Texas Pages

Fandom, he said, was one example of the "networked knowledge" phenomenon that the Internet has made so much easier to create. Fandom, particularly online, is a wiki where what one person knows (or imagines) quickly becomes known to everyone else in the community.

He suggested that the Harry Potter's success may be the last such "mass" mass medium tsunami because we are so divided into smaller interest groups. The Potter success, he said, was as much because it appeals to so many smaller groups as its intrinsic appeal as a book. (This is one of several points he makes that I don't see as unique to Potter or to these days, but maybe as more true now than in the past. And does the past few day's iPhone phrenzy indicate that it's too soon to write the obit of the mass market? )

He swept back to earlier fan phenomena. Sherlock Holmes inspired "real" Baker Street Irregulars to meet and chew over the tiniest details of that canon. ( I recall reading that when Doyle "killed" Holmes in the appropriately-named story "The Final Problem" , he received death threats and eventually wrote new Holmes stories.) Many of Charles Dickens' novels came out in serial form, in newspapers. And some of his fans tried to influence the course of those stories in the same way that J.K. Rowling's fans tried to jiggle her hand, he said.

(Odd detail. The abbreviation LOL for "laugh out loud" predates text messaging by well over a century, he said.)

The fandom phenom -- intereactive, networked, costumed, creating its own art and stories -- was mostly guys until Star Trek came out, he said. The word "Trekkie" was originally coined as a slur by men upset that their previously male bastion of SF fandom was being invaded by "groupies" with no "real" interest in the joys of Science Fiction.

Trek + groupies = Trekkies. Women responded by saying they were "Trekkers," not Trekkies. (He's got the PhD and all, so maybe so. But I'd say that the word Trekkie reached the larger culture without any hint of anti-feminist origins. If anything, it was used to put down all Trek fans.)

He said that women started the same kinds of intensive fan actions about Star Trek we now see with Potter. Fan-created stories that focused on relationships, not tech, for instance.

As for the relationship between Rowling and Potter fandom, he is bemused at where she has taken it.

OTOH, fandom pushed the buzz of her success by its myriad ways of creating content that pushed well beyond the written text. (An aside. A word I learned a new meaning for at Portus is "slash." It's gay porn that involves male fictional characters who are not gay -- Harry and Draco, for instance -- written by and mostly read by women. Go figure.)

OTOH, Rowling has tried to corral that creativity now that the final book is out. The epilogue to Book Seven pushes the characters forward 19 years and establishes marriages, children, relationships. And in interviews Rowling has made other comments ("Dumbledore is gay!") that seem to be an effort to limit where fans can imagine the characters and story going.

"The last chapter really frustrated me," he said. "It was like she was spraying territory"

(Contrast Rowling's door-closing on her fans with the final episode of the TV series The Sopranos, where David Chase wonderfully, astonishingly, simply ends mid-scene. Surely he's finished that final scene in his own mind? And yet he resisted closing any doors on his fans -- not all of whom were enthralled with that decision.)

One final Portus detail that has nothing to do with Jenkins. For non-Potterheads, here's how fine-grained the attention to detail was. (SPOILER ALERT: Though if you haven't read Book Seven, this is not going to make any sense, anyway.)

In the famous King's Cross scene, the flayed, crying baby that represents we assume, Voldemort's soul, is underneath a bench. During a presentation analyzing that whole scene, a woman asked apologetically why the baby would be under a bench. It's such a small thing, she said, but she's wondered.

Three hands shot up instantly, with two interesting explanations:

1) The King's Cross scene is set in a limbo between life and death. Harry stands in the open, willing to accept, but able to choose. Voldemort fears death above all else. The bench is a barrier between him and the possibility of moving "on."

2) A baby under a bench in a train station is a standard literary presentation of an abandoned child, so it's an echo of Tom Riddle's troubled childhood.

Yikes!

I do like the books, but that's a level of analysis to which I do not aspire...