well, that started out like an update
Long time no post! Let's see...
# In the fleshworld, I am done with the semester at the school where I've been teaching, but I'm still consulting at the writing center at this other school. I'm still looking for a FT admin job too. Had a phone interview a few weeks ago, but nothing since.
# Had kind of a health scare recently when I came down with symptoms for something that's in my family history and had to get some tests done. But they came out negative, thank G-d, and they show I'm actually really healthy except for these weird symptoms, for which I'm seeing a specialist soon. Thank you, Obamacare, for making this process more affordable than it would have been!
# I saw a deeply discounted frozen pumpkin pie at the store yesterday and couldn't NOT purchase it. When I got home, I put it in the fridge to defrost without bothering to read the directions, and when I came home today and took it out of the box, I found a pie shell full of pumpkin pie batter. Apparently it wasn't cooked before being frozen. :P But all is well; I stuck it in the oven and it is now a proper cooked pie. Yum!
# I did something unforeseen yet wonderful the other day. It's been a reeeally long time since I've participated in SPN fandom beyond the wonderful yearly summergen challenge. I hardly even read SPN fic anymore, I'm afraid, and I'm almost a season behind on watching. But SPN somehow is the core of my fannish experience regardless, so I've kept most of the comms on my flist, and there were the spn_j2_bigbang artists' summaries right there, so I took a peek out of curiosity and got grabbed by this one genfic that looked plotty and well-written and really interesting... and I signed up to do art for the first time in forever! The fic turned out to be by the lovely jedisapphire, and it is as good as I'd wagered. I'm ridiculously excited to be participating in the bigbang again, as well as really hoping my art does the story justice.
# Fannishly, I am enjoying the hell out of everything. I mean it. Everything. Somehow my meta and critical analysis button got switched to the off position, because I have very little to comment on for my shows and movies except to say they are all awesome. That is including AoU, and it sank my ship and apparently ruined Black Widow. (If I have any meta-ish impulses atm, they are actually more along the lines of saying "feminism: ur doin' it wrong" to certain corners of fandom--but even those impulses have died down over the last few weeks.)
# Okay, actually, maybe they haven't, because I feel the need to ask (rhetorically) why so many fans insist on canon giving us what we can easily find or create ourselves through fannish work? Which is not to say canon shouldn't damn well improve in terms of representation or anything, or that people shouldn't point out screw-ups. What I'm noticing is a different issue, which is that I hear a lot of fannish voices (newer ones? based on Tumblr mostly?) giving way more authority to the canon than I'm used to seeing, or maybe than I think I remember seeing. I haven't done a study or anything, so I could honestly be wrong. It just seems to matter a lot more to a lot more people whether x-pairing happens in canon, or y-plotpoint takes place in z-way, whereas in earlier times I seem to remember more people rolling with the punches and using canon as a starting point for fix-its or AUs or whatever.
Those are still all over the place, of course, but I feel like maybe one of the side-effects of having such a malleable 4th wall is that people who would otherwise exercise their imaginations creatively are now spending that energy on lobbying creators to do things a certain way. This is a little hard to argue against because much of the "lobbying" that goes on has to do with increasing diversity and not oppressing people--to be absolutely clear, I'm for that. TPTB need to hear it and keep hearing it. It's also hard to argue against because some of the pairings fans are desperate to see canonized are slash, and I'm certainly not arguing against lobbying for that either. I'm not sure I'm even arguing that anyone should stop lobbying for anything at all; people should do what they want (sans harrassment, but that's a different and more obvious rant).
No, what I think I'm getting at (writing this is helping me collect my thoughts on the matter) is that it's not productive to give TPTB most of the creative authority. Creative fandom is based on the premise that the original author/producer doesn't get to call all the shots, that readers/viewers can reimagine at will, and that rewriting/remixing/extending/etc is a way of honoring and loving the source. It's an incredibly empowering position for a media consumer to take, and it's one that asks surprisingly little of the canon; the canon can just be, and our transformative works can just be. So maybe what's got me is that so many people who have creative visions for their favorite canon are responding not by writing/reading/drawing/podding/etc, but by asking TPTB to conform. In many ways, this is the opposite of empowering; TPTB tend to disappoint when asked for things, but more importantly, why should their answer matter at all?
I know this rant has shortcomings, and maybe I'm off the mark. But I feel like there's something to be said in the neighborhood of the above. Like maybe at the intersection of "fannish entitlement" and wank and the shifting 4th wall we're seeing a clash of worldviews, one that locates all or most narrative authority with the original author and the other that finds pleasure and satisfaction a little more readily by thinking of narrative authority as something easily shared/borrowed. Thoughts?
