Friday, February 26, 2010

A Different Kind of Book Art

Being the week before spring break, today’s Monday to Friday was pretty hairy-scary, as the saying around here goes. People had too much homework and not enough time to do it, I had to theoretically be in three places at once on Thursday night (although I’m glad I was where I was at the end of the night) and everyone’s freaking out about how we’re going to get through the projects due on the flipside of break.

Not a lot of time for the blogging, in other words.

But now it’s Friday morning, I haven’t got to be anywhere for an hour and then all I have to do is finish my essay for Writing essays on my revelation on the nature of life, the universe, or anything and I’ve got two days before I go on retreat at the Monastery here at Saint Ben’s.

Ah, blog, how I have missed you.

I got to participate in two cultural activities this week I’d love to share with you, but I think I’ll save the first one for tomorrow morning. On Monday night I went to the movie theatre and saw Percy Jackson and Olympians: The Lightning Thief with a good friend of mine, and on Wednesday, I ate lunch with Buzz Spector, a reknowned book artist, art critic, and currently the Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

Percy needs a whole other post – Buzz I can talk about here.

If you EVER get a chance to see this man’s work or hear him speak at an event, GO. He is one of the most insightful, depth-filled and honestly funny men I think I’ve ever met. And he’s succinct, too. I honor and respect people who can be succinct without trying. He doesn’t look like much when he walks into a room, kind of a mad scientist type with curly gray hair that’s going everywhere and anywhere, but get him talking and it is a thing awesome to behold.

Buzz (I’m friends with him on facebook, I think I can call him Buzz; Mr. Spector sounds a little strange) is, as I mentioned, a book artist. He does things with books. Yes, that could sound dirty, but he also writes about how the rest of us do things with books as well – in his article “Going Over The Books” re-published from the magazine Dialogue in his collection of essays The Bookmaker’s Desire, he talks about how books, unlike any other artwork, are a medium consumed when we are at our most vulnerable –
“The space of reading is intimate; only the beloved’s body comes closer to that
of the reader than the book, held in the hands, resting on the chest, or nestled
in the lap…we dress up and go out to look at art. Undressed, in bed, we read.”

Buzz also addresses the physical presence of the book as an erotic thing – open a book to the middle pages and set it out on a table. Do the spread pages remind us perhaps of spread legs? Do we not say after we have read a book that we “know” it?

I thought it was a beautiful image. The rest of my book arts class was a little wierded out by that one.

In our tour of the gallery exhibition Spreading The Word (which I had to help set up in exchange for good grace to be somewhere else other than the opening on Thursday) Buzz brought up the idea of surplus meaning when we read a book, and in order to explain this, I think we have to expand on the word 'book.'

BOOK in the book arts sense can, I think, be broken down into three elements. First we have Book as Concept, the ideas we get when we think of the word Book. A repository for knowledge, a way to communicate experience. Historically and conceptually, a scroll is a book, just not one we recognize. Book artists explore these ideas when they create books that at the end of their process don’t look like the second concept at all, Book as Object. This category intersects with element One a little bit -- Covers, pages, spine, words maybe, pictures maybe, story maybe, a particular book, paperback, hardback, no back at all. And third, we have Book as Text. Now that Kindle is removing the physicality of covers and paper pages, reading a book is coming back to reading text in a different vehicle. When we ‘discuss the text’ in English class, we don’t care about whether your copy is hardback or paperback – as long as it’s not abridged and you have THE TEXT, we’re fine.

The surplus meaning that Buzz was talking about comes when the book as text and the book as object work together to convey meaning. A less obscure example than the one Buzz gave us is Harry Potter’s textbook in Prisoner of Azkaban, the Monster Book of Monsters, a book about magical creatures that is itself a creature – attempting to pacify the book enough to read it is also to experience in the anger and power of the creatures portrayed in the book.

One of Buzz’s concepts as an artist is altering books – he tears out pages, removes text, adds elements like spindles to the middle of books. He feels bad about this process sometimes, as he grew up in a family of committed bibliophiles and is technically taking apart someone else’s piece of art. “The book came to me a finished product,” he says, “and I have unfinished it, yet when it leaves my hands as an artwork it is once again finished.” (On a side note, this reminded me of the quote from DUNE – “Arrakis practices the attitude of the knife – chopping off that which is incomplete and saying ‘It is complete because it ended here.”)

As I look at Spector’s work online, I can’t help drawing some connections between the art of physically altering the book and the less physical process of fanfiction and the way it alters the way we experience books. Can’t we say that attempting to make two characters love each other in a non-canonical way is the same thing as putting a knife through the text in an attempt to create “space”?

