blair mitchelmore's blog

I finished Dracula last night — around three in the morning so technically it was November but I still count it as completing the book according to the Infinite Summer schedule — and I thought it was a really great book. Not one of The Greats, but a good story with a decent amount of emotion and pathos underpinning the basic plot.

To cap off this month of reading Dracula, I’m writing up this post to talk about a few of the interesting things I found about Dracula, as well as try to find some connection between it and Infinite Jest.

Vampire Lore

In truth, I’ve never seen a Dracula story in all my years of Vampire stories, so I wasn’t sure how much of the traditional Vampire lore we are familiar with came from Dracula. It turns out that it was a surprising amount. I look to Whedon lore before others so they are the standard against which I compare and the comparison is mostly favorable.

Vampire’s require an invitation to enter buildings; killing a vampire does turn them to dust, though only if they are so old as their natural bodies would be dust by then; to become a vampire you have to be drained of blood and then drink the Vampire’s blood, though you do not have to be drained to death and the effect is permanent: once this procedure occurs, no matter when you die you will become a vampire, provided your sire remains among the undead; a vampire, or someone on the way to vampirism, also has a special psychic link with their sire, something not made explicit with Whedon but the master/sire relationship is strong there as well; you lose your soul when you become a vampire; and finally, vampires show no reflection in mirrors.

However there are a few notable differences: vampire’s also cast no shadow; they can turn to mist or creatures of the night; from my reading of the book, their fangs are not retractable; their physical powers seem to be limited to strength, with no enhancement to vision of hearing; vampires must rest on holy land, that of a church or a graveyard; to be immersed in water is death for a Stoker vampire, and while on the sea a vampire can control the weather; and most importantly, they can walk the streets by day, though their powers are linked to the night and they are unusable in the day.

Novel Structure

The novel is structured as a collection of diaries, memos, letters, and news articles. There are two interesting side-effects of this. The first is that all the characters correspond with each other but with varying levels of delay. So while Lucy has already died, we read Mina’s letters of joy to her, and later on experience her sorrow at learning of Lucy’s death, undeath, and destruction. These delayed emotions play to the reader well, I thought, giving a level of sympathy to the characters, and also establishing a world of hidden truths that can only be noticed when seeing the story in its entirety, something the writers of these individual pieces cannot enjoy — well actually they do, which brings me to the second point.

Around half-way through the novel, the two main stories collide with Mina and Van Helsing discussing her husband’s strange story out of Transylvania and Van Helsing telling of Lucy’s sordid end. At this point, Mina begins to collect the various diaries and articles, essentially creating all the previous sections of the novel for the group of Vampire hunters to use as a tool for finding and killing Dracula. From this point on in the novel, the diaries continue and they are all shaped by the open sharing of all the diaries in uncaptured scenes. This is a very meta-y type of storytelling, almost post-modern in construction, something that perhaps inspired the Infinite Summer people to read Dracula.

Gayness

This isn’t actually a real thing, but rather a construction of modern minds, I think. Still, as I read this book, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all if everybody was banging everybody else, regardless of gender, with the heaps of praise and love they throw on each other. I mean, some of the early letters between Mina and Lucy are almost lascivious, they talk about sleeping together, dressing each other, long walks on the beach, it’s kind of ridiculous. The man on man action isn’t quite as explicit, but I found more than a few moments in the novel where it seems like the men were moments away from a gay-ass tongue bath.

Feminism

Mina Harker is a really bad-ass woman. She’s the one who first puts all the diaries together, she’s the one who figures out where Dracula is living, what some of his motives are. She determines that the psychic link between her and Dracula, one created when she is forced to drink his blood in a siring ceremony, can be exploited to find Dracula’s location. She’s basically the smartest one of the bunch. She’s also pretty tough:

When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a fainting disposition.

That sounds like a line from a fucking superhero. Later on, when she’s done all the Batman-esque super-sleuthing for the men, and it is time to go to Dracula’s lair and kill him, the men tell her to go to bed because ‘we are men, and we are able to bear’ and she quietly accepts it, but only because she fears they will remove her entirely from the venture if she protests on this; she isn’t some pussy glad to be away from all the danger, she’s afraid they’ll put her further away from it.

