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October 21st, 2008
 | 11:53 am
Finally, someone who says what I've been thinking for a long, long time. Rolanni said it about the encroachment of academia upon science fiction; if you remove the SF references and put in media fandom ones, you start to have a sense of my views.
I think the situation is actually worse for non-academics in fandom than it is in science fiction. I have yet to hear of anyone who reads or writes science fiction being told they're not smart enough to understand the discussion of their own work -- but it has happened to me, and to several other people I know, more than once, with the stories we wrote in media fandom. Fandom is supposed to be large enough to make room for everyone, but as time goes on I see people who don't have lit docs and don't give a damn about postmodern crit being edged out and shoved around by those who do. In some fandoms there's very little room for anyone who is interested in writing, as opposed to self-serving critique -- it's not the sort of feedback that helps an author, but an elitist head game played by people who often don't give a damn about either the person or the writing, just about the game. IMO, but that's what I've seen and experienced, in pretty much every major fandom I've encountered in more than a decade. The one place where this hasn't happened yet (so far as I know) is Yuletide, where there are a myriad of small fandoms and (so far, thank God) nobody has started ritually deconstructing the stories and staking them out on postmodernist anthills.
I say that I'm not a postmodernist, I'm a modernist, but that's not quite true; what I'm not is a deconstructionist. I have never liked dissections and vivisections. Hand me an old wind-up clock and I'll take it apart and fix it, but not anything that's alive or has ever been alive -- and any story that's worth its salt is alive. I almost said 'worth its metaphors and mythology', and that's true also. When something's alive, I look at how all its parts are connected -- which foot goes down in what order when it's running -- but I don't pull the feet or wings off and see how they'd do as stomachs or ears. I try hard not to take things out of context because the context matters. The author matters. The story matters in its context, the characters at this particular time and this situation, informed by the events of the world in which they take place and sometimes by the events of this world, large and small. And it matters that this person wrote this story at this time and place in the turning world. Ignoring the context isn't just inaccurate, it's dishonest.
I'm a synthesist*; I put things together; I spent most of my working life putting facts together, piecing the puzzle together to see what it shows in a larger sense. I spent years going to town and village board meetings, school board meetings, zoning board meetings, listening to people talk about what concerned them, finding out the background that created that concern, the reasons for it, the situation around it, and what would happen because of it and what results would be created. Nonfiction or not, it was storytelling. I would be willing to dare anyone to cover a four-hour sewer adminsitration board meeting, sit through the whole thing, just to see what stories they'd come out with. I inevitably found half a dozen or so, though I usually got to write up one or two and hint at the others because that was the same night as City Council, and smaller stuff got bumped for the next day (smaller in comparison to City Council, not necessarily smaller in any other way.) Every one of those stories was part of a longer, continuing saga of construction, renovation, maintenance, even of international affairs -- such as when the valves and precision instruments for a pump station have to be reordered from Israel because the Egyptian military shot down the plane carrying the last ones. People would go to the sewer board to ask that the digging be put on this side or that side of the property, to preserve specific trees that they didn't want harmed -- because those trees mattered to them, trees their families planted to honor someone's birth or death or marriage.
And then there was the school board that was considering banning 743 books from the school library, in a town that didn't have a public library, because one woman on the board didn't like the questions her daughter asked her about sexuality after she was reading a few of them. Her embarrassment about having to talk about homosexuality or pregnancy or sex at all made her go through a huge stack of books with a magic marker and black out the words she disliked, without regard to context. She ranted at me about Catcher in the Rye, and how there were four-letter words in it -- and I mentioned that Holden Caulfield, the book's narrator, had seen the words and was trying to erase them or paint them over so his little sister wouldn't see them -- and she just blinked at me. Reading stories wasn't part of her context; she was only concerned with censoring 'bad words'. You don't want to know what Slaughterhouse Five looked like when she was done with it, or Catch-22, or M*A*S*H, or Native Son, or Another Country -- all books that I read in high school, in my own high school library that was blessedly free of ideologues of that sort. (There were, and are, other sorts of ideologues there, but that's for another time.)
Like those trees, stories are rooted in context. They make no sense without it. I am still putting things together, patchwork bits of national and world events in newsblogs, piecing one view with another and looking for the larger picture behind them, not just the problem with vote counts but the rigged machines and the political machinery that's pulling the strings on all of it.
