Dispatches from the other side of the “war on Christmas”: today, my four-year-old daughter and I pass a barber shop, all decked out with Santa etc. She asks, “Mommy, are Jewish people allowed to go in that store?” I reassure her that we are. It takes a little while.

Barney Frank still has it:

What would be the nicest thing I could say about Newt Gingrich? He may be one of the great supporters of the humanities, because you have people who don't want to study the social sciences, because it's not profitable, and now Newt, as the highest-paid historian in American history, may be an encouragement to people to study history.

… So none of those people [Republican presidential candidates] I would want to be on a desert island with, unless one of them, as I said, had skills in catching fish or whatever I don't know about.

My favorite Barney Frank story, because it also uses my favorite joke form: Barney Frank is on a panel at Yale with Peggy Noonan, who gets asked a question she doesn’t want to answer immediately. To stall for time, she asks, “Why is [noted conservative and killjoy] Bob Bork smiling down at us?”—indicating a portrait of him in the room. Frank instantly replies, “Because it’s a painting and not a photograph.”

Also, because it amused me, the following exchange, at the start of oral argument, between the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court and counsel for a fortuneteller who was challenging a local ordinance that prohibited fortunetelling within city limits on First Amendment grounds:
Chief Justice: Counsel, you have us at a disadvantage.
Attorney: Why, Your Honor?
Chief Justice: Well, hasn’t your client told you how this case will ultimately turn out?
Attorney: No, Your Honor, you must remember I did not consult my client for advice. She consulted me.

Also, this RPF reminds me of the glory days of popslash: a meditation on celebrity as a mask that eats into the face.

Here.

The AO3 announced April Showers, a challenge to archive your older fiction.  With the exception of my old Yuletide stories, everything I consider a story is up there already, but perhaps others can take advantage?  Then there's remix_goes_wild, which is challenging the boundaries of the remix with a lot of different prompts for how you might remix a story--yours or someone else's.  It doesn't have a deadline.  I don't think I can commit to doing more than Remix Redux and my still-outstanding auction story, but it still sounds awesome. And, as always, anyone is free to remix any of my stories at any time.

I don't know who you are, thesmallmachine, but you wrote an amazing response to Laura Miller's article on the Russian LotR reworking.

Here's a big chunk:

It was also nice to hear Ms. Miller's acknowledgment that she isn't in the best position to judge what fanfic is and what it's worth. This doesn't change the derision of her tone -- particularly in the bet-hedging use of the word "stereotype," which allows the review to essentially blame an amorphous community of stereotype-mongering Others for the ensuing, memorable, never-really-questioned definition of fic as the domain of teenage girls who earnestly write their romantic stories about a patronizingly quote-marked "canon."

Those quote marks really get me. They block off the term's irony, reserving it for the reviewing voice. In fact, I think most people in fandom are aware that they are not speaking of the canon of Harry Potter in the same sense, and with the same seriousness, that one might speak of the Western Canon (though the Western Canon's seriousness is increasingly dented now, and will probably dent deeper as the years go by).

One more word on that "stereotype" of fanfic as the domain of female teenagers -- of course it's an insult to adults who find fanfic to be a unique mode of criticism or a zero-g literary playspace or, sure, a sexual outlet; it's also an insult to female teenagers, a group who've seen enough insults, I think. The teen fic writer is finding her literary voice, learning to comment on mainstream fictions, finding a way to express her sexuality that's not entirely about recreating herself as a visual object for others' consumption. She is rarely a very good writer, because she's usually a very new one, but it's harsh to make her up into a symbol of writing as "fantasies" of "unlikely romantic pairings" and nothing more. She has an intellectual life, even if it's sometimes more potential than realized.

(If you're reading on LJ: the Dreamwidth icon says "I am not your user-generated content.")

Introductory note: the person who prompted this story, Aaron Schwabach, is to the best of my knowledge a nice guy—not a Nice Guy, but a person who is proceeding in good faith and, as will become important below, gives prominent and substantial credit to his predecessors in the field of his writing, which is the legal analysis of fan fiction. He is a nice guy; he is also a beneficiary of male privilege.