Dracula has a weird sort of feminism to it. Throughout the novel, Mina is praised by Van Helsing for her bravery, her wit, her sharp detective skills, pretty much everything. But he still says things like ’she has a man’s brain’ as though it were a compliment. It’s struggling to establish a female lead as at least close to an equal, but falls slightly short. Still, I’m impressed that the novel was so willing to have even a remotely powerful female lead.

Horror

This is not the scariest novel I’ve ever read — there are moments in Stephen King’s Misery that almost made we sweat with horror — but it still managed to evoke real terror at times. In particular, the section which recounts the face-off against the vampire Lucy is great: so far as I can tell, it has the very first instance of the phrase ‘if looks could kill,’ a cliche now perhaps, but surely a terrifying description, and one that struck me with the instant I read it as well.

Infinite Jest Connections

The connections to Infinite Jest are mostly tangential or internal fabrications, but there are some interesting ones. There are a few explicit references to Hamlet early on, but those seem purely incidental. And I’ve already mentioned the self-referential writing which seems a very modern conceit for a novel written over a century ago, and one reminiscent of the Infinite Jest film inside Wallace’s novel.

Another particularly compelling connection comes from the closing chapters of Dracula. In them, Mina Harker is racing toward Dracula’s castle with Van Helsing hoping to consecrate his resting place in order to refuse him safe harbor from their hunt. In the superstitious Carpathian mountains, the scar upon Mina’s forehead — a burn from the placing of Holy Water on her flesh — causes their journey ill will from the villagers; in order to avoid these hassles, she takes to wearing a veil to hide her deformity. If that’s not an Infinite Jest connection, I don’t know what is.

Actual closing thoughts

Overall, I’m glad I read Dracula. I’ve always liked Vampire stories, so it seemed like I had to read it eventually and the month deadline really helped with that — I read over 140 pages yesterday to ensure I would finish it according to the schedule. Beyond that though, it opened me up to a very different writing style. I’ve mostly avoided classical novels for fear of being bogged down by archaic language, but I found Dracula to be fairly readable, which makes me more willing to read other classic novels I’ve put off for too long. So go read a classic or something.

For a long time, I’ve valued reading books, except I didn’t really read books myself. I bought books, I planned to read books, but that’s as far as it went. When I decided to read Infinite Jest along with the Infinite Summer website this spring, it was an active decision to reevaluate my reading habits.

I’ve read perhaps a dozen books in the last five years, most of which have been read in very quick bursts followed by long lulls in reading, and that’s an abysmal rate in my opinion. So I’ve started being more proactive in my reading of late, trying to jump right into a new book each time I finish one.

Related to that, I recently finished Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon, a book not considered science fiction by its author but widely seen as one of the most influential early science fiction novels. It is written as a chronicling of the future iterations of humanity for the next two billions years.

The time scale is exponential in nature; the first four chapters cover a mere five thousand years, whereas the last three chapters cover a full billion.

Some of the initial ‘history’ is obviously wrong. His ‘predictions’ that France and England would war to such an extent that both nations would be decimated, that Europe and America would come to violent throes leaving Europe a biological wasteland, were both quickly proven wrong by World War 2.

But the end result of those early events is that Russia’s Bolshevik revolution slowly morphs to a capitalist nation and grows stronger connections with America. China also develops into a communist nation working not as a vassal of America but a strong economic competitor. These details aren’t quite the world we live in, but to consider them outlandish is also cutting Stapledon short.

From there, the world goes through epic changes, the rise and inevitable fall of countless world governments, cataclysms that shatter the world, and much much more. Humanity evolves into 18 unique forms, some more advanced than us, others vastly more primitive, even more so foreign as to barely recognize their origins.

Having read this book, my old post about people’s terrifying pessimism seems not strongly worded enough. These are troubling times, but every time in history has been troubling. The world isn’t ever going to magically become a utopia. We’re going to continually struggle against our needs, our wants, our vices, our neuroses. But we will, in the long run, improve.

