On being grown-up and a closet fan

[parthenia14]

I just came across this community from a meta list. I was interested in how people reconcile the two parts of life. My interest in Harry Potter is hardly a secret to my family - but the depth and breadth of my, er, love is pretty well hidden. That is, I can answer trivia questions on the first five books with breathtaking ease -that's OK. But

Comments

[parthenia14]

Dr. Who is begging, begging to be slashed, from the moment where the Doctor picks up a copy of Heat and says, "Well, that's never going to work, I mean he's gay and she's an alien."

I live in a rather academic community where people get very superior about Literature, and view reading rather like aerobics: it has to really sweat or it's not proper exercise. I'd actually really like to read about the academic view of fanfiction, because I find it interesting to see the way that certain stories are written and rewritten (which I imagine varies from one fandom to another). And slash - well, I imagine the ponderings on what that's all about go on for miles. Although I maintain that the best Netspeak defence is because it is teh hawt.

Hmm. Well, I like my HP slash to be either crappily, horribly teenage (no, I don't know why either) or smooth post-Hogwarts AUs featuring moderately aged up characters, like the glorious HP/Alias crossover, Trade, currently being written by hackthis.

I think it's escapism, really. I can't bear to watch things like Desperate Housewives or Cold Feet because they're too close to my own life. Well, they're not, but you know what I mean.

[cathexys]

how bizarre...i thought that the last 30 years of postmodern thought had finally overthrown ridiculous hierarchies and the canon...are they English departments if i may ask??? [b/c you may find a few dinosaurs here and there in the states that will still believe that, but even they don't quite admit it in public :-)] seriously, though, is lit theory and cult studies ignored by you guys????

but then you're kind of doing the same aren't you??? :-) *bristles with defensiveness* by foregrounding the sexual and escapist tendencies only, you place ff in juxtaposition to "literature" which works differently, right? [have you read radway's reading the romance? one may criticize the outsider look at those weirdos vibers here and there, but overall one of the earlier and better studies, i'd say... and much of fan culture and audience studies is, of course, utterly indebted to the birmingham school... *ponders people who get superior about Literature (love the capitalization:-)]

well, what if i love reading my hollinghurst and work quite seriously on my popslash??? :-)

with you on the desperate housewives...in fact, i always argue that there is i have one squick only, which is domesticity...give me anything else and i may not love it but if well done will read it...except when they start buying curtains :-) b/c, yes, i am a suburban soccer mom and do not need to see krycek go shopping or lex change diapers!!!

finally, you've already found metabib, so my precious resources are all at your disposal :D i've long been impressed with fan-generated discourse, b/c much of it is more sophisticated and complex than the academic discussionsso check out the slash subset and the following ones on gender, queer female space, etcyou want any of the articles on the actual bib, btw, i have a good number of them and in good fannish fashion, share...email me, if you're interested.

[parthenia14]

Ooh, thank you. I will look at metabib.

Na, we're all snobby dinosaurs here, who make distinctions between 'serious' and 'light'. I'm a sort of social psychologist by background but I don't know quite how critical theory etc get applied in literature.

I belong to a book group - which I'm just about to leave - which is very, very up itself, and convened by people who are very big on Serious Literature. (Actually if it's ever on video there is the most fabby dabby series, The Book Group, which satirises this sort of thing beautifully). I thought it was a good idea to begin with, because I read different things to what I'd have chosen. But lately the choices have been No Fun. Well, not compared to some of the wild fanfic stuff I've reading.

But it's all coming together. I read Alan Hollinghurst's 'A Spell' recently, as recommended by a female friend who'd just confessed her love for gay literature. And I read it and thought, this is just like slash, with better sentence construction, slightly less sex, and rather poorer characterisation (because I kept mixing up the main characters).

And behold, I bumped into the most po-faced (straight, male) member of my book group who thinks we should read The Line of Beauty (which I've just started). That would be fun, perhaps, but I doubt whether we can have the conversation that I'd like to have about it. Which I think would be more about the response to it, and about - not homoeroticism exactly - but gay culture in straight culture, and the frisson it creates. (Discuss, with reference to the Franz Ferdinand song, 'Michael.')

Popslash, eh? Is that what I think it is? and it can't possibly be any good, can it?

