I have tasted hell, and it tastes like chemicals.
It seemed innocuous - a bag of potato chips can't possibly be that bad, can it? - so I dipped my hand into the bag, extracted what appeared to be a perfectly normal deep-fried sliver of what started out as a starchy, tuberous root, and put it in my mouth. I never expected to shriek, spit the partially masticated chip into a paper napkin, and slam back a hit of Valu-Time Pineapple Soda to cleanse myself of the sensation that I had just spent several hours eating something grown in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
That I was reduced to drinking off-brand pineapple soda to cut the taste of Satan's Own Snack Food says it all, especially since the soda was the color of a yellow legal pad and bore as much resemblance flavorwise to actual pineapple juice as it did to crankcase oil. I'm not sure my mouth felt normal until I got home a couple of hours later and brushed my teeth. You can be sure I spent an unusual amount of time flossing last night, too, just in case there was still a trace of potato-like horror stuck in my dental work.
Is it any surprise that the potato chips came from the same Big Lots as the Valu-Time Chemical Cocktail? Or that the on-line reviews of this particular snack were uniformly terrible? Or that even the college students happily glomming down available junk food were avoiding something that would have made Dante write an entire new canto of Inferno to describe the punishment that awaited the manufacturer?
Seriously. Lay's Chicken and Waffles Potato Chips really are that bad.
As for why I decided to try this culinary torture device...well, I'd just willingly subjected myself to clips from some of the worst movies imaginable, so giving really, really bad potato chips a try seemed like the thing to do at the time. I'm at Conbust, the annual SF convention at Smith College, and the movie clips, which included delights like Warbirds (soldier attempts to deal with a dinosaur in the cargo bay of his aircraft by, in order, shooting at it (and missing), hitting it repeatedly with a fire extinguisher, and then dropping a nuke on its scaly little head), were part of an annual presentation called the Smithee Awards.
These awards are named for the legendary (and fictitious) film director “Alan Smithee.” For many years, directors who were not happy with studio interference with their films, or have the suits recut their movie in a less than excellent way, had the option of taking their own name off the finished product and substituting that of Mr. Smithee. This story, which may not be entirely true but should be, in turned inspired at least one movie (called, of course, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn). It also inspired the Smithee Awards, which are actually a group of SF fans who travel from con to con showing bad movie clips and letting the audience vote on which is the worst.
I'm sure you can see the appeal for me. I haven't actually asked people to vote on their favorite terrible books (yet), but these merry pranksters are of the tribe that knows Joseph. They, too, love the terrible, the stupid, the far too strange to be real. They see the humor in the awful, whether it's a “tropical snake” that is no more than a knitted puppet with button eyes, a trio of martial arts masters killing an opponent with an anti-aircraft missile, or DVD cover art of a silver pyramid with big sharp teeth chomping people in half. It's what I do, or try to do, on Saturday nights, and if I'm managed to convey just how much fun it is to read a really, really bad book, I've done my job.
That said, tonight's entry nearly defeated me. It is at once truly bad and truly groundbreaking, extremely lucrative and crushingly dumb. It's a prime example of how to get rich underestimating the taste of the American people even as it makes mildly kinky erotica respectable. It had me laughing out loud, but for a lot of people, it's allowed them to tap their sexuality without shame.
The name of this remarkable, terrible, culturally important, utterly ridiculous book is Fifty Shades of Grey. You may have heard of it.
Fifty Shades of Grey is an unlikely candidate for best-seller status, let alone potentially liberating piece of erotica. As I briefly mentioned last week, it began life as that most innocuous of productions, a piece of fanfiction inspired by Stephenie Meyer's mega-hit Twilight and its sequels. Originally intended solely for the amusement of one woman and her friends, it took on a life of its own and rose, like Bella Swann herself after her longed-for, oh so romantic transformation to an immortal monster, to heights of fame, fortune, and fandom that its creator could only dream of.
Erika Leonard, author of this unexpected smash hit, was an equally unexpected author of an ode to the joys of sexyfuntimes. Happily married, gainfully employed, and solidly middle class in every way, she had never even heard of fanfiction, let alone written any, until she encountered Twilight. The book so captured her imagination that she started seeking similar works on line. She quickly found fanfiction, original stories written for amusement purposes only by devoted fans of certain books, television shows, and movies, and started to read. And, like so many people who read the book, then read the fic, she decided that she could do just as good a job as any other amateur and started writing her own.
The result, Master of the Universe, was a long, sexually explicit, non-vampiric retelling of the story of Bella and Edward, her beloved and sparkly bloodsucking boyfriend. Written and posted under the name “Snowqueen's Icedragon,” Master of the Universe moved the story from the tiny town of Forks to the big, bad city of Portland, Oregon. It also included generous, frequent, and explicit descriptions of Bella and Edward gettin' their freak on, as the saying goes, as they engaged in a dominant/submissive relationship that went way, way, way beyond anything that the devoutly Mormon Stephenie Meyer ever imagined for her creations.