The global temperature might rise five degrees, destroying island nations with rising sea levels, crippling the economy and agriculture of the world, but we will adjust. We all won’t adjust because a lot of us will be dead. But we will persist. I think that any one who is so pessimistic as to look at the state the world is in rate now and imagine it can only get worse, or that it’s just not worth it to live a longer life in these dire times, or any of these sorts of things suffers from an extreme, almost hysteric, lack of imagination.

I’m still not sold on immortality, I still suffer from the belief that life would eventually get boring and I’d prefer the nothingness to continued life. But this book has shown that there’s so much more out there than we can even imagine, from the sheer quantity alone. If any one person lived forever, who knows what they’d discover, what truths they’d develop, what intractable problems they’d swat away with a few millennia of concerted effort.

I’ll close this post with a video that, every time I see it, reinforces the idea (among others) that even immortality isn’t enough time. There’s simply too much to experience, too much to do.

I haven’t blogged recently, not for a lack of thoughts worth blogging (though perhaps a doubt in my ability to express said bloggable thoughts adequately is encouraging the drought) but for a panoplic plethora of thoughts and ideas Infinite Jest is bringing to light. Reading this book is something which demands intense thought and concentration, and often leaves you drained, but in the best way possible. I’m still far behind the pack, so I don’t expect to be writing much here for a little while longer — though as Joe Hill noted on his twitter feed, these notes of delay are often shortly followed by frequent bursts of activity so let’s not say it’s impossible that I’ll be writing more before the end of the month.

Infinite Jest is not a book to be taken on lightly. I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to take part in Infinite Summer; Wallace’s magnum opus wears its heft on its sleeve. But when you begin to read about it, the barriers begin to grow in your mind.

It doesn’t help when the Infinite Summer blog provides a guide to reading Infinite Jest; even before reading the post you have a sudden realization that this is much more than just a long book.

Use bookmarks. Persevere to page 200. Trust the author. These are some of the maxims presented to the virginal reader of Infinite Jest. And they are not said in jest¹. This book is tough to get in to.

But luckily, there are a few keystones along the way, even before page 200, that signaled to me that this book had something to offer me.

The first keystone moment for me was the nightmare sequence beginning on page 61². This short two page sequence is centred around the idea of noticing in the curls and bends of your hardwood floor a face. This is an idea I thought of several months ago as an interesting starting off point for a short horror tale — one I never really started and certainly wouldn’t have written about as well as Wallace — but beyond that coincidence it was a shockingly good vignette into a realm of terror and emotion that demonstrated to me the range this book was capable. I had enjoyed sections prior to that one, but it wasn’t until then that the critical mass of enjoyment overcame the dread and awe this book engenders in the reader.

Since then, I’ve found many more sections, paragraphs, sentences, and even words that resonate with me. The book might be tough to get into, but once you’re there, you’re there. Which is a good thing because I’m still way behind according to the schedule so I can use the momentum.

1. I didn’t want this to be a pun but unfortunately, the word jest works better than its synonyms in that context, so suck it haters. [↩]
2. I should have written about this over a month ago, but I’ve been woefully behind the Infinite Summer Schedule since almost day one so these digressions have been put on hold. [↩]

There’s been a lot of backlash¹ over the way vampires are being handled in new stories, but the criticism I’ve read seems to suffer from a lack of imagination if anything.

Vampires were, I suppose, a horror tale in the beginning, and then when Bram Stoker created Dracula they became a symbol for seduction and sex. But they were still scary.

But, so the critics say, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer² we’ve had a slow pussification of vampires. They are no longer ravenous beasts who view humans as nothing more than a slow moving meal, who use their overwhelming sexual charisma as a mere tool to entice humans into their arms (and fangs).

I understand that to a degree, especially in light of Twilight³, but I respectfully disagree. Vampires were made to evolve along this path.

Zombies, werewolves, and vampires are the holy trinity of supernatural horror. Zombies are mindless horror, and any expansion of zombies beyond that is likely to be seen by connoisseurs as no longer being zombies. Werewolves are generally seen as a Jekyll/Hyde scenario with the werewolf half being uncontrollable so any shift away from that changes the definition of werewolf. But vampires are at their basest level undead creatures of the night who drink blood for sustenance. You can make a harrowing tale based around the premise of that creature, or you can tell a story of addiction, or a story of human empathy, or a story about the power of free will over base desires.

