Today HP, tomorrow the world

[rivkat]

The Boston Globe has yet another story about fanfic. It's pretty insulting, in my opinion. To add injury to insult, they don't quote me, though they do quote heidi8 and Meredith McCardle, whose article about the legality of fanfic is here (scroll down; the article is in .pdf format). McCardle's article is written for either a legal or a fan audience. She says many things I agree with and some that I don't; she's clearly less comfortable with trademark law than copyright, and makes the trademark issues too complicated. (The short of it: there's not a trademark problem with fan fiction. Really.)

I have over twenty books stacked up that I ought to review and stories I ought to finish, but the Supreme Court really screwed me in my professional life by refusing to decide Nike v. Kasky, which I was planning to write about, and I need to figure out what to do about that. I already knew they were going to strike down sodomy laws, so the announcement didn't make me feel all that good. In fact, this Term was a real drag; my mom lost her prison visitation case 9-zip, and the end-of-Term cases make the Court look more moderate than it really is, which can only help Bush because people will think that the Court will keep the Republicans from going too far to the right.

At least Derek Lowe continues to make me happy: "They're advocating a mixture of aspirin, a statin, folic acid, an ACE inhibitor, a diuretic, and a beta-blocker. The idea is to go after cardiovascular disease with pretty much all the known therapeutic options at once. This is a touchingly linear approach to drug therapy. It's actually kind of sweet." A man who can think that an approach to drug therapy is cute is my kind of commentator.

Comments

[rivkat.livejournal.com]

This got to me: "Mira's thoughtful observations on the writing life and gender roles stand in sharp relief to the rough and raw writing she actually posts online. And Mira is by no means alone.

Scratch the surface of a few slash sites online, and it doesn't take long to find tales of bestiality, rape, sexual torture, and Weasley twins sodomizing each other."

Because we all know that rough and raw writing about sex is incompatible with deep thought. You can think or you can fuck, but heaven forfend that writing about fucking be thoughtful. Of course the reporting is going to focus on the outliers, the way it always does, and I'm not active in HP fandom so I can't speak about Mira's writing directly, but I didn't like the author's tone. Or "Ulysses this isn't." Which is of course true, but then HP ain't no Odyssey. The underlying attitude, that JK Rowling is a true authorial source whose words are being stolen out of her mouth as she speaks (or sings, given the karaoke analogy) while fan authors are just poachers, is hard to swallow given Rowlings' debts to others.

But this sort of thing always happens in popular reporting on weird excesses, so I'm actually not that exercised unless I make myself be.

Re:

[thornsilver]

I think I took "rough and raw" as on observation on quality, not subject matter. Not having read any "Mira" myself, I wouldn't have known if that was right, or what.