Gnumoon's Stuff

Nightmares for little Gnumoon

Halloween season is officially upon us.

In the spirit of that, LBPS, esq. and I have embarked upon our yearly "Countdown to Halloween," with the requisite badly-done photoshops. Today I was doing one with some of the artwork from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books, and I started thinking about that series. The artwork was undeniably terrifying, but the stories themselves weren't all that scary.

For the most scares per weekly checkout in your elementary school library, the top prize goes to Jack Prelutzky's "Nightmares: Poems to Trouble Your Sleep."  I was simultaneously obsessed with and horrified by this book when I was a kid. I must have checked it out from the library at least every other week (I think the even-numbered weeks were devoted to books about sharks). I would read the poems voraciously during the day, memorizing passages to scare my friends with. But when the sun went down those same poems would haunt me, reducing me to a terrified, shivering ball of nerves underneath my covers. I would promise myself tearfully to never read the book again, to take it back to the library and never even look at the cover again, if I could just survive the night without dying of fright.

Then as soon as the sun came up and I was awake again, I would be pulled in once again by the siren song of the book. The long dark nights would become a distant memory as I memorized the passages and studied the gruesome illustrations.

Repeat.

In the intervening years, I decided that my reaction to the book (listed for ages 7 to 9) was due more to my fraidy-cat nature and less due to the poems/illustrations actually being scary. The guy who wrote the book is a well-respected kiddiebook author, I told myself. I was overreacting to this! Surely the illustrator, who gave the world such innocuous fare as Frog and Toad Are Friends, wouldn't purposefully try to scare kids! It was all in good fun, and I was just overly-sensitive.

Today I googled it, and found a listing of the poems. It included the one that remains the most seared into my brain, The Ghoul. The drawing was not included, but I remember it vividly: the creature sits atop a jngly gym, awaiting the inevitable release of the children from school. Then he will eat them up.
So...perhaps I wasn't overreacting. This seems a bit much for a 7 year old:

The gruesome ghoul, the grizzly ghoul,
Without the slightest noise,
Waits patiently beside the school
To feast on girls and boys.

He lunges fiercely through the air
As they come out to play,
Then grabs a couple by the hair
And drags them far away.

He cracks their bones, and snaps their backs,
And squeezes out their lungs.
He chews their thumbs like candy snacks,
And pulls apart their tongues.

He slices their stomachs and bites their hearts and
Tears their flesh to shreds.
He swallows their toes like toasted tarts,
And gobbles down their heads.

Fingers, elbows, hands and knees,
And arms and legs and feet.
He eats them with delight and ease,
For every part’s a treat.

And when the gruesome, grizzly ghoul
Has nothing left to chew,
He hurries to another school,
And waits, perhaps, for you.

I've located the book on Amazon, and I think I'll buy a copy. I hope that at the age I am now, pushing into a new decade of life very shortly now, I can read the poems and still be able to sleep.

Twilight & perfect Edward's perfection: a wee vampire love story to cut your canines on

OK, after earnestly promising to update often, this is my first post in over 2 weeks. I’m a big fat lying sack of fail.
I’m going to skip over everything bloggable, and do something really random. Shocking, I know! And I may piss some people off and get angry comments and emails. Shocking, I know!

So I’m finally getting some time to read again. I never thought that would happen, and yet here I am, having read several books in the past few months and even comprehending and remembering some of it. I’m quite proud of myself.

 So a friend gave me a book and said, “Try this. It’s fluff.” And I’d heard an interview with the author on NPR and the cover was appealing (you can get a graphic designer to read almost anything encased in a flashy jacket) and it was an interesting enough subject, so I gave it a go. I read it in one night, which shouldn’t be at all surprising since it was written for 14-year-old girls. Twilight. Prudish vampires. Perfect perfect Edward. And a heaping dollop of angst. 

I don’t want this post to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy it, because I did. I enjoyed it with the same guilty feeling of indulgence that I have when I snarf down too many S’mores. I enjoyed it in a way that made me feel stuffed to the point of queasiness, yet still somehow unfulfilled. 

