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Mar. 8th, 2022 04:53 pmA Master of Djinn by P Djeli Clark
I didn't warm to this initially. Clark's prose is a little bit clunky, just tending to use one or two extra words than are needed, and I was finding that offputting until I got into the story, but ultimately the alternate Cairo of the book, with steampunk gears and all manner of djinn and a radical reorientation of the global status quo is so compelling that I got really invested. I haven't actually read the other stories set in the world, but I feel like they gave Clark a leg up in making the world feel immersive, there was continuity that made all the characters feel more alive and dynamic from the get-go. There are a lot of really fantastic secondary characters, that's one of the things that really stands out here.
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
I'm having a minor crisis over this book, because a woman I was set up with told me it's her favorite book series and so I read the first book and now I'm trying to figure out what that means. I mean, I asked her and she told me, it's not like I'm attempting mind-reading, but it's a vampire book with some problematic consent subtext to the main relationship between a witch and a vampire, and I'm uncomfortable with that and I told her as much. She told me she liked it because of the way it plays with history, and Harkness definitely has a historian's touch for detail and I admit I really enjoyed some of the stuff about vampire and witch DNA and the historiography of alchemy. I dunno, someone teach me how to date people with different taste in literature than me, please? LOL
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
This was recommended in a Mystery Hunter community and I really liked it! It's a very puzzly story, and it has really interesting complicated characters and this world that's... just to the left of ours, full of very colorful pirates and smugglers and thieves. It's the kind of book you'd like if you like Ellen Raskin.
Vidding: A History by Francesca Coppa
Available for free online, see this post for details: https://vidding.dreamwidth.org/466268.html
This was a really great read. I've been frustrated in the past with some of Coppa's theorizing about vidding fandom. The way she centers vidding as a female fannish enterprise is not wrong, it's just... well, I once wrote about a different Coppa essay "I feel accepted in my corner of fandom except when people theorize about my corner of fandom as an essentially female space." Similarly, I know![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ghost_lingering and I have been a little resistant to some of her A vid is an Essay in Images kind of language as sort of limiting the potential of what a vid could be to only that which can be academically studied. I felt a little of that here, but less than usual because giving her the space of a full book to talk about this stuff means that she can present the full kaleidoscope of different perspectives on what vidding is and how it has evolved over time as a cultural and artistic practice. One of my favorite passages in the book is a couple of pages in the introduction on the way vids engineer emotional affect that I thought were really terrific at contrasting to that Vid as Essay idea. I think the book is well worth reading, it does a great job of contextualizing the history of fandom in shifts in technology and culture.
But this is going to be one of those reviews where I mostly loved a book but nonethless spend the whole review griping about it. Let me talk some more about the being a dude in fandom part of it. There's a very big part of Coppa's book which is invested in depicting a female history of vidding, and... look, that makes sense from Ben Kenobi's certain point of view. Most of the '80s VCR vidders who were going to Escapade and Media West were women, there's this whole scene that makes sense to describe as an essentially female artistic community, and there is a good deal of continuity between them and certain vidding communities today, and everything Coppa writes about them is true. There are real facts on the ground here. All you need to do is be very careful about how you define vidding. AMVs are just, you know, out of scope of her history project. Studying the demographics of people making fanvids on youtube is out of scope of her history project. Russian fanvidding is not in the scope of her history project. Some other historian can write that story, she says. And that's fine, but it takes a very, er, nuanced kind of mind to be able to maintain both that vidding is a female project and that any fan video editing that isn't female isn't vidding. I don't say this to #notallmen or anything. Coppa tells a great history of the community that calls itself Media Fandom Vidding and it's important to tell that story because it's a community that often gets dismissed in part because it's female. Also, I'm part of that vidding community and it's great to read a history of us. But you can drive a truck through the book's blind spots, that's all I'm saying. Coppa reads "I Thought I Made a Vid, but Then You Told Me That I Didn’t" very differently than I do.
My only other major caution is that I'm not sure who the audience is? There's a lot of stuff in here targeted to how to use the book as a teacher of media studies, which makes sense since that's Coppa's day job. There's also a lot that seems more targeted to academics studying fandom, which again makes sense. But Coppa is of course a vidder and vidfan herself and sometimes the book feels like it's written more for us, there's kind of a seesaw feeling I had while reading between the stuff written for fans and the stuff that wasn't. The book also does a lot of really excellent close readings of vids and the online version has streaming versions of all the vids she talks about, and if you are not like me and haven't already watched most of these vids many times, I would say you should really make sure to watch along as you read or you will be confused.
Oh, one other complaint, and it's a super-weird one. I don't think Coppa does a great job of engaging with the fact that most fanvids are terrible? I mean, I think this is not unusual, artistic histories tend to focus on successful works and influential works and not the works that don't get attention, but bad fanwork is such an important part of fan culture that I think it merited more attention than it got.