Sounds like small town stuff? Yeah. So's most of fanfic, regardless of fandom -- stories that concern a handful of characters dealing with things that involve them intimately, not a remote city of characters. (Yes, I know, there are whole archives of stories out there with characters whose cardboard is so thin it wouldn't make a recipe card. I wrote a few of them, more than a decade ago. That's not the point.) It's all small town. I like my small towns in one piece, healthy and happy, not looking like Hobbiton in the time of the Sheriffs. I like my stories -- in whatever format, however they are written -- to continue to live, like those trees, without being dissected for someone's public amusement. I'm not interested in playing self-serving head games with the work that someone put hours and weeks into writing. I'm interested in reading stories about characters who are alive, whether they're realistic or fantastic or just plain absurd (girl scout cookies? penguins? talking whales? shamans and ghosts? cloned and recloned and rejuvenated and reanimated and resurrected and still kicking ass because, hey, not dead yet? And still the prettiest?)
See, when you take all the living bits of a story apart, out of context, skin them and stake them out and dance around them while they're drying, what you've got is something that you've killed, and it's dead. It might make stew, but it's not a story any more. You haven't 'controlled the narrative', you've slaughtered it, and it's attracting flies and smelling pretty bad. You can say you've got Einstein's brain, in a jar on the shelf, and you can measure it and figure out what shade of pinkish-gray it is this week, but it's not a living mind any more, is it?
It's even worse when this no-context-allowed approach is carried over to discussions of other issues -- that's when you end up with assumption on assumption, sand on sand and not a rock in sight. That's the kind of inadequate worldbuilding that results in stuff like the Wall Street meltdown of this last month. (No, I'm not being extreme; I studied economics in grad school, and as far as I'm concerned the 'economic assumptions' underlying the way economists have been making decisions are far more science fiction than anything Heinlein or Clarke ever wrote. Both Heinlein and Clarke were masters of context; the economists ignored anything that didn't fit their particular ideology. And look where those assumptions have gotten us in the last month.)
I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if anyone had ever offered to *add* to the context of a story by talking about the mythology that it fits into, the archetypes, the way that Daniel Jackson's continual return from the dead relates to the death and rebirth of the Corn King or the emperor's dream of the butterfly, or how Jim Ellison's life as a Sentinel may relate to the stories of Heracles. But I'd rather read stories in which the author had thought about these things and had let that richness brew in the dark side of the brain while writing, so that reading becomes a deeper experience of the character's personality and actions in that world. I'm seeing more stories like this online now, in a very few places, and they are wonderful.
Every once in a while, someone asks me why I'm not writing fiction any more. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of them online and some offline, but what I've written above is one of the larger ones. Except for small snippets here and there in small-but-lively fandoms, I don't feel the urge to put stories out there any more. If it's not fun, why do it?
*I had always seen it spelled the way it was, synthetist, but there is apparently another spelling: synthesist. I'm not sure if the difference is one of those US/CA/UK changes or if the back of my mind hears it differently than the front. Whatever. Same idea. Puts things together instead of taking them apart.
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Comments:
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 21st, 2008 11:21 am (UTC) |
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Not all academics skin stories and stake them out. I am a historian. I've been reading sf since I was 12 years old, and as I have posted on the other site, if I wanted validation I'd have stuck to American religious history.
I don't know of any academic in sf, under 40, who wasn't a fan first. Certainly, no one who wanted validation before that would have worked on sf. Most of the older academics I know of had to fight very hard in their academies.
How the hell can I encroach on something I am a fan of? Or are we now deciding that if I write criticism in a fanzine it's ok, but if I send it to a journal, or publish it with Cambridge I've suddenly gaffeated?
fjm
You want to publish critique in a fanzine or a journal or Cambridge, go to it. Enjoy. Have fun. I hope everything you write and send out is published to great acclaim and monetary reward. You're not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the online public behavior of academics in media fandom, and to some extent academics in media fandom who are similarly rude in person at cons.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 21st, 2008 11:54 am (UTC) |
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| | From StarWatcher | (Link) |
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.
Basically, yeah. I want to enjoy the story as a whole, not turn a magnifying glass on every detail; the distortion squashes the pleasure. It's why I keep resisting the idea (which, thankfully, seems to be fading) that feedback should offer "valid critique". No, dammit! Critique is work; I come to fanfic for fun.
If it's not fun any more, why do it?
Can't argue with that. But, seeing the way you put words and ideas together in other instances, I'm sorry I wasn't around when you were writing more fanfic. I know an excellent author who moved to another fandom because her original fandom became too aggravating like that. When fandom runs people out of town, I really wish I could sprinkle, "Think before you speak" liberally across everyone's head.
.
