50 Shades of Grey, Christian Grey and Batman and what this book could have been

To be very honest, I wasn’t going to read this book. Curiosity got the better of me and I read it. It was disappointing, over-hyped by people who really loved it and people who really hated it both.

I’m not going to comment on the things that have already been picked to death—Ana is a poor copy of Bella, the minor characters are cardboard cutouts, the relationship is flawed, the intimacy was dangerous, etc. May the mob slay me for this, but I actually thought Christian Grey was pretty cool. He’s a lot better than Edward Cullen, which isn’t saying much. He is fifty shades of fucked up, pretty creepy, but somehow, people in-universe actually like him.

The thing about this book is that it’s overhyped by everyone. It’s not well-written at all, it portrays a dangerous relationship, it was Twilight fan fiction, etc.  I have to put it out there that Christian Grey, for all his faults, is well-planned. There were points in the story where I thought that E.L. James was going somewhere really significant—in their first meeting, Ana observes that Christian is ‘the ultimate consumer,’ which he confirms, and then spends the rest of the book proving wrong, to a certain extent. He’s selfish beyond belief, but he himself is completely consumed by responsibility, and the ramifications of his decisions. There was plenty that could have been done about Christian the capitalist extraordinaire, but unfortunately, nothing.

One redeeming quality about Christian, other than his supposedly rugged good looks, is his humor, which is stupidly good. I’m being serious here. I spent a lot of the earlier chapters wondering who Christian reminded me of, and it wasn’t until he said something about being a ‘dark knight’ that made me think, “Oh, shit, he’s Batman,” which explains a lot. Bruce Wayne is the ultimate consumer, a womanizer, a young CEO, extravagantly wealthy, etc. Like Grey Enterprises Holdings, Wayne Enterprises is a vast private-sector conglomerate helmed by their protagonists, and like Bruce, Christian donates extravagantly to public institutions.

All of this leads up to the one hilariously funny thing that Christian Grey said, that made me think slightly better of him. He borders on sociopath (like Bruce Wayne, my opinion), has been pulled into being a public figure (like Bruce), so it is completely funny when he cuts open the zip-ties on Ana’s wrists and says, “I declare this Ana open!” That was funny. Seriously, I thought that was funny.

The Lord of the Flies, my first Goodreads review

There are some books that you wish you could read for the first time again and again. The feeling of that is so fleeting, and for many books, it is so awesome and magnificent. The Lord of the Flies is one of these books.

I remember that the first time I read it, I was in sixth grade, eleven years old, around the age of the boys on the island. My friends bugged me about reading such a weird book, and that was all good in tenth grade when we read it as a class. The thing about reading TLotF in sixth grade is that in sixth grade, everything is a little bit more frightening, and the reactions you get when you are eleven are more visceral, instantaneous than those you get in tenth, or in university, after you’ve been trained to analyze the text to shreds.

I can credit TLotF to my obsession with underlying religious subtext, religious iconography, the demons and devils in the characters and settings. Reading TLotF for the first time, I was struck with certain horrible things, since the back cover summary told me I should expect Swiss Family Robinson or something. I had a thing for island survival stories. This was when I still thought the CBS show Survivor was about…surviving.

The characters drive this story, and even though we had a foolish tenth grade assignment about drawing the map of the island, we knew that the characters were the focus. The first time around, I rooted for Piggy because he was smart. We didn’t need tenth grade English to tell us his glasses symbolized scientific, rational thought, or that fire meant hope. In some cases, overanalyzing, focusing on the minutiae fed to us by the curriculum killed the story for many people. Go with your gut, sixth grade me said. Maybe sixth grade me didn’t know any better.

I liked Simon and I liked Roger. I hated Jack because he was a bully, but admired the cruel and merciless Roger because (1) I was supposed to be named Roger and (2) sixth graders like the mean bad guy, but not the bad guy that could possibly pick on them at recess. And as the story progressed, the kids divided, the sixth grader realizes, holy crap, this isn’t a ‘what if I were on a deserted island’ story, but rather a model of sixth grade, and, as the tenth grader will realize, a model of society as a whole. There is no winning in this situation, except when acts of God intervene.

The other reviewers have probably picked the social commentary bit of this to pieces, so I’ll tackle the stuff I really got out of this allegory. If you’ve seen Inception, you’ll remember that one core theme is that an idea can take hold and proliferate uncontrollably, that concepts and thoughts are incomprehensibly powerful. We see this in the boys, choir boys many of them, who presumably quickly abandon their original Christian dogma once it appears that God has forsaken them. An almighty and merciful (or merciless) God can be substituted by a beast, the devil, Beelzebub, whatever. A dictator will suffice, if history teaches us correctly. Whatever.

The lessons it teaches an adolescent are very good. While I could have gotten a boatload of symbolism from the story (I actually wrote an in-class essay comparing the boys to fairy-tale and religious figures, which I got an A on) but that is not as useful as the concepts that hide behind the story. What it boils to is a very explicit treatise on human nature, reduced to a few figures that play their roles perfectly. It affirmed my idea that the conch method (in elementary school, we used popsicle sticks, in Breaking Bad, they used the talking pillow) will not work, and that kids, whether they’re reading literature whose themes are over their heads in middle school, or stranded on an island without adult supervision, are good models for how humankind will behave, stripped from their institutionalized knowledge and moral, ethical constraints.