Is this the stuff of tweener lit these days? Because I can tell you that my life changed the day I found the box of Stephen King books in the shed. And I was in the 5th grade. It wasn’t “safe” reading; it scared the hell out of me, and it thrilled me. This current batch of books is so safe, you never worry about turning the page, you never worry about the themes staying with you and haunting your dreams.

And vampires, really? I bet Anne Rice sees the numbers of these books swooping off the shelves and knocks back another slug of Macallan while wondering how Lestat’s sexy legacy of sin ended up so diluted. 

The newbie’s guide to Twilight goes thusly:
-    Edward is perfection, an angel, a god, an adonis. These words are repeated at least 666 times. I wish I had a word counter to check the word “perfect.” He is also a vampire.
-    The novel is written in the first person, which can be rather distracting. But (and I suspect this is the point) it lets preteenage girls (and guys too, remember our good fiend Lestat) slide perfectly into the role of the heroine, Bella Swan.  I can see the gears turning and the light clicking on, “Why, I am clumsy too! The boys here are bumbling just like that! My parents are clueless too! Oh kiss me, Edward!”

- ANGST!

-    The author is a devout Mormon housewife. There isn’t any sex. Read it again: a vampire novel with no sex. It’s the literary equivalent of going to a Beach Boys concert and not hearing any songs about surfing. 
Any mention of sexual stirrings in these 17-year-old characters is subtle and indicated in ellipses, thusly: “His gaze fell on her, his deep amber eyes drank her in. She felt a tingle of electricity in her soul and also in her body …”
(please note the ellipses. “Ellipse,” it sounds like “eclipse,” which happens to the moon. That’s vampirey, right? I could WRITE THIS!) As a friend noted, “When I read a love scene, there had better be something “quivering,” or I’m not interested.”
{Note: For a primer on how to write love scenes for teenagers that might inspire some quivering, please see Tabatha King's One on One.}

- Conveniently for our heroine’s virtue, physical closeness to the godlike Edward would cause him to become so aroused that he would kill her in blood/lust.
And also she couldn’t handle him physically. I ell oh elled at that because I thought of the scene in Mallrats where they are discussing the logistics of Superman and Lois Lane having sex.  I won't quote it here, since my grandmother reads this blog, but it's amusing and involves Kryptonite condoms.

- ANGST!

- Girls these days are apparently into obsessive love. This is because they must not have ever actually experienced it. Edward breaks into Bella’s house and watches her sleep. He follows her. He reads peoples’ minds to see what they think of her. It is creep-tastic. Or wonderful, depending on your age and experience level.
Hey, preteen girlies: you wait a few years and then tell me how romantic it is when you realize the psycho ex is sitting in a parking lot across the street watching you decorate the Christmas tree with your family so he can "feel close to you." Isn't obsession just the sweeeetest thing? Restraining orders, sonnets, what's the diff?

So I've only read the first book, and I plan to read the rest of them, but in the meantime I've written some fanfic of my own that I think rounds out the story nicely for those of us who are old and cynical, much past the point of being dazzled by the icy-hot stare of an immortal.
Behold:

I couldn't believe how much and yet how little time had passed since I'd arrived in Forks and met my perfect, godlike, perfect Edward and fallen madly in love. Even though we could never be together as a couple, my breath still caught in my chest when I caught a glimpse of him, as I did now, as his long alabaster fingers brushed an errant stand of stringy brown hair off my forehead.

"Bella" he whispered across our trig homework, the word scarcely more than the shadow of a breath. I shivered with delight ...

We were at his house, studying after school. Perfect perfect Edward didn't have to study, of course. He was well-learned in mathematics and music and art and practically everything else...
I didn't have to worry about his beautiful vampire family threatening me; they were a special coven of vampires who had spent years perfecting the art of hunting only animals, suppressing all their natural urges ...
I was comfortable here, as comfortable as I was anywhere, really, what with my parents being blundering, if well-meaning, children themselves.

I would do anything, anything at all to be with my love, my angelic perfect Edward, to be close to his cold chiseled body and smell the scent of the hunt on his lovely breath. He said it put me in danger to love him, but I didn't care. I would happily lie down if he wished it, prey to his predator...