[cathexys]

LOL...it can't possibly be any good, can it...it is all that and more.

seriously, i've read in about a dozen fandoms, some of them quite seriously and near comprehensively and the best writing i've encounterd has been in popslash. i'd happily rec some stuff :D so, i'm not even sure whether hollinghurst has better sentence structure :-)

eh...since you asked :-) all but the last one are very brief pieces and might or might not work since i assume you're not that familiar with canon...but they give you an idea of the more interesting side of popslash (and they're all personal favorites!!!) [and all you need to know for most of them is that justin's the youngest (14 when they started) and chris was almost a decade older yet the narrative has them as prank and best buddies):

one of my all-time favorite fics which i use in the article i am sending off *now* (i need to stop tinkering :-) Borderlines

hookerfic is my BPK, and this is by one of my favorite writers who's now going pro, left behind

this one's about as fucked up as it gets, but i adore the way she nails the mother/son dynamic in general and its permutations when celebrity gets thrown in: coeur de la mere

and if you've ever had the full fannish experience, you'll appreciate not based on a true story...b/c hate threads and escapade? dude!!!

now this one's an agenda fic but a wonderful one at that: oddly comforting

and another one by jae that addresses the celebrity aspect a well: photograph

the last one is less for reading than just to get a sense of really neat&innovative multimedia fic that challenges the boundaries between reality and fiction that celebritry culture raises and RPS problematizes: flesh mechanic

Thanks!

[parthenia14]

I finally got round to reading some of these, thanks so much.

I loved the multimedia one, just lovely, and meticulous down to the page-titling. I also really, really liked the LJ one. I'm quite new to LJ and still working it out, but the bit about '159 comments but none from anyone whose opinion you care about' really made me laugh. And so I boinged onto the authors' fiction site and discovered a whole pile of mostly Marauders fic that seemed very very good, and a bit of Ginny. (I dream of finding a good Ginny/Harry story; the ones that are do exist were mostly written before OotP and paint her as either Evil or Passive. And that, m'lud, is what prompted me to consider Harry/Draco..)

And there is no better feeling in the world than finding a new author who has written shedloads. Unless it's shedloads of novel-length, because that's what I love.

It also made me think, fanfiction's a bit like, oh I don't know, a literary jukebox, or Groundhog Day. Today I'd like.. an out-take, or a heterosexual romance, or Harry getting a makeover. Or - there must be at least one really good story about an American transfer student.

Popslash.. Have to say I wished I knew just a little about Justin Timberlake and Nsync just to get the stories a bit more, tho' they did pretty much stand alone. I suppose the thing with fanfiction is it's like a ladder leaning on a wall (the canon thing), and part of the enjoyment is the way that fanfic amplifies or challenges, or just leans on the original work. For example AJHall's 'Lust over Pendle' AU is partly fantastic fun because you are trying to work out what the hell actually happened to Hogwarts. But - that doesn't apply to popslash does it? Where's canon there??

I'm getting thru' 'The line of beauty', but if it was a WIP, I would say a) the very smooth first time gay sex seemed a tad unrealistic b) Nick is clearly an author self-insert, not least cos. he's exactly the same as the shy posh older character in 'A Spell' and c) It is good, and I think I can see where it's going, but my God, the endless self-conscious rumination over every tiny detail. Now that is very common in romantic fanfic.

Reading through the metabib stuff *mmm theory*. But no, I must go and drink wine and comment on that later. And also update my own livejournal which has got tumbleweed rolling through it.

Hope you enjoy Dr. Who by the way. DALEKS! And kind Rose, and a new male character.

Re: Thanks!

[cathexys]

LOL about your line of beauty criticism. see, that's why i'm reading mostly fanfic these days :D i can get better writing and characters i already care about!!!

*claps with excitement* so glad you liked !!! there's plenty more where that came from, and a few great novel-lengths too :D [see here for some more recs...i esp. recommend the long run (it was my first ever popslash and i know at least one other person whom it pimped into the fandom :-)]

re canon...eh, yes and no. there actually *is* a canon; in fact, there's more canon than any sane person would ever want to tackle, but it's also more author&fandom created. for a brief summary, see here and maybe here (i think i c&ped a bunch of stuff).

for what they look like, see here (though a link or two may be gone...).

and i can talk about popslash for hours if you haven't noticed [includingits theoretical implications...]

like the groundhog day analogy [and there's definitely one *amazing* story about Harry goes to America aka resonant's transfigurations :D], esp. since that's such a typical ff plot cliche :D i tend to think about it as repetition with a difference and a friend of mine's working on an essay that she gave at a conference recently on fanfic as theatre (i.e., performance rather than text...think hamlet in high school...and yes, she gave it after i'd just given a popslash AU paper weith plwnty of high school AU references...)

my husband just got back after 3 weeks, so we have several DW to make up...no daleks for us tonight yet :-(
glad you like the theory :-) comment away!!!

