Bagheera

I may be very scarce in fandom for the next few months (until June, maybe?) because I'm finally, finally taking my final exams and finishing my degree. I started uni in 2006, so that'll be seven years on the magic mountain.

This means I'll have to study for oral exams in German and English Lit, Medieval German Lit and linguistics in both subjects, written exams in German Lit, German to English translation and English lit, as well as a 40-50 page thesis.

The worst bit is the amount of reading I'll have to do (and I'm a terribly lazy reader) - 50 texts (novels, plays, poems, secondary literature) alone for the oral examn in German lit, plus several medieval epics and accompanying secondary literature, I don't know how much in English lit, and quite a lot of stuff on linguistics, too. One of my examiners pushed me into picking Romanticism and Thomas Mann as two of my topics for the oral exam, and both of these means longish texts, otoh I'm not starting at zero there, as I'm doing with a lot of my other subjects (excepting sociolinguistics). I haven't even decided on any topics for English Lit.

My written exams are in March, my oral exams in April and May respectively and once I've finished my thesis I'll have the equivalent of an MA - or a mental breakdown. (Not kidding there. I'm not nervous during exams, but the nights BEFORE is another story).

Anyway - I'll be really really busy. Not too busy to check on fandom, but too busy for Yuletide etc, and if I write any posts they'll probably be on boring topics like stuff I've read.

I've almost certainly decided on a topic for my ZULA/master's thesis - after a long time waffling about fanfic, Marlowe, fairy tales and Vikings, I've decided to give role-playing games a try. There's just enough of a body of works on them to start from, and they offer many interesting areas of research, plus I think there are some interesting things to be said about RPGs as a form of literary adaptation and transformative fiction (how to make your thesis about nerd stuff nerdier: compare it to other nerd stuff).

Also, there is a Game of Thrones cookbook! I'm not sure whether I should buy it, because I'm not a very experienced cook, but quasi-medieval cooking sounds very tempting, plus it's based on this really cool blog here:

Inn at the Crossroads

I will definitely try some of these recipes for our weekly rpg-group star trek watching/cooking together nights. The Dornish stuff sounds delicious, although I couldn't bring myself to buy a dead python (poor thing!) even if it was available.

It's the first week of summer term. Among other things I'm teaching two tutorial classes for Intro to English Lit, and the students have to read Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked" for the section on novels. At first I questioned this choice and I had to force myself to start reading it today, because the blurb only said that it was about middle aged people and relationship problems and finding love/a purpose in life/questioning your choices, and that's exactly the kind of book I DON'T read.

No one told me that it was a book about online fandom!

Every few pages I go OMG GUYS at something. I'm only 40 pages in so I can't reccommend the book yet, but simply the fact that there is a novel about US amazes me. So far what's happened is that there's this thirty-something ex-Lit student, Annie, who is in a relationship with with college Lit teacher Duncan. Duncan is your typical oldschool male fan (into details, obsessively collecting, belittling Annie as "not an expert" while at the same time expecting her to respect his fannishness as a serious academic pursuit). A few years ago, he discovered the internet and since then, he has become something of a BNF. Annie thinks she has only a casual interest in the object of his fannishness, the musician Tucker Crowe, but then, because she begins to resent Duncan more and more, she writes her own post about the newest album in HIS INTERNET FORUM (which is mostly middle-aged men like him), directly contradicting his review of the album. Duncan is appalled and tells her she doesn't have a professional opinion, while Annie is surprised to discover how much she enjoys writing and being a critical fan.

I don't know how this is going to continue, but the portrayal of fandom, and of gender issues within fandom, is blowing my mind because it was the LAST thing I expected from this novel. Here, have some excerpts:

"And then the internet came along and changed everything [...] Until then, the nearest fellow fan had lived in Manchester, sixty or seventy miles away, and Duncan met up with him once or twice a year; now the nearest fans lived in Duncan's laptop, and there were hundreds of them, from all around the world, and Duncan spoke to them all the time."