Basically, there’s much more wiggle room for what’s acceptable for a vampire story by virtue of their base properties. There’s nothing inherently primal and horrifying about vampires, it just so happens that those were the tales told most frequently until recent history.

So, when people make fun of Bill Compton of True Blood for being a “wet blanket” or some similar term because he desires to live as human a life as is possible as a vampire they’re missing the point. Vampires are homogeneous but not in the way everyone thinks. They’re not universally unfeeling unsympathetic sociopaths. Even looking at their source material can show you that.

Humans are not all the same. And vampires are made from humans. Some, when given eternal life and superhuman power, will forget their humanity and become a darker creature something akin to what we imagine as the prototypical vampire; others may shrink at the very thought of being a creature they previously imagined as an affront to God and may very well consider suicide; and many more will see their new powers not as an excuse to behave inhumanely but as a curse they must reject to retain their humanity.

The other supernatural beasts we’re familiar with don’t have this breadth. Zombies become mindless seekers of brains⁴, and werewolves become a creature who is a regular human most of the time but transforms to an uncontrollable monster during a full moon. Vampires don’t follow either of these paths and so they have a much broader palette from which their personalities can be painted.

So Bill Compton being a self-hating vampire isn’t a failing of True Blood, but rather it’s a sign that people are willing to be more complex with vampires in stories. Much like the wise stoic Native American, and the Magic Negro faded away with time replaced by more natural characters, the monstrous vampire stereotype has found itself a mere permutation in a panoply of perspectives⁵. And this isn’t a bad thing.

But with this in mind, we have to accept that a global shift from one persona to another in vampires would be a weakening of the whole. If everyone began to write all vampires as effeminate waifs afraid of human contact, that would be a terrible fate for vampire lore. But if those original sexual seductive monsters are not supplanted but supported by these new unexplored aspects of vampirism, I can hardly see that as a bad thing, for vampires or for storytelling.

1. I should probably be less lazy and find links to the numerous “Vampires are being made lame” articles and blog posts and essays I’ve read over the last few months, but seeing as you’re reading this endnote that clearly didn’t happen [↩]
2. Again, maybe there were pussy vampires before then, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire comes to mind though I don’t know enough of the details of that novel to include it as a canonical example pussy vampires [↩]
3. which has vampires that twinkle rather than smolder when doused with sunlight [↩]
4. Well, not really. The brains thing is sort of a stereotype that everyone knows but for which there’s remarkably little backing in pop culture instances of zombies. [↩]
5. Sometimes, I think I like alliteration too much [↩]

Wow. I didn’t know I had it in me. I had no idea I felt so strongly about the character development deficiencies in erotic novels.¹

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking part in the grand experiment that is Infinite Summer. But reading Infinite Jest, even in 75 pages per week chunks, can be draining. So recently, to kill some time avoiding reading Infinite Jest, I decided to read another book: Secretary’s Punishment.

A little back story is needed here. A few months ago I bought a few adult erotica books because I wondered how good the books were. If they weren’t well written I was thinking about writing my own, cashing in on my unremarkable writing capabilities. Now that I’ve read one of them, I thought I’d write up my thoughts.

The book centres on a young woman named Emily Robinson. She’s just moved to a new city, away from her abusive fiance, and just started a new job that she needs to keep or she won’t be able to stay in the new city away from her troubled past. The only problem is that her new job is as an administrative assistant (though he abhors the term and prefers the anachronistic ’secretary’) to a demanding man named Edward Caudry, who has yet to find a secretary up to snuff.

That’s the basic premise. And while it’s a diaphanous one it’s enough to establish the early structure of the story. In a format both delightfully and disappointingly like the silver screen Secretary, whenever Emily makes a typo in the documents she writes up, Mr Caudry (as he is known exclusively for the first half of the novel) brings her into his office, has her bend down onto his desk, face pressed to the red-ink circled typos, and gives her an increasing number of spanks to her ass.

