Notwithstanding the fact that Andrea Zimmerman picks Ned Nickerson (Nancy Drew's deeply boring boyfriend) as a literary character she'd sleep with, I find the whole project that led her to that conclusion kind of odd. Perhaps it's just me (in fact, it's certainly just me) but I have a hard time getting invested enough in literary characters to think about them making the leap into my life--or to wish I was leaping into theirs. There have been some exceptions--I badly wanted to be a Jedi Knight so I could wield awesome powers and flirt with Luke Skywalker for a humiliatingly long period of my preadolescence. But I have a hard time understanding, for example, the rabid pursuit of Robert Pattinson. What has the world come to when little girls are asking this actor, who stands in for a vampire as one of his jobs, to bite them becaue they want him to be Edward Cullen that badly? What has come to when folks want to devour artists like that at all?
GayAsXmas and I were talking about that weirdly possessive sense folks have about art yesterday afternoon, and he brought up the example of Buffy fans who savaged the show's writers when Tara died. Neither of us could understand it. "I think part of loving art is submitting to being wounded by it," I told him. I do believe that. There's art I've had to stop engaging with because it was too much for me, notably Battlestar Galactica, which I was unable finish (for reasons that have to do with more than the simple power of the show). But I don't know that I've ever been angry with an artist for hurting me, or wished things could turn out differently for reasons other than artistic ones. I may be a bit...control-oriented, let's say, about my work and my life. When I listen to music, or read a book, or go to a movie, or watch television, it a willing surrender of that hard-won control. I tend to think that mode of experience is more rewarding. And it's also a way to avoid being wounded and disappointed.