New Article Out, and Other Stuff

[caitri]

Today is a lovely fall day with a dark blue sky, golden sunshine, apples on the air, and in the distance, dark clouds over the mountains promising snow up there. It is also decorative gourd season, motherfuckers, as I was reminded when running errands this morning; I impulsively added a small bag of candy corn and a can of pumpkin puree (to make pumpkin espresso bread!) to my grocery run, because while I feel functional I'm going to work it.

I have a new article out at TWC: The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history. I also got cited in another article in the same journal issue, which is exciting!! With my colleague Kate O, we also relaunched the Women in Book History Bibliography last week with a new searchable interface, and I've been doing a lot of data entry from our backlog with it, adding some 250 citations in the past week so that we're at over 900 now! This is extra exciting since when we started we had just over 100, so yay blooming and growing!

I've really appreciated the messages of support I've gotten from you guys about working my way through depression--it really helps knowing that others share the feeling, and so on. <3

Comments

[lettersfromeleanorrigby]

Congratulations on your publication! That's terrific! And being cited has got to be a thrill-- another layer to "I got published" that is... "I got published and other people are relying on me!!!"

That recipe looks good for the pumpkin heads in my life. I still have pumpkin jam from last year leftover-- it's good but super sweet and a little pumpkin goes a LOOONG way for me. Maybe I can stir it into a cheesecake.

[lettersfromeleanorrigby]

Coming back to comment on your article: I really like the point about not privileging book format over function-- it's all gatekeeping of one form or another. I'm sure the earliest scribes were shocked when they saw the Book of the Dead format. I therefore like your bibliographical approach very much.

I have come to think of fanworks from the critical theory perspective-- entertainment value and ease-of-access issues of worldbuilding aside, it's all engagement, supplementation, and critique of one sort or other. The "pleasure" in the denigrated "pleasure reading" can be almost secondary to the critiques running through the various fic premises-- "not gay enough," or "not female enough," or "needs more found families because society's a fucking mess right now."

Re: manuscript culture-- how blasphemous would it be to suggest that the Bible and other religious texts, as initially noncommercial manuscripts (Paul's letters, for example, spreading the gospel rather than selling it...) meant to be shared and discussed rather than profited from, are reasonable cognates for contemporary noncommercial (womens', fannish) work?

Having worked at a Major Bookstore Chain during the advent, hah hah, of epublishing, you're right on point about the format wars-- publishers are male, stubborn, and tenacious about their preferred, outdated models. Tor/DAW was and is still the forerunner in terms of acknowledging epub and online content-- and they're genre, and therefore also problematized in their own way, even as "geek culture" has begun to be more the "norm" so long as it's also male.

TL;DR men usually suck, the 12 Apostles wrote transformative works, and Rule 63 is a radical feminist act. Or somethin'.

Enjoyed the article-- you're wicked smart.

[caitri]

Thanks, bb!!!! <3

So I feel like I've read ~something about the Bible and fanfic, but...I can't find it??? But there's something to be said for that idea and for how there are the competing texts of the New Testament with different versions of events. I mean, the early church straight up had a con to decide what was canon after all, so.... *g*

I'm also working on an essay looking at writing by male fans vs. women fans across the span of the century, and how early fan fiction by men (and that is the term used!) is fiction about fan life and it's...not that interesting? Versus how there's this field to look at writing by women, and I think part of it is very much that aspect of reading for pleasure and pleasure's sake....I'm still working on that bit, but it's just been very striking how there is NO work looking at the men's fan writing!

[lettersfromeleanorrigby]

Hah. Well, clearly now you have to write the bible thing: "Paul's Letters as Seminal Epistolary Fanfic."

Re: male fans-- I can always tell when a straight guy wrote something in Trek fandom-- it's all ship stats and crew complements and phaser and photon torpedo tonnage. *Snore.* It's rare to get a copperbadge who writes more character-driven stuff, but he's never made clear if he's straight or not, either, so... something to be said for dudes who are liberal and work for nonprofits and are artsy re:less of sexuality? All the male authors in Check, Please! and Hockey RPF are self-identifying as gay, nonbinary, or something other than cishet. There's a hell of a survey to be done there.

[caitri]

No kidding. You've seen the AO3 census, y/y? http://centrumlumina.tumblr.com/post/63208278796/ao3-census-masterpost

There's some slightly more interesting stuff in the fanzines, but it's very much in the way of fiction-as-nonfiction with "essays" about the culture of Vulcans (before there was any actual Trek eps about that) or tech manuals and whatnot. Although also fwiw the earliest Tolkien fanfic was by dudes back in the early 1960s: https://fanlore.org/wiki/I_Palantir Some character work here, but yeah, I just find the gender-based disconnect strange!