salt and honey

You guys, there is no MLA citation format for anime music videos. I get to compose my own! Seriously, this filled me with batty pleasure for several days. (Mostly patterned after the citation format for a regular film. What do you think?)

The Perfect Drug (Perfect Blue). Croasdaile, Joe, Maroboshi Studios. MPG, 41.2 MB. Perfect Blue, dir. Satoshi Kon. "The Perfect Drug", Nine Inch Nails. Accessed 14 April 2002.



(I tried to check out the bibliographies of academic work that talked about fan videos, to see how they did it, but the only one I could put my hands on was Textual Poachers and after scouring its bibliography I'm pretty sure that Jenkins cites the fanzines and filk tapes but not the VCR vids. Significant??)

So I was exchanging emails with my professor (who is, clearly, unusually generous with his time and thought as well as unusually awesome) (<-- leaving that parenthesis in makes me feel toolish, but not as toolish as leaving it out! Now I just hope he doesn't read this) about Kristina Busse's review of Media in Transition 5. I pointed my professor to Busse's post because we had been talking a lot about fandom, networked culture, and the internet in class, and Busse's feminist criticism of that kind of discourse had really informed my own take on fan/gamer/etc. studies.

He replied-- I didn't ask for his permission to repost his email, because upon second thought the request sounded kind of creepy, so I offer here instead a very brief paraphrase which I hope does not mangle his sentiments too much-- agreeing that her insights were worthwhile, but saying that he couldn't tell what kind of positive change she was asking of academics who study fan culture, and that he hadn't gotten a sense of the reason for her feminist outrage in terms any more specific than "they're ignoring us".

This is what I wrote back:



From: saltandhoney, aka _swallow
Date: May 15, 2007 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: history of reading paper
To: Tim Burke

[...] I was really grateful to read [your email]; thank you for putting so
much thought into your response. I pretty much buy what you have to
say about panel scheduling and the work of amateur scholars, but the
issue still feels unresolved for me. Mostly I'm working out (as I
guess you'll see in my paper) this reaction I wasn't expecting at all
to have to Henry Jenkins' work. I hadn't read him until this semester;
he's one of those people you see cited in fannish discourse a lot, of
course, and I had always assumed that his basic ideas had been
absorbed into fan discourse and that therefore reading him wouldn't
really surprise me at all.

But I *was* surprised; first, while reading Textual Poachers, at the way
he represented fans as passive, and then, while reading Convergence
Culture, at the way he talked about media fans (i.e., adult female
fanfiction writers) only in terms of negative space. ( In Convergence Culture... )

On the one hand, I can kind of get the Convergence Culture stuff: the
internet is an enormous place, after all, and it's kind of ridiculous
for me to get exercised over the fact that *my* slice of the internet
was not completely and perfectly represented in this book which aimed
to cover so much ground! But when I read it in light of the rest of
his scholarship, my annoyance sharpens: it's not that Jenkins doesn't
look at fans *enough*, it's that his whole lens for understanding them
is off. (Which, again, was surprising to me, considering that Jenkins
self-identifies as a fan. I think perhaps I can tie this to the idea
that he personally is a "science fiction fan" and not a "media fan"--?
Or a man, and not a woman? I'm just stumped on that question.
Anyway--) My problem with Jenkins crystallized when I realized that
throughout Textual Poachers (and, as far as I can see, in the rest of
his work, including his blog entries-- I haven't gotten my hands on
Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers, but if the excerpt we read in class was
indication enough, it's the same story over there, too) he spoke of
fans as people reacting to their source text, rather than people
reacting to one another.

A central metaphor of Textual Poachers is the Velveteen Rabbit: an
object loved so hard it becomes "Real". (I assume that, as a father,
you've read the story.) Fans' actions-- their fiction, their
discussions-- are what make, and what result from making, the show
"Real". That is to say, their actions all stem from and get poured
back into their beloved text. Without the show, fandom wouldn't
happen; without an understanding of the show, you can't participate in
the fandom. The show is the locus of fannish activity not just because
it's where fans meet; it's what brings them together. (In my paper I
am trying to show that that's not the case; I think of fannish reading
strategies as a set of practices and attitudes which essentially can
be imported to look at any source text, from The Matrix to The Tempest
to my Philosophy of Language textbook. <-- sure, that last one would
be really hard, but weirder things have already happened)

Okay, so, that might not sound like so big a deal, but here's why it
has big stakes for me: when we remember to gender our description of
media fandom (and gender is an ineluctable part of fandom! Francesca
Coppa's "A Brief History of Media Fandom" makes this clear), then
Jenkins's description of fandom-- as people reacting to a source text
rather than people reacting to one another-- becomes: WOMEN reacting
to a MALE text rather than WOMEN reacting to ONE ANOTHER. Women
creating "meta-text", or "writing in the margins", instead of creating their
own texts. Considering that fannish reading strategies are so very often
concerned with queering and re-gendering the texts they look at;
considering that fandom is a radically queer and homosocial space
for many women, Jenkins's idea of fandom offers insult on top of injury,
to me.