Obviously, it doesn’t start as that; it begins as an alternative to being summarily fired, which she accepts somewhat credulously due to her financial dire straits. Her arousal over the entire scenario forces her to masturbate in the bathroom of her office, until he begins to exert more and more control over her; he begins demanding that she not wear pantyhose, that she wear ‘approved’ panties (which he examines every morning), that she not orgasm when not in his presence (a simple demand given how readily she seems to orgasm from his spanks).

So there’s three aspects to this: is the story credulous? Is the writing arousing? And is the writing any good? Well, the story is, for the most part, believable. Though, the progression from a hostile work environment (the first day) to walking around the office without any panties, giving the boss a regular morning blowjob, taking of her skirt while seated at her desk, and some light-to-medium bondage (all by the end of the second week) is the most hastened aspect of the story. Each new day at the office was a new level to the dominance and submission, which to a degree works, but it is the most unbelievable and at times troubling part of the progression. Spreading it out over the course of even a month would’ve made it seem more realistic.

And, yeah, the writing is arousing. Well, for me anyways. The descriptions are very good, and the author tends not to use the annoying euphemisms — trouser-snake is one that comes to mind — that make most erotic writing tiring². Of course, generally speaking it’s not hard to arouse the male mind, even with simple prose. Mention a vagina, perhaps a clitoris, include reference to an orgasm rising within the woman’s loins and that’s really all it takes: rinse and repeat.

And the writing isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. One thing that I pondered over as I read the book was if the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the book were intentional or not. I could imagine an inventive couple taking the book and using it in their own BDSM role-playing, highlighting the mistakes, and doling out spanks. Then, again the novel might just have had a shitty editer.

The book is mostly dialogue and descriptions of sex, with the rest internal monologue, almost all of which is dispensable. Does that mean I could write an erotic novel? Well, it’s not impossible. The skills required are little, and if this book is any indication of the genre, it’s in dire need of good characterization.

The novel is split in two halves with the first being written from the perspective of Emily and the second from that of Edward. The first half is fairly well written, with Emily at constant conflict with her confusing desire to be punished, to be controlled, to be dominated. It’s not high art, but the internal dialogue allows the reader to see the character slowly shifting from her rather innocent beginnings to her “true personality” as a submissive. It gives the story a little bit of class and respectability.

And most importantly, even though the story is ostensibly that of a boss taking advantage of his position to garner sexual favours from his assistant, the internal monologue keeps the story from feeling degrading or sexist. Which brings me to the second part of the novel, titled Edward.

The second half is much much worse than the first. The first flaw is taking on the persona of the male dominant Edward. For the first half of the novel he is portrayed as a masterful Dom, able to spot that she’s orgasmed in the bathroom, capable of bringing her to mindblowing orgasms with the slightest twitch of his fingers, perfectly gauged in the way he slowly brings her submissive side out. He was exactly the type of character from whose perspective you should never narrate, so already switching voice was a mistake for that reason.

The novel quickly takes us behind his veneer of self-assuredness into his neuroses about how far he should push her, caused by his last relationship in which he didn’t push his Sub far enough fast enough, and all sorts of things that bring him down to earth so to speak. I understand why the novel tried to do this; by humanizing him, it makes the final ending, with Emily and Edward in a stable relationship, a little more appealing. But the final ending could have been just as satisfying if he remained a cipher on the surface. Even the implication of Emily’s understanding of his inner machinations would have made it clear they were on level footing. This more explicit path is harder to swallow.

But that’s not the worst flaw. Much of the second half of the novel is like Hard Sci-Fi for fetishists, discussing the nuances of the relationship between a Dom and a Sub, the levels of power the must be exerted from both partners, how trust can be re-established when a Sub begins to fear their Dom. There are numerous scenes that reiterate these points in a very lecturey way, as if the author wanted to inform the perverts reading the book about BDSM³.

But after all that opinion, there’s a strange, for more than one reason, shift in the story near the end of the novel. The following paragraph appears not long after Edward has managed to coax Emily back into his life:

She was his girlfriend at that moment and Edward had a sudden revelation. The submissiveness was more like a game, he realized. Adriana [Ed: the ex who wanted more domination than Edward could offer] had never been the woman for him because she was a true submissive, one who required a strong, firm master to guide her. Edward was more like an actor who took on a role now and then. That didn’t mean he wasn’t a true Dom when the time came. It simply meant they didn’t have to live the life 24/7.