One problem: evidently the archive where Snowqueen's Icedragon had chosen to post her work was less than welcoming to sexually explicit work. This is not uncommon, either because certain archives are intended primarily for work by and written for under-18 fans, or because of local anti-obscenity laws (don't even ask about the mess when one archive based in Australia ran afoul of child pornography statutes, even though the stories complained of involved teenagers having fun with other teenagers). She therefore took the fic down, set up her own website, and started publishing it there. And as she acquired more fans, and some of them began urging her to publish her wonderful story for a wider audience, Snowdragon's Icequeen decided that maybe, just maybe, she should listen to her audience.
Thus it was that Snowdragon's Icequeen became E.J. James, Master of the Universe was taken down (for good, and yes, that includes the Wayback Machine, so don't waste your time trying to find the fic – God knows I've wasted enough time for all of us) and extensively rewritten, all the characters were renamed and given new backgrounds, and the spanking new novel Fifty Shades of Grey was offered for sale as both an e-book and via print-on-demand by an Australian publisher called The Writers' Coffee Shop.
The book, which now concerned a mousy college student named Anastasia Steele and the brilliant, wealthy, masterful Christian Grey instead of a mousy high school student named Bella Swann and the sparkly, immortal, perpetual teenager Edward Cullen, was quickly followed by two sequels, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed. What happened next surprised everyone, not least of all E.L. James herself.
The Writers' Coffee Shop might not have had much of an advertising budget, but the fans who'd loved Master of the Universe were equally thrilled by Fifty Shades of Grey and its successors. They bought, told their friends, and the friends told their friends. The friends of friends in turn told their friends, and within a year the series had sold enough copies that traditional publisher Vintage Books bought the rights, convinced that it had a genuine, and very lucrative, phenomenon on its hands.
Sales boomed as a mainstream audience, primarily female, that was already accustomed to hot but still not quite hardcore sex in romance novels found that E.L. James' brand of sex was very much to its taste. Despite problems with just where to stock the books (or even to stock them at all, at least where impressionable youngsters could get their grubby little paws on them), faster than you can say "yes, Master," the Fifty Shades Trilogy was the fastest-selling paperback of all time, with over 100 million copies in print in fifty-two languages. If that weren't enough, Universal Pictures bought the film rights and announced that Fifty Shades of Grey would appear at the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex early in 2015, even though the sexual content meant that the movie would almost certainly have an NC-17 rating.
And E.L. James, who'd only begun writing a few years earlier, found herself one of the hottest literary stars in the world.
It wasn't necessarily for the quality of her prose, which is, to put it mildly, clunky; I have never in my life read a book where so many characters muttered instead of talked, or where the editors seemed afraid to tell an author about this stunning new development in punctuation called “paragraphing.” I'd also managed to live fifty-three years upon this Earth without reading a ludicrous sentence like “I could almost hear her sphinx-like smile” (what?), and I cheerfully could have lived another fifty-three in such blissful ignorance. I was howling with laughter, and not the good kind, barely twenty pages in, and finally had to stop because I was in public and didn't necessarily want to get arrested or scare the children.
You don't believe me, veteran of so much bad prose that it's a wonder I can still write in something approaching English? Read, o my faithful fans, and judge for yourself:
“You’re a sadist?”
“I’m a Dominant.” His eyes are a scorching gray, intense.
“What does that mean?” I whisper.
“It means I want you to willingly surrender yourself to me, in all things.”
I frown at him as I try to assimilate this idea.
“Why would I do that?”
“To please me,” he whispers as he cocks his head to one side, and I see a ghost of a smile.
Please him! He wants me to please him! I think my mouth drops open. Please Christian Grey. And I realize, in that moment, that yes, that’s exactly what I want to do. I want him to be damned delighted with me. It’s a revelation.
Ooookay.
He's naked except for those soft ripped jeans, top button casually undone. Jeez, he looks so freaking hot. My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.
With a bossa nova backbeat, perhaps? Or maybe dubstep?
This is a man in need. His fear is naked and obvious, but he's lost. . . Somewhere in his darkness.
His eyes wide and bleak and tortured. I can soothe him. Join him briefly in the darkness and bring him into the light.
The sentence fragments epic.
He grabs me suddenly and yanks me up against him, one hand at my back holding me to him and the other fisting in my hair.
"You're one challenging woman," He kisses me, forcing my lips apart with his tongue, taking no prisoners.
