E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I finally saw Twilight - and haven't read the novels. Let me wear my heart on my sleeve - I loved it. Most reviews patronise "the girls" in the audience who swoon. However, I feel everyone deserves a slice of the Teen Gothic Sublime, and rarely has a film delivered so well on the genre ( Titanic perhaps). There are dozens of art-house reasons to sneer at this sort of sentimental portentous product - and one to cheer: because they did it without irony. Irony, the bane of modernism (and its spice) has rendered many a Hollywood project DOA - so this one's undead and undying romanticism was blessedly true to the material, and the vein being mined. No one tried to be hip or knowing. They just played it straight. Star-crossed lovers, vampires, deep woods that David Lynch could sink his teeth into, and high school hormones and angst, even baseball - what more could a North American kid marooned in London want? Well, one thing - a Carter Burwell score, his best since Farg...

Sad news. James Purdy has died. Purdy's great novella Malcolm was published 50 years ago, and found favour immediately with a slapdash cabal of wits, misfits and weird modernists - but was equally ignored by the more "preppy" (his words) crowd. I read Malcolm at 14, and it had an instant effect - its grotesque flamboyant perversity enchanted me. Oddly enough, I never read more of him after that - you know how polymorphous teen readers are - there were others to curl up in bed with. Still, reading about his career again in the New York Times obituary it struck me as surprising he had lived so long, and been quite so marginal.