Re: Thanks!

[cathexys]

missing link above is here

Re: Thanks!

[parthenia14]

Oooh more recs (continues to ignore dull report that has to be written by the end of next week).

Looking forward to reading the meta stuff - have been dipping in here and there. I'm intrigued by the intersection of fanfiction and online communities (like fictionalley, for HP and obviously Livejournal).

No time to write more now but will give you one link - fake British blog about a 'str8 acting 18 year old' that's been featured in the Guardian. It's obviously a send-up but it made me laugh, especially 'Who the fuck is Foucault?'

www.jamie4u.blogspot.com

Have to say though, blog sites like blogspot seem really cold compared to Livejournal. Very much the monologue. I nearly wrote mommylogue there. I do that a lot :)

Re: Thanks!

[cathexys]

i'm fixing to writr a paper (well, maybe) on online performances LJ sexualities and RPS...or sth like that :D [and that one fic i linked, not based on a true story's definitely central *g*]

funny blog but yes, i dislike the lecturing non-interactive style of most blogs. i want to start a conversation, not lecture my wisdom to the unwashed masses (do that in RL :-)

yup, great meta stuff out there, great fic everywhere...HP is the fandom that ate the universe, but there are plenty of nifty things and great fic outside of it [as i go back to a wonderful sprawling hockey AU to read in the car and my favorite new fandom where you can actually write lines like "In a place where everybody had one Ph.D. for everyday and another one they saved for special occasions, Rodney was at the top of the heap" (source) and the guys plauy games of prime-not prime canonically!!! :D [OK, i used to be a mathematician and am married to one...sue me if that makes me hot. LOL]

Re: Thanks!

[parthenia14]

That's a really, really nice story. It's always interesting to see how writers develop - I quite liked Transfigurations, but it didn't stand out; but the emotion in this one was lovely. I know I always have this annoying extra-sensitivity to American-ness in HP. I can live with it quite well on occasion - not least because most of the fanfic writers are - but at other times the mere whisper of a 'gotten' will get me gone.

Living in geek heaven, I love the line about 'a ph.d for everyday and one for special occasions'. When I first went out with my husband he used to make me calculate the total intensity in an acoustic waveform (as a sort of chat-up line :-0). The world would be a much better place if the media understood just a little bit more about sampling theory.

Geek sex appeal - Actually I remember a difference of opinion with an LJ user because I criticised a story for describing Harry as 'tall, tanned and muscular' (you know the sort of thing, 'Harry had gotten very muscular over the summer, and he fiddled absently with his friendship bracelets/Death's Head earring/ipod ). NOOO! I felt I was being personally robbed.

I feel various posts brewing about fandom, fan communities, identity and symbolic interactionism but will have to save them (oh and find somewhere better to put them) Thanks for friending BTW - just looked at your journal and thought, oh! I can look at her journal? that's not right.

Back to the evil report, and the voting thing.

[cathexys]

btw, *g* over your book club descriptions. no offense, but it's such a bildungsbuergertum thing, isn't it? whereas the academy is slumming :D

i started line of beauty and got distracted...but yes, swimming pool library, as much as i adored, had major problems...like really hot sex :-)

you like cunningham???

[parthenia14]

no offense, but it's such a bildungsbuergertum thing, isn't it? whereas the academy is slumming :D

Whuh?

I'd like to be able to figure out whether to take offence.

Thank you (I think) for the links - will read when not babysitting friend's 8-year old (*sigh* on a bloody Friday night).

Who's Cunningham?

[cathexys]

argh, i'm sorry. it's a german term referring to the middle class who places a high emphasis on education--unlike the upper class who doesn't need to and the lower who can't afford to?

so, it's pretty much all of us :-) i wasn't insulting you but rather our own value system...

cunningham: flesh and blood and the hours and at home at the end of the world