"Jessica's Older Guy" Sample, or Liz Gets Schooled!
Okay, since I’m being denied (*huff, sulk*) the chance to recap some of the stunningly awesomely wondrous Caitlin books for the time being, why not finish what I started with the College Party (*sporfle*) series?
But I’m gonna do something a little different with this one. See, rhitroadkill already recapped it (http://community.livejournal.com/1bruce1/97037.html) not to long ago, and really, like she said, this book is effing dumb. And like I said, as usual, the SVH Ghosties & Gang had the potential to make this series into something... well, if not MEANINGFUL, at least not a complete waste of time. See, all of a sudden, both Liz and Jess are in this big rush - no Theta House pun intended - to leave high school life behind and become actual real adult-ish college girls, thus proving themselves smart and successful and all that jazz. This has potential for some at least semi-interesting psychological exploration, a chance to show the Perfect Wakefield Twins with some human insecurities and struggles, as we’ve been set up for since they first took the SATs two long, dreary books ago. But instead, this book starts off with Jessica comically spilling her water glass and climbing out a bathroom window, continues with sexist puns that surely would only exist in old Blondie comic strips, reaches a climax with camptastic Mistaken Identity Shenanigans and Dramas at the big college formal dance, and dissolves into a final craptacular Reverse Psychology Scheme to get the Wakefield twinsies back to SVH where they belong, with all their friends ‘n boyfriends ‘n cheerleaders ‘n school papers ‘n parents ‘n faithful doggie named after a genital piercing. And any chance for anything even remotely non-stupid or non-lame or non-exasperating is completely flanged aside like a plastic cup full of beer foam at a wild college party.
It’s like when Cousin Oliver comes to live with the Brady family and, instead of DOING anything with the potential subject matter and _really exploring_ the idea of being an outsider within one’s own family or being a stranger in a strange land or fitting in, everyone just ends up throwing cream pies at each other. And hilarity and hijinx ensue.
Jessica’s Older Guy, then, is a big old blast to the face from a bottle of seltzer. And sadly, it would be far more pleasant if that WAS a euphemism for something.
This book does, however, contain a particular refreshing moment of something usually not seen in the SVH universe: not only is the sanctimonious and perfect Saint Elizabeth the Brilliant taken down several much-needed notches, but a usually crap-laden experience (SV’s notion of “college”) actually provides something sorta kinda akin to reality in terms of the college experience.
Oh yeah, bitches.
LIZ! GETS! SCHOOLED!
The problem with the last book is, supposedly, Liz - a sixteen year old high school junior - shows up at an advanced college journalism course taught by a supposedly famous journalist, and promptly proceeds to “write circles” around the other students and, overnight, in one thousand-word article, makes off with first prize in an essay contest.
Which we all know is complete and total and pure, unadulterated bullshit.
Not that We-the-Readers could be expected to see Liz write a mediocre article that doesn’t win diddly-shit, have a total of a breakdown (which would be consistent with the theme of her post-SAT insecurities, I might add), and be kindly but firmly lectured by a respected journalist about how she can’t expect to succeed at every single thing she does, that she’ll fail sometimes, but if she has the passion and drive for this line of work, she can use that to pursue her journalism studies and create a respectable body of work for a person her age, can gain skills and experience, can develop critical thinking abilities and notions of the public sphere-
Or, better yet, Liz is so wowed by the intense socio-political “fuck authority!” climate of a college campus that she ends up becoming a kick-ass Gonzo journalist or something.
But there’s a small glimmer of something in between all of the Zeta formals and football games and Theta teas and purplest of prose about Jessica’s Older (Not!) Guy. There’s something that resembles a bit of an actual and accurate college life and includes a desperately-needed smack-down on an actual Wakefield twin!
So, Liz is attending the Wednesday Open Mic Night at the College Coffeehouse. And she’s sitting there, surrounded by “left-wing liberal” types (doncha know) in tie-dye with Birkenstocks and nose rings and green hair and everything. Them fucking liberals. (Don’t ask me how the twinsies have only been at SVU since the weekend, yet have attended a full week of classes and two weekends’ worth of activities, and Liz is somehow for some reason starting her internship in the middle of a week just like *that*!) Anyway, she’s gooning about being here at college, and getting to play with the big kids! Why, she’ll be wearing tweedy jackets with elbow patches, houndstooth skirts and argyle vests in no time! “Elizabeth felt energized as she thought of the intellectual possibilities suddenly open to her” and she wonders if she’ll “ever have the courage to recite one of my poems here?” Go for it, Lizzie! It can’t be worse that the piece of total and complete twaddly shit We-the-Readers get.
