The Boy Who Lived Forever...

Thanks to fairestcat for pointing me to this article, The Boy Who Lived Forever by Lev Grossman. It seems like a long time since I've noticed mention of fanfic in mainstream journalism; though it has been become increasingly common to mention the participation of fans, fanfic included, in TV shows like Supernatural.

The first article I remember ever seeing about slash was in a British tabloid where the author wrote about the "scandal" of Kirk and Spock being lovers in this clandestine media. One got the impression that the author of the piece didn't know (or didn't care) about the difference between fact and fiction.

I particularly liked it that Lev Grossman starts out talking about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. which was my first fandom, though confined to me and my two best friends. I found the wide world of fan fiction with Star Trek and K/S much later. Until then, as far as I knew, I was the only one doing it.

Thursday...

I got to leave work earlier than I expected, and so had extra time to return books to the library, pick up a rather large pile that were being held for me, and to come home to study French and prepare for the talk I was supposed to give in class. In French.

I spent most of that time reading Ultimate Spider-Man: Pouvoirs et Responsibilités. Love it. It has the most wonderful vocabulary, like having Harry Osborne say to Peter Parker, "Qu'est-ce que c'est? Tu vas pas faire sauter le bahut, hein?"

One other student, David, was also to give a talk this evening. The teacher asked him to go first and he gallantly said, "No, no, ladies first," so I had to start out. Coward! I talked about Wolverine, who in French is not carcajou but Le Goulon (originally), Serval (later on) and ultimately Wolverine. I talked about his history, his claws, his memory of childhood in British Columbia, his involvement with the X-Men... And all their questions were about comics and collecting comics: how many did I have? where did I buy them? did I ever go to conventions like the San Diego Comic Con? It was really rather fun. My worst problem was with verb tenses, which I screwed up a few times - it's so much easier to catch other people's mistakes than to catch one's own before they are made.

And I learned some great words, like facteur auto-guérisseur and squelette et griffes en adamantium.