A debate via links:
- Bitch Magazine describes TWILIGHT as inaugurating a new genre: “abstinence porn.” (Courtesy of the Dairi Burger.)
- The Atlantic Monthly writes a fabulous article, highly complimentary to TWILIGHT, on what it’s like to be a teenage girl and why our novels meant so much to us. (Courtesy of one of my professors; I suppose there’s, improbably, an upside to allowing your love of teenage romance novels to become so widely known.)
obMSCL*: Extra credit to the second article, because it ends with an anecdote that is ripped from the single most iconic scene of MY SO-CALLED LIFE, except that it’s reporting the author’s actual experience.
* obMSCL = Obligatory MY SO-CALLED LIFE reference. The label comes from a listserv I’ve long been a member of (like, over a dozen years now), which started as a MSCL fan list and gradually morphed into random discussions of a group of friends. Who would occasionally still feel the need to talk about the show. I’ve transported it into other contexts, because, really, when is a MSCL reference not obligatory?
-->Feed me text
February 24, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Not having read the TWILIGHT books, I was going to leave reading the Atlantic Monthly article til later until your MSCL teaser. But I’m glad I did read it, b/c it is excellent, and, more importantly, I felt an intense pang at her geometry class moment and absolutely must go home and watch that MSCL episode tonight.
February 24, 2009 at 10:35 pm
…So did you watch it? I haven’t watched any episodes since you and I watched some DVD commentary tracks together in, when was that, last December?
February 24, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I wasn’t home this evening, but I’m thinking maybe this weekend I’ll watch a bit. I may have watched some episodes soon after we watched the commentary, but not recently.
March 16, 2009 at 9:30 am
[...] kind of does sum up a lot of teen fiction (this is what I think BITCH got right with its neologism “abstinence porn”). And the presence of passion and absence of coy may indeed be what makes the National seem like it [...]