![[User Picture]](http://www.insanejournal.com/userpic/4718202/36985) | | | Re: From StarWatcher | (Link) |
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Most of my older stories are online at www.twistedchick.org/stories, if you want a look. (I warn you, some of the Highlander stuff is pretty dreadful.) They're in older fandoms, and the site format hasn't been updated in a while. The only things I've written in the last few years are Yuletide stories and some snippets in the small fandoms that have arisen around Synecdochic's Broken Wings series.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 22nd, 2008 08:41 pm (UTC) |
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| | Re: From StarWatcher | (Link) |
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I'm a grad student (science, so my magnifying glasses are literal). Fair warning.
Anyway, I read for fun. And I enjoy stories as a whole, but I also enjoy looking at the details--of writing style or of characterization, or references in the story to other things. I read author's notes. I love DVD commentaries, both on the DVDs and on stories.
I also like music. And most of the time I listen to it normally, but when I'm really obsessed with a song I'll listen to it over and over, trying in my not-very-music-savvy way to pick out the different instruments and what they're doing and how the rhythms change. It doesn't impair MY overall enjoyment of the song, although I can certainly see why other people would think I'm a nutbar.
So...I suppose I'm a little puzzled. We all relate to and enjoy fiction in different ways. Is there something wrong with that, or with certain modes of enjoyment?
-Carmarthen
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 21st, 2008 08:02 pm (UTC) |
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Sylar is one of the better send-ups of the Academic in genre.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 21st, 2008 10:35 pm (UTC) |
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How is he a send up?
I'm not trying to be argumentative or dense here, just ... explain it to me?
(here via metaquotes)
Personally, I really like the dissection and mythology and linking (which would fit into your syncretic model, wouldn't it?) It's when people start saying that their way is the RIGHT way of reading the story that I have major problems - whether that's coming from scholars, shippers, "long-time fans", someone who once met the author at a con, or even the author hirself. The analysis does, usually, add a great deal to the story for me, and I'm sad that you've obviously run across more bullies than I have.
There is certainly room within fandom for analysis. The problem I see is that there seems to be no other room available for those of us who don't do things that way.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 22nd, 2008 01:34 am (UTC) |
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From I can't remember where.
I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if anyone had ever offered to *add* to the context of a story by talking about the mythology that it fits into, the archetypes, the way that Daniel Jackson's continual return from the dead relates to the death and rebirth of the Corn King or the emperor's dream of the butterfly, or how Jim Ellison's life as a Sentinel may relate to the stories of Heracles.
Oddly, enough, that's not that far off from some of my research. But then, I wasn't a lit major - I studied History, Political Science and Economics. And the way I was taught those subjects context is everything. I'm pretty sure I had good teachers.
as far as I'm concerned the 'economic assumptions' underlying the way economists have been making decisions are far more science fiction than anything Heinlein or Clarke ever wrote.
I'm with you. I was taught by proponents of John Kenneth Galbraith, who isn't exactly a big name in economics anymore (according to my teachers). I'd recommend him and Benjamin Barber, btw. Now there are two men who understand context - and economic crises.
arresi@gmail.com
I studied journalism and, in grad school, a combination of economics, history, political science and econometrics under the title of 'public policy analysis'. And I think I'd like to hear more about your research, if you want to talk about it sometime. I have a history project I've been poking at for a long time; it starts and stalls and waits for me to get money to travel to do more peering into town and county historical society archives out of state.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 22nd, 2008 02:00 am (UTC) |
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Hey, um, I don't want to antagonize you, because I'm really grateful for all your political work, and you also wrote one of my favorite DROM stories ever, and I also get the sense that I'm missing a boatload of context, here.
That said: I'm not really seeing a climate of academic fans shoving aside the non-academics. I don't actually even see all that much critique or analysis of fanfic going on, let alone deconstruction. (If you've got links, feel free to throw 'em my way, I'd love to read it.)
For the past decade that I've been in fandom, any time I've seen anyone try to really start a space for critique and analysis of fanfic -- as opposed to sporking or whatever -- there's always been a lot of resistance. The only two communities on LJ that I'm familiar with that do any critique is The Cutting Board (which is either inactive now or is under flock; I'm not a member (I don't think?)), and sga_talk. (I think there's an HP comm like this as well, but I have no idea if it's still active or not.) I've never seen a very welcoming atmosphere in fandom for this kind of critique. I've always seen the opposite of what you're saying, basically.
And you're right -- that kind of critique isn't primarily for the author, unless the author's into that. It's for people who... like to analyze. And I don't think that's bad or wrong.
I honestly don't understand how taking a story apart "kills" a story -- if anything, it opens up new layers and new levels of meaning for me. And while I've seen quick reviews of fanfic that don't go into context, I feel like good criticism I've seen does take the context into account, though I don't have any examples off the top of my head right now.
