(no subject)

Dear Doer of Darkness,

(I was tempted as hell to write a letter like this:

DDD,

DD. DD,DD.

D,
DD

Which would have translated to something like

Dear Doer of Darkness

Dis's dope! Do dramatic, daring documents.

Danke,
Dis Dude

Thankfully, my better impulses won out and I am writing a more coherent message. The problem is that alliteration and wordplay are so damned tempting.)


Dear Doer of Darkness,

Thank you for offering to write a story for me. I'm really looking forward to Kaleidoscope, and I'm afraid I'm taking advantage of it to request fanworks in fandoms so obscure I wouldn't dare request them in Yuletide. Sorry! :P

I have written somewhat extensively, though incoherently, about all of the fandoms I've requested. If you're the sort of person who likes to see what their recipient wants in detail, check out those posts. If you just want to write a story in one of these fandoms on your own and trust that I'll like it, go ahead! I probably will love it, because I love these fandoms deeply.

(Treemonisha

http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/43021.html

Autograph Man

http://community.livejournal.com/50books_poc/357096.html
http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/36282.html
http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/36880.html
http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/37478.html
http://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/38822.html

Dhalgren

http://50books-poc.livejournal.com/246296.html)

I'm not sure what else to say in the letter. I sit on an uneasy edge of fandom the colossus. I like weird source texts, I like strange crossovers, I like post-modernism. The source texts I've requested sort of demand self-conscious storytelling from the fan creator.

Hmm... This is probably pretty banal, but the three works I requested are all extremely anxious about 'authenticity', which is an interesting thing to explore both in the context of fanwork in general and specifically in Kaleidoscope. How do you create something which is original and authoritative and still relevant to cultural traditions? The Autograph Man, for example, tries to recreate the circumstances of Kabbalah and Zen exploration in a faithless modern age, through devices like Adam's charts. Fanfic for The Autograph Man has to reproduce those circumstances faithfully without seeming reductive. Insofar as writing inspired by self-conscious writing is necessarily self-conscious, it's worth exploring the process of creating fic which is authentically imitative not only of Zen and Kabbalistic mysticism, but also of The Autograph Man itself. And what does that say about Kaleidoscope as an effort to celebrate, draw attention to, and reanalyze the works of socially, politically, and culturally marginalized artists without appropriation? (I could have done a similar gloss on Dhalgren's interest in black urban culture in a post-apocalyptic context, or the questions Treemonisha poses about how to find an authentic black experience in a post-slavery world)

So um... yeah, I don't know what you took out of that. Probably not much. I think my point is that Kaleidoscope is an opportunity to not just create fanworks as gifts, but to create fanworks of the sort fandom has never seen before. Fanworks that until now had no impetus to exist, no context within which to exist. And I find that profoundly exciting, don't you?


~Ferret