hiking trip to find Edward’s secret sex meadow from the first book. Why would you do that? Bella was just all excited that she’d definitively cracked the hallucination code (adrenaline and danger), and now we’re suddenly forgetting about that, going after the déjà-vu that didn’t work before? It feels really mechanical; you can hear the plot gears grinding. So what if Bella’s motivations don’t make any sense? We’ve got to get her to the meadow at some point for some reason!

It’s possible to read this as Bella deceiving herself on purpose, elaborately justifying this change in plans based on outdated assumptions out of desperation, but that’s tenuous. I feel like these last few chapters have been the worst so far. The only interesting thing about this stupid, character-consistency-sacrificing section is the fact that this three-paragraph piece of exposition comes in the middle of a scene of dialogue, and it ends when Jacob says “What are you thinking so hard about?” He snaps Bella out of it, and snaps us out of it too. It’s an interesting way to let dialogue intrude on monologue. Normally we think of exposition as outside of the unity of space and time in a novel; when a character is filling us in on backstory we don’t conceive of it as happening in real time, but here it does.

I had fun taking a few sentences in this chapter out of context; as Bella and Jacob prepare for their hiking trip they seem to be speaking entirely in unconscious double-entendres.

• As always, Jacob was game for anything I wanted. No matter how strange it was.
• “I would have figured you for a trail kind of girl.”
• I didn’t playfully shake it off, as I might have otherwise.
• It really looked like he knew what he was doing.
• I’d been waiting for him to bring it up again, but it didn’t look like that was going to happen.

There is also lots to complain about. Jacob agrees to look for the meadow with Bella like this:

“We could use a compass and a grid pattern,” Jacob said with confident helpfulness.

Confident helpfulness? That is a very specific inflection! What does that sound like, exactly?

As Bella and Jacob prepare for the trip, Billy jokes with them about encountering the rumored giant bear, saying “Maybe you should bring a jar of honey, just in case.” Jacob says he hopes Bella’s new hiking boots are fast, and she replies “I only have to be faster than you.” Can we fit a few more bear clichés into this conversation, please?

On their first day out they fail at finding the meadow but succeed at being assholes. Bella remarks that the forest doesn’t seem as dark “with my personal sun along.” It made me realize that if I were in a poetry workshop with Bella I would fucking hate her guts.

Bella asks about Embry at the whole Sam situation and Jacob tells her it’s basically the same as before. He gets all moody, but puts his arm around Bella’s shoulder. She feels too bad to push him away. Jacob is a creep, exploiting his own sadness to get some like this. He doesn’t do much to improve his standing in my eyes, telling Bella that bears don’t like the taste of people anyway: “Of course, you might be an exception. I bet you’d taste good.” Hey, where have we heard a sentiment like that before? Also, shut up Jacob!

The Contract $ituation Has Been Re$olved

Renee had the scoop, in as much as she was the first to tell me, that all's well that ends well for Breaking Dawn contract negotiations; Ashley Greene will be coming back. So will Kellan Lutz, but who honestly gives a fuck about that guy? Other than Ashley Greene, I mean.

Obviously we are all very happy about this and we will all be reading Ashley Greene's interview in Seventeen Magazine (thanks for the tip, Kira.) as a way of celebrating. Apparently when asked if she's ever hooked up with Lutz, Greene says she's thought about it. Did you guys just hear that? Kellan Lutz's blood just rushed to his penis so fast it broke the sound barrier.

In other news, Robert Pattinson appeared on Ellen today, and Rosanne watched it so you don't have to.

