Blissbat.net

This weekend, I’ll be on a panel about fanfiction at Readercon. Here’s the official panel description:

Fanfic as Criticism (Only More Fun). Fanfiction is being produced online at a rate of millions of words per month. Fanfiction can expand on a shorter work, change a work’s themes, or even attempt to “fix” things the author is felt to have done “wrong” (e.g., provide a backstory to explain otherwise undermotivated behavior). These dynamics are not unheard of outside of Internet fandom communities — Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway attempts to “fix” James Joyce’s Ulysses (which itself retells Homer’s Odyssey). In what ways can fanfiction be a valuable part of the criticism of a text? Can it appeal as criticism to readers outside the fanfiction community? If so, how can they find the most interesting works?

The first of the description’s three questions is the central one, I think, and as is probably clear from the fact that I’m doing the panel, I do think fanfiction can be a valuable part of the criticism of the text. Valuable to whom, and in what ways are trickier questions, but let’s start with the basics.

What Is It?

I’m not very interested in taxonomic disputes, but for the purposes of this post and the upcoming panel, here’s my take.

Fanfiction is a subset of a larger group of artistic responses to works of art—a group that includes such works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Wide Sargasso Sea, Finn, and Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D.[1. I'm open to other definitions of fanfiction except for the one that recapitulates a common conversation about SF: "If it's good, it's not fanfiction." AKA "Frankenstein isn't science fiction, it's literature" or "I'm Margaret Atwood and it's not SF because I say so." This dumb little hopping dance lets readers whose investment in mainstream-as-good makes it impossible for them to consider seriously the virtues of non-mainstream lit define genre fiction as bad by eliminating its founding texts and best examples. Finn and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Wide Sargasso Sea work in exactly the same ways as fanfiction, and the fact that they're really quite good doesn't make them a different species—it just makes them some of the best examples of the form. (They're all based on public domain source texts, of course, because most serious writers aren't going to set aside a few years to write a novel or play based on a source text that's still in copyright, because they couldn't then sell the resulting work.)]

Fanfiction also:

• comes with its own subcultural connotations, expectations, and contexts that affect the reactions of those who read and think about it.
• is generally written by adolescent girls and adult women who aren’t professional writers.
• exists in a grey area of copyright law, and is thus typically published online.
• includes several highly visible subgenres that center on romantic and sexual relationships, queer and otherwise.

It’s possible to consider fanfiction as a separate phenomenon from the larger body of art that responds to and criticizes other works of art. It’s also possible to consider the responsive and critical functions of fanfiction within the larger body of work, rather than as a separate category of literary production. Both perspectives are interesting, but that it’s important to be clear which one is under consideration at any given point.

In any case, fanfiction, even narrowly defined, encompasses forms that go well beyond pastiche or simple “missing scenes” stories. Many “alternate universe” stories maintain some features of the source text while introducing new settings, characters, plots, and themes. These range from stories in which most of the source text’s characteristics are maintained to those in which almost none of them are. An example of the latter might include a story about two adults in a nonmagical world who interact in ways that have nothing to do with the source text’s plot or themes, but who are nevertheless intended to be read as shadows or echoes of characters from the Harry Potter series. Or Lust Over Pendle, which is the first of a series of very funny golden age detective novels and short stories in which some of Rowling’s characters co-exist with many others. Or “Corridors of Power: Being An Originally Intermittent Account of the Political (Mis)Adventures of the Viscount Northallerton, Lord Malfoy of Wimbledon; and the Rt. Honourable Harry J. Potter, Member of Parliament for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Liberal Democrat).”

Other stories exhaustively develop characters or subplots that are only briefly alluded to in the source text. “Dust is Gonna Settle,” for example, is a short story about a couple of brilliant people who happen to meet at Los Alamos in 1945. Nothing in the story itself suggests that it’s fanfiction, and the characters are developed from scratch, but the details gain additional resonance if you know it’s intended to depict the meeting of Tony Stark’s parents (that’s Iron Man for you non-comics-readers, bless your hearts). And then you have crossover fiction in which you have, for example, Sherlock Holmes appearing in a Dracula story, or Hermione Granger as a vampire slayer.

