bitterfig

The library in Bucktown got in a whole bunch of volumes of the Natsuki Takaya manga Fruits Basket so I’ve been reading them for the past few days.  It really is an excellent series though sometimes it does get a too cutesy and overblown for my tastes.  It really does an effective job of illustrating the way unconditional love can make a difference in people’s lives and also what a risk it can be to allow your self to love and be loved. 

 

In a way it kind of makes me ashamed of my own writing which is so focused on cruelty, repeated patterns of abuse, and succumbing to hopelessness.  A particularly vivid illustration of this is the Fruits Basket fan fiction pieces I’ve written, which in essence are almost diametrically opposed to the actual series.  While Natsuki Takaya focuses on characters changing, growing and getting over their damage my writing is all about damage, bad memories, and being beaten down.

 

I think this is of special concern to me because of a class I took about two weeks ago.  It was called “Healing Minds, Healing Memories” and was taught by a co-worker of mine who’s big into alternative healing and has studied in a couple different shamanistic traditions.  The class basically dealt with making painful memories and disturbing dreams more bearable by re-imagining them, changing things around to make them less upsetting.  

 

In a way, it sort of reminded me of my writing process which usually starts with a dream or a memory which I proceed to fuck with.  I thought this was fitting, because in a way I view writing almost as a form of prayer or spell-craft but if that’s the case, what kind of spells am I casting? 

 

Not very good ones. 

 

It’s not that I think writing is literally magic, that if I write something it will come true.  I do however think that if you go to the trouble of envisioning something as vividly as possible, working through it step by step and committing it to paper it seems real to you.  Wouldn’t it be better for me to be imagining positive things, situations where people open up, accept themselves, gain confidence, overcome adversary and connect with others? 

 

Of course there is a part of me that honestly believes I only have so much control over what I write—often stories and ideas take on a life of their own and go in a completely different direction than planned. 

I just finished reading Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume 1 is about the formation of a sort of Victorian era superhero team made up of characters from thrillers of the period- Mina Murray from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Captain Nemo from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Haggard’s African adventurer Allan Quartermain. While the series parodies (and sometimes seems to parrot) British Empire xenophobia, racism and sexism of the time for the most part it’s a straight forward adventure comic except for a prose story at the end which provides the back Quartermain’s opium addiction (which he is in the thralls of when his character is first introduced.) In this story, under the influence of a mystical, time and space bending drug Quartermain encounters H. G Wells’ Time Traveler and H.P Lovecraft character Randolph Carter (as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter who I didn’t recognize, having never read any of Burrough’ book). This prose story is full of Alan Moore weirdness and suggests that the crossover potential within the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Universe might just be limitless.

This limitlessness comes to fruition in Black Dossier. Set in the late 1950’s it follows the still youthful Allan Quartermain and Mina Murray as they retrieve a book called the Black Dossier that documents the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s history over the centries. Volume 1 was a comic book with a single prose chapter that mimicked adventure stories of the period Black Dossier is made up mostly of the sort of pseudo-ephemera documents that began each chapter of Watchmen. These documents—chapters from novels, 1984 retold as a Tijuana Bible, postcards, official reports, a Shakespeare folio and a section in 3D-- basically set forth the history of a parallel world where pretty much everything Alan Moore ever read seems to exist all at once. It’s almost as if Moore is striving to do for pulp/pop fiction what Joyce did for literature in Ulysses. Maybe he succeeds too well, because as with Ulysses, 90% of the references are probably going to be lost on the casual reader. I recognized a few of Moore’s allusions—Metropolis, James Bond (not a favorable portrait to my delight), Shakespeare, Jack Kerouac, the gender shifting and immortal Orlando, Fanny Hill, O’Brien and Big Brother of 1984 but missed even more as I’m not familiar British boy’s adventure books, the meta-verse of Michael Moorcock. The Avengers (as in Emma Peel not Iron Man) or fictitious French arch-criminals (to name just a few of the references that were significant enough to the plot that I had to look them up—who knows how many more were made in passing that I just skipped over).

