(no subject)

[seekingferret]

A 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 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.

Comments

[wendylove]

I mean, I got set up with a guy who quoted Good Omens and the combinatorics bit of _Sefer Yetzirah_ on his web page (back when this was a thing), and that was totally acceptable. I did not discover until several dates in that he enjoys reading Lovecraft, but fortunately he also enjoys reading people making Lovecraft less sexist and racist. Also I married him and had two children before I was willing to combine SFF collections.

Anyway, I have no idea if this is helpful, but I promise that it is possible to have a happy marriage despite fundamentally very different reading tastes within the same genre.

[lirazel]

The Djinn books have some of my favorite worldbuilding! It's just fantastic!

I keep meaning to read Greenglass House!

I don't think Coppa does a great job of engaging with the fact that most fanvids are terrible?

Lol! Right? A good vid is hard to find! But a treasure when you find it!

You do not have to answer this question at all if you don't want to, but do you have any thoughts about how to talk about Western media fandom as a phenomenon that has skewed more female (and queer!) and how that female presence is really important and formative...but not leave out the fact that men have always been present and are relevant?

[seekingferret]

You do not have to answer this question at all if you don't want to, but do you have any thoughts about how to talk about Western media fandom as a phenomenon that has skewed more female (and queer!) and how that female presence is really important and formative...but not leave out the fact that men have always been present and are relevant?

I'm inclined to punt more than not, but I'll say that if it's not your principal thesis that vidding fandom is a female community, I think it gives you more room to discuss the ways in which vidding fandom is predominantly female, while also acknowledging the exceptions and contradictions. And it's not that Coppa doesn't acknowledge some those contradictions, it's just that because of her thesis she has a way of sort of rushing past them.

[lirazel]

Got it!

t I'll say that if it's not your principal thesis that vidding fandom is a female community, I think it gives you more room to discuss the ways in which vidding fandom is predominantly female, while also acknowledging the exceptions and contradictions.

This makes perfect sense. Thanks!

[starlady]

I haven't read the Coppa book yet but your comments are very interesting. I do think, to speak to your question of audience, she is probably also writing for the historical record--you're probably familiar with the story of how she was at a symposium about user edited video at MIT in the early 2000s and realized that the mostly male speakers were claiming that men invented fan edits with machinima videos. And a book plants a flag way more than a series of articles do in terms of search engine results.

The stuff about gender and vidding you raise is frustrating, though. I think if I were writing about it I would probably at this point use terms like "feminized" or "female-dominated" space, something like that. Because you're right, it's not just women! In fact quite a few titans of vidding have been men, whether cis or trans--I've seen the list of vids in the book and Absolute Destiny is on there several times, just to take one example.

[scintilla72]

absolutedestiny remains the only person I've heard of to cross over from AMVs to live-action vidding, and even as groundbreaking and renowned as he was in the AMV space, he's clearly kept with vidding for much much longer at this point. Has anyone else been known for doing both?

(I'll see the occasional live-action vid from an AMVer, like the excellent Snape tribute that Rider4Z made some years ago to the remake of "The Sounds of Silence"; but I'm asking about people who do both consistently.)

[starlady]

I mean, I started out in AMVs--I can't claim that I was ever on the level of people like Absolute Destiny, and part of the reason I switched to vidding was my feeling that my tastes and capabilities in editing were much more suited to the vidding space. Fifteen years ago the editing rigs needed to produce the AMVs that were popular were wildly expensive, which was another thing that drove the gender divide in it too, I think.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, you know, she retells the story of that symposium in the book, with a lot more sense of balance. She says she realized much later that the speaker wasn't claiming that men invented remix video in the '90s, he was just saying that machinima originated in the '90s, which is much earlier than most people would have thought. And, like, machinima isn't some cultural juggernaut, it itself is a fairly marginal subculture that was not the subject of intense academic scrutiny. He wasn't trying to elbow women out of the way, he was just trying to clear a bit of space for his own obscure interest. And part of the reason Coppa didn't understand his point exactly is because she knew very little about machinima at the time. Which is not to deny that there are mechanisms by which male privilege can result in history being written in a way that ignores domains associated with women, it's fully plausible to imagine that from that claim about machinima could emerge a narrative that fanvidding was created by men in the '90s, but there is a way in which I feel like that story is punching more sideways than up.

But I dunno, I think it's on the whole an excellent book, and it's better to talk about the book with people who have read it, so I hope you get a chance at some point so we can discuss it more.