I admit, few things are as bad as Bad Poetry. (Well, Bad Poetry About Sex, maybe, which is usually badder than bad.) But this is more bad than Bad Hair, more bad than Bad Money, way way waaaay more bad than Bad Medicine.
This may be worse than “Outside, Looking In” even!
Ahem.
The wall is gone
without a trace
a trail of dust
and dusty memories.
In my mind’s eye
The wall is there
A stony border
behind my eyelids.
How can I see beyond it?
How can I get my thought around it?
I cannot grasp it.
I am the fossil
of history’s lessons.
I am the remnant
of history’s games.
It is sublime.
I cannot grasp it.
The wall is gone
But the wall in my mind
is an ever-present
structure.
How can I
chip it
away?
(It’s on page 69. Tee hee hee!)
Seriously, though? What a complete waste of 87 words.
The biggest problem that I’ve run into in creative writing classes and programs is that there are certain areas that seem to be exempt from artistic denunciations; it’s like you can’t criticize poetry that is about an “issue” like racism or sexism or a historical happening like the Japanese interment camps or the events of September 11th... even if the work _itself_ is a complete and total pile of shit. No one can seem to separate the issue from the (and I use the term loosely in this case) artistic representation of it. Like the woman in one of my seminars who was writing this HORRIBLE collection of poems and songs based on Hurricane Katrina. She called herself something like the “Exiled Maid of Orleans” and wrote all this first-person dreck about even when the floods were rising you had to sing a sing-a-long song to keep your spirits up or something, and parts of it were like Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah in minor key, and it was just embarrassingly bad. I don’t even know if she was actually from New Orleans or lived there or anything... I think it was just a couple friends of hers. Anyway, no one could say anything about the awful quality of the poetry itself, or even make any suggestions for all but the most minor improvements, because then she would flare back with “You just don’t understand what these people went through!” or she would keep repeating what an “important issue” this was.
So sorry, Friedrich Keller, fictional though you may be, your poem is lame. To wit: 1) Cliché, cliché, cliché... both theme and structure. 2) If you have to SAY something is “sublime,” especially in poetry, it isn’t. 3) You are historically inaccurate, because the Berlin Wall isn’t really gone “without a trace.” There are still some remains. What about that, the scar left on a now-reunified country, a scar that can never be erased, no matter how many cobblestones you cover the street with? Or you could mention the fragments of brick that have become souvenirs, paperweights, in the houses of people from suburban England and contrast that with what the Wall used to be and mean. But you went for the cursory, the banal, the surface. 4) That is some weak-ass imagery. “dust and dusty memories”? Which leads me to... 5) At least be consistent in your grammatical structure! If you’re going to use a run-on sentence in the first line for whatever reason, it needs to work with (or deliberately contrast with) the clipped sentences that make up the rest of the poem. But it makes little sense contextually. 6) You’re talking about the oppression of the Berlin Wall and... that’s the best you can do to express the Stalinist rule? Not even the slightest allusion to the system of state power expressed by specific architecture? Or maybe some development of the masonry imagery, the brick-and-mortar of humanity, of political systems, of xenophobia? But, no! Instead we get the completely predictable “Oh no, a big symbolic wall of hate, how can I get around it???!!!” Even Alexander Goth uses metaphor better than you! (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/spike/playing_with_dolls/series.php?view=archive&chapter=2536)
GO SUCK, EAST GERMAN EMO POET!
Ahem.
Ian, however, convinces Lizzie that this dude has “a particularly raw quality.” Yeah, Freddie Keller is “raw” like David Silver is “fresh.” And Liz, of course, is just all electrified with these wild new thoughts: “The poem reverberated in Elizabeth’s mind. A few of the lines returned to her: ‘The wall is gone/But the wall in my mind/is an ever-present/structure.’ As if the memory of Friedrich’s past was stronger than the reality of his present.” Well, if the reality of my present was Sweet Valley Fucking University, where everyone is seemingly concerned with romantic picnics in the quad with hot blondes and keggers and tea, and not so much things like, you know, actual STUDYING, I might be consumed with my past in a politically and socially oppressive nation during a pivotal historical point, too! And don’t ever give Liz a book by Joy Harjo or Gwendolyn Brooks. Her wee wittle suburban head might ‘splode with all them reverberations.