Annie talking to a co-worker:

"'Tucker Crowe has his own website?'
'Everyone has their own website.'
'Is that true?'
'I think so. Nobody gets forgotten anymore. Seven fans in Australia team up with three Canadians, nine Brits and a couple dozen Americans, and somebody who hasn't recorded in twenty years gets talked about every day. It's what the internet's for. That and pornography [...]'
'How come you know so much about it? Are you one of the nine brits?'
'No. There are no women who bother. My, you know, Duncan is.'
[...]
'Sounds like I should buy that CD.'
'Don't bother. That's what gets me. I played it, and [Duncan]'s completely wrong. And for some reason I'm bursting to say so.'
'You should write your own review and stick it up next to his.'
'Oh, I'm not an expert. I wouldn't be allowed.'"

Sometimes it feels as if English Lit and fandom are secretly married to each other :) Or, you know, they're Bruce Wayne and Batman.

ETA:
There are fake wikipedia articles in the book, OMG. And Annie keeps checking her emails for comments, and now Tucker Crowe himself has commented on her review.

I wonder what fandom Nick Hornby hangs out in...

I have a German linguistics essay/termpaper to write (about something related to writing, written language etc - the technical term is graphemics or graphematics) and stupidly I thought that writing about online fandom from a linguistic perspective would be a cool idea. There are three problems with this:

1) it has to be in German, about German fandom
2) no one has ever written anything about this - the closest I've got are linguistic studies of chat communication, email, blogging etc. - mostly in English
3) linguistics isn't exactly my strong suit and I have no idea what I'm doing

But the biggest problem is definitely German fandom. I haven't so much as dipped a foot into the German part of fandom since I was about 17 because I abandoned it as soon as I started to write exclusively in English. I'm almost tempted to write a story in German just to see if I still can. All German fanfiction sounds terrible to me. Is this because you're more sensitive to bad style in your own language, or because I'm not finding the good stories (since so far I've only discovered the German equivalent of fanfiction.net) or because there's something wrong with non-English fandom in general? Fanfiction is largely anglophone, and English is where its stylistic conventions have developed. I assume (but I don't know if this is true) that German online fandom started as a translation/imitation of anglophone online fandom (and to some extent maybe Japanese fandom), with people trying to do the same thing but in their native language and that might be the reason why some of it sounds awkward.

For example, German fanfic authors LOVE gerunds and participles (the -ing forms of verbs). However, gerunds are typical of English, and sound awkward if you translate them directly into German - usually, where English can use a simple gerund, German needs slightly longer and more complicated phrases.

An example from the summary of a D/M fic:
"Mit dem Master an seiner Seite reist der Doktor immer noch durch das Universum, Welten entdeckend, beschützend, rettend."

The part in italics could be translated as "discovering, protecting and saving worlds". In English those three gerunds/participles sound perfectly okay and they fulfil the function of verbs (you could also say "they discover, protect and save worlds"). In German, a participle can't really function as a verb, it's commonly used as an adjective or an adverb, so the author should have used a different verb form instead of a participle. Now, I don't think this author took an English fic and translated it badly in German - I think s/he either reads a lot of English fic or is imitating the style of other fanfic writers who read too much English. The result is incredibly awkward writing (I wonder if I sound like that when I write English - or if I'd sound like that if I wrote German prose.)

ETA: I finally understand why having the Doctor (or the Master) use cuss words is WRONG. All it takes is one instance of German cursing to make me see the light.

ETA2: Also, where English has "you" as a form of adress, German has "Sie" (polite, respectful, distanced) and "du" (close, intimate, informal). Neither "Sie" nor "du" sounds right for people adressing the Doctor.

ETA3: Have found German LJ com called das_fandom. I find this more amusing than I should.

Finally went to get my transcript of records from Durham from my exchange coordinator, and hey! All six courses got grades between 71 and 76, which means I'd probably get first class honours if I went to a British university... unsurprising, but still pleasing.

I forgot this earlier: There are a couple of German fanpeople on my flist, and I need your help. I might write a termpaper in Germanistik about fannish stuff, but this means that I have to write about German fannish stuff, or contrast German and English stuff and unfortunately I've been avoiding the German corner of fandom ever since my English was good enough to get on the greener side of the fence.

So are there any good German LJ coms (preferably for fandoms I know*) that you reccommend? Similarly, are there any off-LJ centers of fannishness for German fandom? All I know is animexx (and they must have deleted my accounts YEARS ago) and fanfiktion.de so any help is welcome.

