Recently in One Man's Opinion Category

Probably no one reading this cares, but I've got something to say!  I am so sick of Battlestar Galactica! 

There was a time when I could not get enough of this show, but these days it's like one of those old boyfriends where you're like: did I ever even love him in the first place?  Or was it just my imagination?  Because as it stands now Battlestar is sloppy and confusing and haphazard and just plain bad, not to mention nowhere near as intelligent or highbrow as it thinks it is.  I find it interesting that the creators and fawning reviewers are always crowing about how the show transcends and bucks the conventions of science fiction when actually at this point it has basically descended to the level of totally ridic sci-fi self-parody, complete with a neverending supply of impossible-to-keep-straight clones, a badass dude who wears a fuschia duster, and at least one truly egregious Mary Sue.

Of course there is one thing that consistently keeps Battlestar Galactica from being a complete waste of time: Mary McDonnell as the fabulous/terrifying President Rozzie. 


Ahh!!!!  She is so much scarier than any Cylon!  Especially now that it turns out the Cylons are the least scary and most birdbrained of all fictional genocidal robot alien monsters ever!

I might want to write for Slate someday, so I am not going to say anything mean about Lunatic Mommy Opinionator Emily Bazelon, who has found a niche writing articles about her charmingly neurotic five-year-old son Simon.  The thing is that I actually love reading Bazelon's articles because I so relate to the character of little Simon, who has been known to have a outrageous drag queeny meltdowns when he can't find the "veggie sticks" in his sack lunch.  This type of thing is familiar to me.  I too was an extremely neurotic child, prone to emotional outbursts, meltdowns and completely irrational anxiety.  I mean, who wasn't, I guess, but I really was. 

In this week's installment of the Simon Chronicles, Ms. Bazelon tackles the topic of "Are G-Rated Movies Too Scary For Simon and What Should Be Done About It?"  Apparently Bazelon and Simon went to see The Tale of Despereaux and it scared the hell out of the poor little guy.  It turns out that G-Rated movies are just too frightening these days-- and not just Despereaux.  Bazelon can't help but wonder:

"What's the point of a G rating if movies like Despereaux fall into that category? This movie confirms my feeling that it's past time to replace G with better age-tailored guidance. I remember sad G-rated kids' movies from childhood: Disney classics like Pinocchio, Dumbo, and Bambi. But my kids didn't find Bambi distressing. Instead, what's hard for them to handle are new movies, ostensibly created for their age group, from which they emerge metaphorically dripping in sweat, wrung out by an hour and a half of suspense and overexcitement.... Despereaux is the latest in a line of recent examples that have unwound my kids or the kids of friends. (Other villains: Finding Nemo, for the barracuda that eats the mom and most of the eggs; The Lion King, for Mufasa's murder; Cars, for the wildly fast-paced action; Swiss Family Robinson, for the pirates; Wall-E, for the landing of the spaceship and attempted shooting; and Monsters, Inc., for all the roaring at the outset.)

I'm not going to make fun of any little kid for being terrified of the "roaring at the outset of Monsters Inc." because little kids are weird and who knows what's going to freak them out?  I myself was inexplicably traumatized by Short Circuit, and let's not even talk about Willow.  But Emily Bazelon is clearly delusional if she thinks the "wildly fast-paced action" in Cars is more damaging to children than Pinnochio, which features one of the most fucked-up sequences in any children's movie ever.  Conflict and suspense, parental separation and nightmarish trippiness are all long traditions in family movies. 

Of course there is another tradition at work here: in the tradition of all lunatic mommy opinionators, everything is much worse in this day and age because it is happening to the most special angel in the world: mommy's! 

So why shouldn't a special class of rating be created to suit the idiosyncratic anxieties of the under-six set?  Perhaps Simon himself can be put in charge of this new ratings board?  Personally, if I had been in charge of such an initiative at age five, I would have established a strict UR rating for UNSETTLING ROBOTS as well as the deadly TFEP rating for Terrifyingly Fabulous Evil Princesses.

But no one cared what I thought.  Instead, I just watched the same three Jem videos on VHS over and over again until I was old enough to actually go to the movies without spazzing out.

It seems that everyone is all ABUZZ regarding Margo Rabb's very thoughtful NYTBR piece on the indignities and ultimate pleasures of writing fiction for teenagers.  A lot of The Community seems mad about this article but, Margo, I hear you girl.  I started writing at least partially for the purpose of gaining respect and hopefully a little hot makeout action at parties and was surely in for a rude awakening when I actually started getting published and found that no one gave enough of a shit to even grab my ass.  The first question I get when I tell people that I write novels for teenage girls is "Oh, but you don't use your real name, do you?"

Yes, writing for young adults is something like being a porn star-- so shameful that a person is expected by the Serious New York Chattering Class to shroud his identity in secrecy.  (My porn name is Tommy Pinecrest, so if I ever decide to go the pseudonym route you'll know how to find me.)  It turns out the difference between being a YA novelist and a porn star is that people at parties are actually impressed by porn stars.  I can vouch for this; I have been at parties with a few porn stars and I was a quivering mess every time.  Did they even know I was in the room?  NO.