So Liz is in the Leftist Radical Liberal College Coffeehouse, which means the other people at their table are a patchworkification of appropriately PC Token Radical Characters: there’s the longhaired guy, the prolly-a-lesbian possibly Mexican girl, the black guy with an earring, the Asian-American girl. And Ian and Liz, natch. That’s not the awesome part, though.
The awesomeness happens when the Patchwork Gang starts talking. And if the setting is full-body cliché and the subject matter is balls-out college pretention, I still gotta say, to have an exchange like this - something that is actually not unlike discussions I’ve heard in class - take place in the bowels of Sweet Valley is a thing of rare and precious beauty:
Asian Girl: Screw EmoPoet’s Germany politics. China is a more immediate concern.
Longhair White Guy: Last week was all about the value of Marxist thought, which rocks.
Possible Mexican Lesbian: Fuck Marxism. Communism is the only humanitarian system, you know.
Ian: Yeah, but what about Russia?
PML: That was totalitarianism, not Marxism, twat-burger, so go back to wooing that blonde high school cupcake you dragged over here.
Black Guy with Earring: Maria’s right because when Marxism is done right, the balance of life is perfect and you are truly free.
Ian: Here in Capitalist America the only thing you’re free to do is go to a nine-to-five job! Haw! Aren’t I witty?
Liz: (OMG! They’re having an Actual Real Conversation about Big Important Stuffs, not, like, parties and the beach! I gotta join in!) Peep peep peep but in America you’re FREEEE so capitalism is the only way to go peep peep peep I don’t even really know what capitalism means in the grand scheme of global economics, really, but my Civics teacher totally had it on a test once peep peep peep. Peep.
Everyone else: *resounding silence*
Liz: (Wait a sec! But... I said the right shallow jingoistic thing! Why aren’t they all applauding and cheering me like they’re supposed to!)
PML: Do you have your head up your ass, girl? How can you be free when you are influenced constantly without knowing it by our market economy? Have you ever engaged in critical thinking in your life, you idiot?!
LWG: Seriously, haven’t you even read Marx’s critique of capital in The Grundrisse?
BGwE: Or read the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass consumer culture? Or had a thought beyond what you learned on Schoolhouse Rock?
AG: Seriously, if you think about the capitalist system for more than two seconds, you’d question the actuality of our “freedom”!
LWG: Yeah, just look at your everyday life if you want examples.
PML: No one thinks about a goddamned thing, they just blindly accept all the media influences around them without questioning the forces behind them
AG: Don’t forget that this rah-rah FREEEE capitalist system in ‘Merika was set up by a select group of rich white men
BGwE: Freedom isn’t so free if you put forth the slightest effort to think about its history and historical contexts
Liz: Um. Gee. (IAN! Help meeeeee!)
Ian: Oh, um, what this cute blonde girl that I’ve got a hot nut for is saying is, since she’s into journalism, she thinks freedom of the press is important. (SCORE! And I’ma better be gettin’ some post-carrot-cake-and-cappuccino action after saving your naïve ass, Elizabeth!)
LWG: Give me a fucking break with that kind of stupid generalization about First Amendment
“Wheee! Free speeeeeech!” rights.
BGwE: No kidding, moron. Aren’t you at least going to question if hate speech should be included in “free speech”?
AG: Or sexual harassment. Men are such fucking pricks, especially when they comment on how exotic and sexy Asian chicks are and ask me if I can shoot ping pong balls out of my cooch. You call that freedom? P.S. If you’re a feminist, you’re bitter, you know!
And at this point, you kinda expect Liz to jump back with “But wait! I was TOTALLY sexually harassed today! I was, I was!” But thankfully, she keeps her inexperienced and uneducated little yap shut. Because “she could still feel her face burning in the darkened room. She had thought she had received a well-rounded education, but she clearly had a lot to learn. If she wanted to enroll at SVU now, she was going to have to take a crash course in literature and philosophy. Elizabeth made a firm resolve. By the time she started classes at SVU, she was going to be at college level. She was going to spend every spare moment reading theory and philosophy.”
Hold on... lemme pull myself together and stop laughing....
*wheezing* Okay. Well. I suppose this is a reasonable goal for the girl who was adamant that she’d pull perfect scores on the SAT, too. Liz? Sugar bun? Dollface? YOU HAVE TO BE AT COLLEGE LEVEL TO GO TO COLLEGE! AND YOU AREN’T! WAKE UP CALL, DEARIE!
