"It's a fat book" My son said defensively when discovered reading Twilight, "So it sucks. I like fat books." I told him I wanted to read it and he looked at me incredulously "Why?"

My son brought home Twilight from the library two weeks ago. Since then we've all read it, with the exception of my husband who values his time much more than the rest of us. My daughter read it because all her friends had. I read it to see the fuss was about. Frankly, I still don't know what the fuss was about.

I haven't read the rest of the series (I probably will because I am told it is better and I'm just the sort of cat that curiosity kills) so I can only discuss Twilight and, frankly, I feel a migraine coming on at the thought. Fat book or no, I read it in two evenings. I tried not to skip too much but, frankly, some of it was just too painful to wallow through. I remember reading comments by Stephen King about this book, he said that while it was entertaining for young folks, the author just "can't write worth a darn." I thought, "Yea, coming from the guy who stuffs 90% of his books with descriptions of Main and 10% with plot." Well, he was right. She can't.

I'm not an editor, so I won't talk too much about grammar, but it would have been nice if someone had edited that book. The characters were shallow and you didn't care one bit what happened to them. About halfway through the book I turned to my daughter (she was reading by day and I was reading by night so we were roughly around the same spot) and said, "You know, she could save this plot if Bella kills Edward in the end." "She won't." she replied sadly. And I knew it was true. It was totally predictable. Every inch of it. Alas.

Many people have compared the Twilight series with the Harry Potter series, including Robert Pattinson who played Edward on Twilight and Cedrick Diggory in the Harry Potter movies (and you can hardly blame him considering). Sorry, no comparison. JK Rowling is brilliant, her stories are creative and her characters are very well developed. This is evident by the fact that so many reviews of her work are emotionally charged based on what happened to the characters rather than on the quality of her work. Think about it, her skill is so developed, that it has ceased to matter in critiquing her work. Meanwhile, Stephanie Meyers is so lacking in skill that it's hard to get past that and figure out exactly what she's trying to say. I suspect she's not really saying anything but instead living out her own white horse fantasies in the written word.

The Twilight character Edward, while shallow, is annoying as hell. If I knew this guy personally, I would have staked him the first day. Bella is pathetic. Not a heroine, a stupid little girl with a martyr complex who needs rescuing every two seconds.

The plot is the most annoying thing about this book. It is not an original plot. It is the same plot of every Victorian romance novel and the hundreds of Harlequin romances my mother used to hide in the headboard of her bed, and I used to steal- till I realized they all had the same plot.

It goes like this:
Girl meets boy. They are irresistibly drawn to each other for no apparent reason except maybe hormones. Boy fights it because of some issue and ends up treating girl like crap. She's miserable. Then, she's in danger and he has to save her life. They get along for awhile, but he still has issues, so he acts like an ass some more. Ultimately, he confesses his issues, she shows him it's not a big deal, he is delighted he's found someone who can accept him even though he sucks, he ceases to be an asshole and they live happily ever after.

I remember in my younger days talking to my mother about these books and trying to explain just what a terrible message they were sending to women and girls who read them.
1. If a man needs to save you, he'll realize how much you mean to him. 2. A man who is a jerk will stop being a jerk once he realizes how much you mean to him. And
3. All you have to do is wait it out, take the abuse, accept whatever issues he has with grace and you will eventually be rewarded with blissful love.
She told me that some women needed that message to stay in their marriages. I was mind boggled. "Maybe," I replied, "those women shouldn't stay in their marriages."

But Twilight's message is even worse. Now, granted Edward is a vampire and vampires don't have to follow human laws of decency, but why exactly is it okay that he snuck into her house and spied on her while she slept? How is that romantic and not just creepy and disgusting? I mean, are there no stalking laws in Forks?

Another thing that really needs to be addressed by society at large is the fact that physical attraction does not equal love. Now I understand that a whirlwind romance is in fact that, romantic and whirlwind-y, but it's not love. Love comes knowing someone and appreciating the good things about them as well as the bad things. Despite Edward's 4000 question game, these two characters don't know each other at all. Hell, we the readers barely know them and we know stuff they don't. And yet they are both willing to throw their lives away for each other? That's not love, that's co-dependency. Both of these manic depressive characters also use threats of suicide and other harm to themselves to control the other; that is not appropriate in a relationship. At all. Ever.

