sundries

Really tired and still catching up on sleep from Dragon*Con. I remain impressed by Patty's comps diligence and know I babbled at her quite oddly when she came to bed last night and I was more or less asleep. Ah well. Only a few more days of this.

Meanwhile, I am trying to solve our cruise drama for April; it's a long story that I thought I had solved and then a sailing we want is sold out and the timing is complicated. So I suspect the next cruise will be 2012 for us, and that in April of 2011, we're either going to do one of the two domestic trips we've talked about or just choose an island and go there for a week. We loved Bonaire, and there are a few places we haven't been that we'll probably consider too. I dunno; if you have recommendations about islands, resorts and the like, please let us know since It's probably not the right time for us to go to Sydney (not the warmest for them), which is a shame, as I want a room in the Altamont right now.

In case you missed it last night, bifemmefatale's 16-year-old daughter has run away from home. If you're in the Illinois area and could keep an eye out that would be good. If you could also not be an asshole or a concern troll (i.e., telling her to go to one of the places it is suspected Morgan might be heading to in order to understand - right now the priority is finding an underage girl who may need help; the Internet can be a part of this. But Morgan is not the Internet's kid, and this sort of stuff is NOT helpful right now; useful advice from folks that work with runaways and street kids is a different matter).

rarelylynne is participating in the DeKalb County Wheel-a-Thon to raise money for disability services in her area. If you're interested in helping, you can visit her journal where she writes more about the event and her fundraising team, Team Caitlin (named after her daughter).

Hey, sihaya09 is facing some MASSIVE vet bills for a lovely cat that is having some hardcore neurological/spine issues. Luckily, sihaya09 is an AWESOME artist and runs a cool etsy shop. If you're looking for something for you or yours, you might wish to check out her wares.

Hero rats search out landmines in Africa. The rats are too light to trip the mines themselves, so only one has died in the field, and that was a result of a car crash.

Religious leaders of several faiths have gathered to condemn the sharp rise in religious intolerance directed at Muslims.

Iran has suspended the sentence of a woman slated to be executed by stoning for an adultery conviction.

Students protest the forced resignation of a lesbian dean at a Catholic college after she married her partner.

After the media apocalypse, stories survive as patchwork quilts. This is an amazing art exhibit. Quilts as storytelling mechanisms are nothing new; quilts as a future mechanism of telling our current stories when they are near lost, however, is an amazing idea.

Said to tsarina at Dragon*Con: "You know, after Children of Earth happened I asked what it would take to remember Ianto for a thousand years, and you know, people wrote fic if they saw me say that or not, but that wasn't what I meant. No one got it. I meant, if this story means so much to us all, let's sit around and speculate on the process by which narrative becomes remembered outside of its pop-culture moment and, eventually, becomes myth. How do we make that story survive? How do we force those characters to keep their promises?"

These quilts make me think of that discussion I never really got to have. Link via shadesong.

Last night on White Collar: ( Read more... )

Last night on Covert Affairs: ( Read more... )

Really, none of you wanted to talk about The Dark Crystal sequel with me? You all suck.

Dragon*Con panel recap - Fannish response to character death (Anime/Manga fandom studies)

I was on this panel with Brent Allison from Gainesville State College. While, on the surface, there was not a lot of relationship between his paper, "Japanese Animation Fandom and Media Education: A Response to Media Education Literature and Classroom Practice," and mine, they certainly did intersect both on matters of authenticity (an issue he raised) and, I think, very strongly in the response from the room.

While I mentioned this in passing at the panel, it's worth reiterating I'm not an anime and manga person by default (the same goes for Western comics and animation for me); it's not a medium I respond to instinctually. However, working on this aspect of my mourning research and hearing Brent's paper along with some of the presentation from the panel before us, I feel like I have a lot more tools to approach anime and manga than I have in the past, so that was personally a very rewarding expansion for me.

