Assorted Linkage: Neurotic Poets, Cult Media, Slash, and Fanfic Studies
Neurotic Poets - Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
This site offers biographies, selected poems, and pictures of Poe, Wilde, Thomas, Shelley, Rossetti, Plath, Dickinson, and Byron.
Mission statement: “These pages present stories about and works by several widely admired poets who courted emotional disaster throughout their lives. Sometimes their struggle was transformed into brilliant creations, sometimes the pain was simply too overwhelming, and they succumbed to it. The tales of their lives demonstrate that often tormenting relationship between pain and creativity.”
What can I say? The company of insane dead creatives makes me feel sane, alive and...uncreative...errr...I'll have to think about that one again...
***
Cult Media, Slash, and Fanfic Studies
Intensities - The Journal of Cult Media
The articles and reviews of Intense cover a wide range of subjects: TV, media studies, movies, publications. The vocabulary is not too academic, which I am very grateful for. I've read a number of articles, the best of which I list below along with an appetizer quote. Sadly, there are only three issues available. The Link to Issue One in the archives section is broken. Pls. access it, using http://www.cult-media.com/issue1/contents.htm
The spring issue's theme is Horror. If you like it dark and scary, you might want to read: Steven Jay Schneider, Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticising Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror
These Intense-articles and reviews caught my interest:
Queer Subtext
Alan McKee reviews Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty
"Doty’s major project here is to demonstrate that if we put aside for a moment our insistent preconception that heterosexism is everywhere and controls everything, then we may find that culture is not nearly so oppressively anti-queer as we are often told - and as we often believe. Doty is particularly angry at those forms of Cultural Studies which have always told him - told us - that his (queer) interpretations of films are readings ‘against the grain’, ‘covert, secret, [and] subcultural’ (2). What if, he suggests, we give up on this idea that heterosexism is necessarily everywhere in culture, and accept that much of the mainstream may in fact be already perfectly queer - that in finding queerness in, for example, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, we are not ‘making’ these texts queer (with the implications of work involved in forcing them into new configurations) but are rather recognising perfectly reasonable ways in which they already circulate in culture."
When Art goes Virtual to become a Real Experience
Sara Gwenllian Jones reviews Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media by Marie-Laure Ryan
"In this book, Ryan proposes 'to transfer the concepts of immersion and interactivity from the technological to the literary domain" and to "develop them into the cornerstone of a phenomenology of reading or, more broadly, of art experiencing' (2)."
BtVs and AtS - Censorship
Annette Hill and Ian Calcutt, Vampire Hunters: the scheduling and reception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in the UK
The article deals with "public criticism of UK television’s scheduling and censorship of imported cult TV. Key examples included Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin off series Angel." and "analyses the circumstances within which British viewers are able to see Buffy and Angel, and the implications of those circumstances for their experiences as audience members and fans."
Slash-Related
Mark McLelland, Why are Japanese Women's Comics Full of Boys Bonking? Title says it all.
On Fanfic Studies
Matt Hills interviews Henry Jenkins. Jenkins, Professor of Literature and Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of the book Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture that, as Jenkins himself explains, deals "with the ways television fans utilized media content as a resource for alternative forms of cultural production, including the writing of fan fiction, the performance of filk or fan music, and the editing of fan videos."
The interview addresses the following subjects:
(I) From textual poachers to media convergence: producers, texts, consumers
Henry Jenkins: "One of the critics who responded to Textual Poachers, Ilsa Bick, has written a piece that seems to be determined to prove that Textual Poachers is wrong because she can demonstrate that certain ideals in slash originated within the text and not within the audience. That’s representative of an either/or zero-sum game, in which if you can prove that material ‘in’ the text has made its way into fan readings, then you can argue that fans haven’t appropriated or transformed the text in any way. I thought what I did in the stuff about how to reread a television show was to show, in fact, how fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."
(II) On the politics of fan studies
(III) Fan studies: The Next Generation?
(IV) Fandom and/as religion? The power of the metaphor ...
(V) Moving towards an 'affective semiotics' ...
(VI) Uneasy relations? Fan studies, psychoanalysis and theories of popular culture
(VII) Fan ethnographies: encountering the 'real' or decentring academic expertise?
(VIII) Textbook versions of fan studies ...
***
What do Slash Criticism and Trash criticism have in common?
I would like to point out another article from Intense... Bad For Good, by William D. Routt, on Ed Wood, his trash cult movie Plan 9 from Outerspace, and Trash Criticism. Well, actually the last four paragraphs of the part titled Trash Criticism. The whole article is good, if you're into Ed Wood. But it were Routt’s inteligent thoughts on trash criticism that make me recommend it here. They shed some light on the recent slash discussion, when transposed from trash to slash and from trash film to fanfic. And not just because trash and slash rhyme. Dammit.
As intense as the slash kerfuffle has been, to me, it deplorably lacks in substance. Critics of slash have failed to provide primary source material to prove their point, thus reducing most of the argument to mere polemics. Call me a bookwormish nitpick who bleeds ink when you poke her with a sharp pen. Don’t care. I like proof as a sidedish to a serving of big words.