What Twilight does is romanticize a relationship that far too many giant red flag warning signs of future abuse for comfort. He is controlling, he is jealous, he uses threats of suicide and leaving to control her, he spies on her, follows her around without her knowledge or permission and does his very best to convince her that if he didn't, something terrible would happen to her. Likewise he is a big whiny, manipulative baby who coerces her repeatedly into doing things she doesn't want to do and is obviously working very hard to convince her that not only does she need him to keep her from hurting herself, he needs her to keep from killing himself. Oh my.

And doesn't it strike anyone as a little creepy that a 100 year old guy is getting busy with a 17 year old girl? Okay, I know he looks 17, but he's not. It's just gross.

My daughter wondered aloud yesterday why why all of her friends like this book so much with its unoriginal plot, unlikeable characters and uninteresting writing style. I replied "Well, most kids didn't cut their teeth on Shakespeare and Homer." And it's true. We are a family of nerds. Most kids don't know bad literature when they see it and are afraid of good literature. I suspect the popularity of such a crappy book is indicative of the state of our public schools.

I have frequently been amazed at the impact early exposure to good literature has had on my children. I wasn't exposed to it a great deal till I was in college, which happened to be when they were little and that's why they heard classic novels at bedtime instead of storybooks and our puppet shows were based on classic theatre. But I really think this has increased their enjoyment of many things. For example Oh Brother Where Art Thou is much more amusing if you've read the Odyssey. People who are familiar with classical literature have a much more developed sense of symbolism and experience greater enjoyment of visual arts, music, poetry and modern films that utilize it.

But as usual, I digress.

Curiosity sent me to the Christian websites to see their take on Twilight and the jury is mixed. Some, like Ignite your Faith reviewer Stacy Lingle find value in the themes of selfless love, sacrifice, resisting temptation and good triumphing over evil. Others, like the author of this blog see Edward Cullen as an anti-Christ figure, and agree with me that the message it contains is a poor one for today's young girls.

As a Pagan, I find Twilight irritating in many ways and I'm frankly relieved my children hated it and the characters in it. It tells me I must've done something right in raising them (certainly not everything!) I would be interested to hear what other members of the Pagan and magical community think of this series. Please leave comments, even disparaging ones. I am really interested in hearing from people who like the book because as open as I like to think my mind is, I just can't get my brain around it.

Meanwhile, I am going to horrify my son by requesting he check the rest of the series out of the middle school library, because I'm a masochist like that. Not enough of a masochist to pay for them... but they can't be much worse now that they've got the predefined romance plot out of the way... can they?

Once upon a time I was reading King Lear , which isn't my favorite bit of Shakespeare, but it's right near the top and I got thinking about Edmund, the bastard son of the Duke who says this:

"Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound.
Why bastard? wherefor base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?

Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father's love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word, 'legitimate':
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow; I prosper
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!"

Edgar is talking about his Nature. He is saying that he must act according to his nature and that his nature is that of a bastard and that this nature was given to him, he has no choice.

I have noticed that in Shakespeare's plays the bastards are always the bad guys. It is the bastard's nature to be so. And the legitimate son is the good guy, the hero, or the victim of the bastard and often the one who settles things, or at least makes it through the end of the tragedy without dying like everyone else. The legitimate son is honorable, respectable, often clever and oh-so-civilized. The bastard is often also clever (sometimes m ore clever than the legitimate son), but he is also unpredictable, often two-faced, and undermines the ligitimate son.

The bastard son and the legitimate son can be seen as metaphores for nature and civilizaton respectively. The bastard son is cruel and unpredictable, but he can't help it. It's just the way he is. He was made that way by his situation. The legitimate son is not cruel, he is lawful, he is often the innocent and oblivious victim to the mechanations of the bastard, often underestimating the bastard and suffering for it. But in the end, the legitimate son always wins, though he often has lots of help.

But what makes a bastard a bastard except the mechinations of man. If there were no such thing as marriage, there would be no legitimate sons, and if there were no legitimate sons, there would be no bastards. All would be equal, none greater than the other.

As I contemplate my front walkway this metaphore comes home to me. The paving stones, perfectly placed are overrun again with weeds. I pull them up and they grow back. They drive me crazy! I hate weaving my darn sidewalk but there they are again, weeds. Nature. Invading my nice civilized sidewalk. (My efforts to plant spanish moss and creeping thyme between the paving stones have failed. Only clover, plantago and shephard's purse wants to grow there. If they were all nice and short, I wouldn't mind so much.) But, what if there were no paving stones? Then I would love the weeds. I would value them as I do any other plant in my garden because without them, I'd be walking in mud.