So once all the rules and boundaries of BDSM have been delicately laid out for the reader, Edward seems to abandon them as a lifestyle, instead twisting them into a game. That in itself is not surprising; aside from the most extreme scenarios, all BDSM is relegated to a subset of your life. But this shift is not made manifest in Edward’s demeanour in the remaining pages of the book. He has the realization that their Dom-Sub is closer to role-playing than it is to the full-on Dom-Sub lifestyle. Yet, he still has her work nude with her arms bound, he still has her spend her nights naked and giving him sexual acts when demanded of her, enforcing her diet and her wardrobe at all times. If it were truly just a game to him, they’d have a normal life, perhaps with innuendo and flirtation throughout the day, leading to some BDSM role-playing at night. But that’s not the situation the novel ends on.

And finally, there’s the closing paragraph:

“Now, I feel like two halves of the same coin. You challenge me, you love me, you take care of me.” Her eyes twinkling, she added, “What more could a girl want?”

Again, this isn’t visibly sexist. But, “a girl” might want many more things. Many girls might want independence, financial stability, someone to converse with, someone who “challenges” them in a form other than in their pain threshold. In fact the novel starts off with Emily leaving her abusive husband to fend for herself and it ends with her being completely controlled by another domineering man. But this time, we’re told, it’s a good thing. Maybe that’s what she wants. But it’s certainly not what “a girl” wants, it’s what “that girl” wants. A minor quibble, but as an ending to the story it sticks in my craw more than the less general alternative.

All this points to one inevitable conclusion: I need to write an erotic novel while ensuring the characters aren’t diminished or degraded for the sake of the sex and that the story concludes pleasantly and logically. Either that, or I need to write something of value, like one of the dozens of half-completed short-stories I have sitting around⁴. Either/or, really.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still a week and a half behind on the Infinite Summer schedule, and now I’m sexually and artistically frustrated. This was a great idea.

1. For the record, this post, which is a far too serious about itself critique of an erotic novel, is written tongue firmly placed in cheek⁵
2. Or at least subject to ridicule on television sitcoms
3. Or it’s the author’s attempt to legitimize some of the, in my opinion, sexist conclusions to the story
4. As an aside, I did write a story on Ficly not long ago, though the word limit (1024 characters) left me with a very ambiguous tale, one that even I have trouble grasping wholly
5. Though I won’t say which one

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

As you all know, I Love TV. Which is why I was neither surprised nor quite expecting a new study that says that unhappy people watch more TV. It wasn’t particularly surprising to me because when you have a series of posts dedicated to how depressed you are, it’s kind of implied you’re at least slightly unhappy. But I didn’t really expect it because TV is actually one of the things in my life that gives me happiness.

This study talks about how TV is escapism — which is true of any entertainment media, even though the same study says that happier people read more books — but in many ways, good television holds a mirror up to you and examines the various aspects of humanity. A few years ago, I was at a (cliche alert) crossroads in my life. I was around half way through a university degree which was promising but didn’t hold the appeal it did when I first applied. Beyond that, my faith was dwindling. For years, I had a constantly evolving understanding of God and religion. When I first had my religious re-awakening in high school, a lot of people thought it was because I had a crush on one of the girls that went to my church, but the fact is that I simply wanted to understand God better. I was experiencing teenage angst and wanted to figure what “all this” is about.

My faith grew over those years but ultimately I found myself having an understanding of God that differed and contradicted the one that both the Bible taught and that my church taught. Because of my growing skepticism of psychics, ESP, and other paranormal phenomenon and my growing understanding of how science explained the universe, I no longer thought that Jesus was actually the son of God. I still believed that he was a wise man likely sent by God to teach people a newer better way to live and worship, but I could no longer consider myself a Christian.