Previously: Jacob Black Pretends To Be Gay

WRITING NEW MOON: Jacob Black Pretends To Be Gay

From time to time, I've decided to hone my Fan Fiction skills for my eventual foray into the ever-popular, ever-horny Twilight Online Fan Fiction Community. I hope by the time I finish blogging this whole series people will still be writing fan fiction. How many masturbatory fantasies can Bella have within the timeline of this series? She only has so much time to masturbate between classes! So here's one, which essentially serves as an alternate version of chapter seven in New Moon, which we just talked about.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

"Jacob Black Pretends To Be Gay"

“This is a stupid plan,” Quil said. “You are fucking stupid.”
“No, no. It’s brilliant.” Jacob paced back and forth across the shed.
“You know where this is going to end, right? It’s going to end with you kissing a guy.”
“It is going to end with me having sex with Bella, is how it is going to end. And then we’re going to get married, and we’re going to start a family.”

Quil leaned against Jacob's car. “Why does your mind always go there right away? Shouldn’t you say like, ‘we’ll have sex, and then she’ll get addicted to the taste of my cum, and then our sex life will get so wild and imaginative that they will have to rewrite the Kama Sutra based on our innovations’?”
“Why do you say things like that?” Jacob said.
“Uh, because I am a guy and I am straight and when I like a girl I don’t immediately start thinking about going steady and fucking giving her my fucking varsity jacket and knocking her up and getting married growing old together, dude,” Quil said. He thought about that for a minute. “Maybe you are gay, like for real. Your fantasies are really gay."
“I’m not,” Jacob said. “Believe me, I’m not.”
“But you’re about to tell Bella that you are.”
“Yes, because then like, we can go shopping together, and Bella will need my help in the changing room, and that sort of thing.”
“And that sort of thing? I can’t think of any other scenario, and even then the best you are going to see is some bra or some panties. No offense, but Bella is not the thong type.”
“Yeah, because she is classy.” Jacob said defensively.
“Because she is a prude. Otherwise you totally would have at least gotten a handjob by now.” Quil made a gesture illustrating the act for some reason.
“I told you I almost did.” Jacob mumbled.
“Right, you were in the garage and Bella’s hand brushed your cock when she was reaching for a soda. That does not count. And I’m not kidding—can you think of another time where Bella thinking you were gay would lead to anything good?”
“Slumber parties,” Jacob said simply.
“What?” Quil said.
“I was thinking we could have slumber parties, and like, watch romantic comedies together. And have pillow fights and one thing would… lead to another.”
“Dude, are you like, writing like, a porn movie for pedophiles or something? What would it lead to? A debate about whether Matthew McConaughey is sexy or not?”
“I thought maybe eventually Bella would want to practice… you know, stuff, and she could on me, because it would be safe.”
“That is never going to happen. You are fucking insane.”
“We’ll see I guess,” Jacob said threateningly.
“Yeah, we really will.”

***

Bella Swan really didn’t know what the fuck she was doing here. She’d driven up the narrow forest path a few feet at a time, stopping occasionally to steady her nerves with a slug of amber liquid from the bottle of Jack she’d stolen from Charlie’s liquor cabinet. The Cullen house was still there, and when she saw it Bella felt like an idiot for ever feeling different. It wasn’t like she’d dreamt up the whole last fucking year of her life. Of course Edward and his family were real. She wasn’t on drugs. Not yet, anyway.

All this time she’d likened Edward to a drug—they were each other’s own brand of heroin. Now Jacob was like, her Quaaludes or something, or her maybe her methadone, weaning her from one addiction and pushing her on to the next. And Bella was getting addicted, and that was not fair to Jacob. She needed something else, something to protect her from the hole in her chest at night that wouldn't hurt anyone else. This bourbon is doing a pretty good fucking job, Bella thought. That was the ticket. What she needed was a real addiction, not another tenuous metaphor. She knew exactly where to go, what she had to do. It was lucky she'd come out here after all. She opened the truck door and almost fell on her face. The ground got there so fucking fast! Holy shit!

The door to the Cullen house was unlocked, and Bella let herself in. It looked like they’d taken a few of their belongings and left the rest behind. Alice probably would have seen this, right? Alice would have left Bella something. She climbed the stairs to Alice and Jasper's bedroom. That was a bit of a misnomer, actually they didn’t have a bed; in the center of the room was a leather swing attached with chains to the ceiling, facing a full-length mirror. Bella had never asked what it was for, but she’d had a pretty good idea. Sitting there on the swing was a suitcase with a note. It read, simply:

Everything in moderation, bitch.-Alice

Inside was a kilo of cocaine.

