--{ on being a fan }------
I admit it. I'm a fan. I act like a fan. I gush, I get silly, I get all stalky and twitchy and overexcited about the objects of my adoration. And there are so many objects of my adoration.
Most of them are writers, of some sort or another. Fiction writers, mostly, like Dave Eggers and Ben Marcus and Jonathan Lethem and Lynda Barry and Andrew Crumey and Jim Crace and David Foster Wallace and people who write such amazing things that they surely must be cool. Oh yes, they must be. I just want to talk to them and read their stuff forever.1
Others are legal writers who write about such neat stuff and do such amazing analyses that again, they surely must be cool. Not cool in a perfect, they- can- do- no- wrong kind of way, but in a wow- can- they- think kind of way. Like Cass, ooh Cass Sunstein and Wendy Wagner and Steven Goldberg and Vicki Jackson and Mark Sagoff. Smarts smarts smarts! I just want to sit in their heads and hang out with them all day.
And sometimes I get like that about musicians and music groups, though I admit, not as much as I used to. Nowadays it's just songs. Like I'm listening to Belle and Sebastian's A Century of Fakers on single-track repeat right now and I feel pure sweet goop about them. This song is so great, they surely must be cool. Must be must be must be!
What I feel for the objects of my fandom is a mixture of adoration and admiration, a stalky silly smushy crush. And I doubt the feeling would change if I became personally acquainted with the objects of my fandom. After all, I actually wrote a paper with Richard (I can't say Richie!) Lazarus who is full of just gobs and gobs of environmental law greatness, and I still feel the same way about him. That he is full of gobs and gobs of environmental law greatness, and no only must he be cool, but he is, he is absolutely cool.2
Strangely, fandom is a highly productive emotion for me. Fandom can drive me to write articles and books and do all sorts of highly productive stuff to somehow get in contact with the objects of my fandom in a real-world, non-creepy manner. (It is self-enforcing process, of course, in that I tend to only become a fan of someone because they write about stuff I already like, and I'm usually already writing about stuff I like anyways.) I always fear, however, that my inner fan will spring out in a really silly way, like it did once with Luke Cole, environmental justice attorney.3
Fandom, for me, is a state of crazy overstimulation. It's not a mental or a physical thing, it's *everything* (even with the writers I haven't met and haven't seen). I am internally over-ebullient about what I like, I realize, and usually I hide it away like the waggy-tailed mutts that many families have in their backyards. But it feels so good, really, this state of fannishness. It's like a crush, but not quite.
It's not a crush, because a crush doesn't have all the components of fandom. It doesn't have the sheer admiration involved with fandom, the "wow" aspect of fandom. Plus a crush usually has those sexual elements, which isn't always involved in fandom.
And fandom is so hard to express! Much more so than crushdom, which comes with a long glossary of love words and metaphors. I mean, I can write my own analyses and cite their stuff favorably, but that can't begin to express the full extent of how gushy I feel. The language of analytical praise is nothing like the language of fandom. "Cogent" is nothing like "awesome!" "Comprehensive study" is nothing like "super super article!" There are no exclamation marks, or even words that are like exclamation marks.
The language of fandom, or at least my language of fandom, is full of exclamation marks. And repeated words, like really really, and really really really. The language of fandom is effusive, but nondescript. The language of fandom is junior high school-ey, often embarassingly so.
And maybe it's because the only period when people are really focused on being fans is during junior high. When we grow old, we move on to more adulty fare, like criticism and stuff. We don't develop our fandom, we don't create a language to express more sophisticatedly the same pure fan feeling that we had in junior high.
Or maybe it's because fandom, at its core, just isn't all that sophisticated. Maybe it's just a simple feeling that's not admiration or crushdom or any of the other words I've used here. Maybe fandom just boils down to fandom. Maybe it's the simplest kind of like we can have.
Ooh.
041001
1. Except I wouldn't really be able to talk to them. I would just say something stupid like "Wow, what a great book," like I said to Dave Eggers.
2. Man, if he runs across this particular web page is he ever going to be sorry he called me a "friend." ; )
3. "Luke Cole!" I said, when I ran into him at a stakeholder advisory group meeting on environmental justice. "I'VE READ ALL YOUR STUFF!" My friend Gina described a similar incident she had with the head of the Asia program at Human Rights Watch. So she understands.