I have plenty of friends-- friends who shed big and sloppy tears at JUNO, for fuck's sake!-- who will never read any of my books for fear of losing precious IQ points.  People have basically told me this to my face.  For awhile I was offended, but I've decided that it's fine with me as long as these friends shell out the $$ for a couple of never-to-be-touched copies of the books or at least oblige me by filling a seat at a reading or two.  You can't worry about much else.  People at parties are never impressed by anything, and if they are, it only gives them cause to hate you and write bitchy things about you on the internet.  That's just how it goes around here.

I think a big part of the general suspicion about young adult books is that most people my age never read them when they were actually young adults.  What this means is that their notion of the category starts with Christopher Pike and ends, if you're lucky, with Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls. 

I myself read some really trashy YA books (not to mention WIFEY) when I was eight years old and then, having exhausted the limits of the school library, stopped reading entirely for awhile before I resurfaced at age fourteen and went straight to the grownup stuff.  It seems that a lot of people followed this trajectory, and it's for this reason that there seems to be a question of why YA is necessary at all.  If teenagers are capable of reading and enjoying books for adults, why should there be a special category of books for teenagers?  Are these books just intended for those teens too dull for Camus?

Maybe Camus is a bad example because, okay, it's hard to find a teen too dull for Camus.  The Stranger is pretty perfect for teenagers: it's really short and it's all about existential angst.  So forget Camus.  But haven't all the grownups in the room ever had the experience of revisiting a book you'd read (and thought you'd understood) as a young person only to realize that it made way more of an impact upon a rereading ten or more years later?  Like maybe you were always smart enough for it, it's just that you needed the experiences and concerns of an adult to actually make you care?  I think most people would answer yes.  And I think if that's the case that the reverse is also true.

I read WEETZIE BAT for the first time when I was fifteen.  I don't remember what caused me to read it; like I say, I didn't really read YA books when I was in high school.  But for whatever reason I read Weetzie Bat, and at the cost of sounding like a jerkoff, it completely changed my life.  I think the assigned reading in school at the time was Billy Budd or something along those lines.  Billy Budd is admittedly an extremely hot book, but at fifteen it was just not doing it for me or any other person I knew.  Weetzie Bat, on the other hand, left me walking around in a daze for a week after I read it.  I was exhilarated by the lushness of the world Francesca Lia Block had created and at the same time kind of depressed because that world didn't actually exist.  It was the same feeling some of my friends got from certain types of music.  Block was my Moz.

These days I reread Weetzie Bat every few years, and I will always love it.  There are lines I can quote by heart and it still gets me in the gut to see them on the page-- both because they are great passages and because they bring back such visceral feelings of what it was like to be the person I was when I first read them.  The book is weird and gorgeous and revolutionary on its own terms, but I think it's probably somewhat difficult for a person over a certain age to wrap his head around the brilliance of it, especially if he's reading it for the first time.  Yeah, you can certainly love it as an adult.  I definitely love it as an adult, but when I reread it, I feel like parts of it are maybe going over my head. 

Reading Proust at fourteen would I guess not be totally pointless, but it might be better to save your efforts until you've at least eaten one of those little cookies.  In the same way, reading Weetzie Bat at thirty is definitely worth your while, but I feel sorry for you if you didn't read it when you were fourteen, because I bet you would have understood it better.  And that's the point of having books specifically for teenagers.  There are things you learn as you grow up, but there's also a understanding that you lose.  In writing what I write, I'm usually trying to relearn some of that lost knowledge.

As for the snobs in the mess hall at Yaddo: if I really wanted to impress people I would have become a BLOGGER.

Doree points out quite correctly in the Observer that Facebook's new "People You Might Know!" feature could just as easily be named "People You Might Hate!"  And although this is totally true, I also think grown people in Brooklyn need to lighten up about Facebook.  The following quote is surely half tongue-in-cheek, but as everyone now knows, the wall between serious and sarcastic has been pretty much demolished for ages, so no hiding behind cheap irony anymore!  (New rule I just made up.)  Anyway according to one anonymous 32-yo Brooklynite writer:

“[The People You Might Know feature] messes with the whole evolution of your social networking identity...There’s a period at the very beginning of your Facebook life, after you first sign up, when you’re madly friend-ing everyone in your address book. It’s the needy phase: You’re trying to establish and legitimize yourself as a user. Then you mature to a more placid state—you stop accepting application requests... But this new feature makes you feel needy all over again... Its infernal machine logic taunts you with people who could, theoretically, be your friends—but aren’t. Your page once served to document the extent of your social support network. Now it advertises the people you never connected to—the friends you don’t have.”

Because this person is anonymous I can't make fun of him/her too much.  It's probably someone I know!  But still.  It's just FACEBOOK.  It is not real.  Remember that everyone.  I don't really care about your status update either!  (I only change my own to amuse myself.)

Speaking of Facebook, I keep meaning to write something about this insane NY Magazine article about kids gone wild on Facebook at one of the poshest, Gossip Girliest private high schools here in Manhattan.  My feelings on the are too complicated to quickly articulate, but seems that I'm one of very few people who actually ended up siding with the kids.  Yes, they seem like disgusting, overprivileged jerk-offs, but the teachers come off as vile, babyish hypocrites.  Which is worse?  I'm going with the teachers because they are adults and should really know better.  I am curious to know if anyone agrees with me at all.

Oh, and just so you know, someone has already registered FECESBOOK.COM.  Can you believe it?  I was already mentally cashing the check from this great idea.