I didn't warm to this initially. Clark's prose is a little bit clunky, just tending to use one or two extra words than are needed, and I was finding that offputting until I got into the story, but ultimately the alternate Cairo of the book, with steampunk gears and all manner of djinn and a radical reorientation of the global status quo is so compelling that I got really invested. I haven't actually read the other stories set in the world, but I feel like they gave Clark a leg up in making the world feel immersive, there was continuity that made all the characters feel more alive and dynamic from the get-go. There are a lot of really fantastic secondary characters, that's one of the things that really stands out here.
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
I'm having a minor crisis over this book, because a woman I was set up with told me it's her favorite book series and so I read the first book and now I'm trying to figure out what that means. I mean, I asked her and she told me, it's not like I'm attempting mind-reading, but it's a vampire book with some problematic consent subtext to the main relationship between a witch and a vampire, and I'm uncomfortable with that and I told her as much. She told me she liked it because of the way it plays with history, and Harkness definitely has a historian's touch for detail and I admit I really enjoyed some of the stuff about vampire and witch DNA and the historiography of alchemy. I dunno, someone teach me how to date people with different taste in literature than me, please? LOL
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
This was recommended in a Mystery Hunter community and I really liked it! It's a very puzzly story, and it has really interesting complicated characters and this world that's... just to the left of ours, full of very colorful pirates and smugglers and thieves. It's the kind of book you'd like if you like Ellen Raskin.
Vidding: A History by Francesca Coppa
Available for free online, see this post for details: https://vidding.dreamwidth.org/466268.html
This was a really great read. I've been frustrated in the past with some of Coppa's theorizing about vidding fandom. The way she centers vidding as a female fannish enterprise is not wrong, it's just... well, I once wrote about a different Coppa essay "I feel accepted in my corner of fandom except when people theorize about my corner of fandom as an essentially female space." Similarly, I know
ghost_lingering and I have been a little resistant to some of her A vid is an Essay in Images kind of language as sort of limiting the potential of what a vid could be to only that which can be academically studied. I felt a little of that here, but less than usual because giving her the space of a full book to talk about this stuff means that she can present the full kaleidoscope of different perspectives on what vidding is and how it has evolved over time as a cultural and artistic practice. One of my favorite passages in the book is a couple of pages in the introduction on the way vids engineer emotional affect that I thought were really terrific at contrasting to that Vid as Essay idea. I think the book is well worth reading, it does a great job of contextualizing the history of fandom in shifts in technology and culture.But this is going to be one of those reviews where I mostly loved a book but nonethless spend the whole review griping about it. Let me talk some more about the being a dude in fandom part of it. There's a very big part of Coppa's book which is invested in depicting a female history of vidding, and... look, that makes sense from Ben Kenobi's certain point of view. Most of the '80s VCR vidders who were going to Escapade and Media West were women, there's this whole scene that makes sense to describe as an essentially female artistic community, and there is a good deal of continuity between them and certain vidding communities today, and everything Coppa writes about them is true. There are real facts on the ground here. All you need to do is be very careful about how you define vidding. AMVs are just, you know, out of scope of her history project. Studying the demographics of people making fanvids on youtube is out of scope of her history project. Russian fanvidding is not in the scope of her history project. Some other historian can write that story, she says. And that's fine, but it takes a very, er, nuanced kind of mind to be able to maintain both that vidding is a female project and that any fan video editing that isn't female isn't vidding. I don't say this to #notallmen or anything. Coppa tells a great history of the community that calls itself Media Fandom Vidding and it's important to tell that story because it's a community that often gets dismissed in part because it's female. Also, I'm part of that vidding community and it's great to read a history of us. But you can drive a truck through the book's blind spots, that's all I'm saying. Coppa reads "I Thought I Made a Vid, but Then You Told Me That I Didn’t" very differently than I do.
My only other major caution is that I'm not sure who the audience is? There's a lot of stuff in here targeted to how to use the book as a teacher of media studies, which makes sense since that's Coppa's day job. There's also a lot that seems more targeted to academics studying fandom, which again makes sense. But Coppa is of course a vidder and vidfan herself and sometimes the book feels like it's written more for us, there's kind of a seesaw feeling I had while reading between the stuff written for fans and the stuff that wasn't. The book also does a lot of really excellent close readings of vids and the online version has streaming versions of all the vids she talks about, and if you are not like me and haven't already watched most of these vids many times, I would say you should really make sure to watch along as you read or you will be confused.
Oh, one other complaint, and it's a super-weird one. I don't think Coppa does a great job of engaging with the fact that most fanvids are terrible? I mean, I think this is not unusual, artistic histories tend to focus on successful works and influential works and not the works that don't get attention, but bad fanwork is such an important part of fan culture that I think it merited more attention than it got.