Laugh, Dante...Part 2

Intermission: This afternoon, I was chatting with my friend Jeremy, who teased me about my AIM status activity bar, which usually reads "around, writing," because I usually am around and in some way, writing. This afternoon, I happened to be writing a syllabus for my upcoming semester, which is not really "writing," but is a lot like writing. You need the same focus, the same ability to pull ideas from some void in the nether regions, but unlike writing, a patience for the hair splitting tedium of daily details. Anyway, Jeremy's first words to me were something along the lines of "A MFA who writes? I thought we all ditched that gig when we graduated." He was joking, but it's pretty sort of true, that in the world of the real, there is much writing of the syllabus type and not as much writing of the writing type. And I thought about this blog, where I have let this part two lapse for at least three weeks, and not that any of you were dying to see what happened in this second part - except maybe Christina - but this conversation with Jeremy reminded me that there is much writing to be done, lest I become a casualty of the MFA, like so many before me.

This is also, in part, for Kristan, in her blog reading, Planet Earth watching, tea-into-the-sink existence at the moment.

So...

This all started with Buffy. No wait -- it goes further back than that, all the way to reading and rereading The Babysitters Club over and over until the spines no longer held together and one by one, pages started dropping out. Then, it was All Creatures, then Sweet Valley High, then those demon-awful Frank Peretti books, and then, the Christy Miller series. Then, there was college, where I tried not to read anything serialized at all, for fear of betraying the not-so-secret English major code that serialized books are dumb. This, of course, was my own take on it and not like anything resembling reality. (Well, maybe just a little.) My friends were still reading Tolkien and Lewis and watching the X-Files, but I wanted to be cool. Cooler than cool. And cooler than cool was more like obscure Medieval theologians and contemporary Irish writers than hobbits and David Duchovny. So there went I, tripping after what I thought would make me smarter-looking and cooler-sounding, when in essence, I was just following the usual hipster-wanna-be directives like a neatly-laid, vintage cobblestone path.

Man, I was lame.

Another not-so-secret English major banner is about the rejection of science-fiction as a lesser, or bullshit, writing style.

Back to Buffy. This was the first serialized anything that I ever stayed up all night to watch in chronological order on DVD, the first series I had bought since junior high, or the first series where I searched out reviewers' analysis of each show and poured over them like a Rosetta stone. I checked out books at the library where fans like me wrote funny and insightful articles about as topics as varying as Platonic ideal in the Buffy verse, or (and much less impressively) Buffy's perfect relationship match. I memorized the soundtrack to "Once More, With Feeling." If I'd been around when the show was still in its hey-day, I might have gone to Comic Con or a meet-and-greet with the stars.

But who am I kidding? I wouldn't have -- I was way too cool for that back then.

The whole Buffy experience, when I thought about it, was a little unsettling. I, literary type who's been trained in tiny cheeses and art-for-art's-sake public readings, suddenly felt as though nothing could reach the pinnacle of the story arcs and characters that I found in Buffy. And that's when I realized, finally, that I was a nerd.

But I didn't embrace it, really embrace it, until recently.

Buffy, as many of you know, had seven TV seasons and then, like most shows excluding The Simpsons, went off the air. But Joss Whedon, that schemey little trickster, didn't end it there. Late last year, he announced that season eight of Buffy would be in comic book form. And to me, that was, comics as in lameness personified?