[oracne]

I love how Clark brings his history background to fiction by making his worlds so complex and nuanced.

Great comments on the vidding book - I haven't read it yet, but am enjoying reading people's comments! (Not a vidder, just a longtime watcher.)

[franzeska]

I'm still reading, so no nuanced thoughts yet, but I'm dying at your point about most vids sucking. I think a lot of the issues with trying to narrowly define vids come down to not talking about just how hard plenty of old vids failed at making their point/revealing a narrative/etc.

[seekingferret]

Newer vids, too. Obviously I was being flippant, but I actually feel like it's a really important point about fandom culture. The only mention of Evanescence in the book is a throwaway line in the teaching guide at the end, and there's no mention of the concept of the Lord King Bad Vid. To me that feels off. I feel like so much of the fuel of vidding culture is that we feel these deep and powerful feelings about characters and vids let us rehearse and revisualize and recontextualize those feelings and so... it doesn't matter if the recontextualizations are any good, or even if they make sense! And ultimately that has built a space for talented vidders, but the infrastructure is there for the bad vidders and especially for the mediocre vidders (like me, I think).

And it's nice to go around saying that vidding culture is this significant underground movement, this artistically coherent group of remix artists creating a powerful visual language, but that's such a numerically insignificant piece of the puzzle.

And yes, cons like Escapade and Media West might have been predominantly female, but the Star Trek cons that people were playing the first vid-like things at were more mixed. There's a reason not a lot of those vid-like objects survive that has nothing to do with gender. They were shlock and they were kitsch and they were fun but they were forgettable. Most of vidding, then and now, is spending dozens of hours putting together the equivalent of Ben Wyatt's claymation. And there's nothing wrong with that, there's an immense amount of joy and satisfaction even in making something that entertains a handful of people at a con. But I feel like a true history should acknowledge that the amateurism is the point more than the art is the point.

[franzeska]

I was sorry not to see you at Escapade. I thought you had great comments last time! We could have used your perspective at the vidding panels this year.

One thing that came up in the book salon was Coppa saying "No offense, but you showed up after the great years of VVC" or words to that effect to me. (Not in a mean way. It sounds much worse in my paraphrase.) I'm maybe a quarter through the book, and it's leaving me with the strong feeling that it's a pretty good look at a particular community from Kandy's slide shows through the early 00s with trailing examples of things influenced by that culture from a little later. But it's really not giving me a feeling of covering what vidding became after the early 00s. It doesn't really cover most of what I personally cared about at VVC, which I only attended in later years. (Which is fair. I had very different tastes in fandoms from a lot of the major movers and shakers. It's just something I notice.)

I don't think you're a mediocre vidder. I think you're a highly conceptual vidder in a way that doesn't translate to accolades.

One thing I've really appreciated in the book so far is how it talks about how people mostly like vids for their own fandoms. I don't think it's always true, but a lot of vidding meta and scholarship goes way too far the other way. So much of what is the popular canon of vidding to a given group of fans is just the best vids by people they like for a fandom they know and love.

A big thing I've noticed when trying to look at the history of vids at Escapade is how much two camps get left out (thinking in general here, not of Coppa's book per se): First, there are a bunch of people who made vids that are just deeply, deeply cringe. They're the kind of thing that would be Lord King Bad if it had any self awareness whatsoever or any technical skill. The kinds of people who went on to write vidding meta later did not like their work at the time and went right on not liking it. Second, some of the fairly well respected vidders also seem to get left out a lot because they kept a tighter control over their products, so they didn't end up on the con tapes and thus aren't recorded on lists of what was shown. They also didn't do as good of a job at getting their own tapes out there as some of the collectives Coppa writes about more. I'd be interested to know what some of that type think about schools of vidding. (I've heard them saying they don't agree with Coppa's divisions at all, but I don't know what they think is valid instead.)

It makes me think about how the willingness to be openly on Youtube affects who's seen as being present at all in the modern day. People sometimes want me to make playlists there of what I've shown at Escapade dance parties, and it annoys me so much because even if I can find 75% or more of the vids on there, it's that last little percent that makes all the difference, IMO.

I do kind of get where the significant underground movement thing is coming from if I look at Coppa's comments about more visible (and more male) subcultures that get asspats for the barest hint of intelligent meta analysis. But it feels like what I'd say to argue fair use and get a rights holder off my back, not how I see vidding as a hobby.