In this conversation, I don't mean to critique Jenkins's explicit
assertions so much as his unconsidered assumptions: I think he speaks
very highly of the power of fannish agency-- the whole point of
Textual Poachers is to argue for academic recognition of fannish
agency! But fans are more powerful and active than he recognizes, not
because he didn't "go far enough" with his analysis but because he's
starting in the wrong place. Perhaps he is too stuck in his
self-identified position of academic "ethnographer", as he calls
himself on his blog.

That is why Busse's subtitle "The Women Men Don't See" (the title of a
classic James Tiptree, Jr. story) resonated so very much with me:
Jenkins's analysis of fandom is sexist, but invisibly so; it was
birthed from an academic perspective on fandom which is sexist at an
atomic level. The very way fan studies has formulated the question
"what is fandom, and what is it good for?" is sexist, because it
understands fandom as derivative, essentially responsive, minutely
critical aesthetic practices, born out of and contingent upon certain
source texts, rather than the wide-ranging, broad-focused, essentially
social, transformative vision that I see in the women around me. From
my perspective, when fan studies says "derivative" instead of
"transformative", it doesn't see fandom-- it doesn't even see that it
doesn't see fandom.

This is an old, old insult to women. The condition of patriarchal
capitalism is women's necessary support-- and the necessary
invisibility of that support. (You need women to bear babies, but your
reckon lineage, and therefore property, through the paternal line.
Etc-- I won't insult you by reiterating Marxist/feminist theory that
you almost certainly understand better than I do.)

( I thought I would start off my paper with a brief history of my own experiences of a fan... )

( Then, I got it. )

( That lets me gesture towards answering your question about what change feminist acafans want from the academy. )

I'm sorry this email is so long (and so, occasionally, confrontational
in tone) (and that it has, at this point, contributed to the
continuing lateness of my paper!). Once I started responding to your
question I found I couldn't stop.

###

I think that once I figure out how to format the footnotes online, I'll put the paper itself (plus my analysis of its weaknesses!) online. I feel really stupidly self-important doing this, but maybe there's a point to it: I've never seen this idea articulated in any of the hundreds or thousands of fannish debates I've read. I can't tell whether that's because it's so new no one has thought of it, so dumb everyone's thought of it and rejected it, or so old-but-new-to-me that it's given the foundation to lots of fannish thinking even though I never had the conceptual tools to recognize it. That last case is probably the answer-- so maybe my essay can do the work of making the argument explicit, even if the argument itself is not original. (And what is fandom about if not communal, iterative processing of an idea over and over?!)

My actual paper barely engages the dimension of this argument rooted in feminist critique, actually; it talks instead about why scholars and businesspeople should study fandom-as-I-see-it (rather than the "scribbling in the margins" model of fandom which Jenkins & co. have now). I think the whole FanLib story lends support, of course...!

Wow, I go without posting for months, and now I have things to say in several of my journals and LJ is laid out on the fainting couch. I guess _swallow, ninablack, saltandhoney, etc., are just on bad clusters-- but it's frustrating to see my friendslist rollicking along at its normal pace while I sit with long essays on the tip of my tongue.

Posting this to see if a smaller chunk of text will go through...



ETA: it's slow, but my posting access appears to be back! \o/
ETA2: false alarm! What's the opposite of Paul Gross arms?

I really like it when my classes all sort of fold together and each help me think about the other. In the fall, we absorbed Freud in Critical/Cutural Theory at the same time we read Hamlet in Shakespeare, for example. Later in the semester, I wrote in my other journal, "All of my papers are about feminist historicism and why psychoanalytic criticism sucks. For every assignment in every class! I'm getting a little embarrassed!" That statement was mildly hyperbolic: it would require a greater mind than mine to work feminist historicism into Introduction to Music. Still, it felt weird and good to feel like I was the same person in every single one of my classes, carrying a consistent attitude from problem to problem to problem. Even if I wasn't right, I was coherent... right?