# In the fleshworld, I am done with the semester at the school where I've been teaching, but I'm still consulting at the writing center at this other school. I'm still looking for a FT admin job too. Had a phone interview a few weeks ago, but nothing since.
# Had kind of a health scare recently when I came down with symptoms for something that's in my family history and had to get some tests done. But they came out negative, thank G-d, and they show I'm actually really healthy except for these weird symptoms, for which I'm seeing a specialist soon. Thank you, Obamacare, for making this process more affordable than it would have been!
# I saw a deeply discounted frozen pumpkin pie at the store yesterday and couldn't NOT purchase it. When I got home, I put it in the fridge to defrost without bothering to read the directions, and when I came home today and took it out of the box, I found a pie shell full of pumpkin pie batter. Apparently it wasn't cooked before being frozen. :P But all is well; I stuck it in the oven and it is now a proper cooked pie. Yum!
# I did something unforeseen yet wonderful the other day. It's been a reeeally long time since I've participated in SPN fandom beyond the wonderful yearly summergen challenge. I hardly even read SPN fic anymore, I'm afraid, and I'm almost a season behind on watching. But SPN somehow is the core of my fannish experience regardless, so I've kept most of the comms on my flist, and there were the spn_j2_bigbang artists' summaries right there, so I took a peek out of curiosity and got grabbed by this one genfic that looked plotty and well-written and really interesting... and I signed up to do art for the first time in forever! The fic turned out to be by the lovely jedisapphire, and it is as good as I'd wagered. I'm ridiculously excited to be participating in the bigbang again, as well as really hoping my art does the story justice.
# Fannishly, I am enjoying the hell out of everything. I mean it. Everything. Somehow my meta and critical analysis button got switched to the off position, because I have very little to comment on for my shows and movies except to say they are all awesome. That is including AoU, and it sank my ship and apparently ruined Black Widow. (If I have any meta-ish impulses atm, they are actually more along the lines of saying "feminism: ur doin' it wrong" to certain corners of fandom--but even those impulses have died down over the last few weeks.)
# Okay, actually, maybe they haven't, because I feel the need to ask (rhetorically) why so many fans insist on canon giving us what we can easily find or create ourselves through fannish work? Which is not to say canon shouldn't damn well improve in terms of representation or anything, or that people shouldn't point out screw-ups. What I'm noticing is a different issue, which is that I hear a lot of fannish voices (newer ones? based on Tumblr mostly?) giving way more authority to the canon than I'm used to seeing, or maybe than I think I remember seeing. I haven't done a study or anything, so I could honestly be wrong. It just seems to matter a lot more to a lot more people whether x-pairing happens in canon, or y-plotpoint takes place in z-way, whereas in earlier times I seem to remember more people rolling with the punches and using canon as a starting point for fix-its or AUs or whatever.
Those are still all over the place, of course, but I feel like maybe one of the side-effects of having such a malleable 4th wall is that people who would otherwise exercise their imaginations creatively are now spending that energy on lobbying creators to do things a certain way. This is a little hard to argue against because much of the "lobbying" that goes on has to do with increasing diversity and not oppressing people--to be absolutely clear, I'm for that. TPTB need to hear it and keep hearing it. It's also hard to argue against because some of the pairings fans are desperate to see canonized are slash, and I'm certainly not arguing against lobbying for that either. I'm not sure I'm even arguing that anyone should stop lobbying for anything at all; people should do what they want (sans harrassment, but that's a different and more obvious rant).
No, what I think I'm getting at (writing this is helping me collect my thoughts on the matter) is that it's not productive to give TPTB most of the creative authority. Creative fandom is based on the premise that the original author/producer doesn't get to call all the shots, that readers/viewers can reimagine at will, and that rewriting/remixing/extending/etc is a way of honoring and loving the source. It's an incredibly empowering position for a media consumer to take, and it's one that asks surprisingly little of the canon; the canon can just be, and our transformative works can just be. So maybe what's got me is that so many people who have creative visions for their favorite canon are responding not by writing/reading/drawing/podding/etc, but by asking TPTB to conform. In many ways, this is the opposite of empowering; TPTB tend to disappoint when asked for things, but more importantly, why should their answer matter at all?
I know this rant has shortcomings, and maybe I'm off the mark. But I feel like there's something to be said in the neighborhood of the above. Like maybe at the intersection of "fannish entitlement" and wank and the shifting 4th wall we're seeing a clash of worldviews, one that locates all or most narrative authority with the original author and the other that finds pleasure and satisfaction a little more readily by thinking of narrative authority as something easily shared/borrowed. Thoughts?