Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: From an interesting post by Eve Tushnet on fanfiction (not that I write, or read, nor do I agree entirely with the quote, but, well, that's why it's interesting to me):

"I submit that our need--and I think it is a basic human need, though perhaps a need that originated in the Fall--for "films about the evening sky" rather than just going outside and looking is significantly creepier, more alienating, and more like "cheating" than the fact that some films about the evening sky are set in Hogwarts, or Gotham City. In fact, fanfiction strikes me as significantly less creepy than the "usual" audience stance (not convinced it is usual--didn't most of us, when we were too young to be fully conformed, tell ourselves stories based on the stories we loved?). We're trained to think of audience-hood as passive, a consumer role; that passive role can often become willingly putting on corrective lenses made by mad optometrists. In fanfiction, by contrast, you don't "lose yourself" in art, nor do you lose the world you see. Instead, you (...sometimes, anyway) try to use whatever media flotsam inspired you as a provocation to delineate more clearly what you actually see when you look at the world. Which bits of the source spoke to you and which were lame or irrelevant?"