But this semester my classes have been syncing to the point that it's uncanny (ha, ha, speaking of Freud). First, History of Reading reminded me about the oral-thought ideas I was exposed to sophomore fall in Discourse Analysis, and I used that to decide not to take the Language and Meaning seminar. In Plato and History of Reading we read about the Phaedrus in the same two weeks, which occasionally made it hard to remember which course I was doing homework for. And, of course, in PEP we have been reading so much Heidegger that I'm automatically bringing a "Heidegger likes carrots" (*) perspective to every single conversation I have (to, I am sure, the delight of my friends and dinner partners).

I've been noticing, though, an odder thread of coincidence stitching my academic reading materials together: pornography. I spent a couple weeks in McCabe reading dry academic summaries of the acrobatic sex happening between figures on Attic vases (in the course of researching ancient Greek attitudes towards familial and sexual relationships); then, of course, in History of Reading, there came Thérèse Philosophe (illustrations included--!), which, uh, made me feel really self-conscious to be reading it in broad view of all the other library patrons. (I briefly considered hiding it behind a bigger book, like a kid in a cartoon sneaking a comic book inside of his math textbook.) Soon, PEP will be reading Luce Irigaray (hah). And now I am thinking about writing my final paper on fanfiction, so....


(*) ahem: this is the name for that stage of being in love with someone, you know, where you can't overhear a conversation your friends are having, about, say, carrots, without having to interrupt-- "Bob likes carrots!!"

----------------

On the first day of class Marie mentioned that she can tell she processes speech and written language differently because, as she said, she doesn't get homophonic puns when she's just reading text.

Later, Prof. Burke made a pun that hinged on the words "oral" and "aural". I laughed a few seconds behind everybody else because that's how long it took

oral

to change to

aural

as appropriate. I see colors in letters (and have all my life) because I have synesthesia . But I have never met anyone else who visualizes a stream of text, subtitle-style, every time anyone says anything.


(NB #1: Firefox users, I think, will not get the 3-D surround-sound experience of this entry-- I don't know why, but my font-color skills are somehow insufficient to please that coolest of browsers.)

(NB #2: As I said to Miranda-- classmate and fellow synesthetic-- earlier, But, seriously-- just translating the letters into their solid-color equivalents via HTML is like, hm, trying to replicate an painting done in acrylics by cutting out shapes from colored construction paper. The limited selection of color-gradients is wrong, but more fundamentally neglected is the way the colors blend and bleed into one another; the way some colors provide a background and other colors float in the foreground; the way some have smoky wispy textures and other hard, or wooden, or slick, or muddy, or electric.)

Miranda and Stephanie both talked about reading lists of ingredients on the outsides of containers (in marmalade, in shampoo). I think I may have already joked about this in class the morning that I brought some orange juice in recycled a peanut-butter jar, but I've been really conscious recently about reading ingredient-lists (which was a purely automatic act for most of my life) because Sally and I reuse all of our plastic containers and so most of the jars in our kitchen bear false witness regarding their contents.

Since, I suppose, I started the habit of automatically reading ingredients lists when I was very young, I never really applied my more sophisticated adult understanding of reading to ingredients-lists. Sort of the way a child who hasn't thought about it very hard might believe that the television contains tiny people performing plays for her-- or the way even an adult who hasn't thought about it very hard might speak about the characters of novels as if they were real people, not authorial constructions (in terms of questions like, "Why did [Character X] do such a thing? That was self-destructive! She needs to shape up or she'll ruin her marriage," etc.)-- I guess I believed that the foods themselves were speaking through their packaging, compelled to describe themselves out loud in print. Enriched flour, folic acid, palm oil, sugar, corn flour, salt, cornstarch, soy lecithin, artificial flavor. (That's the McCabe cookie I'm eating right now-- yum, lecithin!) It's not so much that I depend upon the the ingredients-lists to be true, as I imagined them the self-evident extension of the foodstuff itself. Finding out that an ingredients-list lied to me would be as confusing as having the food appear blue but actually be yellow.

So I feel sort of indignant-- no, it's more intense: I feel mildly offended-- every time I read the information printed on the recycled yogurt container holding our nutritional yeast (*). Contains 1% milkfat?! "Absurd!" I say, shaking the container. "Take that back. It's simply not true and you know it."

I have never witnessed such a radical uncoupling of signifier and referent! Experimental poetry has nothing on our kitchen.



(*) does this make us dirty hippies? It's really good on toast.

I started this a while ago:

I'm reading Fall on Your Knees again; my fourteen-year-old self's earnest marginalia is heartbreaking.

( It's weird to be rereading this novel. )

I knew to expect all those changes when I picked up the book last week.