I’m not saying all fanfiction rips out pages and gouges prose. Certainly some of mine does. The Rose re-write, for instance, is akin to taking a tractor-trailer through Tolkien’s original concept and brutally running it down in the middle of the road, a blatant disrespect in some eyes. But some of it is a different type of book art, the kind that gently pries apart the spine of the book and gently attempts to wedge another page, another character, another scene inside, something that expands the experience of the text at the same time it alters it.

Fanfiction is also different from book art in another way – it’s far more accessible on the internet than most galleried art works. But does it loose something as Text when we don’t have the physically comforting prescence of the Book-Object to find it in? Is there a way to incorporate fanfiction as part of a Book-Object-as-Art-Experience?

An interesting thought.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Eine Kleine Schneemuisk -- A Little Bit of Snow Music.

I could write an actual blog post this week about my writing essays paper on relationships, which I am turning in today after what I think was a successful workshop and edit. I could talk about the unwilling and struggling readers we've been discussing in Pedagogy. I could talk about my book arts project and the typographer Eric Gill.

All of these involve work and some semblence of brain function. Instead, I'm going to give you a poem. I wrote it while I was at work the other day staring out the window to our courtyard and watching the drifting snow.


I think, if I stare out this window long enough

out into the whiteness,

out into the drifting snow

I'll see an angel there.

The wind wraps the snow around,

folds it up like origami and makes it slide around curves

that aren't there,

sewing up the seams on this sheet

with a needle made out of the icicles

hanging from the house eaves.

I think they're angel curves

that make the body being wrapped around,

the celestial being getting dressed for the day in another snow-white garment.

So maybe, if I stare long enough out of this window,

I'll catch a glimpse of what has never been before seen by man or woman --

One of God's elect in their underthings,

Another form to be caressed

Another body made cold by wind
and warm by love.

Friday, February 12, 2010

When Worlds Collide

In string theory, the universe is given as being composed on a gigantic membrane, a large flat surface that ripples, flows, and in some cases, runs into other membranes like it, causing the universes (yes, in string theory there are multiple universes) to collide. If you watch Fringe, you know that funky things happen when universes collide, like what happened in last week's episode, Jacksonville.

Yeah, I know, string theory. Something you probably thought would never be mentioned on this blog. But it's interesting stuff, though, really. If you are looking for a book, I recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Good stuff.

Back out in the real world, we don't necessarily have worlds colliding on a quantum level, but I at least have my internet life and my real life colliding quite a bit this week over the matter of reviews.

Normally I'm pretty open about the fact that I lead this 'other life' on the internet. I write a blog that I love to tell everyone about. I use Facebook. I Skype. I write a lot of fanfiction. And, perhaps more importantly about the fanfiction, I review other people's stuff. Not as much anymore as I probably should in order to remain an active and participating member of my community, but enough. And I start running into trouble when people from my real life outside the internet tell me they'd like me to read their stories and review them.

Okay, that's not the troubling part. The troubling part is when I read them and I don't like them.

It's one thing to get a review from someone you don't know saying "I didn't like this for reasons A, B, and C listed below" and another thing entirely when you get a review from someone you DO know saying "I don't like your story for reasons A, B, and C listed below." When someone asks you to read something in person you feel obligated to like it and say nice things.

Especially troubling is when the person you're reviewing for is older than you (so theoretically you should be defering to them in matters of style and expierience) and you have more experience in the online community. I've been writing (and publishing, the publishing-and-exposing-for-critique part is important) online for six years -- the person in question has been writing and publishing online, as far as I can tell, for two.

Let me explain for the fanfiction laypeople in the audience-- In the online community, because many participants lack what in the real world might be called credentials to show that they're experinced in the field and because the age of the participants ranges across such a wide continuum, legitimacy is defered to those members of the community who have been participating the longest. I've been writing for six years. I have well over three hundred reviews on those stories, with several of them having a chapter to review ratio of 1 to 20. Chapter to review ratios mean that not only have a lot of people read it, but a lot of people have liked it enough to review. It's one thing to have a hundred chapters and six hundred reviews -- that's six reviews a chapter. Nothing special. It's another thing to have twelve chapters and 150 reviews. That's twelve reviews a chapter, a much more respectable number. The LOTR rewrite is averaging seven or eight reviews a chapter, not surprising given that the fandom is large and the original population has moved on to writing and reviewing other things.

Ergo, six years of writing fanfic and review ratios like that give me...well, I don't know, something like a bachelor's degree, maybe even a master's degree equivalent in fanfiction. At least that's what I like to think of it as.

And so we're at a bit of an impass. I'm supposed to defer to her in real life, but in online life, she should be defering to me. Meaning it's going to be hard for her to take my critique and it's going to be hard for me to give it. I don't want to write a long and disinterested review because for reasons of online etiquette no one gives those disinterested reviews and for reasons of proximity I don't want to tell her flat out that I didn't like it because then she can come up to me in person and say "Why?"