What’s It Do?

A few propositions:

• Most fanfic, like most of everything else created by human hands, is terrible. Bad fan stories are interesting to me for social and cultural reasons, but not really for literary ones.
• Some fanfiction is beautifully written, but doesn’t function as literary criticism.
• Some fanfiction accomplishes a great deal of critical work. Of this subcategory, some are clumsily written and characterized, while others are quite good.

Here’s an example: In the Harry Potter books, a Slytherin character named Gavin Montague bothers “good” characters Fred and George Weasley, and they shove him into a vanishing cabinet, which is a device that will later be involved in a major plot point. Montague shows up some weeks later, trapped inside a toilet, having been zapped around through physical space all that time, and he’s so psychologically traumatized that he’s considered mad and sent home. And none of the “good” characters involved are punished, or even found out. Moreover, readers only see the world from the good characters’ perspective.

But there’s a story on Livejournal about Montague losing his shit in terrifying ways and making a sort of military/sexual alliance with Draco Malfoy to get his revenge. So that’s a great example of a story doing things that are clearly critical, questioning the ethical framework of the book’s world and depicting the disintegration of an adolescent’s personality while also providing interested slash readers with an erotic charge re: the sexual relationship and suggesting a whole new alternate future for the series’ plot.

The story’s prose isn’t particularly refined or subtle, but it has the potential to change the way in which readers approach the source text, and perhaps make them more likely to question some of its moral assumptions and so on. (It won’t be read by people who are uncomfortable with slash, and the story’s author and fans are fine with that.)

Range of Motion

Plenty of fanfiction doesn’t function as criticism in any way that I can spot, but some of it does. And when it does, it can:

• raise all sorts of interesting questions about a source text’s underlying assumptions (moral, sexual, etc.),
• criticize plot or character developments that don’t seem to have been properly introduced and grounded (importantly, this is not limited to tacking on happy endings — it’s often quite the reverse),
• complicate characters in interesting ways by carving out backstories that make their behavior in the source text more interesting, or explain oddities,
• retell a source text’s story for a new audience (Harry Potter with sex and drugs in, “Snow White” as an echo of the Persephone myth, just about anything as pornography),
• reveal new aspects of a work by isolating certain of its elements and examining them in a different context (AU, crossover),
• reveal thematic or plot connections between two disparate works, and
• train readers to think about authorial choices in more active ways.

I tend to think that that last one’s especially important.

Notes

Most of my blogging is happening at the revamped Incisive.nu because my brain’s been on a publishing/content tear since before I went to SXSW in Austin earlier this month. Right now, I’m whipping through some strenuous content work stuff to make space to get back to thesis writing. Once I switch gears, things will pick up a bit here. Also on the horizon: Japan. I’ll be somewhere between Tokyo and Noheji for the end of April and the beginning of May.

Anyway, books.

I’ve fooled our ridiculous capitalist licensing overlords into letting me read The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which isn’t out here for another month but has been out in Europe since last fall. It’s making me sad because so far it’s the best of Larsson’s three books, and it’s deeply engaged with investigative journalism, and I’m crushed that he died three books into his ten-book series. I saw the first two movies in the series last week (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is in theaters, while The Girl Who Played with Fire is technically unavailable here), and was impressed by their faithfulness to the books’ spirit. The only things they really missed are Salander’s math in the second book and the endless and intensely comforting parade of delicious-sounding sandwiches that characterize all three books. I’m also slowly reading A Perfect Spy (Le Carre) and it’s schooling me, as his books always do.

On the trip to Austin and back, I found myself bookless in two airports before longish flights and panic-bought A Reliable Wife and The Somnambulist in print and The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death on my phone. A Reliable Wife was readable, if not actually good, and TMAoEASoD was kind of great without making me want to jump out a window like the last few of Huston’s. I haven’t been able to get through The Somnambulist, which is fussy and uses a lot of the detestable “Like some ___” construction. Direct quotes: “like some maleficent vision,” “like some animate portcullis,” “like some latter-day Buddha,” “like some shattered beast,” “like some landlocked Pharos,” “like some especially ferocious javelin-thrower…”

Yeah.