-- I think I should explain how I think about rereading. When I was little-- from the time I started to read until mid-adolescence-- I had sort of funny habits about reading in general. I would be reading six or seven books at any time, switching from one to the other as my mood took me. Before going to bed each night I'd scan my shelves for the books I felt like re-experiencing just then (I knew my shelves intimately; I sorted books not by author or size but by some loose associative algorithm). I'd select an armful bristling with paper bookmarks and take them to my bedside table where I'd read from one and then the next until I fell asleep.

Maybe the strangest thing I did was to regularly begin a book in the middle and read to its end, then go to the beginning and read until the middle. I did this because I felt the beginning was for people who didn't yet know the world of the book, the beginning was for getting new readers up to speed, the beginning was for exposition and introduction. I wanted to go straight to the meat of the novel. I had no idea how weird that was! I don't think I could do it now.

(When did I stop reading as if reading as an activity was mine alone, shared with no one, and start reading the way everybody else does? It's true for a long time I became really startled and upset when someone in the larger world talked about one of the books I read, because I didn't actually believe that anyone else had access to those books which were mine. If I read the first book of a series and not the next, I didn't quite believe the next existed yet, and felt somehow violated if someone mentioned the rest of the series. And so forth.)

At that time I almost never read nonfiction, and never poetry until I was twelve. (It's no longer quite so bad, but I still rarely read anything on my own other than fiction. Except cookbooks, which I consume like pornography.) I read almost entirely for plot, for provocative titles, for the color of the bookjackets. I had no understanding of the different received genres of fiction, or whether cheaply-bound detective novels were less or more or less prestigious than the Western-canon classics I stole from my mother's bookshelves. I read not so very widely (although more widely than most children my age, in that I read many books intended for adults), but instead deeply: once I'd read a book I felt I had absorbed it into me, and I'd reread it many times. I sucked at some texts until they fell apart (I went through a few months in which I read one single epic-ish novel over and over and over, finishing the last page to immediately move back to the beginning). The way I knew I should reread a book was to monitor when I thought of it, when little snippets of its theme or narrative got stuck in my head like pop-song jingles, repeatedly in something like the space of a week: that meant it was time to revisit the book. So I'd reread it, either straight through or just a bit from the middle-- enough that I felt I'd satisfied the demanding echo in my head. And so I went through childhood.

These days, I don't reread nearly as much, because the universe of books open to me is much larger. The more I read, the more I know about new books I want to read! It's not just big-- it's infinitely unfurling. (*) (And, of course, like everyone else in this class, I note that having reading heavily assigned as homework makes it harder to look to reading for pleasure. Sometimes I pick up a novel and imagine how much fun it could be to read it-- but then I read the first few paragraphs and feel exhausted at the prospect of getting to know all these new characters, figure out their mysteries. I usually take a nap or reload my LJ friendslist instead.) But I miss rereading a lot: it still seems that my second read of a book is more vivid and more complete, always, than a first reading. Maybe I should take advantage of these two problems-- my nostalgia for rereading and the kinda-exciting-kinda-unpleasant pressure I feel to find and absorb new books-- and specifically make time to reread what I already know.





(*) this reminds me of the conversation I had with Gavin, the editor of the press I interned with this summer, after I worked up the courage to ask him whether he had read all of the books his house was almost literally (**) lined with. (He and Kelly had stacked bookshelves in the kitchen, in the living room, in the dining room, in the hallways, in the bathroom. I was a little dizzy the first time I visited.) He said something like, "Oh, god, no," and then mentioned he had at one point done the math to figure out how many books he could read in the rest of his life. He is a slow reader, he continued, and he doesn't have a lot of spare time. So every time he reads a book he's doing a little piece of lifetime-literary-intake triage. That really puts the decision to pick up a beach novel over a western-canon classic in a new light, right?

(**) har

Liana and Christina both said on Blackboard that they glance at people's books over their shoulders on the train. I always do that-- although I always feel kind of guilty, as if I'm invading their privacy in an unspeakably intimate way. When I finally puzzle out what they're reading I feel an absurd sense of accomplishment (40 minutes of exercising my peripheral vision on the R8 last month gathered me the title of "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn", and I felt proud enough to crow).

On Friday evening, I was coming back to Swarthmore from work on a packed suburban commuter train. A woman one seat ahead across the isle from me was holding a paperback-- I recognized it instantly (it's unusual to see people reading books I've read myself!) as Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell.