So Liz is all bummed that she’s not anywhere near as smart as these average college students and she just sits there, all tense and afraid and humiliated and mopey, until Ian walks her home. And she whines about how dumb she felt and Ian tries to be all casually friend-flirty with her. Liz is especially bummed that this awful scene at the coffeehouse happened right after she had such a bad day at the campus paper, and she whines that her internship - THE HORRORS! - consisted not of writing some awesome story or even fact-checking someone else’s awesome story, but, alas and alak, makin’ copies and getting the boss coffee.
And Ian laughs and wants to know “What did you expect? To win some more awards and become an overnight sensation.”
And Liz, still totally mopey, thinks “Well, yeah. Yeah, I did, because I’m ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD, you know!”
And Ian tells her that gotta put forth some time and effort , pay some dues. “You can’t just expect to get respect for nothing. You’ve got to earn it.”
And Liz is all dejectetated by this and thinks “I’m soooo naïve.” Which is an understatement.
PWNED!!!!11!!
Oh, man, it is SO AWESOME to see Elizabeth ripped a couple new assholes!
I adore that whole scene. It’s the closest thing to SVH pr0n for me. I can’t help picturing all of the Patchwork Gang, gathered ‘round poor, mopey, Liz, laughing and mimicking her quivering lips and teary eyes and, just like Scut Farkus (“He had yellow eyes! So, help me, God! Yellow eyes!!”), jeering “That’s it, cry, CRYYYYYY, whaaaaaah!”
‘Cos that would be four hundred and thirty seven kinds of awesome, you know.
So really, in the grand scheme of things, nothing is resolved in this book. Professor Newkirk disappears with no conclusiveness (or real usefulness) whatsoever. Steven and Billie never take the twinsies to task for their lack of respect around their home. Jessica’s “older guy” turns out to be a high school kid like her, but not only is there no explanation of how or why he’s been hanging out at SVU for months on end, there’s also the opt-out everyone-ends-up-laughing problem “resolution” of his and Jessie’s one weekish relationship. Everything is restored to the proper natural order. The twinsies go back to school with Todd and Ken and Enid and Lila and The Whole Gang, just as they should.
Because you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
But I’m gonna do something a little different with this one. See, rhitroadkill already recapped it (http://community.livejournal.com/1bruce1/97037.html) not to long ago, and really, like she said, this book is effing dumb. And like I said, as usual, the SVH Ghosties & Gang had the potential to make this series into something... well, if not MEANINGFUL, at least not a complete waste of time. See, all of a sudden, both Liz and Jess are in this big rush - no Theta House pun intended - to leave high school life behind and become actual real adult-ish college girls, thus proving themselves smart and successful and all that jazz. This has potential for some at least semi-interesting psychological exploration, a chance to show the Perfect Wakefield Twins with some human insecurities and struggles, as we’ve been set up for since they first took the SATs two long, dreary books ago. But instead, this book starts off with Jessica comically spilling her water glass and climbing out a bathroom window, continues with sexist puns that surely would only exist in old Blondie comic strips, reaches a climax with camptastic Mistaken Identity Shenanigans and Dramas at the big college formal dance, and dissolves into a final craptacular Reverse Psychology Scheme to get the Wakefield twinsies back to SVH where they belong, with all their friends ‘n boyfriends ‘n cheerleaders ‘n school papers ‘n parents ‘n faithful doggie named after a genital piercing. And any chance for anything even remotely non-stupid or non-lame or non-exasperating is completely flanged aside like a plastic cup full of beer foam at a wild college party.
It’s like when Cousin Oliver comes to live with the Brady family and, instead of DOING anything with the potential subject matter and _really exploring_ the idea of being an outsider within one’s own family or being a stranger in a strange land or fitting in, everyone just ends up throwing cream pies at each other. And hilarity and hijinx ensue.
Jessica’s Older Guy, then, is a big old blast to the face from a bottle of seltzer. And sadly, it would be far more pleasant if that WAS a euphemism for something.
This book does, however, contain a particular refreshing moment of something usually not seen in the SVH universe: not only is the sanctimonious and perfect Saint Elizabeth the Brilliant taken down several much-needed notches, but a usually crap-laden experience (SV’s notion of “college”) actually provides something sorta kinda akin to reality in terms of the college experience.