Obviously, we're coming at this from opposite ends, but I admit I was confused by this post, because I'm just not seeing what you're seeing.
-wemblee on LJ
I think the reason you're not seeing what I see is that we haven't been reading the same friendslists and blogs and maillists and so on for the last 15+ years. If you're not seeing a lot of welcome for academics now, it may have a lot to do with behavior such as I've described that happened before. There are places I see online -- ones I do not participate in, since that participation is not welcome -- where a non-academic viewpoint is simply unwelcome. I have also endured having academics decide they disliked what I wrote and launch into all-but-formal lectures at me from the comments on my LJ at various times over the years, which wasn't something I either anticipated (the first time, at least) or enjoyed.
You apparently read in a more left-brained way than I do. I read stories whole, and if I like them I read them several times to absorb what I find, and then I think about the patterns I see in them and the way things link together. It is not the same kind of reading. Taking a story apart while ignoring its context, shuffling the pieces around and then saying "well, the author plainly meant this" when the author meant no such thing -- it's annoying and rude.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 22nd, 2008 02:08 am (UTC) |
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Oh, sorry, I meant to add this, then deleted it and forgot to put it back in:
Also, in all my experience with acafen, they've always been nice and mild-mannered; I've never had anyone act like I couldn't or shouldn't keep up just because I'm not an academic myself. So, again, our experiences are diverging a lot and I just found myself really confused by all of this.
-wemblee, again
I've had it happen online, I've had it happen in person at cons and other occasions. The people who were telling me to my face that I was not smart enough to be involved in a conversation about my own story were smiling and polite as they said it; that doesn't make it right.
You should maybe ask this to be removed from metafandom if you are against the dissection of fic; this is going to be read and dissected by a large number of acafans in the near future.
See, when you take all the living bits of a story apart, out of context, skin them and stake them out and dance around them while they're drying, what you've got is something that you've killed, and it's dead. It might make stew, but it's not a story any more. You haven't 'controlled the narrative', you've slaughtered it, and it's attracting flies and smelling pretty bad. You can say you've got Einstein's brain, in a jar on the shelf, and you can measure it and figure out what shade of pinkish-gray it is this week, but it's not a living mind any more, is it?
You know, I've heard this argument before, but the thing is, what you're describing is bad academia. If you kill a story, if you deliberately misinterpret a story, you're just being a jerk.
Fandom is founded on subtext -- on the things happening underneath the story, but intentional and unintentional. (God knows there'd be no slash if we didn't believe in the unintentional side of things, right?) For me, the feeling I get when I interpret a text is a purely fannish emotion. I'm reinterpreting an original work; that's what fandom is. Is it rude to do it against an author's explicit wishes? Absolutely -- and that's why I don't write Robin McKinley fanfic. But does that mean I won't think about Orson Scott Card's unintentional gendered subtext? It's the only avenue of fannish expression available for a lot of work; I am not ashamed of taking it.
![[User Picture]](http://www.insanejournal.com/userpic/5309803/36985) | | | Re: from metafandom | (Link) |
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I'm sure it will be; acafen will dissect their breakfast back to its component elements if it amuses them.
I draw a line between the analysis of pro fiction and fanfic. Pro fiction is out there in the marketplace, and it's up for grabs by everyone from the New York Times Magazine and Washington Post Book World on down. Fanfic online is in a smaller space, a more personal space, where the author is present or at least nearby. Or, to draw an analogy, I have no trouble analyzing sections of the federal budget but I'm not going to apply the same analytical skills to someone's checkbook even if it's sitting open on the counter.
Fandom is supposed to be large enough to make room for everyone, but as time goes on I see people who don't have lit docs and don't give a damn about postmodern crit being edged out and shoved around by those who do. In some fandoms there's very little room for anyone who is interested in writing, as opposed to self-serving critique -- it's not the sort of feedback that helps an author, but an elitist head game played by people who often don't give a damn about either the person or the writing, just about the game. Really? Because in almost 14 years of fandom, part of that time spent actually married to an acafan, I've never once felt like there was no place for me--with no college degree of any kind--in any of the fandoms I've been in. And most of those were not tiny, out of the way, Yuletide only fandoms. For me the presence of the acafen are like the presence of any other group of fans who like something I don't really care much about. They have their space and I have mine and the times when we meet in the middle, everyone's usually pretty cool with everyone else. Even in meta discussions, which I occasionally follow, the posts from actual acafen are vastly outnumbered by posts from people who just like to talk about fandom. And even the meta culture is only a small slice of fandom; the SGA newsletter, for example, will link a dozen stories on a day when ![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif) metafandom links maybe one or two posts.
