You may recall my adoration of Salon.com advice columnist Cary Tennis. Today's pleasantly surprising article is no exception, both in subject and in response:
I'm addicted to Harry Potter fan fiction!
The supplicant is a post-doc in her 30's who's afraid her obsession with reading fanfiction is impacting her professional and familial lives. In his lamentably brief but characteristically incisive response, Cary asks her some pointed questions about why she feels it is shameful and wrong to be immersed in these fantasies, invoking perceived social expectations of wives/mothers and academics and readers/writers and people in general, highbrow/lowbrow tensions, the suppression of imagination, and why it is a bad thing that she is not perhaps perfectly well-adjusted:
I'm addicted to Harry Potter fan fiction!
The supplicant is a post-doc in her 30's who's afraid her obsession with reading fanfiction is impacting her professional and familial lives. In his lamentably brief but characteristically incisive response, Cary asks her some pointed questions about why she feels it is shameful and wrong to be immersed in these fantasies, invoking perceived social expectations of wives/mothers and academics and readers/writers and people in general, highbrow/lowbrow tensions, the suppression of imagination, and why it is a bad thing that she is not perhaps perfectly well-adjusted:
Is it you, I'm saying, or is it the world you're living in? Addicted? Full of shame? Shame about what? You say it hasn't killed you yet? No, it's keeping you alive, I dare say.(Also, I confess I'm a little in love with his reference to "the clitorectomy of the Ph.D.")
And who could blame you for crossing the line, when the fences between reader and text and writer have rotted and fallen anyway, when we are all enmeshed like strangers on a train in the same humming engine of creation and retelling?