Oh yeah, bitches.
LIZ! GETS! SCHOOLED!
The problem with the last book is, supposedly, Liz - a sixteen year old high school junior - shows up at an advanced college journalism course taught by a supposedly famous journalist, and promptly proceeds to “write circles” around the other students and, overnight, in one thousand-word article, makes off with first prize in an essay contest.
Which we all know is complete and total and pure, unadulterated bullshit.
Not that We-the-Readers could be expected to see Liz write a mediocre article that doesn’t win diddly-shit, have a total of a breakdown (which would be consistent with the theme of her post-SAT insecurities, I might add), and be kindly but firmly lectured by a respected journalist about how she can’t expect to succeed at every single thing she does, that she’ll fail sometimes, but if she has the passion and drive for this line of work, she can use that to pursue her journalism studies and create a respectable body of work for a person her age, can gain skills and experience, can develop critical thinking abilities and notions of the public sphere-
Or, better yet, Liz is so wowed by the intense socio-political “fuck authority!” climate of a college campus that she ends up becoming a kick-ass Gonzo journalist or something.
But there’s a small glimmer of something in between all of the Zeta formals and football games and Theta teas and purplest of prose about Jessica’s Older (Not!) Guy. There’s something that resembles a bit of an actual and accurate college life and includes a desperately-needed smack-down on an actual Wakefield twin!
So, Liz is attending the Wednesday Open Mic Night at the College Coffeehouse. And she’s sitting there, surrounded by “left-wing liberal” types (doncha know) in tie-dye with Birkenstocks and nose rings and green hair and everything. Them fucking liberals. (Don’t ask me how the twinsies have only been at SVU since the weekend, yet have attended a full week of classes and two weekends’ worth of activities, and Liz is somehow for some reason starting her internship in the middle of a week just like *that*!) Anyway, she’s gooning about being here at college, and getting to play with the big kids! Why, she’ll be wearing tweedy jackets with elbow patches, houndstooth skirts and argyle vests in no time! “Elizabeth felt energized as she thought of the intellectual possibilities suddenly open to her” and she wonders if she’ll “ever have the courage to recite one of my poems here?” Go for it, Lizzie! It can’t be worse that the piece of total and complete twaddly shit We-the-Readers get.
I admit, few things are as bad as Bad Poetry. (Well, Bad Poetry About Sex, maybe, which is usually badder than bad.) But this is more bad than Bad Hair, more bad than Bad Money, way way waaaay more bad than Bad Medicine.
This may be worse than “Outside, Looking In” even!
Ahem.
The wall is gone
without a trace
a trail of dust
and dusty memories.
In my mind’s eye
The wall is there
A stony border
behind my eyelids.
How can I see beyond it?
How can I get my thought around it?
I cannot grasp it.
I am the fossil
of history’s lessons.
I am the remnant
of history’s games.
It is sublime.
I cannot grasp it.
The wall is gone
But the wall in my mind
is an ever-present
structure.
How can I
chip it
away?
(It’s on page 69. Tee hee hee!)
Seriously, though? What a complete waste of 87 words.
The biggest problem that I’ve run into in creative writing classes and programs is that there are certain areas that seem to be exempt from artistic denunciations; it’s like you can’t criticize poetry that is about an “issue” like racism or sexism or a historical happening like the Japanese interment camps or the events of September 11th... even if the work _itself_ is a complete and total pile of shit. No one can seem to separate the issue from the (and I use the term loosely in this case) artistic representation of it. Like the woman in one of my seminars who was writing this HORRIBLE collection of poems and songs based on Hurricane Katrina. She called herself something like the “Exiled Maid of Orleans” and wrote all this first-person dreck about even when the floods were rising you had to sing a sing-a-long song to keep your spirits up or something, and parts of it were like Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah in minor key, and it was just embarrassingly bad. I don’t even know if she was actually from New Orleans or lived there or anything... I think it was just a couple friends of hers. Anyway, no one could say anything about the awful quality of the poetry itself, or even make any suggestions for all but the most minor improvements, because then she would flare back with “You just don’t understand what these people went through!” or she would keep repeating what an “important issue” this was.
