The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mrs._TD:

I recently attended my 25th Generic Ivy reunion. Yes, there were mega-multi-millionaires, self-made and otherwise (and all the women were thinner now than when they were in college, except me). But there were also working artists, composers, and performers of every ilk. And women in fields where there aren't a lot of us. One roommate is a performer of new music who teaches music and music theory, another a political activist and geology professor, a third, a research chemist. BTW: many, if not most, of my close friends had lots of financial aid, and many were first generation college graduates.

But here's what surprised and moved me: the number of classmates who had done their best to dedicate their degrees and lives, at least in part, to the public good. For example, one of the classmates I admired most (because of his intelligence and character) was also pretty much the top student in a huge and competitive English Department. I expected to find him occupying a tenured chair in a building with lots of clinging ivy; instead, he has spent his professional life as an advocate for and teacher of children in one of the East's inner cities. There were other stories like this, each illustrating that the real point of the fancy degree was to *do* something with it, and not just for oneself.

So, yeah, some of 'em are lounging at the club in their white shoes. And others are working really hard to change what the club is and who belongs to it.

And others are playing music.

Just a quick observation that is implicit in much of what is being said. Fanfic may be how many young people learn to become writers; it is also how many become skilled readers of stories. As a parent of a young child, I watch how my daughter's imaginative pretend universe circles around characters (from books, movies and stories she loves); she becomes a character, and acts out different stories in which she can participate in being all that character is. Or pretends to be a character not present in that story, in order to participate more fully in a particular exciting world. (I remember doing this as a child with the original Star Trek, inventing non-existent female characters, since the ones there felt awfully limited). As an adult, although i do not write fanfic, I often (in my imagination) rewrite characters and the ends or plots of movies and books to make them more satisfying to me personally. As such, fanfic appears to me to be a byproduct of the essential process by which we align fiction with our own reality and psychological needs in order to appreciate and enjoy it. This process of playing pretend can be part of what it means to be a good reader, and learning to be one.

Fashion was the industry i grew up in. My father had a chain of retail clothing stores, and i even went to the Paris shows as an impressionable teenager (way too thin, way too tall, those women--and it was the era of the 5 inch platform, too). Yes, it's worse than publishing. Think of it as theater, without scripts. Or, often, talent.

You know, your poem reads very nicely, with all those sonorous names, and the repeated financial statements and continuing implicit and even incoherent requests. As a poem it becomes a comment on the nature of trust, on fictionalization of identity, on the anonymity of the internet, on our aspirations to riches, on the deeply commercial nature of so many human transactions even when they pretend to be otherwise. No wonder they wouldn't publish it.

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