"immense fan energy unleashed"

Hypable, which launched last year, is aimed at a Harry Potter-like audience of tweens, teens and young adults, mostly female. That means lots of coverage of the "Twilight" series and "The Hunger Games" and less emphasis on, say, "Star Wars," which Sims said attracts an older male audience.

[Professor Karen] North, at USC, said entertainment companies are similarly scrambling to harness the immense fan energy unleashed by sites such as Mugglenet.

Two things. First, the above-quoted article on fan labor in the Orange County Register is by Jim Hinch, who is also the author of the amazing pan of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve in LA Review of Books that's been going around.

Second, and the reason I'm posting: it's not quite clear whose language this is—Hinch's or North's—but it seems telling that fan labor is imagined as a sort of natural resource, whose "energy" is "unleashed" by fan sites and can be "harnessed" (read: profited on) by the entertainment industry. Of course this is labor that is being appropriated. What's interesting about the language through which it is understood, here, is that it so explicitly routes that appropriation through an identification of (primarily young female) labor with natural resources, imagined as free for the taking. This usually doesn't end well.

(On fan labor, I highly recommend Abigail De Kosnik's essay in Digital Labor: The Internet as Factory and Playground.)

Greatest ever

Guardian: JK Rowling gives Labour £1m donation.

Brown said: "I am delighted that JK Rowling, who is one of the world's greatest ever authors, has made such a generous donation. I thank her for supporting the Labour party and our values of social justice and opportunity for all."

Oh, yes. Definitely on par with, like, George Eliot.

(Via Silliman)

Some notes on recently read children's books

1. Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Sherwood Ring

I read Pope's The Perilous Gard when I was a child. It was a Newbery Honor book, and I liked it a lot, although I don't know how it would hold up to adult re-reading. The Sherwood Ring is entertaining, but not as good, and most of the time Peggy's actions are just an excuse for ghosts to narrate more of their own stories. The sexism in the novel is... very 1958. Appallingly so. At least Pope got the humanities scholar=poverty thing right. She was a humanities scholar herself, and probably knew from experience.

2. Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom series

I've read two of the books in this series, and right away I was annoyed by the days-of-the-week conceit. Okay, seven days of the week, seven wacky adventures. This is, of course, no worse than the Harry Potter seven years in school, seven wacky adventures. Still. Seven keys to the kingdom is like six Signs of the Light, and like Will in The Dark Is Rising, Arthur keeps being directed by magic beyond his understanding, which, I am sorry, is irritating.

Nix's cosmology is interesting, filled with pastiche but in a self-aware way. Grim Tuesday reflects slightly (not deeply) on the meaning of pastiche and originality in art. The cosmic and the comic intertwine playfully in this series, which is much different from Sabriel's high seriousness.

Sabriel seemed to be Nix's Oxford School shout-out, deeply tied to land, kingdom, lineage, and law. The Keys to the Kingdom is also in love with the law, but the rightful heir is (thankfully) no longer part of a particular blood line. Arthur is chosen as the rightful heir nearly randomly: asthmatic, he is chosen because he is on the point of dying (or so the chooser thinks). Unlike Sabriel, whose Ancelstierre is clearly a fantastic England, Arthur apparently lives in Australia, slightly in the future (Monday features email; Tuesday has "luminescent e-paper").

I'm always fascinated by Nix's representations of text. In Sabriel, text is lex, an emanation of both reality and law (the two are nearly interchangeable in that series). In The Keys to the Kingdom on the other hand, text is either completely banal, i.e. telegrams, receipts, memoranda, and endless records which are filed and can never be found, or the embodiment of will. Which is to say, there is a legal will, which is a volition in and of itself, and is moreover an actual character in the series.

It's hard to tell the two kinds of text apart; there's a critical moment in Monday in which Arthur and Suzy have to work alone, because a pit of "bibliophages," adders that will annihilate any text-bearing thing, separates him, the Will, and Suzy from Mister Monday's lair. The Will cannot cross because it is, ultimately, just text, "entirely composed of type" (interestingly enough), and in that sense indistinguishable from the label in Arthur's shorts. It also has no real medium and no materiality; in Monday it inhabits the body of a frog, and in Tuesday it takes the form of a woman and a bear. These media are incidental to the actual Will, which can flit about as disembodied type if necessary.

There is, of course, a unique codex, the Compleat Atlas of the House and its Immediate Environs, but in spite of its foreign, hand-written text it resembles nothing so much as Wikipedia, for Arthur always opens it seeking specific answers, and gets them (although, as with Wikipedia, some entries are more helpful than others). The textual world of The Keys to the Kindgom is that of the information age, ephemeral, abundant, both banal and all-controlling.

I need to think more about this approach to text in comparison to that of the Sabriel trilogy.

Dumbledore "is" gay, part the second

In his NYT piece, "Is Dumbledore Gay? Depends on Definitions of 'Is' and 'Gay'," Edward Rothstein opines that even if Dumbledore "is" gay, the books make him asexual, like all proper old wizard dudes.

This is why Dumbledore’s supposed gayness is ultimately as unimportant as Ron’s shabby clothes. These wounded outsiders recognize the nature of evil, and finally that is what matters.

But what does "asexual" mean, when the default is heterosexual? Isn't the wise mentor figure above "sex" because he is above women, who are simply defined as the sexual?

When Merlin "falls," for example, isn't it to female pollution, as opposed to the pure Socratic bond with Arthur? It seems disingenuous to suppose that there is no economy of gender at work in the genre, even surrounding the "asexual" mentor figure (isn't it convenient that they're all men, however "asexual"? and that their mentees are similarly male?). Suppositions of sexuality, or lack thereof, are finally not extricable from the gender values that surround them.

I think that if Rowling is arguing for tolerance, as she claims, then it seems odd that she would create a "homosexual" character with, in fact, no discernible sexuality in the books.

It also seems odd that the sole homosexual encounter of the series (if we take it as such) is tragic (not to mention undertaken with a Hitler figure).

Rothstein takes this to mean that we can ignore Rowling's pronouncement. He seems to breathe a sigh of relief, as gayness is brushed to the side as irrelevant.

I'm not so sure.

Dumbledore "is" gay.

From the great swamps of authorial intention:

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore as gay