So sorry, Friedrich Keller, fictional though you may be, your poem is lame. To wit: 1) Cliché, cliché, cliché... both theme and structure. 2) If you have to SAY something is “sublime,” especially in poetry, it isn’t. 3) You are historically inaccurate, because the Berlin Wall isn’t really gone “without a trace.” There are still some remains. What about that, the scar left on a now-reunified country, a scar that can never be erased, no matter how many cobblestones you cover the street with? Or you could mention the fragments of brick that have become souvenirs, paperweights, in the houses of people from suburban England and contrast that with what the Wall used to be and mean. But you went for the cursory, the banal, the surface. 4) That is some weak-ass imagery. “dust and dusty memories”? Which leads me to... 5) At least be consistent in your grammatical structure! If you’re going to use a run-on sentence in the first line for whatever reason, it needs to work with (or deliberately contrast with) the clipped sentences that make up the rest of the poem. But it makes little sense contextually. 6) You’re talking about the oppression of the Berlin Wall and... that’s the best you can do to express the Stalinist rule? Not even the slightest allusion to the system of state power expressed by specific architecture? Or maybe some development of the masonry imagery, the brick-and-mortar of humanity, of political systems, of xenophobia? But, no! Instead we get the completely predictable “Oh no, a big symbolic wall of hate, how can I get around it???!!!” Even Alexander Goth uses metaphor better than you! (http://www.webcomicsnation.com/spike/playing_with_dolls/series.php?view=archive&chapter=2536)
GO SUCK, EAST GERMAN EMO POET!
Ahem.
Ian, however, convinces Lizzie that this dude has “a particularly raw quality.” Yeah, Freddie Keller is “raw” like David Silver is “fresh.” And Liz, of course, is just all electrified with these wild new thoughts: “The poem reverberated in Elizabeth’s mind. A few of the lines returned to her: ‘The wall is gone/But the wall in my mind/is an ever-present/structure.’ As if the memory of Friedrich’s past was stronger than the reality of his present.” Well, if the reality of my present was Sweet Valley Fucking University, where everyone is seemingly concerned with romantic picnics in the quad with hot blondes and keggers and tea, and not so much things like, you know, actual STUDYING, I might be consumed with my past in a politically and socially oppressive nation during a pivotal historical point, too! And don’t ever give Liz a book by Joy Harjo or Gwendolyn Brooks. Her wee wittle suburban head might ‘splode with all them reverberations.
So Liz is in the Leftist Radical Liberal College Coffeehouse, which means the other people at their table are a patchworkification of appropriately PC Token Radical Characters: there’s the longhaired guy, the prolly-a-lesbian possibly Mexican girl, the black guy with an earring, the Asian-American girl. And Ian and Liz, natch. That’s not the awesome part, though.
The awesomeness happens when the Patchwork Gang starts talking. And if the setting is full-body cliché and the subject matter is balls-out college pretention, I still gotta say, to have an exchange like this - something that is actually not unlike discussions I’ve heard in class - take place in the bowels of Sweet Valley is a thing of rare and precious beauty:
Asian Girl: Screw EmoPoet’s Germany politics. China is a more immediate concern.
Longhair White Guy: Last week was all about the value of Marxist thought, which rocks.
Possible Mexican Lesbian: Fuck Marxism. Communism is the only humanitarian system, you know.
Ian: Yeah, but what about Russia?
PML: That was totalitarianism, not Marxism, twat-burger, so go back to wooing that blonde high school cupcake you dragged over here.
Black Guy with Earring: Maria’s right because when Marxism is done right, the balance of life is perfect and you are truly free.
Ian: Here in Capitalist America the only thing you’re free to do is go to a nine-to-five job! Haw! Aren’t I witty?
Liz: (OMG! They’re having an Actual Real Conversation about Big Important Stuffs, not, like, parties and the beach! I gotta join in!) Peep peep peep but in America you’re FREEEE so capitalism is the only way to go peep peep peep I don’t even really know what capitalism means in the grand scheme of global economics, really, but my Civics teacher totally had it on a test once peep peep peep. Peep.
Everyone else: *resounding silence*
Liz: (Wait a sec! But... I said the right shallow jingoistic thing! Why aren’t they all applauding and cheering me like they’re supposed to!)
PML: Do you have your head up your ass, girl? How can you be free when you are influenced constantly without knowing it by our market economy? Have you ever engaged in critical thinking in your life, you idiot?!
LWG: Seriously, haven’t you even read Marx’s critique of capital in The Grundrisse?
BGwE: Or read the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass consumer culture? Or had a thought beyond what you learned on Schoolhouse Rock?