So, I was confused about life, the meaning of it all, and a few other things. Around that time, I started rewatching Babylon 5, a show that I hadn’t watched in quite some time, and I think it’s safe to say that it changed my life. I went from a mass of self-doubt and uncertainty about pretty much everything to having a very solid understanding of myself and the way I wanted to live in this world. I still consider Babylon 5 one of the best shows ever made, and almost certainly the best sci-fi show ever made.

There are a lot of times throughout my life that TV has helped me. Not because it let me forget about my sadness for a few minutes, but because I discovered new things. The long, drawn out character development that happens in television allows you to connect more intimately with their lives and in turn make discoveries about yourself.

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

Well, the final schedule for the San Diego Comic-Con (or “Comic-Con” as it is known among certain circles) has finally been published. I haven’t written about it here, since my dedicated readership is ostensibly me, but I’m going to Comic-Con so this is a pretty big deal for me. Comic-Con is an epic event in the world of comics, film, television, sci-fi, fantasy, and it’s branching into mainstream entertainment as its fame grows. It’s a Mecca for geeks.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.

I don’t have them. I don’t understand why anyone would. A guilty pleasure is something you supposedly dislike liking. This is some form of public self-loathing that everyone seems to revel in. Liking The Spice Girls isn’t anything to be ashamed of; it’s just another part of who you are.

This is just another example of overspecialization our society encourages. If you like mostly rock music then you are a Rock Fan. Or maybe you’re a Post-Rock Fan. Or a Neo-Post-Punk-Rock Fan. The hyphenates only grow.

I’m not advocating the abandonment of categorization, in fact my recently started project is very much about deep and robust categorization of data. I simply believe that the fundamentalism many people employ when creating these categorizations is unnecessary.

It’s because of this fundamentalism that people simply decide that to enjoy a particular type of media, you must enjoy only that type and anything else is a “guilty pleasure.” It’s another form of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy; no true fan of Punk Rock could unironically enjoy The Backstreet Boys.

There’s a problem with this kind of mentality because it leads to division. As the breadth of information our world can offer is expanded by the Internet and mass media, we become inundated by more and more types of information and we need deeper hierarchies of data to be able to think about it coherently. But this doesn’t mean we need to apply such strict boundaries on what we take in, or prefer to, to simplify ourselves for the rest of the world.

In the end, everything we are is a part of who we are. Liking high-brow humour does not exclude you from enjoying low-brow humour, nor does enjoying scripted dramatic TV shows exclude you from enjoying Reality TV (though hopefully, having intelligence excludes you from the latter).

I can understand the mentality behind telling people that certain things you enjoy are guilty pleasures because it not only tells them that you like something, but it also tells them something about the thing you like; it’s a sort of implied metadata. But this particular snippet of metadata is grossly overused in our culture, exactly because we seem to have devolved into a world exclusive esoteric niches.

As this post has hopefully exemplified, I’m not a man of extremes; having a broad swath of interests, some overlapping, some seemingly contradictory is a good thing. But guilty pleasures sound ugly to me. It degrades you for saying that you should be above this but you aren’t, it degrades your audience by establishing false pretenses with them, and ultimately it degrades the thing you like. Liking something in spite of its origins or your initial perception is not a cardinal sin, nor should it be, so don’t act like it is.

Well, with the third season of Buffy finished I decided it was a good time to kick off the reading aspect of this uber-marathon. So when I woke up today — around midnight because of my bizarre sleeping schedule at the moment — I started reading the third book in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series: The Waste Lands. And now, around 3 in the afternoon, I’m done. That was without a doubt the fastest I’ve ever read a novel in my life. It’s not the fastest in terms of time read because I took 15 hours to read the book, but I’m pretty sure I read The Road in less time, just spread over a longer period of time.

But the marathon process behooved quick turnover so I read and I read and I read. And it was a damn good read. The pace was quick, and the story was filled with bizarre twists. The most entertaining thing about the series though is the inexplicable connections between the two worlds. From the soulful singing of the old folk song “Hey Jude” in Mid-World, to the mystically haunted locations strewn about our world that seem to have indelible connections to Roland’s world that has moved on. The next two books are both 700 pages so they’ll be a little more arduous and might have to be split over multiple days but I won’t find out until I’ve watched a couple more seasons of Buffy/Angel.