Because of the Times

makingfists:

It’s like this…

You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.

But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.

And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.

But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.

Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.

Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.

And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.

Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.

Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”

You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable. 

You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow. 

But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.

And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.

It’s like the world clicking into place. 

And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.

welcometotheworldofiris: werard-gay: daniellatara: restores my faith in humanity oh my fucking god awesome people are awesome

welcometotheworldofiris:

werard-gay:

daniellatara:

restores my faith in humanity

oh my fucking god

awesome people are awesome

canon vs interpretation – subtext is subjective – on enjolras and asexuality

potato-moose:

This is an expansion on this because apparently I have Very Many Feelings about this and I got verbose.

a) Enjolras being asexual is not Irrefutable Canon Truth

b) Even if it were, the whole point of fanworks is to derive something new from the source material

c) Being involved in fandom and/or shipping does not equal not appreciating a character on their own merits and/or not knowing the source material

d) Can we please be respectful of different ways that one can be a fan of something and how they choose to express it? That’d be grand.

(bearpicking helped, because she does that, because she’s the actualfax best there is.)

THIS IS REALLY LONG. Sorry I’m not sorry.

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"Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision."

-

President Obama, in an interview with Rolling Stone, when asked about Paul Ryan’s “obsession” with Rand. source (via shortformblog)

#burn unit

(via charethcutestory)

I've never known what's good for me.: downtothelastbullet: tywinning asked you: 2012-08-09 03:37 As a... 

downtothelastbullet:

tywinning asked you:
2012-08-09 03:37

As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?

I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.

Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else.  Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.”  He was the original Gary Stu).  Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic.  In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck.  Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot—although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF—and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic.  Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school.  And Spenser!  Don’t even get me started on Spenser.

Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion.  Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome.  (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.)  People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of?  There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man!  (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)

I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship—barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real—and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history.  First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place.  And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together).  And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn.  And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you.  Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing.  And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work—to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time.  A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well). 

What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later.  Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them.  If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.

I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more.  I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not—and I know how snobbish this sounds—particularly well-written.  That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”—there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose.  That’s why fic is awesome—it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling.  But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing.  There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago. 

But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists.  Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist.  (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)

First-hand Accounts of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds

First-hand Accounts of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds

harrypotterconfessions: graphic submitted by sevsnapealways And thus, the entire field of literary criticism was defeated.

harrypotterconfessions:

graphic submitted by sevsnapealways

And thus, the entire field of literary criticism was defeated.

Sometimes I get bored and turn innocent celebrities into The Corinthian, pt 3/3.

Sometimes I get bored and turn innocent celebrities into The Corinthian, pt 3/3.

Sometimes I get bored and turn innocent celebrities into The Corinthian, pt 2/3.

Sometimes I get bored and turn innocent celebrities into The Corinthian, pt 2/3.

"She was what they used to call a “real” person. She was not the kind who can be fitted away safely under some label or other, as “loyal” or “disloyal” or “self-sacrificing” or “jealous.” Sometimes she was loyal and sometimes she was disloyal. She behaved like herself."

- T.H. White, The Once and Future King (via ria-rabbit)

MoonSet: And I Would Be The Only One To Suffer 

moon-set:

There’s one page in my (well-loved, much-abused) copy of “The Once and Future King” that is marked with red corners so that I can find it in an instant.

“If I were to be made a knight,” said the Wart, staring dreamily into the fire, “I should insist on doing my vigil by myself, as Hob does with…

thedailywhat: Counter-Protest of the Day: To counter a Missouri high school’s ban on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis is offering free copies of the book to students at Republic High School. The Republic School Board recently decided to pull all copies of Vonnegut’s best-known novel from the school’s library shelves, after Wesley Scroggins, a home-schooling Missouri State University associate business professor, complained that Slaughterhouse-Five (AKA The Children’s Crusade) and similar books “create false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth.” “ All of these students will be eligible to vote and some may be protecting our country through military service in the next year or two,” said Vonnegut library executive director Julia Whitehead in a statement. “It is shocking and unfortunate that those young adults and citizens would not be considered mature enough to handle the important topics raised by Kurt Vonnegut, a decorated war veteran. Everyone can learn something from his book.” [plog / reuters via yahoo.]

thedailywhat:

Counter-Protest of the Day: To counter a Missouri high school’s ban on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis is offering free copies of the book to students at Republic High School.

The Republic School Board recently decided to pull all copies of Vonnegut’s best-known novel from the school’s library shelves, after Wesley Scroggins, a home-schooling Missouri State University associate business professor, complained that Slaughterhouse-Five (AKA The Children’s Crusade) and similar books “create false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth.” “

All of these students will be eligible to vote and some may be protecting our country through military service in the next year or two,” said Vonnegut library executive director Julia Whitehead in a statement. “It is shocking and unfortunate that those young adults and citizens would not be considered mature enough to handle the important topics raised by Kurt Vonnegut, a decorated war veteran. Everyone can learn something from his book.”

[plog / reuters via yahoo.]