This would be a photo of my friend Lloyd who attended Dragon*Con this year, a multi-media, pop-culture convention for geeks who love any form ofscience fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film. He hasn't exactly been able to tell me what people do there or why they go, but a major component of the event is the costumes, or fans dressing up like icons they adore. Here I guess we have someone who was torn between her appreciation of Dolly Parton and her attachment to Star Wars—I'd say the former was most tributed by the fan's garb...
One of the most fascinating behavioral tangents of the advent of the Geek, the trend of uncool being the new cool, is fan culture. Think Twilight-hysteria, Star Wars loyalists, fanboy followings of writers like Thomas Pynchon, the Nick Hornbyian music-obsessed protagonist.
Nick Hornby revives the theme in his most recent novel, Juliet, Naked. As far as I have been able to surmise from a couple of reviews, character development in the novel adds a new, interesting component to recent fan dialogue: how the fan affects that which has inspired fanhood. In the novel the conflict between two characters is manifested in their competing web-posted criticisms of Tucker Crowe, the artist the main character seems to spend his life in tribute to. I want to read the novel now to see how their criticisms compare—if Hornby says anything about the different kinds of fans, and how fans look at music in different ways, and how the fans ultimately shape the legacy that the music leaves behind.
There is a sociology/anthropology cultural criticism-thesis waiting to be written on the odds and ends of fan culture. It’s a query I’d like to take on myself if I could first find the time to read Hornby’s book—
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