( That novel served a beautiful mini-revelation to me this summer. )

So I leaned over to the woman across from me. I never do this, but Thus Was Adonis Murdered had felt so important to me, and I like to plug its author every chance I get. And what's the next time I'll meet someone on the train who has a book in common with me? "Hey, Sarah Caudwell is awesome!" I said.

The woman didn't hear me.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought, embarrassment already churning in my stomach, and I tapped her shoulder. She turned around. "Hey! Sarah Caudwell is awesome," I repeated.

"Uh, yeah," she said, looking a little confused.

"The book you have, it's great," I attempted.

"It's the first time I've read it," she said (a response that didn't really make sense), already turning back in her seat. I felt cold disapproval radiating from all the passengers around me: I had tried to smalltalk on the evening train! I had disturbed the social contract! Broken the silence that allowed everyone to pretend they weren't stuffed next to one another on these seats, far too close for comfort.

Whatever, I told myself, no one's really paying attention to you, and slouched down into my seat, putting my knees into the back of the commuter ahead of me, and played with my cellphone for a while because I'd forgotten to bring my own reading material for the train. But my sense of having done irrevocable wrong remained with me, crystalizing terribly a short while later when after speaking with the conductor I realized I had boarded the wrong express train and would eventually have to wait for forty minutes at the station platform in Morton, watching a chilly spring sunset and cursing my own misreading-- here, we're back on topic!-- of the recently-changed train schedule.

I said to Lauren, Freshman year I noticed I had stopped reading [outside of class] as much I used to, so I started keeping a list, as a way to shame myself. By the start of sophomore spring I felt as if I had retrained myself to read-for-pleasure again, so I dropped the effort of the list. But last semester I read exactly one novel outside of classes... and then I ended up writing my final paper for Patty White on it.

I haven't read too much more this semester. I think I can count up several novels, half a book of short stories, and many issues of semi-literary magazines like The New Yorker and n+1. So what do I consume?

→ The bulk of what I read, by any fair estimation, is my friendslist on LJ. Especially when sad or anxious with procrastination, I reload the page over and over as if skimming my fingers along a rosary, for comfort or distraction.

→ I reload and reload the front page of my mom's journal, too: that's more like childishly fingering the nubbins of a familiar blanket in the dark while waiting to fall asleep. Reading her words-- written not for me, but for an audience of her friends and peers, although foremost for herself-- is a chance for me to see one more angle on her fascinating intelligence. Re-reading them is a reassurance I clutch when angry or lonely or bored, standing at a public computer in McCabe.

→ I hunch over the newspaper while I eat dinner alone, reading it automatically and without pleasure.

→ The word BOO was at some point shallowly but carefully carved into the side of the broad wooden table we sit around in my Plato class. If I'm sitting in front of it I touch it with my fingers and try to imagine some long-gone student disregarding her class long enough to scrape the desk over and over until the word appeared. Was it the work of one 50-minute class period, or a long-term project? Why the enigmatic word choice? Did she do it near Halloween? I can't picture someone deliberately ignoring her professor for so long, so ostentatiously, but this week I noticed that the girl who sits next to me during Plato was staring at study-abroad programs on her laptop screen, with headphones in, totally not listening at all.

→ I read Protagoras, speaking of Plato, in the basement of the First Unitarian Church in Center City last weekend, waiting out the mediocre or unbearable opening acts that took the stage before Kimya Dawson. I sat crosslegged on the dirty cement floor with my giant skirt spread around me, bending over my giant book, sort of enjoying how very different I looked from every other brightly-dressed messy-haired hipster in the place. I'm pretty sure I was the only person with a book.

→ I read and obeyed my landlord's note in crayon on the back of a shopping list about how Sally and I should clean up our damn kitchen.

→ I read and ignored many Reserved Students Digests.

→ I read and didn't understand someone else's cryptic notes in Sharpie on the exposed metal beams of the construction site Sally and I stole into and explored last night. TP patch 1/4 JWK down. (The giant condo-to-be that's sitting near where the Pike and the Blue Route cross: you've driven past it.) "What obscure poetry," Sally said. "I really want to be an electrician."

→ The deadline for the English department's creative writing contests was yesterday, and so I spent some time, too, rereading my own writing, most of it composed years ago. This kind of reading-- reading my own work-- is different from reading someone else's, even when I've been charged to edit it. I know so well almost everything I have written-- even LJ posts, even academic papers-- that I can recall the mindset I brought to writing every individual phrase. I have the feeling of the entire text memorized, so when I look for places to revise I'm looking for negative space. It is like running my fingers along a sock I knit myself, searching out holes.