I can’t say I would really rank either book of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in what I consider Alan Moore’s best works (Watchmen, early Swamp Thing, V For Vendetta, Promethea, and From Hell) but reading them has given me more ideas. One of the thing I find really interesting about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it’s a legitimate derivative work. It’s fan fiction in that it uses familiar characters yet it places them in an original context beyond the novels they originally appeared in. And of course since all the works referenced are public domain, it’s perfectly legal.

Almost makes me think it would be interesting to do some sort of a feminist revisionist crossover based on some of the books that were important to me when I was young. The titles that immediately come to mind are Little Women, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series and L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. Just imagine what could happen if mega-brats Amy March, Nellie Olsen and Jellia Jamb all joined forces in a sort of Legion of Obstinate Schoolgirls.

Another interesting idea would be to bring together some of the female characters from the novels I had to read in high school. Even when I was fifteen with no knowledge or understanding of feminism I could tell there was something wrong with the curriculum. All the books and plays we read seemed to be by and about men. The Shakespear plays we read were Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar. Merchant of Venice at least had Portia who uses her wits to save her fiancé’s ass of course she has to pose as a man to do it and the fact that she ends up making a Jewish character convert of die sort of soured the whole thing for me. On the plus side novels like A Separate Peace, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men kind of put the idea of homoerotic subtext into my nasty little mind but still it always bothered me that women tended to be passive love interests, victims or just plain nuts. I think the only novels by women we read were Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar In a Sieve and Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth both of which painted infinately depressing pictures of the lives women in India and China. Equally down-trodden was the heroine of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, one of the few books I remember that had a woman as a main character.

It would be sort of cool to write a story with zombie versions of Tess, Ophelia, those pathological schoolgirls from the Crucible, and ass-kicking versions the long-suffering Rukmani of Nectar in a Sieve and O-Lan from The Good Earth.

Thursday it was sunny and forty degrees and it seemed very much like spring was on the way but this morning everything is blanketed in snow. 

 

Things are moving along with my little workplace insurrection.  The letter I wrote has been signed by about 20 Front End Team Members.  It’s also been read by some members of store leadership who my co-conspirator and I met with them for quite a while on Monday.  They’re talking about putting together some kind of a forum to address the issues and figure out solutions. 

 

I’ve been off work for the past two days but I talked to my co-conspirator yesterday and got an update.  I’m back to work today and it may be rough.  The letter addresses the dismissiveness, lack of accountability and atmosphere of intimidation created by Front End Team Leadership and apparently they have become aware of what’s going on so there may be some kind of a reaction from them—it could be anything from hurt feelings to outright hostility to complete denial—I’ll have to take it as it comes. 

 

Whatever happens I’m glad I did this.  Even though this situation has created a lot of stress for me it’s worth it to have actually done something.  I’ve also gotten a great deal of positive support from my co-workers.  So much so that I feel sort of like Jayne Cobb in the “Jayneville” episode of Firefly.  For those of you not familiar with the series, Jayne is a mercenary and a thief who returns to a planet where he’d bungled a robbery several years to discover that he’s become a hero.  To escape the authorities, he’d had to unload his loot over an impoverished settlement and the locals have re-named the place Jayneville, erected a statue to him and sing folk songs in his honor. 

 

I feel sort of like that. Like I've blundered my way into a position of leadership and respect.  Not that anyone is singing folk songs about me, but they seem to think I did something extraordinary by writing a three page letter which seems odd to me as writing is basically something I enjoy and do with a certain amount of ease.  I can’t say it’s not work but it’s a kind of work that I love doing as opposed to the kinds of work I have to do.

 

I'll be observing the strike against Live Journal and only posting on my Insane Journal accounts. I haven't been gotten involved in the most recent LJ controversies the way I was in last years forays. I think I've just burned out and of course at the moment my activist type energy is concentrated in fermenting revolution at my workplace.

