Received: by bdragon.shore.net (0.99.970109)
  id AA09814; 07 Mar 97 04:28:11 -0500
From: "Rebecca Ore" 
Reply-To: filk-l@bdragon.shore.net (Multiple recipients of Filk discussion)
Nntp-Posting-Host: cust9.max12.philadelphia.pa.ms.uu.net



	The woman who sits next to me and I had a talk.  No harm was intended.  We
are the best of friends.  
	Re suggesting that writers who aren't the few top writers are wannabe fans
maligns top writers who are also fans.  Two different things.  I'll back
away from comparing fans to old ladies and suggest that fandom is like
Civil War Roundtables.  It would be possible to be (a) an enthusiastic
participant in a local Civl War Roundtable and a good Civil War historian,
(b) a good historian but not interested in Civil War Roundtables, (c) a bad
historian and interested in Civil War Roundtables because the colleagues
wouldn't listen at seminars, (d) a bad historian and not interested in ,
etc.,  through the rest of the combinations.  One could be a historian who
is interested in Civil War Roundtables because she or he is studying
cultural beliefs among Southern lawyers about the Civil War (primary
organizers of these things).
	Being a fan in the active sense is not necessarily in opposition or in
congruence with the category s.f. writer, good, bad, or indifferent.
	Re McCrumb, as I've posted in S.F. Composition, I've worked with the woman
and heard what she had to say at length.  Unless she's changed her mind,
she does believe she is as good a writer as Amy Tan, deserves to make
$100,000 a year, bad guys can't be redeemed, and that people shouldn't
build trailer parks in her neighborhood.  Beyond what she'd said and done
re fandom, the most chilling scene in "Peggy O" or another one of her
Appalachian novels is a trailer woman dying of burns giving her child to a
better life.  That's infinitely more horrifying to me than any abuse of my
yard (featured as the deputy's yard in "Peggy O" as Sharyn had to tell me. 
My mother was an orphan by age eight.
	Interesting thing is that I lived next door to some bad guys.  Eighty or
ninety percent of the time, they took care of their children, their old
people, worked on their cars, and were about as decent as the rest of us. 
While that ten percent intersected with the rest of society in grevious
ways, it is more interesting writing to consider them in the whole of their
lives, not in that 10 to 20%.

-- 
Rebecca Ore

Ulrika O'Brien  wrote in article
...
> nancyl@universe.digex.net (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> 
> >This is also just guessing, but my bet is that McCrumb despises
> >people who put a lot of effort into activities that don't bring
> >worldly success, and saw fandom through her prejudices. 
> 
> Rebecca seems to hold this theory too.  Of course, this doesn't
> undermine the suggestion that McCrumb was being a poor 
> anthropologist.  Evaluating cultural data through a filter
> of ethnocentric bias is certainly bad anthropology.  Arguably
> that's why "going native" is a sometime problem among good
> researchers, i.e. they go entirely overboard in filtering
> out their own ethnocentrisms.
> 


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