I'm also having the same problem not with fanfiction but with editing and workshopping we're supposed to be doing for my Writing Essays course. This week we turned in copies of our essays to our workshop groups and this afternoon we'll be getting together to discuss revisions. There are three other people in my group.

I had no problem finishing and editing two of the essays.

The third was a disaster. Okay, maybe I'm overstating a little bit. The first two were funny, relatable. The third was...an essay. We had a topic, and Essayist Number Three wrote about his topic. It was neither funny nor engaging nor even very well written. It was words on a page, and they weren't even cleverly placed. And I don't know how I'm going to tell him that in workshop today after I'm in raptures about the other two essays.

Anyway, we'll report back this afternoon and tell you how it went. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to type up my notes to my online/real-life freind and see how rocky that road gets. Maybe worlds colliding won't have to be a diaster after all.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Under a Snow-Tipped Maple tree, the Village Printshop stands...

Say, that title line ain't half bad.

Writing news has been a little thin on the ground lately. I thought I’d maybe post one of the essays I’ve had to write for Writing Essays, but as those are neither indicative of a great breakthrough of any kind nor indeed very good, I felt I’d be shortchanging you. So I guess I’ll talk about my book arts project, which is to illustrate a fable, as some of you already know. I’ve chosen a rather obscure one from the writings of a Jewish author named Berechiah ben Natronai, ha-Nakdan. Task one – find and adapt fable. Done!

A dove saw flax being sown in a field, flew to the rest of the birds and said "Sisters, please come and eat the flax seed with me. If we do not eat it now, the flax will grow tall and the farmer will use it to make nets to trap us in." But the other birds ignored her, saying, "We have already eaten one meal today -- we do not need another."

However, the other doves listened, went to the field, and ate the flax, though they were not numbered enough to eat it all. When the time came after the harvesting, the doves stayed inside while the rest of the birds were snared in the nets the farmer had made from the flax.

Be careful whose counsel you discredit today -- it may be of more use to you tomorrow.


Task two is slightly harder – using the resources at our disposal at the Hill Manuscript Museum and library (HMML or Himmel, as it’s pronounced here on campus), find a 19th or 20th book artist (lithographer, typographer, engraver, fine press printer, etc) and emulate their style to illustrate your fable. I’ve chosen Eric Gill, the guy responsible for Gill Sans:

Perpetua:

And the Golden Cockerel Bible, which is the example I’m choosing to base my fable illustrations on. I actually got to handle one of these bibles, which, according to the Christie’s website, has a going auction value of a little over eight thousand pounds, or sixteen thousand dollars.

And I got to hold one.

I don't get to say this often without sounding like crazy, but I love the HMML.






Beautiful, beautiful stuff. So this is what the mock-up looks like right now, with Gill's characteristic 'inhabited capital' filled with my sower. That's the little guy underneath. I like him a lot. I think his name is Ezra. Or Schmul. Something Hebraic and nifty.




So that's my life at the moment. Lots of books, lots of engravings, lots of bad sketches, lots of printing and typesetting. Hey, a girl's got to do something with a foot and a half of snow on the ground.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Warning, This Content May Not Be Suitable for Young Adults

Yeah, I put that as my title in a joking sort of way, but I'm actually serious. Some of this content may not be appropriate for young adults. I'd hide it behind a cut or something like you can do on LiveJournal, but Blogger has its limitations, and that's one of them.

So I'll write it again in LARGE RED LETTERS.


SOME OF THE ISSUES ADDRESSED IN THIS BLOGPOST MAY NOT QUALIFY FOR A PG13 RATING.


Okay, best I can do. Anyway. It's my job both as an academic and as a member of the fanfiction writing community who takes her appropriative art form kind of seriously (as seriously as you can take fanfic, anyway) to question why my community does the things they do and what that says about its component members. You may remember my post on marginality a few days back.

No sooner had I written about why fanfiction is often used to involve or emphasize overlooked populations when this little gem crossed my LJ flist. (A flist, for those of you not familiar with the term, is a portmanteau of freind-list)





chichuri (chichuri) wrote in oliviaandpeter
Entry tags:fic
Fic: A Minor Adjustment (Olivia/Peter)
Fandom: Fringe
Characters/Pairing: Olivia, Peter, Olivia/Peter, male Olivia/Peter
Word Count: 3105 Rating: R
Summary: Olivia runs afoul of a pathogen that changes her from female
to male.
Warnings: Smut, some swearing.
Spoilers: Through Season 2.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fringe or its characters.
Author's Note: Written for Porn Battle IX.
Prompts used: genderswap, secret.


Given the reactions of the characters involved, this story should either be categorized as crackfic or as evidence that the Fringe team has become way too jaded. About a ton of thanks go to crazylittleelf , muselives , alamo_girl80 , and vagajammer for enabling me; without them this story never would have been finished.