Which brings us to the following anecdote- Latin can be dangerous.

I talked to my parents on the phone and they were interested in seeing The Letter so I said I'd e-mail it to them. Because The Letter deals with accountability and the misuse of power, I have it saved on my computer as a file titled "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes," or “Who Watches the Watchmen”. This was actually the quote I chose to go beside my picture in my senior yearbook in High School so it’s sort of an in-joke with me, a shout out to the fat, outspoken and very brave young woman I used to be. So The Letter is titled "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.” Also saved on my hard-drive a There Will Be Blood Daniel Plainview/Eli Sunday slash fic featuring delirium tremors, rough, scripture quoting, naughty Daddy role-play and rough, dubiously consensual hate!sex. This file is entitled “Quid Pro Quo.”

So I see a title that starts with Q and has a bunch of words I don’t really understand and click to attach it.

Needless to say, I came this close to e-mailing my parents the slash story by accident.

That would have been very, very awkward.

Last night I watched (for the second time) Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Peeping Tom tells the story of Mark (Carl Boehm), a shy filmmaker who commits a series of gristly murders, filming his victims as they die. Made in 1960, the film pre-dates Hitchcock’s Psycho and (for better or for worse) can be seen as one of the first slasher/serial killer movies. While very controversial in its day, Peeping Tom would probably get a PG rating today-- it’s more psychological than gore-iffic—and in my mind more effective than many of the more graphic films that followed it. One of the things I found most interesting about Peeping Tom is the way it captures the very fine line between art and pathology.

The killer, Mark, has a complex relationship the camera. As a child, his psychologist father filmed him constantly and subjected him to “scientific experiments”, essentially abuse, to provide him with data on his studies of fear on the nervous system. I found myself fascinated by a scene where Mark shows his downstairs neighbor, Helen, the films his father made of him as a child. Watching the footage of the little boy being tormented by bright lights and a lizard thrown in his bed, Helen becomes increasingly confused and anxious. At which point Mark begins to film her. It’s an odd mirror within a mirror moment where he’s using her reaction to his trauma to fuel his compulsive “art”.

In a way it reminded me of what I do as a writer. I feel like my stories and even my journaling involves dredging up my worst and most painful experiences (in my fiction, these are often metaphorical rather than literal, exaggerated and disguised versions of my experiences) and seeing how people respond to them.

I am, in my personal life very shy but I’ve always felt that my writing is to an extent fueled by exhibitionistic tendencies. I often quote Anne Sexton’s poem Mercy for the Greedy where she writes “My friend, my friend, I was born doing reference work in sin and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue's wrangle, the world's pottage, the rat's star.” Because I was raised to believe that there is something wrong with seeking attention, I feel a little ashamed about writing. It always felt like a transgressive act to me. I started writing at 14 but I was a college student before I really dared to show my writing to others. Even today, at 36, I have very mixed feelings about my art. I’ve worked very hard to be able to write freely about things that I would rather keep to myself, including aspects of my sexuality and painful experiences. Still, I can’t help but wonder if, like Mark, by engaging these dangerous parts of myself I’m feeding them, giving them power. 

Despite a certain amount of anxiety incurred by actually eating foods that contain more than 2 grams of fat per serving I’ve managed to persist in my efforts to eat more sanely. It’s actually rather exciting, being able to eat things that would I would have considered taboo a few weeks ago. Indian food! Pad Thai! Chocolate (for the first time since X-mas 2006 when I was only able to eat it because I was drunk off my ass)! Even though I’m experimenting with forbidden foods I am being very careful to stay within the daily caloric boundaries for maintaining my weight and my daily fat intake is also still on the low side (20 to 25% of my calories whereas 1/3 is the recommended intake)

Maybe because I’ve been devoting a lot of mental energy to changing my eating habits I have hardly written at all since my Birthday, only one or two drabbles. Something else I’m trying not to worry too much about. It’s hard for me to back away from my writing and give new ideas time to develop because I always feel like if I’m not constantly engrossed in a project I’m going to lose whatever it is I hope I have but I think that when I take this slower I do better work. I have to try and have a bit more faith in whatever abilities I have.