In better news, Friend Bobert dropped off a truckload of comics over the weekend and I read The Cleaners, which is best trade I’ve read since the first arc of Scalped; Hard Time, which would have been better if an editor had blown up the ludicrous setup sequence; and the first Unknown Soldier, which made me feel like jumping out a window. Oh, and I finally read Westerfeld’s Leviathan, which is perfectly paced, beautifully illustrated, and incredibly fun.

Oh, and I broke down and signed up for Tumblr, so if you do that, I’m here, but it’s all work stuff.

Three points:

1. I’m a white girl. I grew up with all the privilege that entails in the US—privilege it took me years to even start to get my head around. And that’s a task I don’t ever expect to be done with.
2. Though I’m not quite sure how it happened, given my family’s conservative, anti-feminist politics, I identified as a feminist starting in junior high. It seemed…obvious. I believe women deserve the right to things like suffrage, equal pay, and not being brutalized. Ergo, feminist. It’s something I’ve never felt remotely conflicted about. Which is another marker of white privilege, because…
3. Feminism, as a movement, has a big long history of race fail. I don’t think it has to be like that forever, but the only way to fix it is for those of us who identify as feminists and also acknowledge this history—and this ongoing problem—to stand up and holler. And frankly, black and asian and hispanic women have been forced to do a disproportionate amount of said hollering.

So let me be clear.

These women and these women and these women represent the feminism I believe in. These women, who are displaying the usual symptoms of unexamined racial privilege, most definitely do not.

So, I’m not writing this post for sympathy. It’s late winter. Just about everyone’s sick. I’m writing it because I just looked at the palmful of multicolored pills I was about to swallow and cracked up. That may be the drugs talking.

Anyway, I’ve had a chest cold/respiratory infection/bronchitis for nearly three weeks, and it’s still kicking, but I’m mostly functional thanks to a daily intake of:

• Sudafed (the real kind) × 10
• Benadryl × 8
• Zyrtec 24 hr × 1
• Lung tonic × 4
• the 9 supplements I take so I don’t have to use asthma inhalers when I’m not sick
• beclomethasone inhaler × 2
• albuterol inhaler × 2-4
• 6-8 Ricolas
• 10-12 pints of water
• some coffee (not very much)

I’ve had bronchitis about once a year since I was three, and this regimen is making the bronchitis about 4,000 times more endurable than it’s ever been, because drying my hypersensitive sinuses out keeps the dreaded tickle from keeping me up all night every night. That said, said regimen’s effects on my short-term memory and ability to concentrate have resembled a cross between Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Cocoon. If I owe you an email or something, please remind me, because I’m at the point where I’m considering labeling all the objects in my apartment so that I can remember nouns again.

This Is (Still) Nice

In the first chapter of Jane Eyre, Jane reads a book called A History of British Birds. The book is important to the text in a few ways—it introduces a number of Gothic elements to the text in a tricksy way, slipping the arctic shipwrecks and bedeviled criminals in under cover of an apparently innocent ornithological subject, and of course, it’s also the book that the wicked John Reed wings at Jane’s head, making her bleed and provoking the terrifying experience of the red room.

I returned to my book—Bewick’s History of British Birds: the letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not pass quite as a blank.  They were those which treat of the haunts of sea-fowl; of “the solitary rocks and promontories” by them only inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape . . . .

Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive.  The words in these introductory pages connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray; to the broken boat stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking. . . .

With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way.

Turns out, both volumes of Bewick’s are available via Google Books (volume one, volume two). And oh man, are the illustrations bizarre. Here’s what Jane was looking at, crammed in at the ends of pages to fill up space.

A Wonderful FISH

A model for the post-fire Thornfield Hall?

Random guy in the river

….and here’s my favorite, the disembodied, tourniqueted lobster claw of artistry:

I'ma paint-choo

Charles Dickens, or someone writing for him in All the Year Round, also found Bewick’s engavings interesting (scroll down half a page), though he doesn’t really know what to make of the WONDERFUL FISH either.