Surely it is very funny - in the sense of peculiar - that a type of criticism that depends so strongly on the identification of gaffes should itself be so riddled with them. What is even more peculiar is that the Medveds are in this, as elsewhere, typical. Danny Peary, J. Hoberman, Bill Warren, Gary Indiana, Tim Lucas and Mark Carducci each adds at least one blunder to what has gone before.[9] It is as though trash criticism were insensibly moulded by its object, reproducing in its expression the very unprofessionalism of the films for which it professes such contempt.
My point is not wholly a trivial one. In some sense the mistakes of trash criticism are fated, inscribed in the gaze such criticism engenders. I suppose the attitude might be termed "paranoid" since it presumes that there is something bad to be found, if only we look long and hard enough. But clinical labelling does not begin to evoke the kind of seeing involved here: the alertness, patience, disengagement and self-reliance directing eyes and mind. One must be vigilant, like a detective or a psychiatrist, anticipating a revelatory moment, ready to catch one's subject off-guard. Calling such a thing "paranoid" is a way of suggesting that trash critics, like Oedipus, carry the seeds of their undoing within; but you don't have to be a Freudian to know that it is tempting fate to dedicate yourself to the pursuit of error. Consider what I have just been about in nitpicking the nitpickers. Surely this too is trash criticism; and it would be foolish of me or you to imagine I have made no mistakes.
Yet on some level this kind of criticism mirrors its object well. Indeed, a sense of encountering something "beyond all reason", which broadly characterises many people's positive responses to trash, also applies to the wildly unreasonable criticism written by the Medveds and their ilk. In its emphasis on and celebration of what it deems mistakes, the Medveds' criticism does (mis)identify a key element of Wood's films and of bad movies in general. Most of all, the paranoid obsessiveness of trash criticism neatly counterpoints the schizoid oleaginity of so-called trash film at the same time that it so singularly fails to capture or convict such films of the unnameable crimes those critics are dreaming.
There is a way in which trash criticism is just another name for one kind of criticism we all practice, or one way of seeing we all tend to adopt from time to time. Trash criticism is different from the norm only in that its object is trash, and thus there seems to be no need to treat that object with any respect (the respect of checking one’s “facts”, for example). The badness of the object of trash criticism is so evident that it does not matter how extravagantly or erroneously one writes about it. And, of course, the vulnerability of trash objects can act as an irresistible temptation in just the way that a cowering animal escalates the attacks against it.
This site offers biographies, selected poems, and pictures of Poe, Wilde, Thomas, Shelley, Rossetti, Plath, Dickinson, and Byron.
Mission statement: “These pages present stories about and works by several widely admired poets who courted emotional disaster throughout their lives. Sometimes their struggle was transformed into brilliant creations, sometimes the pain was simply too overwhelming, and they succumbed to it. The tales of their lives demonstrate that often tormenting relationship between pain and creativity.”
What can I say? The company of insane dead creatives makes me feel sane, alive and...uncreative...errr...I'll have to think about that one again...
***
Cult Media, Slash, and Fanfic Studies
Intensities - The Journal of Cult Media
The articles and reviews of Intense cover a wide range of subjects: TV, media studies, movies, publications. The vocabulary is not too academic, which I am very grateful for. I've read a number of articles, the best of which I list below along with an appetizer quote. Sadly, there are only three issues available. The Link to Issue One in the archives section is broken. Pls. access it, using http://www.cult-media.com/issue1/contents.htm
The spring issue's theme is Horror. If you like it dark and scary, you might want to read: Steven Jay Schneider, Murder as Art/The Art of Murder: Aestheticising Violence in Modern Cinematic Horror
These Intense-articles and reviews caught my interest:
Queer Subtext
Alan McKee reviews Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon by Alexander Doty
"Doty’s major project here is to demonstrate that if we put aside for a moment our insistent preconception that heterosexism is everywhere and controls everything, then we may find that culture is not nearly so oppressively anti-queer as we are often told - and as we often believe. Doty is particularly angry at those forms of Cultural Studies which have always told him - told us - that his (queer) interpretations of films are readings ‘against the grain’, ‘covert, secret, [and] subcultural’ (2). What if, he suggests, we give up on this idea that heterosexism is necessarily everywhere in culture, and accept that much of the mainstream may in fact be already perfectly queer - that in finding queerness in, for example, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, we are not ‘making’ these texts queer (with the implications of work involved in forcing them into new configurations) but are rather recognising perfectly reasonable ways in which they already circulate in culture."
When Art goes Virtual to become a Real Experience
Sara Gwenllian Jones reviews Narrative As Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media by Marie-Laure Ryan
"In this book, Ryan proposes 'to transfer the concepts of immersion and interactivity from the technological to the literary domain" and to "develop them into the cornerstone of a phenomenology of reading or, more broadly, of art experiencing' (2)."
BtVs and AtS - Censorship
Annette Hill and Ian Calcutt, Vampire Hunters: the scheduling and reception of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel in the UK
The article deals with "public criticism of UK television’s scheduling and censorship of imported cult TV. Key examples included Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin off series Angel." and "analyses the circumstances within which British viewers are able to see Buffy and Angel, and the implications of those circumstances for their experiences as audience members and fans."