Most nights I remember my dreams, so I’m used to carrying strange images away from a night’s sleep however the last couple days have been particularly bizarre. Two nights ago I had a dream that dinosaurs got loose in the Susquehanna river valley where I grew up and where my parents still live. To contain the threat, the government covered the whole area from Portlandville to Cooperstown* with a bio-dome that they released a carcinogenic gas into. My parents house, which is on a hill top overlooking the river, was actually outside of the bio-sphere and at the end of the dream the dinosaurs tore through the dome and the fences and I crawled through and started climbing up the hill towards home. Then last night an even odder dream that managed to encompass sexuality, race and religion. Unfortunately I really can’t describe adequately without providing a huge amount of background on the church I went to when I was growing up, my father’s personal experiences with school integration as a young man, the writings of Eldridge Cleaver, my thoughts on bi-sexuality, ragtime and the Cosby Show as well as my mother’s obsession with John Wesley (the founder of Methodism).

*Note to poultrygeist99 and madjh, I’m afraid your parent’s house was just about at ground zero as the dinosaurs came from an area roughly equivalent to the Field of Dreams baseball camp.

To celebrate their 40th Anniversary The Museum of Contemporary Art is waiving admission for 40 days between September 29 and November 14.  There’s an exhibit going on right now called Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 that I’ve been wanting get to and since I wasn’t working either of my jobs yesterday I decided to go see it while it was still free. 

 

I have to admit I’m a bit of a Philistine when it comes to Contemporary Art.  To me, about 90% of it seems like a con.  In fact my favorite Contemporary Artists are the ones like Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol who sort of acknowledge that they’re hacks.  Still, amidst the usual meaninglessly esoteric video and installation pieces there was some genuinely neat stuff in the show. 

 

My favorite pieces were in the area dedicated to artists/musicians from the Detroit area (the show was sort of divvied by geography—New York, L.A., Europe, Detroit, etc).  The Destroy All Monsters Collective, which is both a noise rock band and a group of artists made up of Mike Kelley (probably best known for the cover of the Sonic Youth album Dirty), Carey Loren and Jim Shaw (pop noir artist Niagara is also affiliated) had series of paintings modeled on sideshow banners and civic pride murals depicting the Detroit’s pop culture icons from White Panther leader John Sinclair to James Brown to Soup Sales to George “The Animal” Steele and Iggy Pop.

 

I also was intrigued by a video installation titled “The Spirit Girls: A Western Song” by Marnie Weber.   It was a film of about 24 minutes that followed a group of white faced women in 19^th century gingham dresses and straw hats who moved through a surreal and theatrical countryside and an old west type town.  The imagery was deeply seeped in Americana— farm animals, hobos, a Barnum and Bailey style circus, musicians playing the banjo and the saw.  According to the blurb outside the instillation, “The Spirit Girls” was about an imaginary all-female band whose members all died at the same time and was also inspired by the 19^th century Spiritualist movement. 

 

This really struck a chord with me as I spent many years obsessively collecting the recordings of all-female and female dominated bands in all musical genres and also because it gave me some ideas of what I want to be doing with my writing.  I’ve resolved to return to original writing and I’m interested in writing about the area I come from, the strange sense I’ve always had that a history of prosperity and significance existed simultaneously with a desolate present. 