***

Jacob paced around in his shed. Where the heck was Bella? He’d kicked out Quil an hour ago, expecting her any minute. He was getting worried. He sat down on the floor to steady his nerves, but soon he could the familiar roar of Bella’s truck. He jumped up, excited, but then he realized he was a little too excited and should probably wait a minute before he went outside. Think of Quil, he thought. That worked.

HOLY SHIT HOW DID THIS TRUCK GET SO FAST? Bella thought, brushing the flakes of blood from her nose. WHERE THE FUCK AM I EVEN? WHERE THE FUCK IS JACOB’S HOUSE? All of these fucking Indian houses looked the same everyone was so fucking poor and shit these motherfuckers should grow some pot on their land and sell it or something Bella would totally buy that shit she bet it would be good weed because Indians knew how to fucking plant shit they even taught the settlers and everything right? She was out of the car before she really understood how and Jacob was coming out from behind the house glowing like he was a FUCKING ANGEL.

“Holy shit,” Bella said. “I feel so alive, can we ride those fucking motorcycles yet?”
“What? No, Bella they’re not ready. Are you okay?”
“Okay? Jacob, I am so much more than fucking OKAY. I am fucking GOLD. I am SOLID GOLD, motherfucker, okay? Let’s go fuck some shit up. Let’s go trash Sam Uley’s house, because FUCK HIM, man, am I right? FUCK SAM ULEY! Yeah hahaha!”
“Actually Bella, I uh, I really need to talk to you,” Jacob said.
“Okay okay okay okay we can talk. That’s great, Jake, that is great. I like to talk. I talk like, all of the time. I think a talk would be amazing where should we talk?”
“In my shed,” Jacob said, still looking at her curiously. “Are you hungry?”
“Oh, god no. I am not hungry at ALL. I don’t ever even want to eat again. I could really use a smoke though do you have a cigarette?”
“Uh, no Bella, I don’t smoke.”
“I thought you fuckers grew tobacco or some shit? You don’t even have a peace pipe we can smoke?”
“Bella, that is racist. Are you trying to upset me?”
“No, Jake, no no no no no no no no no. Of course not. Let’s go to the shed.”

On the walk over, which felt like it took a FUCKING HOUR Bella’s legs felt so weird she thought about her friend Jacob. He was hot she realized definitely pretty hot. She’d been so cruel to him using his attraction to her to keep him around just so she could forget about Edward. Edward what an asshole that guy was where was he even? Fuck him and fuck being mean to Jacob seriously fuck it. Maybe she should just fuck Jake and get it over with he deserved it she had been such a tease and he was hot so whatever. Bella concluded that it would be a great idea to fuck Jake and she decided to do it. She was trying to get her shirt off but she couldn’t find the buttons anywhere when he started talking.

“Bella, I have been having these… strange feelings lately.”
“Uh huh.”
“And well, I guess being around you made those feelings more complicated.”

Bella was pretty sure she knew where this was going she gave up on her shirt and switched to her pants. She would have been able to take them off but her hands were shaking. Why am I so…why shaking? She thought. Maybe she should…say…something…to Jake… before he went through all this… she should just tell him to fuck…
“Bella, I’m gay,” Jacob said, trying to look as serious as possible.

Bella’s hands dropped to her sides, then touched her waist, then rose to her face, then she looked away for a second and muttered a curse word.

“Bella?” Jacob looked at her curiously again. What was going on with her today?

Bella burst out laughing.
Jacob wasn’t even really gay, and still, he was offended. “Bella!” he admonished.
Bella tried to say something, but blood was gushing out of her nose now and so she just made gargling sounds.
“Bella I am trying to be serious,” he said. "Whoa, are you bleeding?"
Bella collapsed in another fit of giggles and blacked out.