Slash-Related
Mark McLelland, Why are Japanese Women's Comics Full of Boys Bonking? Title says it all.
On Fanfic Studies
Matt Hills interviews Henry Jenkins. Jenkins, Professor of Literature and Comparative Media Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of the book Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture that, as Jenkins himself explains, deals "with the ways television fans utilized media content as a resource for alternative forms of cultural production, including the writing of fan fiction, the performance of filk or fan music, and the editing of fan videos."
The interview addresses the following subjects:
(I) From textual poachers to media convergence: producers, texts, consumers
Henry Jenkins: "One of the critics who responded to Textual Poachers, Ilsa Bick, has written a piece that seems to be determined to prove that Textual Poachers is wrong because she can demonstrate that certain ideals in slash originated within the text and not within the audience. That’s representative of an either/or zero-sum game, in which if you can prove that material ‘in’ the text has made its way into fan readings, then you can argue that fans haven’t appropriated or transformed the text in any way. I thought what I did in the stuff about how to reread a television show was to show, in fact, how fan genres grew out of openings or excesses within the text that were built on and stretched, and that it was not as if fans and texts were autonomous from each another; fans created their own, new texts, but elements within the originating text defined, to some degree, what they could do."
(II) On the politics of fan studies
(III) Fan studies: The Next Generation?
(IV) Fandom and/as religion? The power of the metaphor ...
(V) Moving towards an 'affective semiotics' ...
(VI) Uneasy relations? Fan studies, psychoanalysis and theories of popular culture
(VII) Fan ethnographies: encountering the 'real' or decentring academic expertise?
(VIII) Textbook versions of fan studies ...
***
What do Slash Criticism and Trash criticism have in common?
I would like to point out another article from Intense... Bad For Good, by William D. Routt, on Ed Wood, his trash cult movie Plan 9 from Outerspace, and Trash Criticism. Well, actually the last four paragraphs of the part titled Trash Criticism. The whole article is good, if you're into Ed Wood. But it were Routt’s inteligent thoughts on trash criticism that make me recommend it here. They shed some light on the recent slash discussion, when transposed from trash to slash and from trash film to fanfic. And not just because trash and slash rhyme. Dammit.
As intense as the slash kerfuffle has been, to me, it deplorably lacks in substance. Critics of slash have failed to provide primary source material to prove their point, thus reducing most of the argument to mere polemics. Call me a bookwormish nitpick who bleeds ink when you poke her with a sharp pen. Don’t care. I like proof as a sidedish to a serving of big words.
Surely it is very funny - in the sense of peculiar - that a type of criticism that depends so strongly on the identification of gaffes should itself be so riddled with them. What is even more peculiar is that the Medveds are in this, as elsewhere, typical. Danny Peary, J. Hoberman, Bill Warren, Gary Indiana, Tim Lucas and Mark Carducci each adds at least one blunder to what has gone before.[9] It is as though trash criticism were insensibly moulded by its object, reproducing in its expression the very unprofessionalism of the films for which it professes such contempt.
My point is not wholly a trivial one. In some sense the mistakes of trash criticism are fated, inscribed in the gaze such criticism engenders. I suppose the attitude might be termed "paranoid" since it presumes that there is something bad to be found, if only we look long and hard enough. But clinical labelling does not begin to evoke the kind of seeing involved here: the alertness, patience, disengagement and self-reliance directing eyes and mind. One must be vigilant, like a detective or a psychiatrist, anticipating a revelatory moment, ready to catch one's subject off-guard. Calling such a thing "paranoid" is a way of suggesting that trash critics, like Oedipus, carry the seeds of their undoing within; but you don't have to be a Freudian to know that it is tempting fate to dedicate yourself to the pursuit of error. Consider what I have just been about in nitpicking the nitpickers. Surely this too is trash criticism; and it would be foolish of me or you to imagine I have made no mistakes.
Yet on some level this kind of criticism mirrors its object well. Indeed, a sense of encountering something "beyond all reason", which broadly characterises many people's positive responses to trash, also applies to the wildly unreasonable criticism written by the Medveds and their ilk. In its emphasis on and celebration of what it deems mistakes, the Medveds' criticism does (mis)identify a key element of Wood's films and of bad movies in general. Most of all, the paranoid obsessiveness of trash criticism neatly counterpoints the schizoid oleaginity of so-called trash film at the same time that it so singularly fails to capture or convict such films of the unnameable crimes those critics are dreaming.
There is a way in which trash criticism is just another name for one kind of criticism we all practice, or one way of seeing we all tend to adopt from time to time. Trash criticism is different from the norm only in that its object is trash, and thus there seems to be no need to treat that object with any respect (the respect of checking one’s “facts”, for example). The badness of the object of trash criticism is so evident that it does not matter how extravagantly or erroneously one writes about it. And, of course, the vulnerability of trash objects can act as an irresistible temptation in just the way that a cowering animal escalates the attacks against it.