"It's taking all my self-control not to fuck you on the hood of this car, just to show you that you're mine, and if I want to buy you a fucking car, I'll buy you a fucking car," he growls.”
I wonder if this is what they call "auto eroticism"?
“Does this mean you’re going to make love to me tonight, Christian?” Holy shit. Did I just say that? His mouth drops open slightly, but he recovers quickly.
“No, Anastasia it doesn’t. Firstly, I don’t make love. I fuck… hard. Secondly, there’s a lot more paperwork to do, and thirdly, you don’t yet know what you’re in for. You could still run for the hills. Come, I want to show you my playroom.”
My mouth drops open. Fuck hard! Holy shit, that sounds so… hot. But why are we looking at a playroom? I am mystified.
“You want to play on your Xbox?” I ask. He laughs, loudly.
“No, Anastasia, no Xbox, no Playstation. Come.”… Producing a key from his pocket, he unlocks yet another door and takes a deep breath.
“You can leave anytime. The helicopter is on stand-by to take you whenever you want to go, you can stay the night and go home in the morning. It’s fine whatever you decide.”
“Just open the damn door, Christian.”
He opens the door and stands back to let me in. I gaze at him once more. I so want to know what’s in here. Taking a deep breath I walk in.
And it feels like I’ve time-traveled back to the sixteenth century and the Spanish Inquisition.
Holy fuck.
This gives new meaning to the term "auto da fe."
Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with me. Perhaps I've spent too long in the company of my literary romantic heroes, and consequently my ideals and expectations are far too high.
Oh, there's something wrong with you, honey, but it's not that you think.
“- "Why don't you like to be touched?"
"Because I'm fifty shades of fucked-up, Anastasia”
Call me crazy, but I don't think Fifty Shades of Fucked-Up is necessarily a good title for a book.
Is is any wonder that Sir Salman Rushdie, no stranger to literary controversy, was quoted as saying that he'd “never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace”? Or that New York Times reviewer Maureen Dowd said it read “like a Bronte devoid of talent”? Or that Stephenie Meyer herself, who probably never imagined that her literary spawn would itself spawn, would say only, "[T]hat's really not my genre, not my thing... Good on her—she's doing well. That's great!" when informed that James had actually outsold her in some markets.
No, people were not reading the Fifty Shades Trilogy because it's well written, or original. They're reading it at least in part because of something that musical satirist Tom Lehrer had pointed out half a century earlier:
Dirty books are fun, and that's all there is to it.
That this was at all in doubt may seem puzzling – archaeologists have found obscene graffiti in Pompeii, so it's not as if the idea that we humans like sex is a modern development – seems mainly because so many of the people who were buying, and reading, and enjoying,
Fifty Shades of Grey were women over thirty. Sneering critics dubbed the book “mommy porn,” as if women who were married, had children, or were in committed relationships had no right to sexual pleasure of any sort, let alone something that explored the less known frontiers of human sexuality like BDSM.
None of this stopped the book from selling, and selling, and continuing to sell. Home erotica marketers started selling copies at the same parties where the curious could purchase personal lubricants, vibrators, and similar items for discreet fun at home. This did not necessarily please everyone – Katie Roiphe slammed the book on the grounds of confused sexual politics (not that she's any great shakes when it comes to this), while Andrea Reiher of Zap2it complained that it seemed to confuse consensual sexual submission with abuse, a very different thing – but the book continued to sell. Websites such as Jezebel pointed out that the emotional relationship between Christian and Anastasia was what readers cared about, not necessarily the mildly kinky sex, while fans, eager for more, turned to better known romantic erotica writers like Anne Rice for their jollies after they'd finally exhausted E.L. James' literary oeuvre.
And all this, mind, is before the film version comes out next year. Starring Dakota Johnson (daughter of Miami Vice star Don Johnson and his former wife Melanie Griffith, herself the daughter of Hitchcock favorite Tippi Hedren) as clumsy, muttering, utterly charmless Anastasia Steele, it was originally supposed to feature Sons of Anarchy actor Charlie Hunnam in the potentially starmaking role of Christian Grey. Hunnam, claiming that the filming schedule of his television series prevented him from playing a billionaire/dominant/philanthropist, eventually bowed out as rumors swirled that he was afraid that his career would be permanently wrecked if he appeared in a movie about bondage, spanking, and obscenely rich men with personal dungeons. Irish Jamie Dornan had no such qualms, and the resulting film, and boost to sales of the books and plenty of bondage equipment, will grace the Heck Piazza Dodecaplex next February.
It's safe to say that Fifty Shades of Grey will be with us for quite some time to come.
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Do you own a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey? Another erotic book? Are you planning to watch the movie next year? Would you admit it if you were? This diary is a safe space, so come and share....
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