Overheard while wandering through Borders with my husband:
Young 20-something with a Twilight t-shirt on: “Umm, do you still carry any Twilight umbrellas? I saw them here last week.”
Employee of Borders: “Yeah, I’ll walk you over. They’re here in this display.” (walks her to a large Twilight display)
Twilight girl: “Wow! (looks at display) This is awesome.”
Employee: “Yeah, it is, huh? I just got back from Forks last week. It was an incredible time.”
At this point, Don and I had to walk in the other direction because we were in hysterics for laughing.
Now, if you haven’t read Twilight, you need to know that Forks is the town where the books take place. Apparently (I didn’t know this), it’s a real place.
I’ll admit that we tried really hard to not be exude snobbish erudition and laugh and mock. But the conversation was almost too much for me to take in. I couldn’t wrap my head around any sort of reality where someone would spend money and time to go to the town that Twilight is based in. What would be there? What would they do? And how could going there be an “incredible time”? Is there a real house or structure there to visit? Could you sit on Bella’s front porch? And lastly, ummm, really? You really want to do that?
About 20 minutes later, as we were still talking about this, trying to understand the motivation, it occurred to me that I would probably spend money to go sit on Edith Wharton’s porch. I would spend money to visit the Bronte sisters home. I would spend money to find out if Virginia Woolf really had a room of her own.
Is it any different? Or am I just being an insufferable snob?(because it’s entirely possible)
I wouldn’t really care to visit Darbyshire, or visit the fabled house of Fyodor of Karamazov fame, but seeing Austen’s house or Dostoevsky’s stomping ground would be fascinating.
So am I just repulsed by the fact that it’s “pop culture” instead of “high culture”? And who decides what “high culture” is anyway? Am I every bit the same literary groupie?
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