O Snakes!

Winter falls and we fear it. The cold drives us out of solitude and we seek one another, kindred spirits all, feeble and vulnerable alone, safe and warm together. We leave the grass, quickly before the frost hardens us and before the chill kills us, and take for the safe havens, all of us, all together, all of us frightened and cold and lonely, so incredibly lonely, but alone no longer. We go in droves, slithering hard ground, gripping dirt with our bellies, seeking the safety of closed spaces, finding solace in the shadows, and for that we are the strange, hideous creatures of evil.

                We curl into one another tightly, coil together, knot together until we are indistinguishably cords of same scales, same tissues, slim stripes and bands, a roiling, writhing mass of lonesome creatures who seek solidarity in adversity. We will sleep through the cold, altogether, one organism, one family, timid beings that shall vanish from the world until the air is warm again, when we will go our separate ways, and each in our season return again and again.

                We fall into the pattern of our forefathers and their forefathers, and shall remain so for years and years more, for all eternity. Centuries later we will still fear the winter, and we will hide away until spring, participating in a collective sleep, sharing the same dream of the warm sun on our backs, warm soil beneath our bodies. So we comfort ourselves in that communal dream, in our shared bodies, underneath the earth, inside the trees, enclave of comfort and happiness in a cold world.

                But hark! An outsider arrives and uncovers us, his yowls of terror and the sudden intrusion of the cold air and the frost summoning us out of peaceful slumber. As is in our nature, we move and twist, slithering over and under one another in our tangles, and we are frightening and terrible in our fright and terror, we horrify when we ourselves are horrified, and our very image evokes hatred and the outsider leaves us, only to return to remove us, object of his fear, and return tranquility to his own mind. He purges us with fire and we scream as one, slithering faster and faster, tightening our knots and binding us all down to inevitable death. The cold is no longer our enemy and we perish in flames, altogether we die, and when he leaves, we will be no more, all of us gone.

Everything

Everyone has different ways of organizing things. My desk is complete chaos, but at least with my writing and schoolwork, I am pretty reasonably contained.

Behold the beast! This is my Excel document containing all of my live projects, organized by title, status, location (of my publishing platforms, notice TSS), world (in my systems of worlds), genre, length, and destination folder in my fiction collection. I've taken the liberty of blotting out some projects that my be a bit secret, since they certainly do not fit the style that I typically write in.

My system is this: once I complete a project, I highlight it in green. At the end of the month, I pinch out the terminated and completed projects, stick them into another spreadsheet, and truncate my Everything sheet.

Here is January's analytics, just for fun:

And there you have it! That's how I organize my work, and it's served me reasonably well these past few months, in the very little fiction-writing I've done.

Fridays, "Bad Habits", Joyce Carol Oates, Names

Fridays are good days for me and they bear a good pattern for me. I had early class, then lounged around the engineering library catching up on homework or emails. I went to office hours for my computer programming class with a question, had a doughnut at the expense of the engineering honor society, stuck around for a few minutes, then went off on my own. I make time after 1 to watch my favorite campus acapella group, eat lunch on the grass, and then go into the library.

I usually read my National Geographic on Tuesdays, my Economist on Thursdays, saving McSweeney's for Fridays. Our main library has a grand collection of the McSweeney's quarterlies, and today, I had thirty minutes before discussion, and got the chance to read "Bad Habits," a strange, chilling short story by Joyce Carol Oates.

In senior year, I read "Three Girls" and decided that she was a hero of mine. She's obscenely prolific with her writing, and I almost skipped physics discussion to see her in our library. Almost.

"Bad Habits"

The narrator and her siblings are pulled out of school. Their father was arrested--he is a serial killer called Bad Habits, and the story is essentially a sketch of how his arrest, their family's reaction, and the media coverage change them. It's unsettling and suspenseful, and I am without words. One thing that immediately drew me in was the status of names. The children are referred to by initials until the trial date. The narrator remains anonymous, and the eldest child maddeningly searches for connections between her family and the victims.

Perhaps this is because I had math lecture just half an hour before reading, but I was reminded of some wisdom from my professor: "In mathematics and mythology alike, you must give your enemy a name."

In "Bad Habits," the characters begin only with labels and initials. The father is eventually identified (by his long full name, with initials B.H.) and then the siblings, and then an exhaustive list of the victims. The narrator, stated above, remains anonymous. Name thy enemy. Can we think of it as if she identifies her antagonists as they come? Following her father's arrest, the narrator and her siblings are subject to the neurotic overprotection of their mother, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. The family is a wreck, all because of her father. He is named first.

Secondly, her siblings become plagued with bad habits. Bad habits again. Their compulsions bleed into one another, and they become this writhing mess of unhappiness. Their community, their peers, and even their family members come to loathe them, and, I might guess, the narrator identifies them as enemies as well.

About the victims. The eldest sibling, in her fitfully obsessive paranoia, links each victim to a member of the family, by names, first letters of names, etc. Names again. Can it be that the father named his enemies within his family, and transferred that antagonism onto the people he killed?

That's enough for today. It can be read in McSweeney's 18, if you can find it. One day, I shall be rich enough for a subscription.