 

Because of my parent’s interest in history and my own reading, I was always aware that the fallen down places along the roads once meant something, that the rickety old people they dragged us to see came from families that had at one time had mattered.  When I was growing up the past always seemed more important than the present

 

My parents were interested in agricultural history and the daily lives of ordinary people in the 19^th century, especially involving the hops trade in our area.  The areas of history that attracted me were of a different kind.  I paid attention when Edith Wharton mentioned familiar places in her novels like the train station in Utica or the seedy village of Richfield Springs which had apparently once been a summer destination for smart New Yorkers.  I was also fascinated by the idea that the very narrow-minded world I inhabited for so long had once been teeming with religious radicals.  It was in Upstate New York that Joseph Smith supposedly found the golden tablets on which the book of Mormon was written.  Of course that was outside Rochester, a couple of hours away.  Closer to home Ann Lee founded the Shakers, a sect that practiced celibacy but who would dance with abandon in services that sound almost like voodoo rituals and be processed by the spirits of Indians.  Then there was the Oneida colony, a utopian community founded before the Civil War that communal society that practiced a form of “complex” or group marriage. 

 

In the 1960’s where was a similar influx of radical ideas into the area but by the time I came along it had more or less dwindled into a few strange recluses raising sheep in the hills around Cherry Valley.

 

It’s a landscape I’ve always wanted to capture in fiction though I haven’t tried since I got away from it.  In a way “The Spirit Girls” was almost like a glimpse of the kind of thing I’d like to do, except with an actual narrative.

The Spirit Girls

A couple of weeks ago when I was working at the market a woman wearing a NaNoWriMo 2007 t-shirt came through my line and we ended up talking a little about National Novel Writing Month.  She’d participated five times and says that Chicago has a very close knit group of NaNoWriMo writers.  Since then I’ve been mulling over the idea of participating, trying to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. 

 

I don’t doubt I could do it if I set my mind to it.  As a writer I’ve always been distinguished not so much by my brilliance as by my willingness to do the daily grunt work involved necessary to see a story through.  I have a few ideas of what I’d like to write, a piece drawn from my own life, and I think participating in NaNoWriMo would be a good way for me to get back into original writing, which I’ve been neglecting of late in favor of fan writing.   

 

Still, I don’t think I’m going to participate for a couple of reasons.  First, writing on the scale involved would mean putting most of my time and energy into a task that would isolate me.  Secondly, with Thanksgiving coming things are going to get crazy at the market and I’m going to be stressed and exhausted.  Much as I’d like to do NaNoWriMo I think it might serve me better to focus what energies I have elsewhere.  Much as I hate job hunting, it’s something need to start doing in earnest. 

 

As far as my writing goes, instead of working on a novel I’m going to set two goals for myself in the month of November.  I’m going to try to do at least one piece for the community journalism web-site I’ve been in contact with and I’m going to try and write at least one strong, original  story incase I reapply for the creative writing Master’s program at Columbia College next year.  I think writing for the journalism site will be good because it’s something that will make me get out and maybe talk to people instead of focusing inward as working on a novel would cause me to do.  At the same time I do want to start devote some time to original writing.  I enjoy fan writing and I’ve learned a lot doing it but I think to a degree I use it as smoke and mirrors, hiding behind other people’s characters and storylines, keeping myself at arms length from my themes.  There are stories that only I can tell and I need to face them directly even though it’ll be a painful process.

For some reason I can not begin to fathom I was paid on September 29, then one week later (October 5) got a pay check for one week.  I will get my next check on September 19.  I can’t figure out if this is a good thing (getting a check after only one week) or a bad thing (living two weeks on a one week paycheck—though of course I still had part of the last paycheck left over.)  Either way it messes up my budgeting, which I have a certain way that doesn’t account for random one week pay periods.

 

On Friday I went to Andersonville (a neighborhood quite a ways to the northeast of where I live) to meet with one of the editors of a website interested in local journalism.  They’d contacted me back in August and I submitted a piece to them last month, an article about the Bucktown Arts Festival adapted from my journal.  They seemed interested in having me do more stuff for them but I sort of wanted to find out more about the site and what they were looking for just because it seemed rather sports heavy and also because with my two jobs I’m probably not going to be able to do articles very often. 

