"Where are the Vampire Cranks?"
Edward Cullen, century-old high school senior. Kept having to repeat because he never matured. Image found here.
Matthew Yglesias, a smart guy (his liking Harvey Danger notwithstanding) asks the searching questions:I like vampires, but I’m not a Twilight fan, as evidenced by the fact that it was only yesterday when I learned that instead of burning in the sun and dying like real vampires, Twilight vamps just . . . sparkle in the sunlight. Nonsense. And isn’t the idea of a dude who’s over 100 years old hanging out with a high school student pretty creepy and weird?
I ruefully confess that I am halfway through the Twilight Saga. This is because I have teenage daughters who have also read them. I have also seen the first two High School Musical films because I have daughters.
That in turn got me thinking about the aging process. Across various fictions, why don’t vampires exhibit more cranky old man characteristics? I’m only 28 and already I feel myself periodically overtaken by a desire to tell the young people all about How It Was Back in the Day. I’ll bore people with tedious stories about the old Monroe Street Giant in Columbia Heights before the fancy new stores opened, or about how there used to not be all this stuff on U Street but The Kingpin was the best bar in DC. Just yesterday, I think, a colleague and I were explaining to the rest of the ThinkProgress team that if the new progressive infrastructure and its blogosphere last for a thousand years, men will stay say the Social Security privatization fight of 2005 was their finest hour. If I ever attain immortality, I fully intend to harangue the young people of the future with nonsense about Voltron and how people think of Harvey Danger as a one-hit wonder but really that whole album’s underrated and had other good songs.
That and, you know, murder people in order to feast on their blood.
A syllogism:
I at least feign interest in the things my daughters are interested in.
My daughters are interested in the Twilight saga.
Ergo . . .
Because I respect my reader(s), I feel I should warn you: All this is a roundabout way of saying that on down the road, you may see a Twilight post or two here. A preview: The books are pretty bad all the way around, but they are bad in an interesting way, if a maddening one--that way being that you realize how good they could have been if they weren't so single-minded in their drive to be bad. But on the other hand, their badness may be not a bug but a feature. And there's also the more general question of Why vampires? And why now?
Anyway. You've been warned.