(WARNING: this is the really unnecessary part that you might not want to read. It's the cynic's ending, the one that wouldn't have pulled in much money from the kidlets in book form)

"Bella," floated Edward's siren voice again across the velvet room. "Bella what is that smell? It's, it's blood isn't it?" His perfect statue's nostrils flared slightly as if tracking a scent on a breeze I couldn't detect with my mere human senses.

"Oh it's nothing," I said, embarrassed. "I just got my period today. I am a 17-year-old girl, you know."

Because he was a VAMPIRE and not actually the world's most perfect boyfriend, Edward roared ferociously and leapt across the room, tearing out my throat in one ripping mouthful. I tumbled to the floor watching sideways as the blood spurted out and soaked into the rich black velvet carpet. As the white fog encroached on my consciousness, I found myself thinking, "Why didn't I just go out with that other kid? The one who wasn't a vampire?"

Run Devon Run!

I finally got around to editing my football stuff from last weekend. Yay me.

Random iPod listing

For no particular reason except that it's 1 am and I'm up cleaning and listening to my iPod on shuffle, here are the last 10 songs I've been dancing around to while mopping. Behold the random:

Take the Skinheads Bowling - Camper Van Beethoven
This is Where it Ends - Barenaked Ladies
The Hexx - Pavement
Pictures at an Exhibition
Song for the Man - Beastie Boys
Shake Seniora - Harry Belafonte
Thriller - Michael Jackson
Lighthouse - The Waifs
Tai Shan - Rush (ok, I skipped that one. Not even I like that one.)
Forth Eorlingas - Lord of the Rings Sdtk
The Crossroads - Bone, Thugs in Harmony

Some parts of the house are cleaner than others, depending on the funkiness of the song.

In todays'es edishun of 'bad grammer and stuff's'

Apostrophes are probably the most misused punctuation marks in this country. I will not patronize an establishment that shows a blatant disregard for rules governing apostrophes on signage or in ads, and  I now extend that boycott to my university bookstore. Seriously, the bookstore. The official name of the place is "The Scholars Bookshop". And yet ... I received this email in my inbox, promoting a visiting author:

Why? Why? Are the rules so hard to understand? 
If only there was some place, a brick and mortar building, where one could go to procure a printed list of these rules.

Miss Davis, will you be my veep?

The swirling dirt that is flying around McCain's VP selection (Sarah Palin, a name I'd never even heard before Friday) is mostly stupid crap. The "is it her baby or is it her daughter's baby" baby thing, the "hunting wolves from helicopters" thing, the "OMG, Sarah Palin hates Harry Potter because she thinks he's de debbil" thing ... it's all stupid. So I will post something equally idiotic, and bring us one step closer to "Idiocracy."

The fact is, that when I look at Palin, I see Miss Davis from Varsity Blues. You remember her, right? She was the mousey, bespeckled, bun-wearing sex-ed instructor by day, the "Hot For Teacher" stripper by night ( ... it was the night Mox took the guys to the bar until 6am the day before the big game- boy was Coach Kilmer steamed! What, don't you watch that movie all the time?). Let's take a gander (aside: Palin would shoot a gander dead with her assault rifle. Totally true, I read it on the internet):

The shot of Miss Davis actually teaching is even more striking (she has glasses), but I can't find it online and I'm too sleepy to throw in the DVD and take a screenshot. This likeness is a 6+, but that one would be, in the immortal words of Billy Bob, "A teeyun! A effin' teeyun!"

***
I was chastised by my mother-in-law for only mentioning Palin using not-nice terms that were referencing her gender and not her policies. While it is true that I am quite the opposite of her on most issues (So ... how's that "abstinence-only sex ed" thing working out?), I realized that it is true that my comments were somewhat loaded.
So I felt bad about it, for about 15 seconds. Then I remembered that I'm a no-account sarcastic blogger and not a political analyst, and that I'm here to bring the snark. I am snarky to everyone equally, 'tis a service I provide. I photoshopped Hillary and Obama mud wrestling. I was working on a quite hilarious hybrid of McCain and the Crypt Keeper from "Tales from the Crypt." I'm not here to be serious.*

*except about sharks. I'm always serious about sharks. And, to a lesser degree, breastfeeding.