Over the past year, I've had the opportunity to talk about fan responses to character death a lot -- at Gallifrey One, at the Desiring the Text conference at the University of Bristol (UK), and here on Livejournal, where I started this research really in response to what I was seeing and experiencing in the Torchwood fandom, which didn't feel new to me, so much as very, very old.

Most of the time there's a lot of anger when I talk about this topic. The Torchwood fandom isn't just still gutted by the narrative events of its third season, but large swathes of it remain in conflict -- with the show writers and producers, and with other fans who have had different responses not just to the program, but to their feelings about it.

And, of course, it's not just Torchwood fandom. Joss Whedon fans are still nursing wounds from deaths like that of Tara on Buffy, and those wounds are very real, even if I posit that they are less likely to create a ritualized mourning response because of the way Whedon structures his narrative arcs.

In fiction, death is everywhere, and given more than twenty minutes there's lots to say about tons of other properties -- some of which I was able to mention in Atlanta -- like Harry Potter, Elf Quest, Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow's Joe), Sherlock Holmes and the work of Dickens (there's a lot to say about Little Nell) to name just a few.

If you love stories fannishly and so also love characters privately and passionately and in a nearly embodied sense, chances are you know all about this type of mourning, because you've lived it, even if you've never talked about it.

But for a lot of people, this type of grief is really alien, or, if experienced, has been uncomfortable or eclipsed by non-fictional losses. When we talk about the pain of absence, there's a lot for anyone to get pissed about.

Which is to say, a lot of the time, the response I get to this work is one that is angry and in pain (Seriously, I've been on panels with yelling matches, tears, personal stories of non-fictional loss, and more. Grief is big). And that's fine, even if I'm not always as gracious, generous and supportive as I wish I knew how to be. Because my choosing to this work is also a response to my own losses (I even refer to it as "my own 1,000 cranes" in the paper I did for the Bristol conference, not afraid of sentimentality am I).

Spending a lot of time around grief is pretty exhausting. I've been doing it for over a year, and it's taken me on one hell of a trip (including to the UK twice). It has forced me to mourn fictional characters that matter to me both more publicly and more privately than I would wish and to find commonalities with people I'd, quite frankly, rather just argue with in fandom.

Often, when I present on this topic, it's really heated, and it leaves me drained and uncertain of the value (but not the relevance) of this work. Dragon*Con, however, was an entirely different experience.

The audience was generous and curious, provided a perspective through manga, anime and comics, that framed a lot of new and exciting questions (how do we emotionally respond to comics that are constantly retconning and resetting? are we mourning a fictional lover or friend or are we mourning the self?) and also helped to further confirm a lot of the arguments I've been working with.

More than anything though, I felt a sense of eagerness and relief from the audience, and really felt we could have gone for far more time than the slot we had allowed. Unfortunately, I also had to run to another panel right after.

If you're here because you were at the panel (or not) and want to talk about this topic more in comments here, please feel free. If you have particular feelings about how you'd like to access more material on this subject (i.e., book? website? academically focused? pop-culture-y? travel-log of visiting sites of fictional grief? etc), I would love to hear it. In addition, I am always grateful to hear more personal tales of mourning for the fictional. While I do not necessarily feel an obligation to request permission to quote people discussing such issues publicly on the Internet, since I am soliciting your input directly here, I will say that I will not quote or paraphrase anything you say in comments to this post without your explicit permission, and I'll drop you a note if I ever need it.

In addition, if you're curious about the work that's coming out of the Bristol conference, please visit The Society of Friends of the Text. You can also get more information on the Dragon*Con Comics and Popular Arts Conference that put this panel together and its parent, The Institute for Comics Studies. A big thank you to Dragon*Con Anime and Manga Track for giving us the time and space necessary for this panel.

Thanks for attending the panel and/or for reading along here. The Dragon*Con panel was one of the most lovely experiences I've had since I've started working on this project, and I am truly full of gratitude for it.