*well-known and non embarrassing, so Harry Potter, Star Trek, TV shows, comic books, superhero movies, that sort of thing, not, like, your soccer RPF slash pages, or Lindenstraße fanfic or whatever. Can be fanfic, fanart or other fannish endeavours.

Went to my first British essay handback session this morning. Got a 69 (exactly one point under a first) on a Shakespeare essay, and got told that basically, I would have had to do more close reading to get that first, and that next time, I probably will. A wee bit disappointing, but not as much as if I'd got a B at home.

However, once that was said and done with, the tutor asked me if I wanted to do him a favour, since I'm a German native speaker and he doesn't speak a word of it - would I translate an article on vampires from Der Spiegel for him? I said yes, of course, and he said, well, we could go for a coffee as compensation. That was nice :)

This was the first week of winter term and it was somehow particularly stressful. I don't know why, my schedule isn't any busier than usual.

MONDAY
-Work
-Course on "Gothic" (not precisely Gothic literature, since one of thing I had to photocopy - the lecturer is the professor I work for - was a page out of Neil Gaiman's Sandman. This promises to be awesome.)
-Work (again)
-Roleplaying Group (in the evening)

TUESDAY
-Course on "Metaphor and Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics" (I am already horrified. Why are linguistics so much like science?)

WEDNESDAY
-"Cosmology and the theology of Creation in Judaism" (This is actually part of my pedagogical studies, which require a course in Ethics or Theology, although I picked a fairly unusual course. It's offered by the Jewish University, which is a separate, if small university within the university in Heidelberg. The lecturer might or might not be a rabbi, and he reads from the Old Testament in Hebrew a lot, which might as well be Ancient Korean for all that I understand it, but I am definitely in awe. There are a lot of senior citizens - I think this might be something only German universities do, allowing old people to guest-listen - in this course.)
-Work

THURSDAY
- Work
- "German Grammar" (I'm a masochist. But I thought in case I'll ever teach non-natives, this might be a good idea.)
- "Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain'" (Unfortunately, this appears to be the worst course this semester...at first impression, I strongly dislike the lecturer.)
- Creative Writing (same procedure as every year...)

FRIDAY
- Sport (in the evening)

For years, I've wondered if maybe I should apply for a scholarship, but I always decided that I probably wouldn't qualify (my grades are good enough, but usually, they want more than just good grades...). This morning, my mother woke me up by tossing a pile of mail into my bed and one of the letters I opened was from the major scholarship association in Germany, telling me that someone had suggested me for a scholarship. I guess luck isn't just for fools, children and drunks, but also for the excessively lazy :D

Of course this means that I'll have to do paperwork, and show up for a personal meeting with them and explain why I'm so awesome that I deserve to be given money and cool stuff. So far, I've come up with:
- I have good grades and am a fairly fast student
- I'm working as a TA
- I'm from a socially weak background (father has been unemployed for more than a decade, mother is staying at home caring for my grandmother with Alzheimer's, nobody in my family has a completed degree or college education of any kind)
- I'm a member of Amnesty International (lookit! I'm all social!)
- I have cool extracurricular interests that are not geeky at all, like roleplaying and creative writing...

Um, yeah, I guess that last one needs polishing. And I need to do more courses, 8 hours per week probably doesn't cut it.

I don't think it is going to get much better, so here is my Magnum Opus: The Doctor Who Termpaper it took half a year to write. I think the reason it took so long is because its a perfect example of Termpaper: You're doing it wrong. It's pretty silly, and convoluted, and I suspect that the cultural theory its based on sounds or is scary/stupid/weird, but at least you get to see me wax academically about Goo Snake Master. Or not, because it's pretentious tl;dr. (Number of French philosphers name-dropped: 2. Number of Jungian archetypes thrown in: several. Number of random capitalisations to show how SIGNIFICANT a term is: infinite.)

( Meta disguised as termpaper: Posthumanist Reading of Doctor Who )

In a moment of irony, I listened to Big Finish's "Jubilee" yesterday, which I realised says much of what I'm saying, only it's more fun and more eloquent. I feel... redundant, now.