 

I got an idea of what the website is after—community based journalism about events that aren’t really being covered by larger news sources.  The editor said that it would be okay for me to write for them where I could, that they wouldn’t require weekly pieces or anything like that.  It’s okay to only write for them when something I’m interested in comes up and I have the time

 

They don’t pay, so I really don’t have the luxury of going out of my way to cover things for them but I would like to do some writing for the site.  It’s a good excuse to talk to people and since a lot of my co-workers at the market are artists, musicians or activists of various kinds it could also give me an opportunity to help them out with a bit of publicity. 

 

The meeting went well, but directly before it I had a rather upsetting (at least to me) incident.  The editor I was meeting was going to be out of the office and couldn’t get back till 3:30 p.m. and because the buzzer was broken he asked me to meet him outside.  I showed up early as usual and was standing by the door reading Mishama and minding my own business when a woman dragging along a huge suitcase came up and started talking at me. 

 

I really would have preferred to have kept reading my nice little book about fascism and homosexuality but I thought it would be simple common courtesy, one human being to another, to at least acknowledge this woman was standing there talking and not just tune her out or tell her to please fuck off.  So she spent about five minutes going on about how she was an educated woman and a word processing specialist and her sister and a EKG machine and how she was in an intensive outpatient program.  Eventually she finally got to the part where she asked for money.  I didn’t have any cash on me so I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash.”  She snapped back, “I’m sorry you wasted my time.”   So much for human courtesy, I guess the proper etiquette would have been to ignore her or tell her to go away. 

 

The office where I had my meeting was right next to the Andersonville Brown Elephant.  Brown Elephant’s are a series of thrift shops in Chicago run by the Howard Brown Heath Center, a GLBT health organization, so after my meeting I went in and looked around.  I didn’t really find anything I liked.  There was a book of zodiac images by the retro hipster artist Shag I wouldn’t have minded getting but it was fifty cents and the credit card limit was $10 and I really wasn’t lying when I told the lady I didn’t have any cash.  When I was there, it was mostly quite but when I was about to leave this old Billy Bragg song “Richard” started playing really loud. 

 

This is a song that fascinated me when I was in college because it seems to precise and detailed, as if it must be talking about an actual situation but I never could figure out what that situation was.  Like an overheard fragment of conversation, a window into someone’s life but you have no idea what you’re looking at.  I remember I actually wrote a story based on this song, trying to create a context for the lyrics. 

 

Hearing it again, echoing in the warehouse space of the Brown Elephant was a sort of odd experience.  It was so familiar and yet it’s been years since I’d listened to it.  I’d always been so focused on the lyrics I never realized that Billy Bragg does a lot of really strange things with his voice during the song, there are some very odd vocal inflections going on not to mention harsh guitar riffs.  Still, it’s the lyrics that really get to me.  My favorite lines-- “You helped me make this bed, but you won’t help me sleep in it.”  “Our Titanic love affair sails on the morning tide.” and “Do you think I only love you ‘cuz you sleep with other boys?” 

 

 

Maybe because I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind again last week, when I heard the song this time the line about sleeping with other boys sort of reminded me of how Joel thinks that Clementine is unfaithful and promiscuous.  She denies it and both times I’ve watched the film I found myself believing her.  It always seemed to me like part of his fantasy of her as someone free in ways he will never be and also as someone he can be resentful towards. 

I don’t usually write about issues related to my fan fiction and participation in the world of fandom on this journal.  It’s always dealt more with my personal life but there’s been a certain overlap lately.  Basically, the recent controversy about Livejournals suspension of users for posting sexually explicit fan art is making me take a look at the role fandom has come to play in my life and what my shadow career as a fan fiction writer means to me.

 

I’ve been closely following several communities related to the controversy and a few days ago I came across an article called “The Terrible Secret of Livejournal” by Matthew Skala.   Written in a tone of authority, this essay basically said that fandom material is against the law to start with and that writers and artists should be glad that Livejournal and their parent company Six Apart allow it and therefore should not give them grief.  That any kind of sexually explicit material involving minor characters is illegal to create or possess and that that’s the law and anyone who thinks otherwise is “confusing one’s wishes with the law.”  And also all the normal people out there think people who write fan fiction and draw fan art are creepy perverts anyways.   