There are plenty of valid reasons for not wanting your online activity and information to be packaged up for anyone who wishes to “follow” you. Many people who use one or more of Google’s services never intended for, say, their Google Reader information to be connected to their e-mail addresses. Some of them need to keep that information unlinked so that, for example, abusive ex-husbands and threatening strangers can’t find new ways to torment them.

It’s easy to believe that open access to personal information is mostly harmless, and that stalkers only harass drama queens and women who “put themselves” in dangerous relationships offline. It may be especially easy to believe this if your worst communication experiences online have involved flamewars and nasty emails.

Here’s the thing. I’m using Google Buzz, albeit carefully and tentatively, but a year ago, I wouldn’t have been doing so.

For a long time, I kept my online identities as fragmented as possible to make it harder for strangers (or the wrong acquaintances) to physically find me in non-public venues, or to see what I was posting under other names. Why? Because when I was an undergraduate ten years ago, two men with whom I did not want contact found me—found my dorm and room number and supposedly private unlisted telephone number. This information was “confidential,” but that didn’t keep me from getting surprise calls late at night, including one from an unstable young man I had known briefly in high school who happened to believe that I was causing him to be spiritually attacked by demons, and who now knew exactly where I lived.

Those calls—demonstrations that people who did not have my best interest in mind wanted and could easily obtain my personal information—shaped my online habits.

About a year ago, I realized that by speaking at various conferences, I had already left a trail for anyone who cared to bother me. So I stopped asking people to remove my last name from the captions of photos posted online. I let my anonymous accounts drift toward my identifiable ones. I started to publicly talk about travel plans. The fact that I’m approaching my mid-thirties and have been in a committed relationship for ten years has shielded me from a lot of random harassment, but I remember what it felt like to be so vulnerable.

It’s unconscionable for Google to connect up disparate accounts and circles of online activity that happen to be associated with a Gmail address by default. It is even less acceptable that they have provided such inadequate ways of opting out, aside of deleting all information associated with any Google product or service or any product or service they eventually acquire. But most Gmail users won’t object, because they’re used to having their privacy treated as a non-issue by the companies with whom they trust their information. Nevertheless, it’s wrong. And for some people, especially for young women, sexual and ethnic minorities, activists, and anyone engaged in controversial communication online, it’s dangerous.

The difference between reading for pleasure and garden-variety academic reading is the difference between visiting the paintings you love in a museum and spending time with paintings you don’t immediately respond to because you want to understand what kind of paintings they really are, and how they work.

The difference between reading for pleasure and reading for intensive academic research is the difference between buying a beautiful piece of art for your home and meticulously going through a giant patch of dirt divided into little squares by lines of string and painstakingly unearthing broken bits of pottery. If you’re a researcher, you don’t dig up a shard of a cooking pot and make a face because it’s jagged on one side or it doesn’t really appeal to your sensibilities. You brush it off with a special brush and bag it up with custom-made padding and carefully tag the bag and thank your archeological saints that you found it at all because what are the odds of that, and then you use it to reconstruct a piece of a lost world.

All these ways of reading are useful and good. But it’s important to know which you’re trying to do, lest you wander haplessly into a dig and be unexpectedly set upon by sweaty archeologists with mud on their trousers and a deranged gleam in their eyes.

My mother’s PET scan and new CT scan got read this morning, and her tumor is gone. Gone as in missing, not there, as in no one knows what happened.

To recap, there was a baseball-sized mass behind her sternum in November that showed up as a shadow on an x-ray and then very clearly on a CT scan. It was still there at the end of December. During the biopsy, the surgeon found it wrapped around her blood vessels and diagnosed (for the second time) invasive inoperable thymoma, which is a form and type of thyroid cancer that kills more than 85% of patients within the first couple of years after diagnosis, often quite quickly.

The pathologist’s report from the biopsy conflicted with the unequivocal clinical diagnosis, so the biopsy went to specialist lab in Texas, and they couldn’t find cancer cells. The surgeon continued to tell my mother and her husband not to trust the pathology, that it was wrong and offering false hope. The insurance company finally approved a PET scan (though they, of course, reserve the right to decide not to pay for it after all, because we live in the US and that’s how they do) to find out what the mass was really made of.