Yes, really.
If acafen are such a small portion of online fandom, then where online in fandom are the discussions of *writing*, as opposed to critique, without postmodernist interpretation?
Finally, someone who says what I've been thinking for a long, long time.
Perhaps you would be surprised to hear that many someones have made it clear how much they dislike critical discussion of fan fiction? In every fandom I have been in there have been fans who will speak out against it, to the point of barring it from mail lists (an example would be SENAD mailing list in The Sentinel fandom) or objecting to and lobbying against discussion communities, like lj community thecuttingboard. It's a little difficult for fans (whether they be actual academics or simply fans who like to discuss stories from a critique point of view) to do so in public without being admonished by fans who don't like it. There was a discussion this year in SGA fandom where one 'no critique please' fan likened public critical discussion to doing a workplace annual review in public, which well, no, but you see, you are far from being all alone and Rolani is very, very far from being original in her opinion.
But nevertheless, how arrogant and offensive of the person who told you you couldn't understand a discussion of your own work.
I have yet to hear of anyone who reads or writes science fiction being told they're not smart enough to understand the discussion of their own work -- but it has happened to me, and to several other people I know, more than once, with the stories we wrote in media fandom.
I still find it amazing that anyone would even suggest that the author of a work himself/herself is not qualified to understand an analysis of that work. I've heard it suggested, and I found it incredible at the time, and said so, and got annoyed handwaving and dismissal in response, but still -- seriously? The person who actually *wrote* the story isn't smart enough to understand it on that rarefied academic level? That's just plain *made* of "get the **** over yourself" ..
I more or less agree with lilacsigil. For me, analyzing a work of art I really liked (text, picture, ff etc.) is adding an extra layer of fun. But I do know that it isn't everyones cup of tea, so I don't do it if it isn't requested. And I dislike people who think their way is the only right way to do something (what ever it is). Nothing is that easy.
I don't know what other universities teach their students, but the first thing I learned was never to analyze a text out of it's context or if you do, never to forget you did it (I'm studying german language and literature in the university of Leipzig, a city in the eastern part of Germany). I just was in a lecture in which my instructor analysed the works of Ayschilos and Sophokles and linked them with those created in Germany in the 1815-1830s. She said that they were created under similar structural circumstances and so feature similar structural elements. If that isn't (historical) context, what is?
[I've added this to show that analysis and even vivisection of a text can lead to more context instead of less]
I don't know what Fanstudies is like, I haven't read any of those books. I imagine I will soon for my thesis, but I will reserve judgement until then. Personally I'm a little split. I always thought it would be cool to write my thesis about something I like doing in my spare time, but sometimes I'm afraid it will destroy fandom for me.
"I wouldn't mind so much, I think, if anyone had ever offered to *add* to the context of a story by talking about the mythology that it fits into, the archetypes, the way that Daniel Jackson's continual return from the dead relates to the death and rebirth of the Corn King or the emperor's dream of the butterfly, or how Jim Ellison's life as a Sentinel may relate to the stories of Heracles."
And here I thought that is what we are for *wonders* But maybe that is just the perspective of those who study literature and all things we call "Geisteswissenschaften" (my translation program says "the humanities"; what I mean is analyzing art, literature, theatre, language, philosophy; everything that is not natural sciences or - apparently - media studies).
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | October 22nd, 2008 01:15 pm (UTC) |
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I'm more or less with you on this. I'm deeply suspicious of academia in fanfic the same way I'm suspicious of it in any other artistic, creative, personal field of endeavor. There is value in singing for the pleasure of singing, whether or not the singing is good or says something of value to the world or whether or not somebody wants to study it. And also, I am not sure that all fields of endeavor are improved by someone studying it. Sex, for example, is rarely improved by having a psychologist watching you and enquiring as to your responses on a 10 point scale! The presence of the observer changes and detracts from the action. I'd like to just sing and have sex without someone making notes.
--Artaxastra
It occurred to me overnight - with reference specifically to the Large Hadron Collider - that if you talk to an academic who specialises in quantum physics and ask him or her what they do in their day job, they will bend over backwards to explain it to you (Cox, from CERN, went so far as to put rap videos on YouTube to explain what the LHC was supposed to do) working on the principle that you are probably an intelligent individual who just doesn't happen to have followed the same educational path.
If you ask the same question ("what, actually, is it that you do?") of a Eng Lit academic they are likely to tell you that you don't have the vocabulary to discuss it, they can't discuss it except in the appropriate vocabulary and therefore the conversation has no purpose. |
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