Schwabach wrote an article, The Harry Potter Lexicon and the World of Fandom: Fan Fiction, Outsider Works, and Copyright, that appeared in the University of Pittsburgh Law Review in 2009. After the article appeared on SSRN, he noticed that the Wikipedia coverage of legal issues surrounding fan fiction had been turned into its own article, with material he thought significantly derived from his article.  Being a good Wikipedian, Schwabach didn’t resent the apparent copying, especially since he well understood that copyright doesn’t cover facts or ideas; he merely added a citation to his article. (Other present citations are to Sonia Katyal, Charles Petit (a nonfan and nonacademic), and Rebecca Tushnet.)

The story seems to be that Wikipedians accepted the page as appropriately significant so that it was not deleted and edited it to follow his lead. (At least one page editor is quite fannish, and in examining her/his history I noticed that Whedonesque had been flagged for deletion as nonsignificant, though apparently this was beaten back.)

Excluding (1) pieces written from the copyright owner’s perspective or about Internet issues generally and (2) pieces about scanlation, fansubbing, and manga, here are the names of the people on Fanlore’s Legal Analysis page who wrote about fan fiction and fanvids in law reviews before Schwabach did (and most of whom, I emphasize again, he himself cited): Rosemary, Rebecca, Deborah, Meredith, Cecilia, Simone, Krissi, Leanne, Sonia, Mollie, Christina, Anupam & Madhavi, Ernest, Jacqueline, Casey, Christina, Edward, Nathaniel, Sarah, Steven, Megan & David, and Shira. 

Notice anything?

As a baseline point of reference, 20.3% of law review articles at top journals have a sole female author, while adding articles with at least one female author brings the percentage to 25.2%.  By contrast, of the 23 (including Schwabach) law review articles focusing on fan fiction through 2009, 8.7% are by male-female partnerships, 21.7% are by men, and 69.6% are by women.

So, a subfield of knowledge largely created and explored by women became interesting to Wikipedia when a man talked about it, and citation-wise looks on Wikipedia--increasingly the first place to which people turn for information online--like a field in which male sources of authority are at least equal to female sources. 

Tell me again that Wikipedia doesn’t have a woman problem? 

And, you know, I reserve most of my limited editing energy for Fanlore, though I did correct the faulty reference to Fanlore in that one Wikipedia entry.  I suppose I could, like Schwabach, edit the Wikipedia entry, though that might be considered to run afoul of the self-promotion policies, which, of course, have generally admirable purposes and effects.  Given various forms of policing feminist-friendly entries on Wikipedia, though, I'm not inclined to switch my focus.

Passing it on: the pink sparkly hearts challenge at fanlore. The idea is that over the next two weeks, we're encouraged to make new pages at Fanlore celebrating favorite fanworks -- specifically, the first fanworks we ever fell in love with.

I did one for The Sin-Eater, which was either the first X-Files fic I read online or as near as makes no difference; it was the first for which I wrote feedback, and I received a gracious reply from Jane Mortimer, which was a wonderful introduction to online fandom. So I went ahead and wrote another for Mercy. I’m not sure how I prove the story was influential, but I remember that it was much talked-about.

In other news, I’m in the middle of reading a book that, when I described the first 60-odd pages, two separate people spontaneously responded, “Red Dawn with aliens!” It’s mostly, but not quite, that; I’m still reading.

Unlikely but true: Jensen Ackles is prettier in HD. Still getting used to the color differences from my old TV, but really glad to see the full screen.

Interesting video from Kink for all, where participants talk fanfic.

I also wrote a little something:
Five More Deaths That Didn’t Matter, PG/gore
Prompt: later_tuesday, 5 deaths Dean had during Mystery Spot (that weren't aired)

( Stephen King, Sime/Gen, Claudia Gray )

Still not caught up.  Maybe I'll get to see SPN tomorrow? In the interim, shallow TV thoughts:

( Vampire Diaries and Fringe )

I’m totally shocked that Roundup Ready seeds have led to the evolution of … Roundup-resistant superweeds. Who could have seen that one coming?

In terms of creativity and copying, have a letter from Vincent van Gogh:

Hey, so I have an Archive of Our Own invite code—first come, first served.  [ETA: and, taken, but if you want the next one I get let me know.]

( art & free speech and mom & pop stores )