AG: Seriously, if you think about the capitalist system for more than two seconds, you’d question the actuality of our “freedom”!
LWG: Yeah, just look at your everyday life if you want examples.
PML: No one thinks about a goddamned thing, they just blindly accept all the media influences around them without questioning the forces behind them
AG: Don’t forget that this rah-rah FREEEE capitalist system in ‘Merika was set up by a select group of rich white men
BGwE: Freedom isn’t so free if you put forth the slightest effort to think about its history and historical contexts
Liz: Um. Gee. (IAN! Help meeeeee!)
Ian: Oh, um, what this cute blonde girl that I’ve got a hot nut for is saying is, since she’s into journalism, she thinks freedom of the press is important. (SCORE! And I’ma better be gettin’ some post-carrot-cake-and-cappuccino action after saving your naïve ass, Elizabeth!)
LWG: Give me a fucking break with that kind of stupid generalization about First Amendment
“Wheee! Free speeeeeech!” rights.
BGwE: No kidding, moron. Aren’t you at least going to question if hate speech should be included in “free speech”?
AG: Or sexual harassment. Men are such fucking pricks, especially when they comment on how exotic and sexy Asian chicks are and ask me if I can shoot ping pong balls out of my cooch. You call that freedom? P.S. If you’re a feminist, you’re bitter, you know!
And at this point, you kinda expect Liz to jump back with “But wait! I was TOTALLY sexually harassed today! I was, I was!” But thankfully, she keeps her inexperienced and uneducated little yap shut. Because “she could still feel her face burning in the darkened room. She had thought she had received a well-rounded education, but she clearly had a lot to learn. If she wanted to enroll at SVU now, she was going to have to take a crash course in literature and philosophy. Elizabeth made a firm resolve. By the time she started classes at SVU, she was going to be at college level. She was going to spend every spare moment reading theory and philosophy.”
Hold on... lemme pull myself together and stop laughing....
*wheezing* Okay. Well. I suppose this is a reasonable goal for the girl who was adamant that she’d pull perfect scores on the SAT, too. Liz? Sugar bun? Dollface? YOU HAVE TO BE AT COLLEGE LEVEL TO GO TO COLLEGE! AND YOU AREN’T! WAKE UP CALL, DEARIE!
So Liz is all bummed that she’s not anywhere near as smart as these average college students and she just sits there, all tense and afraid and humiliated and mopey, until Ian walks her home. And she whines about how dumb she felt and Ian tries to be all casually friend-flirty with her. Liz is especially bummed that this awful scene at the coffeehouse happened right after she had such a bad day at the campus paper, and she whines that her internship - THE HORRORS! - consisted not of writing some awesome story or even fact-checking someone else’s awesome story, but, alas and alak, makin’ copies and getting the boss coffee.
And Ian laughs and wants to know “What did you expect? To win some more awards and become an overnight sensation.”
And Liz, still totally mopey, thinks “Well, yeah. Yeah, I did, because I’m ELIZABETH WAKEFIELD, you know!”
And Ian tells her that gotta put forth some time and effort , pay some dues. “You can’t just expect to get respect for nothing. You’ve got to earn it.”
And Liz is all dejectetated by this and thinks “I’m soooo naïve.” Which is an understatement.
PWNED!!!!11!!
Oh, man, it is SO AWESOME to see Elizabeth ripped a couple new assholes!
I adore that whole scene. It’s the closest thing to SVH pr0n for me. I can’t help picturing all of the Patchwork Gang, gathered ‘round poor, mopey, Liz, laughing and mimicking her quivering lips and teary eyes and, just like Scut Farkus (“He had yellow eyes! So, help me, God! Yellow eyes!!”), jeering “That’s it, cry, CRYYYYYY, whaaaaaah!”
‘Cos that would be four hundred and thirty seven kinds of awesome, you know.
So really, in the grand scheme of things, nothing is resolved in this book. Professor Newkirk disappears with no conclusiveness (or real usefulness) whatsoever. Steven and Billie never take the twinsies to task for their lack of respect around their home. Jessica’s “older guy” turns out to be a high school kid like her, but not only is there no explanation of how or why he’s been hanging out at SVU for months on end, there’s also the opt-out everyone-ends-up-laughing problem “resolution” of his and Jessie’s one weekish relationship. Everything is restored to the proper natural order. The twinsies go back to school with Todd and Ken and Enid and Lila and The Whole Gang, just as they should.
Because you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.