Okay, so now you all know that yes, I follow the TV show FRINGE enough that I'm part of a group on LJ that ships Olivia/Peter (because come on, after last episode we all know even Walter ships O/P) and you also know that let's face it: fanfiction writers write some CRAZY shit. This is otherwise known as crackfic or crack!fic, i.e., writing you would do if you were on crack. Additionally, you also may have figured out that I'm crazy and liberal enough to give this fic half a chance. I only got about half-way through because I am not a slash shipper and as much as I support the gay rights movement, I don't want to hear about gay sex. Sorry. I have issues with heterosexual couples kissing in public, too, though, so I don't know what that says about me.



Anyway. The mere existence of things like this brings to my mind a lot of questions about fanfiction and the crazy people who propagate it. Olivia and Peter as a m/f pairing is something that is a completely and totally viable plot option within the premise of the show. As I've already mentioned, we even have a canon character rooting for the Olivia/ Peter ship to sail. So why go through the trouble of making Olivia turn male for the purposes of a story? Fringe is one fandom where, oddly enough, things like that might actually happen.


The obvious answer is that some teen girls (and some not so teen girls, for that matter) really like guy on guy sex. Don't ask me why, I'm not one of them. The more subtle and slightly less obvious answer is that fanfiction has always been a way to question the standards of heteronormative society (big word that i'm sure my Human Relations prof would be proud of me using) and this is one more way to do it, by physically changing the gender boundaries already placed on the characters to allow a heteronormative pairing (Olivia and Peter) to be made into something that can question the norm (Oliver and Peter.) Catherine Tosenberger in her 2008 article for Children's Literature magazine entitled "Homosexuality at the Online Hogwarts: Harry Potter Slash Fanfiction" brings in the work of several other authors on why slash is prevelent, saying



"It is unsurprising that most fandom scholar-ship presents slash as a potential
site for women to resist the dominant ideologies of patriarchal, heteronormative
culture. [Constance] Penley draws upon the work of Joanna Russ, as well as that of Patricia Frazer Lamb and Diana L. Veith, and discusses slash as a subversive act, wherein women can articulate a fantasy of equality between romantic partners that is difficult to achieve in heterosexual relationships (see "Brownian" 155–57, and
NASA/TREK 127–30)."

Never thought about questioning the heterosexual norm for reasons of equality, but hey, I guess it makes sense. (The rest of this article, by the way, is really interesting, and if you can get to an academic library that can get you an online copy through Project Muse or something, read the rest of it.) Tosenberger goes on to talk in the rest of her article about why Harry Potter fanfiction in particular is a great playground for authors intent on exploring thier identity through fanfiction, gender or otherwise, which is something that I've already explored in other writings.



In the course of my wanderings to make something substantial out of this find I discovered two things. One is the existence a term I'd come across before but never known the meaning of -- acafan. Tosenbeger identified herself at the end of her article as someone who participates in online fandom; like all statements of this nature, I wanted to find out more. A search of her name lead me to 'acafan'. The term can be hyphenated (aca-fan) and appears most significantly in the title of Henry Jenkins' Blog "Confessions of an Aca-Fan." Henry Jenkins, whose work was only some of the source material I used for my fanfiction paper, is an academic at USC currently teaching a course on participatory culture, and the term he uses in his blog title comes from the abbreviated term 'academic fan' an academic who both identifies themself as a member of the online participatory culture community (as either a contributor or observer) and a mainstream academic involved with researching appropriatly mainstream things. (Or teaching about non-mainstream things, as Jenkins' case may be.)



Does this make me an acafan? I consider myself academic, and I consider much of the fanfiction writing I do now to be based in an academically sourced ethos (observe the five books I checked out today on medieval poetry and courtly love for research on where to begin an interesting cultural exercise I'm inserting into the middle of my LOTR fanfic reboot.)



The other discovery (more of a pet peeve, actually) is why my fanfiction, as a perpetuation of the heteronormative discourse, isn't worthy of scholarly articles. Can't I explore my sexuality too and have people write about it? I know that's what I used fanfiction for in middle and high school. It's something I'm revisiting as I revisit this LOTR story that occupied most of my time as a fanfic writer then, too. Two massive (and may I say for the fifteen year old version of me, very racy) sex scenes? Probably not going to be in this version. At least the first one isn't. The second one is going to be toned down on account of a lot of things, not the least of which is me paying more attention to the ROTK timeline.

So that's my two cents worth of research that I'm not getting a grade for. Like so much other research in my life at the moment, unfortunately. But hey, as my pedagogy class is teaching me, the self-motivated learning is the kind you get the most from, so maybe this blog thing might be beneficial after all...