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I haven't written for a while. I think I've had about five posts I almost wrote and then never actually posted.
Hope everyone having a holiday weekend had a good one.![[livejournal.com profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jlh and I went to see Gonzo, which was great--despite the fact that I left the theater COVERED IN BUTTER! (Which I will never stop complaining about.) Then we went to a nice place to eat where we got a nice floor show. A young man apparently out for his first beer picked a fight with a guy at the bar. He was thrown out in the middle of an impassioned speech about the Fourth of July and how we are all the Mets and what else do we really have except that? His friends dragged him out as best they could and the bartender led all of us (an international crowd) in a rousing farewell and good riddance. Yay!
What I've been reading while not posting is Don Quixote, which proves that
It’s just that the story includes its own fandom drama. DQ is two books, and the second one begins with a dedication that's basically a rant against some fanficcer who wrote a sequel and passed it off as the real thing. So Cervantes is all, "So here's the second book and it's going to cover the REAL Don Quixote's REAL life and he's going to DIE at the end so you can't write any more stories about him!"
Though I like to think his problem was that people thought that book was the real thing and that was the problem rather than the fanficcing. Since it’s not like he doesn’t incorporate other known stories into his book too.
Also, so often in HP fandom people would complain about flints (some people seeming to have the idea that on one extreme no competent author could make a mistake and on the other extreme that books all have teams of editors whose job it is to be obsessed fans on the lookout for minutiae and they all need to be fired if a mistake gets through). Cervantes has this huge flint in DQ that people obviously zeroed in on the same way, so an entire chapter of the second book is devoted to it. Within the fictional universe the first book exists, having allegedly been written by some mysterious biographer (Cervantes himself). So the characters in the second book can react to the fame they got by the first book, and meet people who have read the first volume.
Naturally the first thing they have to answer for is the strange incident of Sancho's ass. He wakes up one morning to find Dapple stolen and cries about it, then is somehow riding him a few chapters later, and then runs into the thief and gets him back after that. People ask Sancho in the text, "What's up with that?" and he says look, obviously the biographer is an idiot. All I know is that I lost my ass and then I got him back.
He also changes the name of Sancho's wife in the middle of the book. Oops. And mentions complaints about this whole section that has nothing to do with the story. It’s like if Tolkien included a scene where Sam Gamgee and Frodo had a discussion in the Undying Lands about how maybe they should have cut Tom Bombadil out.
Anyway, since DQ definitely did seem to have a fandom back in the 17th century that wasn't all that different from its modern form, imo.
Hope everyone having a holiday weekend had a good one.
jlh and I went to see Gonzo, which was great--despite the fact that I left the theater COVERED IN BUTTER! (Which I will never stop complaining about.) Then we went to a nice place to eat where we got a nice floor show. A young man apparently out for his first beer picked a fight with a guy at the bar. He was thrown out in the middle of an impassioned speech about the Fourth of July and how we are all the Mets and what else do we really have except that? His friends dragged him out as best they could and the bartender led all of us (an international crowd) in a rousing farewell and good riddance. Yay!What I've been reading while not posting is Don Quixote, which proves that
It’s just that the story includes its own fandom drama. DQ is two books, and the second one begins with a dedication that's basically a rant against some fanficcer who wrote a sequel and passed it off as the real thing. So Cervantes is all, "So here's the second book and it's going to cover the REAL Don Quixote's REAL life and he's going to DIE at the end so you can't write any more stories about him!"
Though I like to think his problem was that people thought that book was the real thing and that was the problem rather than the fanficcing. Since it’s not like he doesn’t incorporate other known stories into his book too.
Also, so often in HP fandom people would complain about flints (some people seeming to have the idea that on one extreme no competent author could make a mistake and on the other extreme that books all have teams of editors whose job it is to be obsessed fans on the lookout for minutiae and they all need to be fired if a mistake gets through). Cervantes has this huge flint in DQ that people obviously zeroed in on the same way, so an entire chapter of the second book is devoted to it. Within the fictional universe the first book exists, having allegedly been written by some mysterious biographer (Cervantes himself). So the characters in the second book can react to the fame they got by the first book, and meet people who have read the first volume.
Naturally the first thing they have to answer for is the strange incident of Sancho's ass. He wakes up one morning to find Dapple stolen and cries about it, then is somehow riding him a few chapters later, and then runs into the thief and gets him back after that. People ask Sancho in the text, "What's up with that?" and he says look, obviously the biographer is an idiot. All I know is that I lost my ass and then I got him back.
He also changes the name of Sancho's wife in the middle of the book. Oops. And mentions complaints about this whole section that has nothing to do with the story. It’s like if Tolkien included a scene where Sam Gamgee and Frodo had a discussion in the Undying Lands about how maybe they should have cut Tom Bombadil out.
Anyway, since DQ definitely did seem to have a fandom back in the 17th century that wasn't all that different from its modern form, imo.