 

For all the unwavering certainty with which it is written, many of Skala’s points can be refuted.  I know I’ve seen documentation that fan fiction and fan art are not against the law so long as their source is acknowledged and they aren’t used for commercial purposes.  Further, the statement that any sexually explicit work concerning underage characters (let me stress, not actors or actual people but characters) can be considered child pornography can’t be true either.  .  I’m no expert of pornography, but in my small collection there’s a graphic novel called The Young Witches, by Solana Lopez.  It involves schoolgirls who are definitely under 18 yet as far as I know The Young Witches, published by the Seattle passed Eros Comix has been in print and avalaible to the public since 1993.  You can get it on amazon.com.   

 

But enough on the legalities.  My brother’s the lawyer in our family.  I’m the basketcase.  This isn’t about the law, it’s about me feeling crummy about myself as usual. 

 

In “The Terrible Secret of Livejournal” Skala uses words like “delusional”, “whining” and “irrational” and “unreasonable” to describe any sort of questioning of or speaking out against the suspensions and censorship.  Skala apparently isn’t the only one who feels this way.  I’ve seen his opinion mirrored, to a lesser degree, in several personal journals.  Increasingly over the past few days, I’ve felt stupid and hysterical for being so upset by Livejournals actions and for allowing myself to get so bogged down in the controversy.  I can’t help wondering why I’m taking all this so personally.  I really wonder if I’ve become too invested in my on-line persona and my fan fiction writing. 

 

Intellectually, fan fiction is exactly the thing that fascinates me.  I’ve always been interested in the idea twisted retellings, Snow White or the Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the witch.  Jayne Eyre as seen by the madwoman in the attic, Gone With the Wind through the eyes of the slave (here I refer to Alice Randall’s controversial novel The Wind Done Gone).  Further I’m also interested in the way people interact with text, incorporating the stories they consume into their own story.  In my dreams, there are frequent appearances by characters from the television series Charmed and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  It’s almost as if characters take root in each person’s subconscious, enter into their dreams.  When I was growing up, my sister and I made paper dolls based on every superhero we knew of, hundreds of them each only and inch tall.  With these characters we created elaborate on-going stories of our own.  In a way, I see fan fiction as a grown up version of our childhood games.  A form of what Diane Ackerman would call “deep play”. 

 

And that’s just the pseudo-intellectual side of my brain.  Emotionally, fan fiction has provided me with something I never had before as a writer-- an audience.  Making the decision to put my work forward before this audience hasn’t been easy and I’ve gotten a couple devastating smack downs since I posted my first story back in April of 2006 but mainly it’s been a really positive experience for me to know people are reading and enjoying the stuff I write.  When I went to my parents in New York last week I was looking through my old papers.  There was so much there-- whole novels, an 18 year olds attempt at metaphysical fantasy ala Sandman, dozens and dozens of stores written between the ages of 14 and 32.  Most of it’s never been read.  Most of it’s withered on the vine. 

 

Maybe it’s no wonder I take this whole thing too personally.  I haven’t gotten a whole lot of positive reinforcement in my life.

 

Fan Fiction posted on the internet isn’t supposed to have any value.  It’s supposed to be a hobby at best, a sick obsession at worst.  It’s amateur, illegitimate, throw away.  But didn’t a lot of things with value start out that way?  Things like comic strips and later comic books, the first musical recordings?  Maybe someday the value of the kind of writing I’ve been doing on-line will be evident to the people Matthew Skala calls “John and Mary Whitebread”.  Until then I have to go by my own, unvalidated belief that it has value which for me is the hardest thing in the world.  Other people’s opinions have always meant a great deal to me.  I don’t want anyone to think I’m annoying or out of line.  It makes me sick to think that somewhere someone thinks I’m pathetic or stupid.  How do you believe yourself and not all the people out there who really know what they’re talking about?

P.S. My icon for this post is Luna Lovegood because I think I need to start modeling myself on her.