lunch

I hate food. Hate hate hate.

Or rather, I hate cafeteria food. Why, when I'm trying so hard to be good and not-self medicate with lots and lost of chocolate even though I was really low and depressive yesterday, does the caf decide that, oh, we don't really need to *feed* you. Yeah, and that having edible sustenance thing? Not so much. ABut we have a lot of gross icky things made with unspeakable meat byproducts, if that sounds good to you.

I just had pbj for lunch. With fakeo pb. On wonderbread.

I hate food.

rambly meta: multiplicity in reading

Fandom has changed the way I read.

Because since I started reading fic I've seen a hundred thousand different takes on Frodo/Sam, Mr. Tumnus, every character and pairing and dynamic. And they all live in my head at the same time, and some of them are a little bit out there but many of them I like no better nor worse than the others. I don't have a lot of hard-and-fast canon any more.

Frex, wrt Frodo/Sam, I have no idea where I like the first time best--Rivendell? Mordor? Cirith Ungol? The Fields of Cormallen? Pre-quest slash doesn't work for me, though I'll read it gladly, because I read more class issues into the pairing than some. But I can see that there are many many possibilities, and they are all plausible and fabulous and interesting. And I like being able to read in many ways at once.

There's a certain performativity to the sort of reading that fandom has taught me--I know that I've compared it to Shakespeare before, and other long-running literary/theatrical traditions that rest on constant re-interpretation.

I've found this year that I really do read texts like a ficcer. Not just filling in the gaps, because although I do that there's something more going on. To my mind, reading like a ficcer has to do with flexibility and multiplicity, the ability to perceive the story going off in eighty different directions all at once and liking it.

I was talking to The Boy the other day about literary theory, the various schools of thought and the differences between them, and he asked me which one I belong to. And I belong to really a lot of them all at once. Structuralism is shiny and interesting and can show you parallels and inversions that take you to very sex places. But deconstruction opens everything up and recognizes that sturcture is imposed and texts are so much bigger than that, and finds discord and awareness and I *like* that. And I think both ways at once. I can see the ways in which "the Tempest" is a meta-narrative about theater and writing and magic and that's very shiny, Prospero as parallel to the author. And I can also see the breakdowns in that--control, race, Miranda, Caliban. I think that my reading of the text would be immeasureably impoverished without either reading.

In conclusion: I hate it when people get all upset about the fact that there's more than one way to read a text. Because the multiplicity is the good part, you silly silly people! And that's why fandom is a fabulous thing.