There was a time long ago when the people of Europe lived in harmony with Nature, but that time was long over before Shakespeare was born. To them Nature was a cruel and unpredictable goddess (I lowercase goddess on purpose there because She wasn't really a Goddess to them, it's another metaphore.). She was failed crops, hailstorms, swarms of locusts, poisonous reptiles and insects, rodents that ate their food and spread diseases, poisonous plants, thorns, and predators who ate their livestock and sometimes their kids. It wasn't until relatively recent times that nature became flowers, and butterflies, and hummingbirds and majestic trees and fluffy bunnies. Incidentally, it wasn't that to the prehistoric people who lived in hermony with nature either. It took wiping out most of our natural predators and paving most of our arable land to do that and even still, there's mosquitos.

Alot of people think of ancient Pagans and think "Oh, they lived in harmony with Nature" or "Oh, they held Nature sacred." but that's not necessarily true. All civilized societies have seen nature as an adversary. Something to be faught back, kept away, tamed into manicured lawns, trimmed trees and neatly rowed crops. Walls were built to keep out, not only human enemies, but nature as well. People who lived off in nature away from civilization were seen as odd and branded with deragatory terms and Gods and Goddesses of natural realms had the most terrifying stories told about them (read a bit about Artemis, Dionysus and Hecate and you'll see what I mean.)

But as Edmund's status as a bastard would disappear with the institution of marriage (a civilizing force)

Why bastard? wherefor base?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous and my shape as true,
As honest madam's issue? Why brand they us

So too does the attitude toward nature disappear if civilization did not exist.

But both marriage and civilization serve an important role to the human. Without these, we must live in harmony with nature because we cannot separate ourselves from it. We would not be able to hold ourselves above the animals, we would not be able to speak of ourselves as guardians of nature. We would be just like all the other animals. Civilization allows us to transfer property, to keep records, to maintain knowledge, to store food, to think of ourselves as above other species. Civilization is what allows us to be such a successful species. Without it, our numbers would dwindle, and perhaps that wouldn't be so bad.

It may seem that from Nature's point of view that we are the bastards undermining the sanctity of Her legitimate children, usurping their lands, driving them out and stealing their birthrights. But remember that bastardy was invented by civilization. Nature cares no more for any of us that love Her than she does those who don't. Earthquakes, storms, tidal waves, plague are going to take as many environmentalists as they do oil barons (probably more because the oil barons can afford to buy bubbles to live in) and dogs and cats and birds and fish are going to die too. Nature can be a loving mother, but in the end She is pragmatic and nonpartisan. What is best for the All is what will be done and the most convenient will be the ones sacrificed. Nature loves us (ALL species) equally, and she will destroy as many of us indiscriminately as she needs to to ensure the survival of some. It seems horrible on the surface, but it is really quite a beautiful mystery. Great Mother Gaia, the Mother of us All destroys randomly because she loves us too much to choose. There are no bastards- no matter how bastardly we may behave!

But is Nature a bastard? Will the legitmate son eventually vanquish Her? The birth of civilization made Her a bastard, for She was first, She is after all fatherless, and civilization invented bastards. I think civilization could vanquish the spirit of Gaia, yes, though it certainly won't be easy and a whole lot of other characters in the play would be dead before the closing act. Her material form would still flow through space, barren and on life support provided by civilization. But She'd probably still scheme from the dugeon, awaiting Her chance to rise up and strike back and claim the throne She enjoyed before that upstart legitimate civilization came into being.

Call me a geek, you wouldn't be the first, but I think this is totally cool.

Some scholars have used astronomical clues in The Odyssey to put a date to the day Odysseus killed his wife's suitors April 16, 1178 B.C.

How do they know? According to a story by the Associated Press, Marcelo Magnasco at Rockefeller University and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Laboratory in La Plata, Argentina, searched the text of the Odyssey carefully for clues to the position of the stars in the sky throughout the story. If you've read the story, there are frequent mentions of constellations (and even more frequent mentions of rosey fingered and saffron robed Eos.) (When I read it out loud, the family jokes that all they ever do is eat and watch the sun come up!). They did fudge some things. For instance, they interpreted a statement that Hermes had gone far to the West to deliver a message to mean that Mercury was near the Western end of its trajectory.

Anyway, it's all very cool and yes, maybe some people have too much time on their hands, but there are worse ways to spend your time.