And it’s gone. She has residual inflammation, and of course she’s still healing from the biopsy—the incision goes all the way around one side of her torso, from front to back.

This feels as dreamlike as the initial diagnosis. Both scans agree, though, PET and CT.

Words don’t cover this relief, “grateful” doesn’t describe how this feels. My mother is…I have not, in these weeks and months of corrosive uncertainty, been able to imagine my life without her.

How can I say what it means that my children will probably know their grandmother?

Since this began, I have learned about so many of your losses: how many of you have been through this or something like it, or are going through it now, and you have been so generous with your love and good wishes. All I can say now is thank you for your help. I wanted to tell you as soon as I got confirmation, even though I’m not sure how to say it. I feel like we just walked away from a plane crash and the plane is still on fire and other people are still on the plane and I can’t hear very well.

It’s been a busy weekend at Blissbat Central.

Over at the Hope Mirrlees site, there’s a mini-essay on connections between Mirrlees’ novel Madeleine and the 17th century French salon-goers and fairy tale writers called the précieuses. There’s also a list of great critical entry points for potential readers of Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees’ most famous novel. As I collected and sorted material for those posts, I wound up with more interesting material than the posts could accommodate, so here are a couple of my favorite oddments for your Sunday afternoon.

La Carte du Tendre

Mlle de Scudéry, one of the most famous of the précieuses, wrote a novel, Clélie, that included an engraved map called the “Carte du Tendre,” a map of Arcadia in which the geography represents aspects of courtly lovemaking: the Dangerous Sea, the Lake of Indifference, and the River of Inclination, on whose banks lie towns including Attentiveness, Tenderness, and Constant Friendship. The wonderful Strange Maps blog has a great breakdown of the map’s fantastic narrative of love.

La Carte du Tendre

Natalie Barney

There’s an excerpt on YouTube from Greta Schiller’s 1995 (not 2004, as it’s marked) documentary, Paris Was A Woman. The excerpt focuses on the life of the dashing American writer Natalie Barney and her many affairs with interesting women. Wonderful stuff, despite its rather mannered documentary style. (New York Times review of the film.)

The Other Thing

I’ve also just finished the arduous part of a secret project. Now I just need to do some spiffing-up and send a couple of emails, after which I should be able to show it to you.

Back in 2000, I made a mini-website to host and compare a handful of translations of poems by Rumi and Omar Khayyam. The purpose of the site was to make available samples of alternatives to the sappy, New Age Rumi “translations” by Coleman Barks (who doesn’t even read Farsi), to offer a comparison of Khayyam translations, and to give my new boyfriend something fun to look at between coding jags.

After a couple of years, I put the whole site hosted at Blissbat.net on ice, and I had assumed that the Persian material would have fallen off the internet by now. Turns out, not so much. I recently discovered by accident that my Persian poetry pages were on the first page of Google’s results for “Persian poetry,” and that they were still getting quite a bit of traffic—more than they ever got in 2000, certainly. I took a look at the files themselves and was a bit chagrined to see tables used for layout (though CSS for type control) and various other technical sins, but that’s how we had to do it in 2000.

My tastes have changed in the last ten years, and I’m more interested in Donne than Rumi these days, so I’m not likely to spend the time required to fully update the pages now (though I did go in and bump up the type size a little so I could actually see the words). Were I to build such a site now, I would certainly:

1. Use CSS for layout
2. Build it on WordPress to ease updates
3. Take a more academic approach to the texts and supplementary material
4. Consider illustrating them with something a little less rooted in the tradition of European fairytale Orientalism than Dulac’s paintings, glorious though they are—although it’s probably appropriate to put Dulac and Fitzgerald together, given their culturally similar starting-points.

…but you know, the text is there. And as far as Google and its users are concerned, that seems to be what matters.

It was a different web in 2000—a mostly pre-Wikipedia web, even—and for all its faults, it made available a lot of hand-rolled and often useful content. So I’m going to leave the pages up, be glad that modern browsers are as forgiving as they are, and get on with the business of making new things that will look just as funny in 2019 as the Rumi stuff looks to me now.

It’s not that the medium doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have worked at A List Apart for ten years if I didn’t believe it did. But the message (still) matters more.