Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

I love Lord of the Rings and reread the novel every December. That said, I will say that Tolkien can be a fairly dry writer. Still, he makes some interesting points in this article about challenging the assumptions connecting fantasy literature with children. I happen to enjoy reading fantasy a great deal and am drawn, like Kathy, almost exclusively to series that I can become invested in and that have fleshed out worlds to explore. I think Tolkien’s assessments about the value of fantasy stories in general are compelling and certainly describe my engagement with fantasy literature.

At the same time, when it comes to his works in particular, I was drawn to them at a very young age and return to the stories yearly not only to explore the world one more time, but also because of nostalgic associations reading Lord of the Rings brings. The direction the class went in today with regard to using vaguely intellectual reasons to justify enjoyment of certain texts, especially fan texts, is also relevant to my own experience. Whenever I mention LotR to someone I don’t really know, I first bring up my respect for Tolkien as a philologist and his work in devising the languages and cultural history of his world before I mention liking the story itself. Because of that childhood nostalgia and that noticeable shame about my LotR fandom, I wonder to what extent I have absorbed the pervasive assumptions of a link between childhood and fantasy. What other activities and texts (particularly ones with large fan followings) are similarly associated with childishness? I mean childishness in particular and not just fringe and strange…

Hello all. The inspiration to this post is the release of a NEW Counting Crows album followed with a tour!! For any of those interested, check it out at www.countingcrows.com .And to see a video to their new single, check out this website: annabegins.com
Now many of you are probably asking why this is at all relavent to the class. First, for those of you who read my fanifesto- you may (but probably don’t) remember that I have never seen a Counting Crows concert, despite my obsession with their live versions of songs. I am proud and extremely excited to announce that this summer, it shall be remedied! On July 31st, I will have the Trekkie equivalent of seeing Spock speak at a convention in person. I cannot wait.

Also, the release of this new album was also exciting seeing as it has been quite a while since they have produced much (two years since the release of their last album, which was a live album recorded in 2003 and did not include many new songs). Due to this I had begun to fade interest in keeping up with the band, seeing as I already had most of their songs and plenty of live versions to keep myself occupied. But this new album has certainly spiked my interest level way back up. I’m going to make this a long stretch and connect this to how the the Tolkien movies really brought attention back to the original book series. The parallel lies in that the original fan generation had all the books and simply passed them onto their children, reducing sales and some of the interest in the series. With the revamping of the tales through a hollywood movie, much of the suppressed fan notions were brought back to the surface. While watching the rather interesting “Ringers, Lord of the Fans” documentary, I couldn’t help but relate it to my own re-awakened fanish practices with Counting Crows in reponse to their album. (I am embrassed to admit that I did not know until recently that they even had a new album coming out! I was too caught up in 1994 with “August and Everything After” to even check up on them!)

This then made fan fiction click with me. It is a way to keep excited about the object of the fandom, and gives the fans something to look forward to as well as something new to process. I was struggling a little with the concept (seeing as fan fic does not really translate over to music, except maybe into revamped versions of old albums like the “August and Everything After Deluxe Album” ), but it certainly falls into place seeing the significant response I had to something new (finally!)

Sorry if I have begun to gush, but I wanted to share this with all of you. I also thought it would be cool to open a discussion about fan objects that are not producing new material anymore, and ways in which fans maintain interest, interaction and contact with.

PS: For some reason, the blog won’t let me add links to this post. Sorry.