ahorbinski | Entries tagged with fandom

Through the OTW, I spoke to Oakland Tribune writer Angela Hill about fanfiction two weeks ago, and her article, quoting me and a few other OTW and Bay Area people, went live on January 16: "Fan fiction: A world where Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes could meet."

(I should note that my stories about Irene Adler are more about allowing her to continue being awesome than making her awesome, because as we all know, she's already awesome.)

* I was interviewed by the Burlington County Times during the midnight release party for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in 2000. Good times.

Anna Wilson, with whom I am tangentially acquainted, has a great post on where the first duty of the historian lies, RPF, Procopius, and me, over at The Society of the Friends of the Text:

I like the insistence on the tension between our felt responsibility to those we are writing about, and to those we are writing for. I like that poking at that tension forces self-scrutiny, forces me to ask myself who, or what, my work is for, after all: other postgraduate scholars? Undergraduate students? Myself? Where does my loyalty lie? Asking the same question of other historians can often generate surprising moments of understanding that help separate personal context from historiographical content, or at least come to a higher level of understanding about their interrelation (I felt a great “OH!” moment when I read, in Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, that Charles Homer Haskins, a historian of medieval government and university institutions, worked for the CIA).

I'm not sure what to say to this, other than that it's a crunchy post that bears repeated cogitation. Personally, while I find myself frequently sympathizing deeply with my research subjects, my first sense of responsibility always lies, fairly equally, with both the present and the future--everything I write, I hope will carry forward to posterity as well as speak to the present moment. It's a large ambition, but a true one, and for that I make no apology.

I can feel myself teetering on the abyss that yawns beneath all aca-bloggers, namely, not having enough bloody time. So while I get posts together on the symposium on Japanese politics I attended last week and the documentary Autumn Gem, which I saw today and which is very good, have some links from the current issue of Transformative Works and Cultures. Disclaimer: I know all three of these authors personally (which is why I'm linking to them).

Mikhail Koulikov has a piece on "Fighting the fan sub war: Conflicts between media rights holders and unauthorized creator/distributor networks."

sasha_feather has a piece on "From the edges to the center: Disability, Battlestar Galactica, and fan fiction."

And Alex Leavitt has a website review of Inside Scanlation.