swatkat: knight - er, morgana - in shining underwear (i love the whole world)
I find fandom's anti-academic bias absurd. Furthermore, I find the anti-aca/fen debates that make the rounds in fandom every now and then worrisome, and very opposed to that aspect of fannish culture I've come to cherish over the years: tolerance of other people's weird obsessions.

There, I've said it.

I know my biases. I do, after all, harbour notions of getting myself a Ph.D in English; even teaching, perhaps - even though my thoughts on that topic mostly centre around, 'STOP ASKING ME GROWNUP QUESTIONS OK?' I work in a publishing house that thrives on pretentious academic publications. Where I stand today, I need to validate academia. Ooh, look, isn't the ivory shiny?

I also have difficulty comprehending how analysis is not fun, because it's something that comes very naturally to me. Splitting hairs is fun. Studying everything is fun. Fun me for me, anyway - they might not be for you. Which is not the point of this post here. The point here is very simply, why is my version of fun such an issue for you?

Here, for instance: The older I get and the more I have to do with academicians, the more I agree that academia is the enemy. Not, mind you, through any willful doing of evil, but through an insistence that everything must be studied. I lay the blame for the large number of college-educated people who never read for pleasure at the feet of English lit courses, where one is taught to examine the work at the expense of simply enjoying the story.

This posits 'simply enjoying the story' as opposed to 'analysing and ruining the fun in the story', which, as far as I'm concerned, is a false binary, because no, it doesn't work like that. For one, 'simply enjoying' is a vague and deceptive term. What does 'simply enjoying' mean? One assumes it is the pleasure of reading the story and knowing what happens next - except that this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not inimical to analysis, and, in case of some stories, impossible, because nothing actually happens in them. Or perhaps it is the pleasure of words - soaking up the beauty of a well-written piece; enjoying the beauty of a metaphor; reveling in the mystery of words; etc. And again, this mode of 'simple enjoyment' is not opposed to an academic's brand of reading a text, either, because a lot of academic analysis follows naturally from this 'simple' pleasure (ref. the five hundred million works on language in Shakespeare, where the authors are thisclose to dying of wordgasm).

But more importantly, take away the theory and big words, and leave just the academic and her and her endless analysis and debates, replace the 'Derrida' and 'Foucault' with 'Joss' and 'SGA', replace the big words with, say, 'slashy' and 'canon', and what do you have? Someone very close to - dare I say? - what we call a Fan.

Fandom takes its Cult of Squee very seriously. It's very serious about not being serious. And in this serious not-seriousness there is a reverse snobbery, which posits that if you're not here just for the LULZ and can't see the simple pleasures of life, you must be a boring idiot or a pseudo-intellectual; which proposes that it isn't possible to be genuinely entertained by anything other than the simple way of reading, whatever that might mean. And in this inverse snobbery, fandom becomes precisely what it claims not to be: intolerant. Like Them.

I cannot be having with this.
swatkat: knight - er, morgana - in shining underwear (May 25)
I should not be online. I have Things To Do. But I am online, and I read this on today's [livejournal.com profile] metafandom and I just... don't know what to say. I don't want to argue with the OP on her LJ, because she isn't exactly being inflammatory or crazy, just stating her opinion. So I'll just rant here. Because this is my LJ, and that's allowed, right?

So. Lilac Day. Some Discworld fen got overboard with the celebration. Others were annoyed. There was wank, as I'm sure you must have seen. But what I don't understand is all this hostility towards celebrating a fictional holiday by fans in fandom. Again I repeat: fans. Fandom. This is how it goes. I say happy birthday to Harry Potter and argue over whether Ron Weasley makes a good Pisces (he does. trust me). We wank because JKR got Bill and Charlie's birthdates mixed up and spend days discussing the House timeline. Why do I do this? I don't know. Maybe because I like to? Maybe because I'm a fan and because these characters somehow touched my heart and I'm expressing my love for them this way? And it *annoys* me that I'll be criticised for this in *fandom* of all places - RL yes, they're mundanes, they don't understand. But in fandom? Where our primary purpose is obsessing over the sex lives of fictional people? It is alright to argue whether Remus is gay or not (he's bi), but it's not to celebrate a fictional holiday?

I'm perfectly aware that Sam Vimes doesn't exist. I'm perfectly aware that Night Watch did not happen and no one ever died. I KNOW. But the book made me laugh and cry, like most Pratchett books do. And we show our appreciation for it in fandom by using our lilac icons and saying 'Were you there?', though I'm perfectly aware of the fact that I wasn't there and I will never be there because it's fiction. How is that creepy and crazy? How is that wrong? *Why* is that wrong? And why do I have to be criticised for it in *fandom*, of all places?

There's something I'm missing in here. Or maybe I'm just, you know, obsessed. But hey, guess what? I'm fine with it. That's what I'm here for. *shrugs*

-

All this drama over Discworld. What would Vetinari say? *sigh*

Here, read some House pr0n: Hot Lesbian Sex and Other Misnomers by [livejournal.com profile] ijemanja. House/Cameron/Cuddy. Hot and fluffy, with perfect banter. I just went to a very happy place. [she says in her best House voice]
swatkat: knight - er, morgana - in shining underwear (Default)
A real, serious question.

Tell me, what, exactly, does make a book 'deep' and 'meaningful'? What? What does it have to contain to qualify? What makes a book 'good'? What makes it 'well-written'? I've tried and tried, but my feeble brain can't seem to work this out (and I may have had too much to drink. BFFs rock. *hic*). Surely most of you have read the HP books - some of you even have a BA (*gasp*). Can somebody please help?*

*In case you don't know what I'm talking about, go here.

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